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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

In Germany, we have "Verkehrsberuhigte Zonen"[0] (Wikipedia says the english term is "living street"), where the speed limit is very low, and drivers are expected to look out for playing children. It works relatively well, at least in residential areas. Usually such streets are built in such a way you cannot go very fast any way.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsberuhigter_Bereich / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street

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The US doesn’t have anything similar, at least not normally. Roads are almost always wider than needed, I assume because it feels safer, but really just makes people drive faster. Any redesign that deprioritizes cars in any way (even if it just appears to do so) is ridiculed and fought against.

In a lot of cases, US roads are wider than needed because the fire department wants to continue riding the 30s style fire engines you know from the kids books to their missions, 99.9% of which do not involve fire. And the tradeoff is that a lot more people die from vehicular crashes than ever would to fires.

It's stupidity at work, and government committees are the environment that fosters it.

I'm sure it's a bit of a circular problem. Fire dept has big trucks, so roads are built wide, so fire dept buys more big trucks, so more wide roads are built, etc. It's a hard cycle to break, even if everybody agrees it's the right thing to do.

But, yeah, the US really does suffer from a "bigger is better" complex. There are no small fire trucks for tight areas. Ambulances are all mega-sized, built on heavy commercial truck chassis. Personal vehicles are huge - SUVs and dually pickup trucks instead of sedans and hatchbacks.

> Roads are almost always wider than needed

Wait until you see Boston. I live in this street in Cambridge, its not quite wide enough for buses so occasionally they cross the lane of the opposite direction, especially if some asshole parked a little off. If this wasn't unsafe enough, there is also an elementary school near this street! In general. Boston streets are very narrow and it makes it hard to drive since (1) you can scratch other cars parking or (2) it's hard to see the direction you're turning to.

This is actually beneficial for pedestrian safety because it decreases the perceived safe speed for all sensible drivers, versus putting a 25mph speed limit on a wide boulevard where everyone drives 40mph.

Haha you're underestimating Boston drivers. Out of all the places I lived in my life (SF, Berlin, Paris) drivers in Boston drive by far the fastest. Streets being narrow doesn't make people drive slower, instead it makes people drive more aggressive which puts stress on drivers, bikers and pedestrians alike.

Yeah, we have these streets here that are "2 way but only one at a time". So you have to get on it and go the whole length of a block or more. Amazingly this results in more perverse incentives...

Interesting, my family's hometown in the UK (Blairgowrie, Scotland) is full of those types of streets. And with street-side parking, the open lane can vary. It doesn't seem to be a problem - people are used to it. Granted, small farming town vs big city, but still, there's no fundamental reason people should suddenly turn into arseholes just because the streets are narrow.

That is the default residential street in Berlin. Often with cobblestone to further decrease speeds.

> Wait until you see Boston. I live in this street in Cambridge, its not quite wide enough for buses so occasionally they cross the lane of the opposite direction, especially if some asshole parked a little off

Have you been to a European city? This is the norm in any city I've driven in. Meanwhile, driving in the US, even in a city normally involved roads which are wide enough for multiple Lanes of traffic each way. It's perfectly safe, it just required drivers to pay attention.

Same with Australia. I live on a street that is also needed for emergency vehicles of most kinds as a primary route, so is just that bit wider, and you can see how ordinary motorists respond to this "incentive".

As an American living in Munich now: even regular neighborhood streets are far friendlier to walking and biking (and thus children) in Germany compared to America. They're much narrower, lower speed limits, more nearby cut-throughs and trails and protected bike lanes.

Your average US street prioritizes cars to the exclusion of anything else. Walking is pointless, it feels terrible and nothing is within walking distance except maybe a neighborhood park or elementary school. Biking is uncomfortable and unsafe, especially for kids with dubious levels of focus/traffic awareness; the city will slap a strip of paint on the ground and brag about how bike-friendly it is. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.

And then ironically it's also worse to drive a car in the US. Where speed limits could be higher without risking anyone else they are still stupid low and many drivers don't know how to zip or even merge or even use their turn signals. It's really the worst for both drivers and pedestrians.

Haven't seen that very often. Occasionally a highway/freeway has an oddly low speed limit, but most of the times neighborhood streets and arterials are much too fast to be safe for people walking or biking. And whaddya know, there are hardly any people walking or biking around, almost as if...

In America driving at 6 km/h (3.7mph) in a parking lot would induce road rage in other drivers. Trying to make roads with a 6 km/h speed limit would be political suicide for any politician that recommended it.

That's literally a slow walking pace. Kids running would be breaking the speed limit. Bikes would always be breaking the limit. The speedo in my car isn't even accurate at speeds that low.

It's not about a hard speed limit, it's about driving at walking pace. It's not for thoroughfares, it's for cul-de-sacs where people live and children play. No car has any business going fast there.

Bikes aren't a problem; they're small and nimble and don't kill people when they hit them.

Bikes on the road are subject to all of the same laws cars are.

