Drivers Complain Raised Crosswalk Slows Vehicles | Hacker News Reader

Drivers Complain Raised Crosswalk Slows Vehicles

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21 pointsDoreenMichele59 comments

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I don't think its unreasonable to mark them a little clearer, they are painted red on the road here in my suburb.

https://www.google.com/maps/@-35.3193446,149.0814324,3a,75y,...

This one in Reykjavík does wonders. I hardly ever have a car not stopping when I try to cross there.

https://www.google.com/maps/@64.1493811,-21.9324505,3a,75y,2...

Very nice design there. Elegant.

At zebra crossings pedestrians have right of way by law so I would hopes so.

Also adjust the sidewalk to make a bigger contrast (ie paint them blue or something like that)?

The law is messier than you would think. At least in WA (where I live) if a pedestrian steps out when it would be unreasonable to expect the car to be capable of stopping (e.g. you step out a foot in front of a car that is going the speed limit and you weren’t visible) the driver is not responsible.

If I saw that for the first time while driving, I would probably think it best to find another way altogether.

If you can't see a raised crosswalk, how can you claim to see someone wanting to cross the crosswalk?

It's absurd.

Did you watch the video? They're actually quite difficult to see

Even so, driving over these at 35mph is damaging to a vehicle.

Going over a speed bump at even 15 miles per hour is a minor annoyance, whether you're a driver or a passenger. I'm not surprised people are complaining about them.

Flashing lights make me feel safer as a pedestrian and are less annoying to me as a driver. I don't know how well they actually work, though.

If you don't want people going 35mph down the street, maybe the speed limit shouldn't be 35mph.

Edit: I hate vague traffic signs. "Reduce speed". Ok, I was going 30, now I'm going 20. Is that good enough?

Speed limits are pretty ineffective at reducing speed, although they are good at communicating expectations (which is one the issue here). Iirc the green book recommends road narrowing for slowing down drivers.

The complaint is damaging vehicles - years ago at college one of the guys on my course trashed his classic MGB's exhaust driving at 5ph in the college car park and sued them to recover the quite large cost.

5mph is obviously too slow, indicating that perhaps that speed bump was poorly designed. But practically it is impossible to design something that forces cars to slow down without risking vehicular damage. Speed bumps, speed tables, and chicanes all carry the risk of serious consequences should the driver not slow down. Without those consequences some drivers can and would ignore them.

Also worth pointing out that the point of these obstacles is to protect pedestrians. Given the extreme lopsided nature of vehicle to pedestrian crashes, I believe that some risk of vehicular damage is a fair trade to prevent pedestrian fatalities.

Every driver that complains when going too fast and damaging his car on such a speed reducer should loose his license for a couple of weeks to get a clear head again.

How bad people are driving is kind of a mirror of the current society. I‘m annoyed by people thinking the world belongs only to them. No buddy, other people have the same rights.

That’s a lot of vitriol.

Based on the photos of the cross walk it looks like it isn’t clearly labelled. There’s 3 signs you have to read in order to know what is going on. There should be a sign giving drivers an estimate of the appropriate speed, or something similar.

Did you watch the video? The raised-ness of the crosswalk is practically invisible. This wouldn't be news if it weren't confusing the shit out of all the locals. When's the last time you saw a damn speed bump in the local paper headlines?!

Maybe instead of assuming other people are idiots, just accept that people are people. There's probably a better solution here.

Where I live we have a standard sign next to speed bumps:

https://www.direct-signaletique.com/I-Grande-14093-panneau-r...

There, no more problem. From what the reporter said though, it looks like the US doesn't have such a standard sign yet…

The sign design in the USA is weird. They really don’t like symbols, and prefer to spell things out with weird abbreviations. Instead of an obvious sign like that, you would get a diamond shaped yellow sign with saying “SPEED BUMB” and instead of a standard crosswalk sign you would get the same yellow diamond saying “PED X-ING”, and it is by no means consistent what they actually say.

