Quote:
Originally Posted by #-3
I don't think I believe this at all.
If you want to slow down residential streets, put more trees near them, paint more center lines on them, paint shoulder lines to define parking areas, paint more crosswalks, empower communities to do the painting themselves if it's a budget problem, many community associations will do it. make the streets feel narrower and people will slow down.
The vast vast majority of drivers will drive the speed that feels comfortable to them, regardless of the posted speed limit. Having some people drive a speed that feels uncomfortably slow on a road because they are sticklers for rules is breading conflict that creates risk. If you want slower roads make it less comfortable to go fast by making the roads feel narrower without making them narrower.
Even if we can't agree on what the speed limit should be, I think we can both agree what the end impact of this change will people. People will continue to drive whatever speed they have always driven on residential streets unmonitored and unenforced. While police resources are wasted on areas that accidentally fall under these new guidelines and have nothing to do with the pedestrian safety arguments you are making, because those will be the easiest places to rack up fines, and speeding tickets as they are currently issued have nothing to do with a concern for community safety.
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I agree with you that trees and boulevards extending into intersections are far better than speed limits. Fundamentally speed is a design problem.
I disagree having people drive uncomfortably slow creates risk. You’d have to explain that one further to me. In general I believe accidents are caused by inattentive drivers rather than reckless drivers. If this is true (And I have never found any good information on it) then convincing these general law abiding Drivers to slow down will reduce the consequences and frequency of collisions. If collisions are caused by the ####### driving 80 in a 50 then this won’t work. School zones have been shown to reduce speed in school zones so the assertion that people will drive the speed they feel like is not true. It is influenced both by feeling and posted limit.
I agree with you that current speed enforcement is poorly done and is a revenue Center rather than a safety program. Speed enforcement should have KPIs based on reducing the conditions that cause incidents in high incident locations. It doesn’t always need to be tickets either. The electronic radar signs training people what the speed limit feels like is important too.
http://conf.tac-atc.ca/english/resou...dfs/lazic2.pdf
The above link is a study done in Saskatoon and found that people speed less through school zones. You still don’t have compliance with the limit but lowers limits lowers speeds.