Usually these roads are so small, you can barely fit a car and maybe one pedestrian on one / each side. And these streets are quite common in residential area. As in the picture, usually there are light poles along the pedestrian street. the pictures pole is pretty small but normally they're big enough you can only circumvent it by going in the path of the car, and that's a Hotspot when people get hit.
I didn't even know you were allowed to drive 60km/h on those streets. Most people slowed down because the chance of damaging your car is quite high
Edit: also why big American car are not that popular in Japan. You can't even reach your house for many, if you get an American car
The really big thing in Japan is you're not allowed to park ("litter") your car in the street. In fact you can't even buy a car unless you can prove you have somewhere on your own land where you can park it. It makes a big improvement to walkability and general attractiveness of neighbourhoods.
Sweden has a similar concept where car and pedestrian traffic share the same space. The rule says that pedestrian has priority.
A less-known aspect of this is that bike traffic (and scooters) are also limited to 7km/h. Very few people actually follow that traffic rule, and enforcement is very rare. There are shared bike and pedestrian roads where bikes are allowed to go faster, but they are more rare and has their own designation.
Your edit reminds me of some years ago at a conference an American was asking in a boasting way what some European people thought of cybertrucks. I don't know if he owned one or worked on them or just liked them, but he seemed to want some praise on it. They tore into it including how big it was relative to narrow European streets and that they wouldn't be legal to sell in Europe. The guy didn't talk to them after that
In general, all cars are too wide now because they have gradually maximized their width up to a limit. The old Italian Fiat cars were much more nimble, of course.
I saw one in Austria for the first time just a couple of weeks ago. It had Polish number plates, so presumably it is legal to buy and register one there, and to drive it in other EU countries.
> In traffic, energy used over a specific period of time (power) translates into speed. In this case, the critical quantum will appear as a speed limit. Wherever this limit has been passed, the basic pattern of social degradation by high energy quanta has emerged. Once some public utility went faster than 15 mph, equity declined and the scarcity of both time and space increased. Motorized transportation monopolized traffic and blocked self-powered transit.
>...
> From our limited information it appears that everywhere in the world, after some vehicle broke the speed barrier of 15 mph, time scarcity related to traffic began to grow. After industry had reached this threshold of per capita output, transport made of man a new kind of waif: a being constantly absent from a destination he cannot reach on his own but must attain within the day.
Ultimately the limit is mostly decided by the width of the road. You can set a 10km/h limit but if your road is wide and straight, many will just go at whichever speed they feel comfortable with. The reverse is also true: I can bet it was very rare for anyone to ever reach 60km/h on streets like those shown in the picture.
So to really enforce slower traffic, narrow down your street to the bare minimum required for a car to pass through. Add obstacles as small turns or bumps. You'll also gain space for sidewalks and cycling paths.
I'm surprised the limit was so high on those narrow, low visibility streets to begin with. In many EU countries the limit is 30km/h even on streets that are double the size, if they're in residential neighborhoods to increase pedestrian safety.
All of the posted limits around my area are 30 or lower on this type of street. It seems like the real change is if the limit is unposted the assumed default is now 30 instead of 60, which is probably fair.
Back in the early 00s my host family had an imported left hand drive chevy blazer, and it felt enormous there. I can only imagine in the years since how ridiculous it would be with ballooning SUV sizes.
Halved? So you could go 60 on narrow city streets?
In Netherland, the speed limit in cities used to be 50, and even in the 1980s, people were complaining that that was too fast. Most residential streets have been 30 (or less; the street I grew up in had a limit of 5 or 10 km/h) for some time, and Amsterdam recently made it the default for all streets with only exceptions for the biggest thoroughfares. They've also experimented with closing some of those thoroughfares.
Cars are bad for cities. It's a simple fact. The big advantage of cities is that everything is within walking or cycling distance, and the density is perfect for dense public transport. The only use for cars is to get out of the city.
Low speed limits make cars safer, but they also encourage safer forms of transportation. It's great to see this insight take hold in more countries.
Machines allow the city to become bigger. Cars are machines. To move stuff. And big machines like buses, trams, subways, planes can move at batch speed. But fail on granularity.
I would not say, cars are bad. For me they are the cells that bring the oxygen, to use another analogy.
What is missing is organization to avoid clogging. And i dislike the noise and the danger one has. This can be done all better.
In cities cars have no reason to exist. You can combine better scalable public transit (light rail, subways, trains) with bikes/scooters and you get best of both worlds. Have been living in one for years without a need for a car.
There are many things like moving furniture or even larger amounts of groceries that are infinitely harder without a car.
