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85% Of Car Drivers Break 20mph Speed Limits, Reveals U.K.’s Department For Transport
(www.forbes.com)
Speed limit is enforced by road design, not by signs
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
284 points (93.0% liked)
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You’re suggesting they add even more potholes to motorways?
Context is 20 mph steets, making them more complicated and narrower forces drivers to slow down to not hit anything. Straight and wide streets allow drivers to speed as they feel comfortable.
Motorways on the other hand encourage to speed with wide lines, long view distance, long turn radiuses, hard shoulder and long paint stips
A center line with floppy cone-pole things, barriers on the side (such as planters)(bonus it keeps pedestrians and cyclists safer and beautifies the area)
Etc
More round a bouts.
it's enforced by road design, and in some cases our desire to not murder children with our cars. call me autistic (I am) but I follow speed limits in residential areas even if the road is designed like a formula 1 track
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There are quite a few 20 mph roads near me where the only incentive to slow down is to avoid being caught be a speed camera.
The roads are wide and straight for long stretches, and going at the 20 mph limit just means you become an obstruction for the rest of traffic, even buses and lorries.
The design of the road and posted speed limits are sending mixed messages.
There's a concept in road design that says the engineer must first determine the design speed, which is basically how fast they want traffic to be able to flow. This part of the process is generally not part of any public hearing or put to a vote by public officials - it is just decided on and then they move on to the next step.
There's also a prevailing concept in road design that seems to indicate that high traffic speeds are a design issue, but low speeds are an enforcement issue. The road is designed to accommodate the highest amount of traffic anticipated in the future without really thinking about if that's even a good fit for the area.
Once the road has been built to exacting standards (which means it is far too wide and flat,) the city steps in and slaps a speed limit on it, often at odds with the design speed.
When residents get worried about all the speeding cars, they petition the city for a traffic study to see if anything can be done. The engineers conducting the traffic study determine that the road is capable of handling higher speeds than the current limit, and so to cut down on speeding the recommendation is to increase the posted limit.
It's amazing to me how much influence the engineering team has on the design with basically no accountability. You can try to reduce speeding by putting up speed traps and police patrols, but at the end of the day people will drive as fast as they are comfortable with and that is often a result of the design of the road they are driving on.
Yea around here we have 4 or more lane highways with 60mph speed limits. You could almost double that safely if people actually used the lanes properly when not passing. Instead we have to deal with a mix of assholes going all different speeds trying to get around the people going 60 in the left lane and god help you of there's a cop around.
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I think a large part of it is inappropriately making 30 mph areas 20mph and also poor enforcement.
I live on a long wide 20mph road and I can't stand the people going at 40, 50 or even 60 or 70 mph at times. But I don't think my road should have been 20mph, it should have been 30mph. It seems it was easier to stick some 20mph signs up to say "we've done something" as a way of discouraging some people going at more rediculous speeds and hope most go at 30mph.
Instead what was needed was actual investment in the road - speed bumps, narrowing the road with choke points and passing points, physical rather than painted cycle lanes - that kind of thing.
Fortunately after years of pressure our road is now going to be in a LTZ (Low Traffic Zone). Both ends of my own long road are blocked off to allow pedestrians and cyclists only through, and my main road is being split into 3rds with X-junctions being turned into filters(Instead of X it's now > and < with no connection). If you're driving you can only turn into one side street while cyclists and pedestrians can pass through as normal. We've had a trial for a while and it's been very effective - my whole block has been split up with filters so you can't use it to pass through to reach the main roads around it - this has stopped the arseholes using my road as a shortcut and speeding at 60 mph.
People are still going at 30mph but the twisting and turning through the block means you can't really get up to anything more than that and also unless you're going to a house in the block it's pointless to even enter.
So while I abhor speeding, I would argue these stats reflect bad road management - over relying on 20mph speed limtis as a cheap alternative to actual road management and redeisgns which are expensive (and difficult in many parts of the UK with lots of very old and narrow streets inherited from previous eras).
Speed bumps are the worst possible solution, they often mean if you're in a conventional car you have to come to a near complete stop and if you're in a large SUV you can cross at 20mph. This reinforces the trend away from conventional cars to higher ride height vehicles which is a disaster for road safety (especially pedestrian and cyclist safety).
