this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
395 points (94.8% liked)

Fuck Cars

9672 readers
4 users here now

This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.

This community exists for the following reasons:

You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.

Rules

  1. Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.

  2. No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.

  3. Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.

  4. No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.

  5. No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.

  6. No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.

  7. No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.

Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] spicytuna62 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year 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.