And then there is also the question of the environment on that public transport. IME "good enough that complaints remain manageable" seems to be the target here unlike a car where you can have private entertainment and air conditioning (not to mention sufficient ventilation) to whatever level you wish.
And even for relatively frequent public transit routes you end up wasting quite a bit of time waiting. Even more so if your start and destination don't happen to be close to the same route.
You don't need to move furniture every week, so you can always rent a van for that. Using a car for the 500m to my nearest supermarket seems a bit silly, but these days our groceries are delivered to the front door.
All of this is a matter of how you design your cities. Some have been designed so you have no choice but to use a car, others have been designed so you don't need a car at all. I know you don't control the design of your city, but others do. They could be making different decisions.
> And even for relatively frequent public transit routes you end up wasting quite a bit of time waiting.
I agree overall, with the caveat that it really depends on the infrastructure available and sprawl. I had flown in to a city late at night, and all the subways and busses had stopped for the night. My only option was a taxi or stay at the airport.
In my experience, cyclists travel from 15-25 in the city. Very rare to find someone going 60. Even motorcycles don’t usually go that fast. There’s a lot of people on the streets of Amsterdam.
The biggest danger here is not terribly clear. Somewhere in the intersection of people cluelessly walking into the bike lane and bicyclists hitting the clueless.
A cyclist that can do sustained 60km/h in narrow streets is an elite athlete.
Have you tried biking at 60km/h? Even on a very good bike with a gigantic gear ratio I don't think you'd manage to get close to it on flat ground.
Quick edit: just to give you some figures, if the bike + cyclist weighs in total about 80kg the cyclist needs to sustain an output of about 1000W (on an aggressive position down on the drops) without wind to ride at 60km/h on flat ground. Very few people on Earth can do that...
> cyclists doing well over 60 inside town narrow streets
I used to cycle and I don't think I could achieve 60 on flat ground like Amsterdam. That's very solid sprinting that even the best cyclists in the world can only achieve for short periods of time. On narrow Amsterdam streets with cobblestone? Impossible...
I'm fast. I've been clocked at over 40. 40 is crazy fast. Most cyclist go 15. The fast ones 20-25. The very fastest maybe 30-35. 60 is a wild exaggeration. That's what sprinters do in the Tour de France.
> And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:
These bikes are not going at 36 km/h, whatever device she is using to measure it is incorrectly calibrated or simply not made to measure people on bikes.
WTF how does she measure 36km/h on the leisurely cycling people? And how does she measure the 28km/h guy when being so far from the direction he's travelling?
"Cyclist" and "someone on an illegal e-bike" are not one and the same thing.
> And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:
No, those people freewheeling on a regular city bike on relatively flat ground are not doing 36 km/h. That's around 20 km/h by my somewhat well tuned eyeballs. Have you never been on a bike and measured your speed?
You're not going to be seeing cyclists going 36 km/h beyond significant downhills or sporty people on drop bar bikes putting in significant effort.
Going 60 you need to have a _really_ good bike and want to go that fast. I barely manage to keep 30 for more than 20 minutes, and I would consider myself an average cyclist on an above average bike.
You'd need a good bike and also be an elite cyclist/sprinter. I can usually manage 30kmh for an hour or so (providing there's a good tailwind and I'm going downhill), but the issue with going faster is the air resistance which is roughly proportional to the square of velocity (rolling resistance is roughly proportional to velocity so that becomes less important). Going twice as fast will mean quadrupling your power output.
Maybe in Japan it will be effective. Since their "zone 30" creation was apparently a success, it seems probable that people will generally comply. My experience in France differs.
I live in a French town where the default speed limit is 30 km/h instead of the national 50 km/h. In the street where I live, the drivers that willingly (sometimes they can't overtake bikes and slow cars) observe that limit are a tiny minority. Why would they, since there are no automated controls in the city, and police sets manual controls once in a blue moon.
My street was already at 30 km/h in 2016 when the global speed limit was introduced by the city council. I'm pretty sure the mean speed has increased since then, though I don't have hard facts to prove it[^1]. At first I thought that, since all road signs were removed except on the city borders, the drivers needed a constant reminder of a limit that they'd prefer to ignore. Now I just think that people soon saw that there was almost no risk in breaking the law.
[^1]: There was a study, but the methodology was so poor that it was inconclusive. They monitored the speed in a dozen streets before and after the change, but it was done for different lengths of time (one or two weeks), at different times of the year, and with explicitly no attention payed to potential popular events or roadworks. So the average speed was globally lower after the change, but in most streets it had increased!
