cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7658487
For more detailed information: https://www.gov.wales/introducing-20mph-speed-limits-frequently-asked-questions
This will hopefully ensure less people get hit by cars when the fights inevitably break out on the roads near pubs after Wales lose to Fiji and Australia and exit in the group stage of the Rugby World Cup this month
Also way to make money from the shitload of speeding tickets lol
I wish my neighborhood would do this. 25mph feels really fast on my street. I usually hover around 15-20 when I’m not paying attention to my speed.
Edit: I am surprised that this was my third most controversial comment since I’ve joined
It’s been surprising to see just how many pro-car users seem to lurk on these anti-car/pro-alternative transport communities.
I live in a super rural area and would have an almost impossible time working, buying groceries or getting medical care without a car and even I think the vast majority of the arguments against this are dumb as fuck and the epitome of car brained.
Also lowering it from 30 to 20 realistically means people will now drive 30 instead of 40.
I’m in favor of lower speed limits, but this will result in a temporary uptick in speeding tickets, followed by loss of interest by local police, which yields no net change. Lowering the speed limit is a band aid fix. It’s quick. It’s cheap. But it can, by no means, be seen as a permanent solution. If you want people to slow down, you need to make a road that will make people want to slow down. So yeah, I like lower speed limits, but they cannot and do not work alone. It’s a step in the right direction, but more should be done.
They’re not just lowering the speed limit. From the FAQ:
Will the roll out involve money being spent on speed bumps?
There is no plan to include traffic calming (including speed bumps) as part of the change to speed limits. There are other ‘softer’ measures that might be introduced, such as using buffer speed limits, removing the centre line, narrowing the carriageway visually, using planting etc.
These ‘softer’ measures (which definitely are traffic calming) will be essential to make this plan a success. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is going through a similar process of lowering speed limits in residential areas. The planning staff said they needed the speed lowered so they could implement these traffic calming measures, otherwise the speed limit would be higher than the street design can accommodate.
i can understand not strictly calling paint traffic calming, but planters? what galaxy brain definition of traffic calming are they using where placing a box on the road isn’t traffic calming?
My guess is the phrase “traffic calming” has negative connotations with the local general public due to poor implementation.
I’ve driven down streets that are 50km/h and I think most people would gladly do ≤60km/h. If that’s too fast, there’s many ways to ‘softly’ calm the speed like narrowing the road, chicanes, paving stones, etc. Instead, they have speed bumps ever couple kms so drivers slow to a crawl for the bump, then accelerate hard to >70km/h, then brake hard to go over the next bump.
Fuck cars
Wouldn’t this, in the end, make cars have to shift to a lower gear, thus keeping about the same RPM, and thus eating about the same amount of fuel, which results in about the same volume of the sound produced by the car?
This feels like a terrible fix.
A lot of cars can cruise at 20-25mph just idling in Drive, foot completely off both gas and brake. The RPMs don’t get much lower than that.
Make cars use more gas by having operate at speeds they aren’t meant to operate at constantly. Check.
Make people sit in cars longer resulting in longer commutes and more pollution. Check.
Claim that some number printed on a sign magically saves lives. Check.
Do literally anything to actually address the issue at hand. Not check.
Make people sit in cars longer resulting in longer commutes and more pollution. Check.
I agree. The longer time people spend on the road, the more pollution and traffic you get. The obvious logical solution will if course be to abolish all woke speed limits and instead mandate that motorists drive as fast as humanly possible at all times.
Literally the “more people will die but others will get to work faster, raising productivity” argument
Lower speeds gets better gas mileage.
Lower speeds means spreading out when people arrive, improving traffic.
The concept of more velocity being equal to more force is a pretty simple and fundamental concept in physics (if you really want to be a pedant the force required to overcome the decelerative forces to maintain a constant velocity at higher speeds)
Too bad they can’t just complain about people doing something instead of nothing on the internet like you.
While it sounds good on paper, in practice, they’ve screwed it up. They’re putting the new speed limits in place on every 30mph road in Wales before they’ve put the public transport alternatives in place.
There’s currently no reason for someone to switch to public transport, especially if the buses are going to be stuck at the same speed as the cars, but stopping regularly too. Our roads are too narrow to install bus lanes, and barely have enough room for single file traffic through lots of the towns and villages. The trains are being upgraded, but that’s not scheduled to finish until at least next year, and at the moment they’re slow and very unreliable. It feels like every week the trains are cancelled and an inadequate replacement bus service is put on.
I’m disabled, and have to travel from my town, Aberdare, to the main hospital in Cardiff, UHW, on a regular basis. If I had to leave now, it would take 42 minutes by car, or 2 hours and 6 minutes by public transport. The shortest journey is tomorrow morning and would take 1 hour and 31 minutes, more than double the time of the car journey. The closest inpatient hospital is 22 minutes by car, or over an hour by public transport. The difference the new speed limits are going to make is negligible compared to how slow public transport is here.
All this is going to do is annoy and upset people, and turn them off the idea of using public transport, and push a lot of people towards voting for the parties who were against this. Out of the main parties, that mainly seems to be the Conservatives, so that’s going to be bad for all of us.
All this is going to do is annoy and upset people, and turn them off the idea of using public transport, and push a lot of people towards voting for the parties who were against this.
Bingo. But they don’t care who they hurt in the process. “Fuck cars = fuck lives”
Get fucked car lover lmfao
Completely deranged
lmao
oh fuck off you hysterical dipshit
Shidding and farding over a 1 minute increase on my commute through a residential area
“Fuck cars = fuck lives”
are cars sentient where you live
I do not get the 20mph speed limit here. E-Bicycles get to do 15.5mph in Wales, apparently. On a perfect, no traffic, no obstruction 1 mile stretch of road the speed difference here would save you, what, 30 seconds at most?
Exactly, so it’s incentive to get rid of your car and get a bike
not going far enough there is my point
I also agree they should just ban cars
I do like the idea of not banning cars but instead make them horribly embarrassing to use through regulation and legislation, its just really funny to me
Cars are allowed but you have to get the horn replaced with a clip of somebody sarcastically saying “ohhh look at me I think I’m so much more important than everybody else”
Limit cars to 10 mph by mandating every person pulls into the dmv so a clown with a big comedy screwdriver can turn the screw that turns off turbo mode :'(
I like your idea of incorporating clown technology. Maybe we can invest in giant turnkey technology so you have to get out and rewind your car every couple minutes.
And you have to have at least 14 passengers in it.
Ride Scaring
