The Welsh parliament has passed a law bringing down the speed limit on all residential roads and busy streets to 20 mph (30 km/h). Not everyone is pleased.
  • 𝕾𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖞 𝕿𝖚𝖓𝖆English
    47•9 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      34•9 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        3•9 months ago

        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?

        • @[email protected]
          4•9 months ago

          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.

      • oo1
        3•9 months ago

        yeah there are places where you can add a hard separated a bike lane and rejig parking - not so much for the bikes, but to narrow the carriage way and reduce the ‘natural’ speed of the road.