Street bumps are much more efficient in lowering speed than either "automated controls" or "manual controls". You (plus neighbours, probably) could petition your council to put one (or several) on your street.
The elegant way to implement such a speed limit is to have the driver do a "slalom" between things like trees or parking spots set alternatively between the two sides of the street, or green islands in the middle of the street. It forces a low driving speed without the discomfort and potential damage caused by speed bumps.
Street bumps are a discomfort even for those who respect the speed limit, and sometimes for residents (more noise) so they don't have popular support unless it's a problematic area, with a low safety record. There are high tech bumps that incorporate a radar sped detector and instantly raise in front of speeding cars but there are costly and require more maintenance.
I pass three speed bumps on my street every day. I'm driving at low speed, and the bumps are designed so to not create discomfort at these speeds. I don't even brake before them. They only create discomfort to people who drive way above the limit, which is the whole purpose, and the bumps are very effective at that.
Yes, the idea is to provide drivers with clues as to the relevant speed. Straight roads are usually designed to prioritise motorised vehicles and often need speed limits to try to control the drivers. By designing in chicanes and narrow sections, drivers don't usually have to be told to slow down. Also, having plenty of trees makes roads a lot nicer and you may even get free road bumps from their roots.
You are likely referring to prefabricated rubber speed bumps, outlawed because the material becomes very slippery when wet, endangering motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles.
Asphalt and concrete street bumps seem to be legal in 30 km/h zones.
Street bumps damage cars, make noise and create even more pollution. I head of a neighborhood action were drivers were honking on newly installed speed bumps. Until they got removed.
Reducing the speed limit often does little in itself because the v85 (85th percentile of speeds) is more dependent on how fast drivers feel it is safe to drive. Streets should be (re-)designed so that the limit and drivers’ intuition match, but that, of course, takes time and money (and will). Still, it’s much more economical in the long run than active monitoring/enforcement.
I'm a busybody. I have bought radar guns from eBay. I have lightly shamed the local authorities with data. There are now more physical speed controls (more signs, speed bumps, one way roads) in my local area. Perhaps my nagging helped. I like to think it did. Start chipping away at it. If not you, then who?
It will probably never happen, but maybe it's a way to facilitate the creation of traffic calming infrastructures (chicane, bump)? There's not better way to reduce the average speed than being forced to pay attention to not ruin your car (see the sibling comment with a picture of a narrow Japanese road)
The headline is a bit misleading because it was already 30km/h on many narrow streets.
Something about speed limits in Japan, almost no one follows them. I’ve seen police cars go past speeding cameras without their lights on while exceeding the speed limit by ~20% and everyone around them was doing the same.
This sounds like it would be a super dangerous place to drive then, but the speed limits are pretty low on local roads, and instead of driving the speed limit, people drive at a speed more similar to what you’d find for a similar road in most countries.
If you ever have the opportunity to drive in Japan, just drive at a speed you’re comfortable at and not faster than most of the traffic around you, and you’ll be fine. This isn’t legal advice though.
The one place I wouldn’t recommend exceeding the speed limit are those very narrow roads, many accidents happen there, though they’re rarely fatal.
Source: I’m working for a rental car company in Japan
> Source: I’m working for a rental car company in Japan
Then you should know the posted speed limit is low for enforcement reasons. And yes, the Japanese government and society decided to have a fake speed limit and a real speed limit, rather than change the threshold at which speeding is a prosecutable crime.
Good. Everywhere in the cities the speed limit in residential areas should be 30km/h and 60km/h for everything else. No need for higher speeds in dense urban environments.
Fun fact. In Lithuania there was a standat speed limit 60km/h. But we have this curiosity that if you exceed speed limit by less than 10km/h, there is no fine, just a warning. Basically "hey, could you please not"
Because of that de facto speed limit in streets was 70km/h. So to combat this, currently we have speed limit 50km/h in cities, which translates to de facto 60km/h
It's been the same in Germany. Literally everyone drives over the speed limit all of the time. 30km/h is somewhat stuck to when it's near a school but everywhere else people just drive faster because the fines were ridiculously low for the longest time.
In Sweden it's commonly 30-50km/h for inner city streets, I think it's a good sweet spot, 60km/h has 44% more kinetic energy than 50km/h, and since most time lost in urban areas is due to stoppage (traffic lights, intersections, etc.) there's minimal change on travel times at the lower speed.
> applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media report
>The measures apply to about 870,000km of roads that are less than 5.5 metres wide and do not have centre lines or median strips, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. They account for about 70% of the country’s general roads, the newspaper said.