The USA could really use some sign design revision.

For a second I was confused because I thought "raised" referred to one of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_separation_structur...

Those are much safer, but unfortunately also much more expensive.

I'd be curious about the safety idea, given that most such pedestrian overpasses involve a couple of stories of stairs on either side. Their real purpose is to allow auto traffic full ownership of the intersection.

I've seen ones which have a spiral ramp, not stairs.

Safer but because its trouble to use, not all pedestrians will take it.

I wish they had more of those at busy pedestrian-auto intersections like busy train stations, etc., so that peds could cross at any time rather than having to wait for a light. A nice kitty-corner to kitty-corner X above an intersection. I think a compromise could be have these but not require ADA if the street level crosswalk is ADA compliant. Otherwise these get prohibitively expensive and don't get deployed at all.

At a train station where you're raising pedestrians to get over the tracks already it'd be less difficult to integrate.

I mean, as long as the car doesn’t bottom out when you’re at the speed limit, this is perfectly fine. I live in France, here there are speed bumps where you practically have to stop in order not to ruin your car, even though the speed limit is 30 or higher... that is annoying.

To be fair speed bumps to slow a car to 35mph seems like slightly the wrong tool.

Also why does a text based website require a loading animation???

> To be fair speed bumps to slow a car to 35mph seems like slightly the wrong tool

What alternative would you suggest?

As a parent of kids who cross the street to get to school, in my fantasy world, speed limits in school zones are enforced by impounding the offenders' cars.

Well I would be aiming for a lower speed for outside a school, and I also wouldn't want to drive over a speed bump at 35mph.

If the aim is to lower to speed to 35mph, speed cameras?

In my fantasy world school drop off points would be 10 minutes walk from the school. But impounding sounds good too :)

35mph is presumably the upper limit, not the lower one. Perhaps the goal is to make cars go even slower than that when going over the crossing.

>35mph is presumably the upper limit

Yeah. I'd wager that they will not be pleased when they catch some teenager catching air in his shitbox at 34.9mph.

Why can't this be one of many tools in designing the environment to accommodate multiple road users? And isn't it better to design the road to encourage safe driving rather than designing a system designed solely to punish users who do something against the rules?

> I also wouldn't want to drive over a speed bump at 35m

... yes, that’s the point.

I get that.

What if they put speed bumps on the motorway/freeway, to slow everyone down for roadworks?

FTA "and was built to slow cars to 35 miles per hour"

Yes use speed bumps to slow people to 20mph, not 35mph.

Your argument seems to center around you conflating various traffic calming measures. If you look at the pictures in the article you will see that they are depicting a speed table, not a speed bump. Speed tables are longer and gentler than a speed bump, and designed to slow the vehicles down less than a speed bump or speed hump. I agree that 35mph is a bit high for most speed tables, but 30mph would not be out of place for such a device.

Obviously hitting a speed bump at 35mph would be a very bad experience, but that's a different device than what's represented in the article.

>What alternative would you suggest?

Roads that are not straight, wide and well marked cause drivers to slow down naturally. Bushes trees and other landscaping can be used to make the road seem narrow which also makes people slow down. Having a good S-curve before the slow area works well too and many rural towns do this.

For a school zone you should probably stick a traffic light at the school entrance since that will allow you to create a traffic clusterfuck in order to slow traffic for the hours when you want it slow and not reduce the capacity of the road the rest of the time. Turning it into a 4-way stop would probably work well since people approach those slowly since they have to stop anyway.

And also reduce bushes and lawns, they obstruct. And overly tall trees.

In the UK 90% of the traffic near schools and start and end times are parents driving there kids to school

The cars should already be driving below 35mph since that's the road's speed limit. These raised crosswalks are a very common sight in Europe, they help drivers be more attentive to their interaction with pedestrains. Once they are more common (and people follow the speed limits) it becomes a natural element in driving, though still a bit annoying.

