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“I don’t want to lie to people,” lieutenant Megge tells us. It may make parents feel better if the speed limit on their street is 25 mph instead of 35 mph, but
by cm2012 7y ago
“I don’t want to lie to people,” lieutenant Megge tells us. It may make parents feel better if the speed limit on their street is 25 mph instead of 35 mph, but that sign won’t make people drive any slower. Megge prefers speed limits that both allow people to drive at a safe speed legally, and that realistically reflect traffic speeds. People shouldn’t have a false sense of safety around roads, he says."
This is likely false.
NYC changed the speed limit to 25 mph in Nov 2014. Pedestrian deaths have been sharply reduced:
1) https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/8/16863408/nyc-vision-zero-traffic-pedestrian-fatalities-statistics https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/8/16863408/nyc-vision-zero-traf...
2) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/nyregion/nyc-pedestrian-deaths.html?module=inline https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/nyregion/nyc-pedestrian-d...
At the same time pedestrian deaths in the US as a whole have increased:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/01/pedestrian-deaths-reach-another-high-drivers-entirely-to-blame/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/01/pedestrian-deaths-rea...
The data is clear that lower speeds means accidents are less dangerous:
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/31/3-graphs-that-explain-why-20-mph-should-be-the-limit-on-city-streets/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/31/3-graphs-that-explain...
- HBKXNCUO 7y agoIs there any data showing that people are actually driving slower in NYC as a result of the speed limit decrease?
- notatoad 7y agois there any evidence that traffic speeds have actually reduced due to the speed limit change? the vision zero project includes a whole bunch of stuff, including redesigning dangerous intersections, which the decline in pedestrian deaths could be attributed to.
- kolinko 7y agoRegarding your last link - lower speeds and lower speed limits are not the same. Also, your claim that it’s lower speed limits that reduced deaths seems not entirely honest - the articles say that there were more things that changed besides speed limits.
- joe_the_user 7y agoSure, it's possible that pedestrian deaths can be reduced by lower speed limits. But in busier roadways, what I've observed is that slow drivers tend to be biggest danger now - and that is naturally because slow drivers tend to also be distracted drivers (by cellphones or otherwise). Naturally, such distraction is a bigger and bigger phenomena and dealing with them by making it clearer how they ought to drive seem OK.
- bryanlarsen 7y agoDriving too slow results in more accidents. Driving too fast results in more fatalities. It might be nice to decrease both, but I know what I care more about reducing.
- joe_the_user 7y agoSure but the argument is what can be controlled. The major portion of drivers are going to be driving as fast as the road allows, some portion faster and some will drive as fast they read on the sign (as they tap on their phones). We can ticket the reckless drivers, maybe have devices to reduce the average but raising the speed limit to the speed of the bulk of traffic makes sense, as per argument in article.
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoYou can see the Vision Zero data here: http://www.nycvzv.info/ http://www.nycvzv.info/ I don't think your interpretation about speed limits is correct compared to other factors mentioned in the nytimes article: > more stringent enforcement of moving violations, revamping hundreds of street corners to slow down turning cars and rejiggering crossing signals to give pedestrians a head start. For one, traffic in NYC just doesn't move that fast, especially on the streets where most of the accidents happened. It's not really appropriate to extrapolate NYC data to the rest of the United States unless you focus only on urban centers. Second, almost all of the fatalities seem to happen around intersections. I'd expect to see more jay walking deaths in the years before the speed limit change if your interpretation was correct.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>revamping hundreds of street corners to slow down turning cars This is probably the biggest one. Lots of pedestrians and get hit by people turning right who can't see them until the last second because of other things on the street corner (like people waiting to cross in the other direction).
- mikepurvis 7y agoAlso drivers who roll through a right-turn-on-red while looking the other way for cars. By the time they see the person walking, they've already slammed on the gas so they don't miss their opening. There are a few intersections in my city that are notorious for this; I have an extremely loud airhorn on my bike that I use to blast drivers who allow their vehicle to move forward without looking where it's going. I no longer believe RTOR can be performed safely by the majority of drivers— it should be banned.
- WillPostForFood 7y agoThe data in your links is inconclusive. It is improbable that the 25mph speed limit, in effect for only 2 months, accounts for the drop in fatalities from 2013-2014. There were lots of other Vision Zero things happening in 2014 that likely had a bigger effect. 2015 was the first full year with the speed limit, and it looks like no real impact from 2014. 2014 (2 months of 25mph) : 140 pedestrian fatalities 2015 139 pedestrian fatalities 2016: 148 pedestrian fatalities
- bartimus 7y agoCame to say this. The 25 limit was set at November 2014.
- cbhl 7y agoThere are two kinds of safety: collisions between cars and cars, and collections between cars and everything else (pedestrians, bicycles, children). For a limited-access road or grade-separated road (especially electronic toll roads), simply minimizing the speed difference between cars is enough. For the pedestrian case, you want to minimize the speed difference between cars and pedestrians. Speed limits are only part of a plan to accomplish this goal -- instead, you want affordances that make people naturally drive slower: removing car lanes (replacing them with trees or sidewalk or protected bike lanes), narrower lanes, adding curves to the road (but without adding blind corners), adding pedestrian crossings, and so forth.
- bluGill 7y agoYou are missing the context of what Megge is trying to say, even though it is right there in your quote: if you want people to slow down use engineering to design a street where people will drive slower.
- frankus 7y agoI like this guy's take: "The common US rule requiring speed limits to be set at 85% of actual average car speeds amounts to crowdsourcing the value of human life, on a platform where only motorists have a voice." (https://twitter.com/humantransit/status/1123264831790899200 https://twitter.com/humantransit/status/1123264831790899200)
- mehrdadn 7y agoI like the sentiment but I don't like that it's blatantly lying to express it. Just because I'm walking right now doesn't mean I never drive. Or the reverse.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoKinetic energy = 1/2 m*v^2 is all I kept thinking reading this article.
- leetcrew 7y agodon't stand in the road while I have the legal right of way is all I can think of when I read posts like this.
- chriswphoto 7y agoIf only it were that easy. If you think this way you're very much part of the problem. People's right to life supersedes right of way. We have to work together to accommodate each other's mistakes and reduce pointless suffering.
- cryptonector 7y agoIt's highway speeds that are too low. Street speeds are mostly OK, though the best way to fix speeding on city streets is to have speed limiting devices rather than lower speed limits.
- sevensor 7y agoPerhaps what we need to do is make roadways more dangerous for motorists, so they'll slow down and not kill as many pedestrians.
- nullwasamistake 7y agoHow much of this is due to safety features to reduce pedestrian injury in accidents? Devil's advocate, but crash fatality rates have been on a downward trend for decades. Some safety features like automatic emergency braking, abs, stability control, and modern (more powerful) headlights protect pedestrians as well as drivers Somewhat recently, many cars have been specifically designed to reduce injury when colliding with pedestrians, and these models have become more common in the 2014-2018 window. I wouldn't completely discount the research, but the majority of the reduction could be that newer cars are simply safer for everyone