So basically they went from no effective speed limit (since most people will probably not drive 60kmh on those kinds of roads if left to their own devices) to a specific speed limit on a bunch of tiny roads that the overwhelming majority of people were probably already going pretty darn slow on for the most part.
I suspect this will just result in a bunch of roads that really were overdue for it getting center lines and specific posted limits getting them and not much change anywhere else.
Anec-data, but I was in japan recently on my honeymoon, was in some big and small cities, and I was shocked at how fast people were driving on exactly these types of roads. I grew up in a neighborhood where the speedlimit is 20mph, which is slightly higher than this new regulation, so fwiw I think I can recognize when cars are going faster than that as they wiz by me.
So I’m pretty optimistic about this change, better than they way things are now at least.
The sign of an area with a dense population where people operate within close proximity to people-squashing-machines, and the people have rightly decided that reducing the severity of any potential people-vs-people-squashing-machines incidents is worth far more than the modest reduction in travel time for the occupiers of the people-squashing-machines, most of which never spend much time at 60km/h anyway due to congestion.
Frankly, anyone driving at 60km/h through narrow streets isn't driving with due care and consideration for the surroundings anyway.
> The introduction in 2011 of “zone 30” areas on a limited number of residential streets and along school routes resulted in a 30% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries
Not really. Taipei is basically a geriatric colony. You can tell because every year they shut down or limit the hours of nightlife districts, slow the MRT escalators down (more), spend public money on geezer karaoke social hours, etc. But not speed limits. It’s always the senile farts blasting their Mercedes down the street at high speed, losing control and plowing into school kids. There’s absolutely no political will to reduce speeds on residential streets.
Maji and various bars get limited or shut down because businesses in other areas (esp Xinyi) encourage local residents to file noise complaints to get more business over from competition. The number of open air raves says it's not much of a geriatric colony.
Worse than that, driving can be a partially subconscious activity and people tend to drive at the speed that "feels" right. It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.
> It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.
Unfortunately that doesn't facilitate bad people's need to stomp other people with the state and without bad people who want to stomp people with the state there wouldn't be enough people on the bandwagon to get anything done. That's the unfortunate deal with the devil that is faced in pretty much every area of public policy.
The article don't have a good picture of a small road. Here's an example https://kuruma-news.jp/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/20230214_g...
Usually these roads are so small, you can barely fit a car and maybe one pedestrian on one / each side. And these streets are quite common in residential area. As in the picture, usually there are light poles along the pedestrian street. the pictures pole is pretty small but normally they're big enough you can only circumvent it by going in the path of the car, and that's a Hotspot when people get hit.
I didn't even know you were allowed to drive 60km/h on those streets. Most people slowed down because the chance of damaging your car is quite high
Edit: also why big American car are not that popular in Japan. You can't even reach your house for many, if you get an American car
The really big thing in Japan is you're not allowed to park ("litter") your car in the street. In fact you can't even buy a car unless you can prove you have somewhere on your own land where you can park it. It makes a big improvement to walkability and general attractiveness of neighbourhoods.
There’s a hack though, just put on your hazards and you can park wherever you like!
I’m kidding of course but I see many people do this and it’s super frustrating.
Also fyi, you can buy a kei car without a parking certificate
In Germany that would probably be a "verkehrsberuhigter Bereich", Traffic calming area with a speed limit of 7 km/h.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street#Around_the_world
Sweden has a similar concept where car and pedestrian traffic share the same space. The rule says that pedestrian has priority.
A less-known aspect of this is that bike traffic (and scooters) are also limited to 7km/h. Very few people actually follow that traffic rule, and enforcement is very rare. There are shared bike and pedestrian roads where bikes are allowed to go faster, but they are more rare and has their own designation.
Your edit reminds me of some years ago at a conference an American was asking in a boasting way what some European people thought of cybertrucks. I don't know if he owned one or worked on them or just liked them, but he seemed to want some praise on it. They tore into it including how big it was relative to narrow European streets and that they wouldn't be legal to sell in Europe. The guy didn't talk to them after that
In general, all cars are too wide now because they have gradually maximized their width up to a limit. The old Italian Fiat cars were much more nimble, of course.
I saw one in Austria for the first time just a couple of weeks ago. It had Polish number plates, so presumably it is legal to buy and register one there, and to drive it in other EU countries.
There are some loopholes that exist for many european countries. The Netherlands has one cybertruck afaik.
> was asking in a boasting way what some European people thought of cybertrucks
Not a lot at announcement and even less now, not seen one in the UK (they aren't road legal).
