Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community - View Single Post - Councillors green light public engagement on lowering city speed limits

#-3 · 11-18-2019, 10:31 PM

I would be interested in seeing why the city thinks they will have a reduction in incidents. I haven't looked through the data in some time, but my understanding is that the more repressive speed limits become the more accidents there are.

Montana eliminated speed limits for a time, saw accidents drop, re-instated them and saw accidents and fatalities go up above the original levels.

I could be remembering the location long wrong. But I think it was somewhere in New Jersey, they had the opportunity to study average vehicle speed prior to and after a large reduction in speed limit, to find that speed limits had no impact on the median speed that cars drove, although they had a large effect on the outliers at the low end and high end of the distribution. There findings also noted a spike in incidents. They postulated that it is not in fact speed that causes traffic incidents put is having a wide variety of speeds on the same roadway.

All of this to say, enforcing speeds seems to be an non-optimal way of improving road safety. If they want people to slow down and be aware of pedestrians, they should narrow roadways, paint more lines, and widen sidewalk, if the end goal is to create safe pedestrians and roads that drivers want to slow down on.

A reductions in average severity of incidents is probably a reasonable thing to anticipate. But it would probably be difficult to predict total harm, with more lower impact problems.

Also: as a side note, I have always had a problem with them randomly taxing people for a rule few people respect and fewer adhere to as a means of finance those who issue the tax (I'm talking about speeding tickets) especially considering they only seem to enforce this rules in places where they are most flagrantly ludicrous. On the economist podcast today, they were talking about an Asian country that experiment with time-outs as a punishment for speeding (caught speeding, sit on the side of the road for 30 minutes), it seems like an oddly effective punishment for the crime, that would give those in a hurry allot more pause than a fine. Setting aside the administrative boondoggle, and waste of law enforcement time, its kind of a fun idea.

11-18-2019, 10:31 PM	#119
#-3 #1 Goaltender Join Date: Mar 2008 Exp:	I would be interested in seeing why the city thinks they will have a reduction in incidents. I haven't looked through the data in some time, but my understanding is that the more repressive speed limits become the more accidents there are. Montana eliminated speed limits for a time, saw accidents drop, re-instated them and saw accidents and fatalities go up above the original levels. I could be remembering the location long wrong. But I think it was somewhere in New Jersey, they had the opportunity to study average vehicle speed prior to and after a large reduction in speed limit, to find that speed limits had no impact on the median speed that cars drove, although they had a large effect on the outliers at the low end and high end of the distribution. There findings also noted a spike in incidents. They postulated that it is not in fact speed that causes traffic incidents put is having a wide variety of speeds on the same roadway. All of this to say, enforcing speeds seems to be an non-optimal way of improving road safety. If they want people to slow down and be aware of pedestrians, they should narrow roadways, paint more lines, and widen sidewalk, if the end goal is to create safe pedestrians and roads that drivers want to slow down on. A reductions in average severity of incidents is probably a reasonable thing to anticipate. But it would probably be difficult to predict total harm, with more lower impact problems. Also: as a side note, I have always had a problem with them randomly taxing people for a rule few people respect and fewer adhere to as a means of finance those who issue the tax (I'm talking about speeding tickets) especially considering they only seem to enforce this rules in places where they are most flagrantly ludicrous. On the economist podcast today, they were talking about an Asian country that experiment with time-outs as a punishment for speeding (caught speeding, sit on the side of the road for 30 minutes), it seems like an oddly effective punishment for the crime, that would give those in a hurry allot more pause than a fine. Setting aside the administrative boondoggle, and waste of law enforcement time, its kind of a fun idea.