They do successfully slow down the flow of traffic (and also cause traffic to follow alternative paths, at least until speed bumps are saturated in the area) but it fucks up emergency vehicle access and damages cars (increases wear and tear). The other road design solutions (more narrow roads, inclusion of roundabouts, addition of choke points etc) all are equally as effective as humps at reducing speeders and diverting traffic away from roads (in some cases they are better) and have none of the negative consequences, speed humps should never be used imo.
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Way too many people are speeding where I live too and I partly blame the road design as well. I've seen many places in Denmark where I live that they at some point reduced the limit from 60 to 50 or from 50 to 40 kmh with no modifications to the road design or obvious reasons like schools or crossroads. Or similarly you are driving along at 80 and then the limit changes to 60 but the road looks the same. I know it's usually because of safety or more commonly noise pollution or hidden sideroads. This doesn't make sense intuitively while driving because the road design signals higher speed than allowed. It's still no real excuse for driving too fast but I think it could solve a lot of the issue with better road design like "not just bikes" are also preaching in his videos
It's the same or higher here in the US based on my personal experience.
At least 10% lied. Nearly everyone speeds.
In the US speed limits are set by 85% of traffic speed on a road. So if the road was set for 30mph, and then you changed it to 20MPH with no other changes, you will immediately get 85% of drivers breaking the "limit."
Another way to say it is that UK's department for transport has incompetently designed 85% of their 20mph roads.
UK highways departments have had essentially zero budget for 2+ decades now. There's no funding to completely retrofit every single residential street to match the new signage. Most of them are already incredibly narrow and tight compared to your average North American street.
Hmm, sounds like the infrastructure for personal vehicles is pretty unsustainable, perhaps we should start closing off streets so that traffic will naturally be limited to locals only thus solving the problem from the demand side.
It ends up being kind of naive that drivers will simply respect a new, lower speed limit with no other changes. If the road could previousy accomodate a certain speed then some "arbitrary" sign won't change this.
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If you’re out there, need to be in a car and for whatever reason find it hard to keep the car at 20mph - do what I do and use the speed limiter function (if you have one). Works a charm.
With or without the tech aid though, there’s no excuse.
I believe it 100%.
I started riding with a Garmin bike radar and installed an app that tells me exactly how fast a car is going when it passes, and the majority are over the speed limit.
Just the other day, in a 60 km/h zone, I clocked two cars going 125 km/h.
If I thought for a second that police would charge these drivers using photo/video evidence, I'd fork over the $500 to get the radar with a camera built-in and report each and every speeding driver that passes me.
In Denmark we have the lovely new law that if you drive more than 100% over the speed limit and over 100 kmh or drive over 200 kmh at all or drunk driving with over 2‰ they confiscate the car and you are not getting it back at all. They confiscate the car regadles of who owns the car (with very few exceptions) and that is also if it is leased. So far since when the law started they have confiscated over 2000 cars in two years. It's my favourite law of all laws right now. The fine for driving crazy is also nicely proportional to your income and it removes the car so the person cannot just drive without license afterwards.
I can't get behind property seizure without compensation, but I can understand everything else.
Even if they said "you can't have this car any more, but can sell it from our facility" that'd be better I think
As long as it then goes swiftly through the court system to confirm this. Otherwise it is theft, like US asset forfeiture.
In effect, is it really that different to a fine? It seems to have a couple of advantages, though: it's easier to collect, and it's proportional, so a person who can afford a fancy luxury car pays more than someone in an old banger, without the complexity of having to evaluate their income and savings.
This is exactly the reason they are doing it. Proportional to income and the car is completely and physically removed from the road. There was a big issue here where the offender would just drive without license or the car was leased or borrowed so there was no real penalty. Now the leasing company would have to take responsibility for leasing fancy supercars to anyone and everyone and people lending their car to a known drunk or fast driver would definitely think twice.
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Yeah, 5 over is my norm.
Same. Speeding tickets are so fucking expensive where I live. Guaranteed to be at least $300 at a minimum. I can't afford that, so I barely go over to mitigate the effect of being the slowest driver on the road. In general though, idgaf.
I also drive a Prius, so it's at least somewhat expected ha
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Exactly why we need LTNs etc. Existing restrictions don't work!
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