"The Secret to Japan's Great Cities" (Not Just Bikes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlwQ2Y4By0U
(thank you, cassepipe)
The Secret to Japan's Great Cities - Not Just Bikes
Consider at least giving the title of what you want to share and even to add a small description as to why this is worth anyone's time
Even 30 seems a bit optimistic and 60 is insane.
It is insane that 60 was ever considered a limit :P 20 seems much more than needed
> In traffic, energy used over a specific period of time (power) translates into speed. In this case, the critical quantum will appear as a speed limit. Wherever this limit has been passed, the basic pattern of social degradation by high energy quanta has emerged. Once some public utility went faster than 15 mph, equity declined and the scarcity of both time and space increased. Motorized transportation monopolized traffic and blocked self-powered transit.
>...
> From our limited information it appears that everywhere in the world, after some vehicle broke the speed barrier of 15 mph, time scarcity related to traffic began to grow. After industry had reached this threshold of per capita output, transport made of man a new kind of waif: a being constantly absent from a destination he cannot reach on his own but must attain within the day.
https://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1973_energy_equity.html
Ultimately the limit is mostly decided by the width of the road. You can set a 10km/h limit but if your road is wide and straight, many will just go at whichever speed they feel comfortable with. The reverse is also true: I can bet it was very rare for anyone to ever reach 60km/h on streets like those shown in the picture.
So to really enforce slower traffic, narrow down your street to the bare minimum required for a car to pass through. Add obstacles as small turns or bumps. You'll also gain space for sidewalks and cycling paths.
In a street like that the even 30km/h is too fast.
I'm surprised the limit was so high on those narrow, low visibility streets to begin with. In many EU countries the limit is 30km/h even on streets that are double the size, if they're in residential neighborhoods to increase pedestrian safety.
All of the posted limits around my area are 30 or lower on this type of street. It seems like the real change is if the limit is unposted the assumed default is now 30 instead of 60, which is probably fair.
Back in the early 00s my host family had an imported left hand drive chevy blazer, and it felt enormous there. I can only imagine in the years since how ridiculous it would be with ballooning SUV sizes.
Halved? So you could go 60 on narrow city streets?
In Netherland, the speed limit in cities used to be 50, and even in the 1980s, people were complaining that that was too fast. Most residential streets have been 30 (or less; the street I grew up in had a limit of 5 or 10 km/h) for some time, and Amsterdam recently made it the default for all streets with only exceptions for the biggest thoroughfares. They've also experimented with closing some of those thoroughfares.
Cars are bad for cities. It's a simple fact. The big advantage of cities is that everything is within walking or cycling distance, and the density is perfect for dense public transport. The only use for cars is to get out of the city.
Low speed limits make cars safer, but they also encourage safer forms of transportation. It's great to see this insight take hold in more countries.
Machines allow the city to become bigger. Cars are machines. To move stuff. And big machines like buses, trams, subways, planes can move at batch speed. But fail on granularity.
I would not say, cars are bad. For me they are the cells that bring the oxygen, to use another analogy.
What is missing is organization to avoid clogging. And i dislike the noise and the danger one has. This can be done all better.
But i like cars. I like my bike also.
And after all, i like technology. :)
In cities cars have no reason to exist. You can combine better scalable public transit (light rail, subways, trains) with bikes/scooters and you get best of both worlds. Have been living in one for years without a need for a car.
There are many things like moving furniture or even larger amounts of groceries that are infinitely harder without a car.
And then there is also the question of the environment on that public transport. IME "good enough that complaints remain manageable" seems to be the target here unlike a car where you can have private entertainment and air conditioning (not to mention sufficient ventilation) to whatever level you wish.
And even for relatively frequent public transit routes you end up wasting quite a bit of time waiting. Even more so if your start and destination don't happen to be close to the same route.
You don't need to move furniture every week, so you can always rent a van for that. Using a car for the 500m to my nearest supermarket seems a bit silly, but these days our groceries are delivered to the front door.
All of this is a matter of how you design your cities. Some have been designed so you have no choice but to use a car, others have been designed so you don't need a car at all. I know you don't control the design of your city, but others do. They could be making different decisions.
> And even for relatively frequent public transit routes you end up wasting quite a bit of time waiting.
The same is true for busy car routes.
I agree overall, with the caveat that it really depends on the infrastructure available and sprawl. I had flown in to a city late at night, and all the subways and busses had stopped for the night. My only option was a taxi or stay at the airport.
If there is no posted speed limit then the default is (was) 60. Now narrow roads have a default of 30.
