In the UK, the cost of owning a car is high yet our potholes, while frequent, are small enough to survive. Thus being more of an annoyance rather than a speed restriction.
this sounds like exactly the right tradeoff, especially since these decisions actually increase convenience for those not in cars
It is possible to go too far in either direction.
Acknowledging life has risk tradeoffs doesn't make you an American, but denying it can make you a self-righteous jerk.
Taken literally, that's clearly not true.
For example you can easily drive 150mph in the flat desert where there is nothing for a hundred miles and you can see many miles ahead. You have zero risk of hurting anyone else unless they somehow teleport in front of you.
But driving 5mph in tight street full of elementary school kids running around can be extremely dangerous.
It's all about context.
There’s this techbro utopia mindset leaking through as well, just like it does for climate change topics, that pragmatic solutions that work for us today are deprioritized because some incredible technology is right around the corner. This is also distinctly American, specifically Silicon Valley, culture.
> An evaluation of 20 mph zones in the UK demonstrated that the zones were effective both in reducing traffic speed and in reducing RTIs. In particular child pedestrian injuries were reduced by 70 per cent from 1.24 per year in each area before to 0.37 per year after the zones were introduced
https://www.rospa.com/siteassets/images/road-safety/road-saf...
The "Vision Zero" program was started in Sweden, and is becoming more widely adopted.
And it’s not “runaway”, it’s exactly the right prioritisation. I’d encourage you to spend some time on Not Just Bikes and the say whether you’d like to live in a Nordic or an American neighbourhood. The Nordic style is also about convenience because car centric infrastructure makes a lot of things less accessible and convenient.
Roundabouts are safer. They're safer because they prevent everybody from speeding through the intersection. And, even in case of an accident, no head-on collisions happen in a roundabout.
Roundabouts are worse for land use though, which impacts walkability, and the safety story for pedestrians and bike users with them is decidedly not great as well.
They're much safer for pedestrians than intersections. You're only crossing and dealing with traffic coming from one direction, stopping at a median, and then crossing further over.
Unlike trying to navigate a crosswalk where you have to play guessing games as to which direction some vehicle is going to come at you from while ignoring the lights (people do the stupidest things, and roundabouts are a physical barrier that prevents a bunch of that)
This assumes a median, which is not present at most smaller roundabouts in the US.
I could handle it as an adult just walking my bike but it would be a nightmare for someone pushing a stroller or dependent on a mobility device.
IMO you are absolutely playing frogger with the gaps in the traffic.
Otherwise you either risk getting run over by a car exiting the roundabout without seeing you; or getting run over by the car that stopped, but was rear-ended by another inside the roundabout.
The what now? Seriously, what in the world are you talking about? Roundabouts are heaven. They physically force drivers to slow down when approaching or leaving them, creating a safe environment for pedestrians and cyclists.
For example, there's no such thing as "running a red light at full speed" at a roundabout, no speeding up to "make the light", etc.
For cyclists specifically, they're amazing, because they eliminate the deadly left-turns. Every turn is a right turn, which is super safe.
Though I've never been in an accident either on a crossing or roundabout, so I can't really judge how true my impression is.
Many roads in London have parked cars on either side so only one can get through - instead of people cooperating you have people fighting, speeding as fast as they can to get through before someone else appears, or race on-coming cars to a gap in the parked cars etc. So when they should be doing 30mph, they are more likely doing 40-45. Especially with EVs you have near-instant power to quickly accelerate to get to a gap first etc.
And putting obstacles in the road so you cant see if someone is there? That sounds really dangerous and exactly the sort of thing that caused the accident in the story here.
Madness.
Yes. They have made steady progress over the previous decades to the point where they can now have years with zero road fatalities.
> And putting obstacles in the road so you cant see if someone is there? That sounds really dangerous and exactly the sort of thing that caused the accident in the story here.
Counterintuitive perhaps, but it's what works. Humans adjust their behaviour to the level of perceived risk, the single most important thing is to make driving feel as dangerous as it is.
From experience they will adjust their behaviour to reduce their total travel time as much as possible (i.e. speed to "make up" for lost time waiting etc) and/or "win" against other drivers.
I guess it is a cultural thing. But I cannot agree that making it harder to see people in the road is going to make anything safer. Even a robot fucking taxi with lidar and instant reaction times hit a kid because they were obscured by something.
The evidence is that they do though. E.g. the Exhibition Road remodelling (removing curbs/signs/etc.) has been a great success and effectively reduced vehicle speeds, e.g. https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/sites/default/files/media/documents/...
Sure they do, all humans do. Nobody wants to get hurt and nobody wants to hurt anyone else.
(Yes there are few exceptions, people with mental disorders that I'm not qualified to diagnose; but vast majority of normal humans don't.)
Humans are extremely good at moderating behavior to perceived risk, thank evolution for that.
(This is what self-driving cars lack; machines have no fear of preservation)
The key part is perceived though. This is why building the road to match the level of true risk works so well. No need for artificial speed limits or policing, if people perceive the risk is what it truly is, people adjust instictively.
This is why it is terrible to build wide 4 lane avenues right next to schools for example.
"Sweden hates cars."
There must be a happy medium somewhere in between.
Street parking has mostly been turned into exclusive residential parking, so parking houses are often the only choice. As a result they are quite expensive, and you got to walk to the destination.
Parking and access is much better in the country side, and the highways are fairly good and similar to those found in the west Europe. It not as straight or wide as authobahn, but not as much traffic either.
*
"""
- Gavin, you know our shameful history of worker suicides. Since the renovation? Not a single one.
- Not even one? Ok. But there's gotta be like, a middle ground here...
"""
One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time.
For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7km/h) near where I live, they intentionally added large obfuscating objects on the road that limited visibility and harder to navigate. This forces drivers to drive very slow, even when alone on the road, as they can't see if a car or person may be behind the next object.
In an other road they added several tight S curves in a row, where if you drive anything faster than 20km/h you will fail the turns and drive onto the artificial constructed curbs.
In other roads they put a sign in the middle of two way roads while at the same time drastically limiting the width to the curb, forcing drivers to slow down in order to center the car in the lane and squeeze through.
In each of those is that a human driver with human fear of crashing will cause drivers to pay extra attention and slow down.