Councillors green light public engagement on lowering city speed limits

[Torture]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

No one has the data, so they resort to emotional appeals around public safety.

Let's try this again. From the article:

In 2018, collisions cost the Calgary economy $1.19 billion.

A city report also suggests a blanket speed limit of 30 km/h would result in 10 to 20 per cent fewer residential road collisions.

Is 10% to 20% a big number? Are you suggesting the City just pulled those numbers out of the air? Do you have a reason to dispute it? Is it 1%? Is 1.2B the wrong number? Or do you just not like it so you've chosen not to believe it?

[burn_this_city]

You can't just take a total and then divide it evenly as if every collision at every speed costs the same amount.

[getbak]

LiveWire put together a map showing the reported locations of pedestrian collisions this year through November 15: https://livewirecalgary.com/2019/11/...an-collisions/

Not surprisingly, the major problem areas are those where there are a large number of pedestrians and a high traffic volume. Places like the 36th St C-Train corridor; Downtown; 16th Ave NW; and 17th Ave SW are all high collision areas.

It looks like the major arterial roads are the biggest problem, with the collectors seeing fewer collisions and the residential streets seeing almost none. Again, this shouldn't be surprising that roads with both higher traffic volumes and more pedestrians are going to have more collisions.

Also, this map only shows the collisions that were tweeted about. In theory, that could lead to underreporting of residential collisions since those will typically only get wide attention if they're particularly horrific.

[Canadianman]

Save the $200k and remove playground zones.

Keep the limit at 50, but actually enforce it.

[getbak]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

You can't just take a total and then divide it evenly as if every collision at every speed costs the same amount.

Yeah, and the collisions that would be eliminated by reducing the speed on collectors and residential roads are the ones that likely cost the least.

[Canadianman]

Originally Posted by Torture

Let's try something...everybody repeat after me: "Hey Google what is 10% of 1.2 billion dollars per year" (Hint, it's 120 million)

While I'm not thrilled with the idea of having to drive 30km/h on residential/collector roads, if it saves lives and $120 million a year (low end), who am I to complain about my right to drive a car as fast as I want to on residential streets?


Maybe one of the 10,000 people involved in collisions on a residential road each year would have an opinion.


I'll vote how I like, thanks.

This is my new favourite pretentious comment on CP. Tries to sound smart but can't form a logical thought.

Why not ban all cars? Then we could save the entire $1.2B!

[burn_this_city]

Hey Google, what's a multivariate analysis?

[topfiverecords]

Originally Posted by Torture

Let's try this again. From the article:

Is 10% to 20% a big number? Are you suggesting the City just pulled those numbers out of the air? Do you have a reason to dispute it? Is it 1%? Is 1.2B the wrong number? Or do you just not like it so you've chosen not to believe it?

$1.19B? Sounds like collisions are good for the local economy.

[chemgear]

Originally Posted by topfiverecords

$1.19B? Sounds like collisions are good for the local economy.

"That's like a 1000% return on investment"

- Naheed Nenshi

[corporatejay]

Originally Posted by Torture

Let's try this again. From the article:



Is 10% to 20% a big number? Are you suggesting the City just pulled those numbers out of the air? Do you have a reason to dispute it? Is it 1%? Is 1.2B the wrong number? Or do you just not like it so you've chosen not to believe it?

What does "cost the Calgary economy" mean? Is that like that thing where someone says that the final four costs the US economy trillions? These numbers are entirely made up.

[burn_this_city]

Big autobody is funding dissenting opinions.

I'd really like to know what the offsetting fleet fuel mileage decline would look like against the collision cost.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by burn_this_city

Big autobody is funding dissenting opinions.

I'd really like to know what the offsetting fleet fuel mileage decline would look like against the collision cost.

Druh Farrell is a Bilderburgerian Lizard Man!!

[llwhiteoutll]

Originally Posted by Torture

While I'm not thrilled with the idea of having to drive 30km/h on residential/collector roads, if it saves lives and $120 million a year (low end), who am I to complain about my right to drive a car as fast as I want to on residential streets?

How many fatal vehicular collisions have there been on residential streets in say, the last 7-8 years? Keep in mind, you can't include the ones where the fatality was a pedestrian since none of them would have been prevented by this.

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by Canadianman

This is my new favourite pretentious comment on CP. Tries to sound smart but can't form a logical thought.

Why not ban all cars? Then we could save the entire $1.2B!

I think Torture is Druh Farrell.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Torture

Let's try this again. From the article:



Is 10% to 20% a big number? Are you suggesting the City just pulled those numbers out of the air? Do you have a reason to dispute it? Is it 1%? Is 1.2B the wrong number? Or do you just not like it so you've chosen not to believe it?

I like having fun with numbers like this

So each km traveling 30 instead of 50 cost you 48 seconds.
The average Calgary income is 55k or so. So those 48 seconds cost about 22 cents. So at 22 cents / km we would need 545 million km of residential driving per year to break even assuming your 120 million is accurate.

Calgary has about 1 million vehicles registered (including business). So does the average vehicle drive 1.5km of 50km road today that would be lowered? If so even at 10% accident savings it no longer pays off. This ignores that higher income people are more likely to drive.

[ken0042]

Originally Posted by llwhiteoutll

How many fatal vehicular collisions have there been on residential streets in say, the last 7-8 years? Keep in mind, you can't include the ones where the fatality was a pedestrian since none of them would have been prevented by this.

As much as I’m opposed to a decrease in speed limits, you cannot use this argument. One of the main reasons they want to lower limits is that a pedestrian hit at 30 kmh has a much better chance of survival than one hit at 50.

If they want to make residential streets safer, have the streetlights on before it’s pitch dark out. Driving home tonight at 5:15- a solid 30 minutes after sunset, a few of the streetlights just started to flicker on. Same thing in the mornings. Somebody is saving a few bucks by sacrificing safety. But somehow they think lowering the limits is the answer.

Make going 5 kmh over the limit a huge fine- and step up enforcement. Any near misses I have had has been either somebody doing well over 50- or people blowing through stop signs.

[Torture]

OK so lowering speed limits is off limits. Learned something new today.
I'll back away slowly now.

[chemgear]

Originally Posted by Torture

OK so lowering speed limits is off limits. Learned something new today.
I'll back away slowly now.

50 km/h slow? Or 30 km/h slow?

[#-3]

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.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by #-3

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.

The end goal should be to reduce collisions with pedestrians...maybe we should start with the pedestrians.

Its rare that vehicles and pedestrians collide on sidewalks.