In my area, I can’t think of a an example of a road that would be affected by this law change that didn’t already have a 30 km/h posted speed limit.
Its ironic, because the biggest danger in Amsterdam are cyclists doing well over 60 inside town narrow streets.
In my experience, cyclists travel from 15-25 in the city. Very rare to find someone going 60. Even motorcycles don’t usually go that fast. There’s a lot of people on the streets of Amsterdam.
The biggest danger here is not terribly clear. Somewhere in the intersection of people cluelessly walking into the bike lane and bicyclists hitting the clueless.
>> Somewhere in the intersection of people cluelessly walking into the bike lane and bicyclists hitting the clueless.
Looks like bicyclists are the clueless...bordering on criminal:
https://youtu.be/u10OCGJH0Lg?t=3
https://youtu.be/P0bZFkPtu4M?t=3
A cyclist that can do sustained 60km/h in narrow streets is an elite athlete.
Have you tried biking at 60km/h? Even on a very good bike with a gigantic gear ratio I don't think you'd manage to get close to it on flat ground.
Quick edit: just to give you some figures, if the bike + cyclist weighs in total about 80kg the cyclist needs to sustain an output of about 1000W (on an aggressive position down on the drops) without wind to ride at 60km/h on flat ground. Very few people on Earth can do that...
>A cyclist that can do sustained 60km/h in narrow streets is an elite athlete.
Most "cyclists" are now actually drivers of light electric motorcycles. A $1500 Chinese ebike will do that easily.
It will do for about 15 minutes until the battery complete discharges.
Riding at 60km/h on a bike consumes a lot of power, aerodynamics are a bitch of a force.
> cyclists doing well over 60 inside town narrow streets
I used to cycle and I don't think I could achieve 60 on flat ground like Amsterdam. That's very solid sprinting that even the best cyclists in the world can only achieve for short periods of time. On narrow Amsterdam streets with cobblestone? Impossible...
I'm fast. I've been clocked at over 40. 40 is crazy fast. Most cyclist go 15. The fast ones 20-25. The very fastest maybe 30-35. 60 is a wild exaggeration. That's what sprinters do in the Tour de France.
You probably mean over 30-40 km/h, not 60.
more like 15-20 km/h
No I mean up to 60... km/h
https://youtu.be/aEHIqqaPIqI
And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:
https://youtu.be/FdoViT8-s5I?t=47
you get hit by one of these silent missiles, with an 80kg passenger on it, you spend weeks in hospital...you are older person, its life threatening...
Amsterdam bikes are terrifying :-))
> And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:
These bikes are not going at 36 km/h, whatever device she is using to measure it is incorrectly calibrated or simply not made to measure people on bikes.
WTF how does she measure 36km/h on the leisurely cycling people? And how does she measure the 28km/h guy when being so far from the direction he's travelling?
It's probably a device meant for and tested to measure cars, not arbitrary objects. Probably needs to be used in a specific way too.
> No I mean up to 60... km/h
That's not a bicycle, that's a motorbike.
> No I mean up to 60... km/h
"Cyclist" and "someone on an illegal e-bike" are not one and the same thing.
> And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:
No, those people freewheeling on a regular city bike on relatively flat ground are not doing 36 km/h. That's around 20 km/h by my somewhat well tuned eyeballs. Have you never been on a bike and measured your speed?
You're not going to be seeing cyclists going 36 km/h beyond significant downhills or sporty people on drop bar bikes putting in significant effort.
Going 60 you need to have a _really_ good bike and want to go that fast. I barely manage to keep 30 for more than 20 minutes, and I would consider myself an average cyclist on an above average bike.
You'd need a good bike and also be an elite cyclist/sprinter. I can usually manage 30kmh for an hour or so (providing there's a good tailwind and I'm going downhill), but the issue with going faster is the air resistance which is roughly proportional to the square of velocity (rolling resistance is roughly proportional to velocity so that becomes less important). Going twice as fast will mean quadrupling your power output.
It’s not ironic. Once you remove the biggest danger (fast cars), fast bikes take the top spot.
Maybe in Japan it will be effective. Since their "zone 30" creation was apparently a success, it seems probable that people will generally comply. My experience in France differs.
I live in a French town where the default speed limit is 30 km/h instead of the national 50 km/h. In the street where I live, the drivers that willingly (sometimes they can't overtake bikes and slow cars) observe that limit are a tiny minority. Why would they, since there are no automated controls in the city, and police sets manual controls once in a blue moon.
