Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
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. |
School zones have reduced speeds in school zones through aggressive enforcement, if you make everywhere 30 they can no longer target enforcement in a way to skew peoples behavior. Targeted enforcement isn't scalable and if it is that just sounds a little dystopian, I'm already fairly uncomfortable with speed on green cameras as an enforcement concept, the wastefulness of watching every slam on their brakes then slam on their gas pedal just to appease some camera.
I actually don't think we are that far apart on what we think creates risks on roads.
Lack of attentiveness to surroundings is exactly why accidents happen, but not an overall lack of attentiveness, it is letting important things slip outside of your frame of reference. My proposed mechanism of risk for lowering the speed limits to an unreasonable slow level, is moving the locust of attention from the roads to either their speedometers if then intend to follow the speed, or to the person in front of them obstructing the road if they do not intend to follow the speed limit. By moving the locust of attention you are increasing the risk to things that aren't within that frame.