You seem to be intentionally missing the point here. It's about safety for playing children. Cars are a bigger issue than bikes. Especially when the bikes are being used by playing children.

that's an absurd speed. i literally cannot go that slow in my car without lugging the engine or slipping the clutch the whole way. no thanks.

In driving school I learned that I should put the car in first gear, not touch the gas and keep my foot ready to hit the brake when I enter such a street. That is, I'm supposed to go as slow as reasonably possible and be prepared to stop on a dime if a child materializes in front of the car.

It's really not that bad. Keep in mind that you typically will only go this slow for the last 15-60s of your drive. Before that you will likely go faster than on a typical drive in the US. European speed limits and especially German ones have a lot more range then US speed limits. To be that makes for a more deliberate and fun driving experience. It also turns out to be safer if you look at fatalities per mile traveled, even including the Autobahn which seems to be unfathomable to most Americans.

The speed is not defined by a number: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... (comprehensible, though probably more poetic in the original German)

It's not my place to speculate, but I'm going to do it anyway: I expect you can get away with simply just driving as slowly as you can, assuming that isn't ridiculously faster than the 7km/h that is suggested. (My old automatic car (1.4L) would probably creep at about the right pace. My manual car (3.0L) isn't super happy to pull the car along while idling in 1st gear, but it's fine at ~1000rpm and that's ~8km/h.)

(This does make me wonder. I typically drive in car parks in 1st gear at <2000rpm, so max ~16km/h or ~10mph. But, you know... maybe I'm going too quickly?)

fluid-coupling automatics do have an advantage here, as they can essentially creep at any speed without causing undue stress to any of the vehicle's components, although you would need to use the brakes to go really slow.

when driving through complicated areas with lots of pedestrians (eg, parking lots), I usually travel at the lowest speed in 1st gear that puts the engine in a happy RPM range (as low as ~1200 in my car, maybe 1500 up a hill). this is definitely faster than a human can comfortably walk for a long time. if that's sufficiently slow, I guess I don't have any objections.

I could put my car in neutral, open up the door and push my car that fast.

6 mph... yeah. About that. People in the US don't really go the speed limit even in a 25mph zone so I don't know how well that will work. The only time I see people generally going the speed limit is in areas with speed tracking cameras.

Same in Switzerland, but if the city/community is really serious about that and there are some long-term plans: don't build slick surfaces but ones made of "bricks" or similar (example: https://www.experiencedbricks.com/images/products/kushequa-b...) which definitely get rid of the "need for speed"-feeling (as the faster you go the more everything vibrates in your car, kind of an analog force-feedback feeling), and additionally build some bumps at strategic locations which force the drivers (like myself) to actively use the brain and pay attention.

Works great (kind of a relaxing feeling while slowly driving on the "brick"-surfaces, like a massage), but I admit that it's expensive if not building with a long-term planning in mind.

Edit: on the other hand I do absolutely hate such streets/areas that have a low speed limit (20/30 km/h) but have absolute smooth surfaces (I don't "feel" the need to drive slowly).

I know, it's stupid, but that's how my brain works...: smooth surface therefore fast, not-smooth surface therefore slow and careful :)

Bricks are also a pain for bikes which often don't have huge tires and suspension.

Right, but we're talking about few millimeters (not centimeters) of difference between bricks, which are not comfy but not too extreme if driving on any bike at ~10km/h => advantages outweigh disatvantages.

Bikes being the least problematic opponent group, I would be more worried by skateboard, inline-skate, etc... opposition groups.

In Switzerland we solved it (as long as it was implemented by the local community or city) by having very smooth sidewalks (but bikes still have to drive on the street as they're too fast for the sidewalk and have more than enough suspension for the normal street at normal speeds).

> People in the US don't really go the speed limit even in a 25mph zone so I don't know how well that will work.

If you just change the signs, obviously it would fail miserably. You need to change the actual design of the street to match the ideal. There are lots of ways to do this, just google "road diet".

The only way I could see this happening is with really damaging speed bumps every car length.

Nah, there's lots of other ways to get people to slow down. I mean, speed bumps/humps are one way, and they have their uses, but you can also add trees (yes, it's a psychological thing), narrow the road (e.g. add bike lanes or extend sidewalks), make the road less straight, add roundabouts that people can't blow through, add chicanes at some points (I've seen this in the bay area), add diverters that discourage car through-traffic, etc. Lots of options.

The most obvious difference I see between Germany and the US is that the roads are just way wider in the US. That makes drivers feel like they can go faster, so they do go faster, thus making them less safe. You don't really need to enforce tight speed limits in neighborhood streets where I live in Munich, they're so narrow that it's very obvious that you cannot go fast.

Given speed bumps are frowned upon for this very reason, narrowing roads and adding obstacles (brick and concrete islands, parking endcaps, flower beds) is preferred

They're called "woonerf" in Netherland. Cars drive at walking pace, and pedestrians, particularly playing kids, always have right of way.

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