My street was already at 30 km/h in 2016 when the global speed limit was introduced by the city council. I'm pretty sure the mean speed has increased since then, though I don't have hard facts to prove it[^1]. At first I thought that, since all road signs were removed except on the city borders, the drivers needed a constant reminder of a limit that they'd prefer to ignore. Now I just think that people soon saw that there was almost no risk in breaking the law.
[^1]: There was a study, but the methodology was so poor that it was inconclusive. They monitored the speed in a dozen streets before and after the change, but it was done for different lengths of time (one or two weeks), at different times of the year, and with explicitly no attention payed to potential popular events or roadworks. So the average speed was globally lower after the change, but in most streets it had increased!
Street bumps are much more efficient in lowering speed than either "automated controls" or "manual controls". You (plus neighbours, probably) could petition your council to put one (or several) on your street.
The elegant way to implement such a speed limit is to have the driver do a "slalom" between things like trees or parking spots set alternatively between the two sides of the street, or green islands in the middle of the street. It forces a low driving speed without the discomfort and potential damage caused by speed bumps.
Street bumps are a discomfort even for those who respect the speed limit, and sometimes for residents (more noise) so they don't have popular support unless it's a problematic area, with a low safety record. There are high tech bumps that incorporate a radar sped detector and instantly raise in front of speeding cars but there are costly and require more maintenance.
I pass three speed bumps on my street every day. I'm driving at low speed, and the bumps are designed so to not create discomfort at these speeds. I don't even brake before them. They only create discomfort to people who drive way above the limit, which is the whole purpose, and the bumps are very effective at that.
Yes, the idea is to provide drivers with clues as to the relevant speed. Straight roads are usually designed to prioritise motorised vehicles and often need speed limits to try to control the drivers. By designing in chicanes and narrow sections, drivers don't usually have to be told to slow down. Also, having plenty of trees makes roads a lot nicer and you may even get free road bumps from their roots.
Street bumps are no longer allowed in France. Existing ones can stay, but cities can't create new ones.
Instead they create bottlenecks and turns to force cars to slow down.
You are likely referring to prefabricated rubber speed bumps, outlawed because the material becomes very slippery when wet, endangering motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles.
Asphalt and concrete street bumps seem to be legal in 30 km/h zones.
Here's an offer from Citroen which is free and "open to all 34000 French mayors via an online form": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-AI70ImUgE
My street has speedbumps since a few years and its been an amqzing improvement
Street bumps damage cars, make noise and create even more pollution. I head of a neighborhood action were drivers were honking on newly installed speed bumps. Until they got removed.
Reducing the speed limit often does little in itself because the v85 (85th percentile of speeds) is more dependent on how fast drivers feel it is safe to drive. Streets should be (re-)designed so that the limit and drivers’ intuition match, but that, of course, takes time and money (and will). Still, it’s much more economical in the long run than active monitoring/enforcement.
I'm a busybody. I have bought radar guns from eBay. I have lightly shamed the local authorities with data. There are now more physical speed controls (more signs, speed bumps, one way roads) in my local area. Perhaps my nagging helped. I like to think it did. Start chipping away at it. If not you, then who?
It will probably never happen, but maybe it's a way to facilitate the creation of traffic calming infrastructures (chicane, bump)? There's not better way to reduce the average speed than being forced to pay attention to not ruin your car (see the sibling comment with a picture of a narrow Japanese road)
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The headline is a bit misleading because it was already 30km/h on many narrow streets.
Something about speed limits in Japan, almost no one follows them. I’ve seen police cars go past speeding cameras without their lights on while exceeding the speed limit by ~20% and everyone around them was doing the same.
This sounds like it would be a super dangerous place to drive then, but the speed limits are pretty low on local roads, and instead of driving the speed limit, people drive at a speed more similar to what you’d find for a similar road in most countries.
If you ever have the opportunity to drive in Japan, just drive at a speed you’re comfortable at and not faster than most of the traffic around you, and you’ll be fine. This isn’t legal advice though.
The one place I wouldn’t recommend exceeding the speed limit are those very narrow roads, many accidents happen there, though they’re rarely fatal.
Source: I’m working for a rental car company in Japan
> Source: I’m working for a rental car company in Japan
Then you should know the posted speed limit is low for enforcement reasons. And yes, the Japanese government and society decided to have a fake speed limit and a real speed limit, rather than change the threshold at which speeding is a prosecutable crime.
Good. Everywhere in the cities the speed limit in residential areas should be 30km/h and 60km/h for everything else. No need for higher speeds in dense urban environments.
