Even with the caveats about limited data and untangling causation and correlation, the statistics are striking: the first year of a scheme in Wales where the speed limit on urban roads was lowered to 20mph resulted in about 100 fewer people killed or seriously injured.
Look you don’t understand I need to speed so I can get suck on traffic faster. It allows me to get to my destination earlier (I don’t care what proof you have that it doesn’t). Nothing else matters.
I will not be taking questions, just getting mad at people for not having common sense.
Go fuck yourself.
Years ago, my parents set out on a long journey from their home city to a rural location in another country.
Approximately five minutes after setting out, a car went flying past them. It was a bright red sports model that was very eyecatching.
Not long after, they arrived at a toll bridge, right behind the same red car. They noted the number plate.
Past the toll, the red car sped off again, quickly accelerating well past the speed limit.
Over the next few hours, this repeated at a major junction. When they eventually arrived at the ferry again just behind the red car, my father flashed his headlights.
Disembarking, they got another flash from my father, and sped off.
Several hundreds of miles later my parents arrived at their destination, parked up, and got out to stretch, when pulling in beside them was a curiously familiar red car.
Not wishing to make assumptions, my mother casually checked the plates, then saluted the driver and inquired about their journey to the event they had all arrived for.
Nope, they’d made no detours or stops, they’d taken the same route.
My mother has a way in these situations of wording things just so, that totally makes the person she’s talking to feel like an absolute worm without ever getting the escape of thinking my mother was being anything other than lovely and charming to them.
Red car was spotted driving most sedately in the local town the following afternoon.
I think improved road safety is a great idea. 20mph lowers emissions and wear on both roads and cars.
I just wish they made it 20mph in other areas, rather than where I drive.
I think it’s a great idea, and support it. Just… Not in my back yard.
In my home town ALL roads are 30kph, and like 50% of the intersections are roundabouts. The result is traffic just continuously flowing and you arrive much faster than before with the roads at 50kph. Other side effects are less gasoline use, less pollution from gas and tires, less accidents, less noise, basically less bad and more good.
Add to that the great cycle and walking infrastructure and yeah, of course I’m talking about the Netherlands
Queue the replies with "but you could nevah do this in [Canada | United States | England | Mexico | Russia | China | whatever] because [too cold | too many mountains | too large distances | whatever]
To be fair in NL a lot of people ignore the speed limits if the road invites you to drive faster (not enough traffic calming stuff). Not a lot and still driving safely but for example there’s this huge straight road near my house that they changed to 30 recently but didn’t make any changes to the infrastructure and pretty much everyone still drives 50 on it. Also on highways it’s 100 everywhere during the day but you see a lot driving 110/120 where there’s no speed control.
I wonder what the optimal speed is to maximize speed and flow while minimizing accidents.
If it’s mixing bikes, pedestrians and cars? 30kph is about the maximum safe speed for cars because of the maximum speeds of bikes, and even then they’d need to be on separate roads
By that logic we need to lower it down to 1kmh so we’re going to arrive to the destination even faster
is there a fallacy for when you just make shit up?
Sigh.
So you’re 8 years old, I take it?
There is a big possibility that you might struggle with sarcasm
There is a big possibility that you need to get a dictionary and look up the definition of sarcasm. Maybe take a course on it?
I constantly encounter people who speed in my town in Wales. Then I meet them at the next light. It’s infuriating because they’re making the place more dangerous for everyone but for literally no benefit. The average road speed possible is below 20 mph so speeding just means a longer wait at the next junction.
These selfish fuckwits don’t appear to be able to grasp that though so things are still dangerous due to their childish twattery.
The 2023 figures (the latest ones and which had the 20mph change) also changed the way the statistics were gathered.
They state
It is likely that KSI collisions and casualties in 2023 are affected by Dyfed Powys police force migrating to Crash. This is further discussed in our quality report.
(KSI is “Killed or seriously injured”. Crash is the new collection method)
100 people is about a 10% variance. To call that “striking” when there’s also a change in record keeping is bullshit. You need more data.
Fantastic! wonder how people are adjusting? Walking more, pooling trips, or avoiding slow roads?
I wondered at the definition:
defined as roads where lamp-posts were no more than about 180 metres apart.
Will this result in worse lighting to avoid the reduced speed limit?
Not sure why they’d adjust. It’s mostly urban areas where top speed makes little difference to journey times. Journey times are generally decided by how long you spend waiting at every light and intersection.
The thing about the lamp posts doesn’t really have any significance. Roads in the UK have a default speed limit that doesn’t need to be marked with the speed limit - it’s 30mph for “normal” streets with regular lamposts, 60mph for other roads, 70mph if there’s an embankment thing in between each side of the road. 180m spacing must just be the technical definition for what makes a road 30mph. In Wales, they made default 30mph roads 20mph.
Why is there still debate?
Because “driving beyond skill” needs more than a speed limiter to fix.
I’m ok with the limit itself, I just want a dedicated button on my steering wheel to turn on/off 20mph speed limit.
What wete they before?
21
30mph
I’m all for survival of the fittest. If people are too stupid to stay on the pavement, it’s on them. Why let drivers suffer to protect those idiots that blindly run into traffic?
Maybe we should ban ALL cars to get traffic related injuries to 0… 🤦♂️
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Your last sentence is the only one that isn’t idiotic.
More! Child! Deaths!
Don’t worry, the intelligent ones will survive.
Clearly you weren’t one of them, yet here you are
suffering is when someone in a climate-controlled vehicle with comfortable seats gets to their destination seconds later than the fastest possible.
zero road deaths have been caused by drivers running red lights or zebra crossings or mounting the pavement.
/s
That’s not the story of evolution! Read your Darwin! There’s like two pages on competition. Darwin, page after page after page is marveling at: oh my gosh, look at how species are collaborating and cooperating with one another for mutual survival!
haha yeah, why should we prevent deaths?
so like, would you just accept your entire family being shot as the natural way of things? if i throw you off a cliff that’s just… fine?
Shooting someone or throwing someone off a cliff is a deliberate act to hurt/kill someone else. No driver wants to kill someone. (Well, apart from these extremists that occasionally drive into German Christmas markets…)
People mindlessly walking into traffic, because that funny video on Instagram is more important than watching their surroundings, they are the problem.
Thinking about the absolute inability of the average Brit to drive like a sane person… we should
The scary thing is British driving ability appears on the high end of the spectrum from my experience.
The worse thing is speeding which is normalised.
The roads are just shit and full. When you go to a part of another country with same sort of traffic and narrow roads its becomes apparent Brits drive well.
