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- cross-posted to:
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As road deaths increase and cycle lanes overflow with e-bikes, the Netherlands is considering a cycling speed limit of 12mph (20km/h).
The government has started a two-week trial in Houten, near Utrecht, to gauge whether freedom-loving Dutch cyclists are willing to slow down – and whether they have any idea how fast they are going in the first place.
I’ll copy my comment on this article from a different thread
As a Dutchman, I’m not a fan of this proposed speed limit.
My natural speed at which I comfortably cycle is around 25 km/h, which is perfectly safe if you pay attention and slow down when it is necessary in order not to hinder your fellow road users. The issue is people who cycle recklessly without keeping other cyclists in mind, in my opinion.
Enforcement is the key. And we already have reckless road usage laws.
I much prefer the Belgian method, where they set a recommended speed limit with signs of 25 km/h on the bikepath. You can cycle faster, but that’s at your own risk.
The whole reason to regulate those things is exactly because that’s not “at your own risk” since you’re sharing the road or bicycle path with other people.
As I see it, in your own space you can do whatever the fuck you want whilst risking only yourself (really, go wild!), but as soon as you’re in a space shared with other people where your actions can harm others, then your freedom to do whatever the fuck you want is constrained because others too have various freedoms, not least to not get killed or seriously harmed by somebody else simply because they’re using the same shared space.
In practice “indicative” is the same as non-existent.
Sure, thoughtfull people who take others into account will moderate their speed in more dangerous situations, but those people would already do it anyways even in the absence of an indicative maximum and, besides, even those with the best of intention can simply be wrong in their assumption that “this is a safe speed for these conditions” (funny statistic, not quite for cycling but appropriate: around 90% of drivers thing they’re “good drivers” whilst thinking most other drivers are “bad drivers”) and in a crash it’s often not just them who suffer from their misjudgment. Meanwhile, selfish assholes will just carry on being selfish assholes in the face of a maximum speed indication or in fact in the face of a legal speed limit which isn’t enforced and just go too fast in order to shave themselves a minute or two in their trip, since assholes only moderate their “what’s best for me and fuck everybody else” when forced to (meaning that they MUST get punished if they don’t).
It’s a sad and unfortunate side-effect that because of need to stop assholes from fucking things up for everybody else you end up with rules that are too tight for a few people who only ever go above that level when it’s safe and who do have the proper experience to judge “safe” rather than being overconfident, but that’s just the point were you better balance the “freedoms” of everybody involved.
20km/h is just too slow though. It turns transportation infrastructure that is quite useable on 20+ km journeys and turns it into infrastructure really only usable for short trips.
Also if you were to trying to get somewhere fast with a 20km/h speed limit that you abide by your effort would esentially be a lot of short sprints up to speed and a bunch of trundling in between, imo maybe the most annoying way to ride a bike.
I could see like 30km/h city and 40km/h country or something like this but 20 is just too low.
A 20km/h limit makes an average of ~ 20km/h impossible and i’d recon most long bike commutes find around a 20km/h average to be quite comfortable, but a 20km/h average even on flat terrain requires stints well past 20 to make up for lights and such. If it gets hilly this limit gets even more ridicoulous, depending on the grade the bike rolls way faster than 20.