Fun fact. In Lithuania there was a standat speed limit 60km/h. But we have this curiosity that if you exceed speed limit by less than 10km/h, there is no fine, just a warning. Basically "hey, could you please not"
Because of that de facto speed limit in streets was 70km/h. So to combat this, currently we have speed limit 50km/h in cities, which translates to de facto 60km/h
It's been the same in Germany. Literally everyone drives over the speed limit all of the time. 30km/h is somewhat stuck to when it's near a school but everywhere else people just drive faster because the fines were ridiculously low for the longest time.
Meantime in Sweden +8kmh gets you 100€+ fine and a free lecture how speeding kills people.
In Sweden it's commonly 30-50km/h for inner city streets, I think it's a good sweet spot, 60km/h has 44% more kinetic energy than 50km/h, and since most time lost in urban areas is due to stoppage (traffic lights, intersections, etc.) there's minimal change on travel times at the lower speed.
Many rather wide streets in the centre of New Zealand cities have had 30 km/h speed limits since ... I think the 1990s.
For example here, Willis St in Wellington:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8hHCLxCDK4C8U8Tz9
You can see it is already 30 km/h in the first streetview capture in 2008.
In Spain it's 30km/hr in the city on most one-lane roads. Most people comply, maybe people will go 40 but I can't imagine people going 60 down them.
>slashed from 60km/h (37mph) to 30km/h
> applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media report
>The measures apply to about 870,000km of roads that are less than 5.5 metres wide and do not have centre lines or median strips, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. They account for about 70% of the country’s general roads, the newspaper said.
So basically they went from no effective speed limit (since most people will probably not drive 60kmh on those kinds of roads if left to their own devices) to a specific speed limit on a bunch of tiny roads that the overwhelming majority of people were probably already going pretty darn slow on for the most part.
I suspect this will just result in a bunch of roads that really were overdue for it getting center lines and specific posted limits getting them and not much change anywhere else.
Anec-data, but I was in japan recently on my honeymoon, was in some big and small cities, and I was shocked at how fast people were driving on exactly these types of roads. I grew up in a neighborhood where the speedlimit is 20mph, which is slightly higher than this new regulation, so fwiw I think I can recognize when cars are going faster than that as they wiz by me.
So I’m pretty optimistic about this change, better than they way things are now at least.
I remember reading a news story about how popular kei cars (compact cars) are in Japan.
It feels like these traffic laws and the local conditions really go hand in hand with that.
The sign of an area run by old people
The sign of people that live in a city that understand how dangerous cars are in a shared space with people.
To be fair, the cars themselves aren't dangerous - it's the drivers.
The sign of an area with a dense population where people operate within close proximity to people-squashing-machines, and the people have rightly decided that reducing the severity of any potential people-vs-people-squashing-machines incidents is worth far more than the modest reduction in travel time for the occupiers of the people-squashing-machines, most of which never spend much time at 60km/h anyway due to congestion.
Frankly, anyone driving at 60km/h through narrow streets isn't driving with due care and consideration for the surroundings anyway.
From the article:
> The introduction in 2011 of “zone 30” areas on a limited number of residential streets and along school routes resulted in a 30% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries
This benefits everyone.
Not really. Taipei is basically a geriatric colony. You can tell because every year they shut down or limit the hours of nightlife districts, slow the MRT escalators down (more), spend public money on geezer karaoke social hours, etc. But not speed limits. It’s always the senile farts blasting their Mercedes down the street at high speed, losing control and plowing into school kids. There’s absolutely no political will to reduce speeds on residential streets.
Maji and various bars get limited or shut down because businesses in other areas (esp Xinyi) encourage local residents to file noise complaints to get more business over from competition. The number of open air raves says it's not much of a geriatric colony.
They're old because they didn't get hit by a car.
What? It’s the children who get run over by speeding assholes.
that might be news to you but those people don't give a shit about speed limits
Worse than that, driving can be a partially subconscious activity and people tend to drive at the speed that "feels" right. It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.
> It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.
Unfortunately that doesn't facilitate bad people's need to stomp other people with the state and without bad people who want to stomp people with the state there wouldn't be enough people on the bandwagon to get anything done. That's the unfortunate deal with the devil that is faced in pretty much every area of public policy.
Narrow spaces using concrete and steel poles. Too fast will wipe out your vehicle rather than a person.
Doesn't even have to be anything that harsh. Narrow, twisty tree-lined lanes, speed humps, paved road surfaces that are louder inside the car
Arrest them, take away their cars. Repeat until they do "give a shit".
How many kids will be isekai'd in the process?