If the overwhelming majority of drivers want to drive more than 35mph on the road than slapping a 35 or below sign on it is not going to have any meaningful effect unless you back it up with the kind of strict law enforcement that is incompatible with American ideals.

Edit: And as I said in the my other comment, if you want people to go slow you need road features that will make them want to go slow on their own. Speed bumps are far more of an insulting road feature than bushes or something to make the road feel narrow because they basically say "this road is capable of X but we're going to make you go Y and you can't do anything about it" which is why people are complaining. If you want people to go slow toss in a raised median and raised curbs to make the road feel narrow.

Yeah, that's what traffic calming measures such as raised crosswalks are for...

No, if the majority of drivers want to drive faster than 35mph, the road is badly designed. It needs traffic calming devices, such as narrower lanes, curb extensions, and, yes, raised crosswalks. Enforcement (including automated enforcement) is a useful tool, but the start should be designing the road so that drivers naturally go at a safe speed.

No, but that's why we're not talking about a sign, but a raised crosswalk (i.e. a speedbump.) If you're going over 35mph, your car will scrape against it and possibly catch air off it, and you'll quite quickly regret going over 35mph and probably not do it again on that stretch of road.

Or you might be dead or your car might be wrecked.

When I was very young and very dumb, I did ~45 over a railroad track with a raised crossing. I landed OK, but it was a pretty scary experience.

Edit: some people seem to think that I'm against speed bumps to protect pedestrians because of my experience. I'm not really, I was just explaining my experience from when I was an idiot in how these bumps take speed. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Far more pedestrians are hurt and killed by vehicles than drivers are hurt by speed bumps. As someone who both drives and walks, I believe it is 100% acceptable to trash a few people’s cars (who ignored the speed limit) to reduce pedestrian fatalities.

Please don't assume I think this is a bad idea. I was just explaining the consequences of speeding over a bump like that, I'm completely pro speed bump as a way of slowing down traffic. Just that we can be idiots when we are kids.

If the car is wrecked, this will definitely discourage the driver from doing it again.

If the driver dies, I put it to you that it was only a matter of time, whether there was a raised crossing in this place or not. This sort of careless driving is vanishingly rarely a one-off, and almost always an example of a pattern of behaviour. Let us hope that they didn't take anybody else with them.

It was a one off for me! When you are 15 years old with a drivers license, you are learning lots of things for the first and last time. For example, I quickly learned about hydroplaning during a heavy rain storm.

Better a careless driver dead than an innocent pedestrian on a designated crossing.

This was a road in the country out in the middle of nowhere. There were no pedestrians, and the RR crossing was only protected by this bump and some lights (no gates).

> cars should already be driving below 35mph since that's the road's speed limit

Let me stop you right there. What's generally accepted in the US--not sure about other countries--is to keep your speed less than 10 over the speed limit. This is commonly cited by new and old drivers, driving teachers, and traffic enforcement police. If cars are bottoming out when going over the bump at the speed limit, the road is built wrong.

In the UK the limit is the limit. There is leeway to exceed the limit by up to 10% to allow safer overtaking (you're usually using the oncoming lane and opportunities are scarce) and to take the accuracy of car speedometers and police radar guns into account.

In Australia you can be fined, heavily, for exceeding the limit by any margin. e.g. Limit was 100kph you were clocked at 102.

If you're driving so much over the limit that you're damaging your car on a properly built speed bump you're going too fast. In the UK you'd run the risk of getting hit with "Driving without due care and attention".

Honestly that makes way more sense to me. As is, (almost) everybody in America is breaking the law, which means we can all be pulled over without cause at any time.

Still, system being what it is, this speed bump makes no sense in the US.

Curious what you think the right tool is? Raised crosswalks can solve problems beyond just traffic calming: if they are lifted to sidewalk level they make wheelchair access much easier and safer; they also lift pedestrians higher in the air to make them easier for drivers to see.

Really I think raised crosswalks are the only time a speed bump is properly used. A free standing speed bump (without a crosswalk) is sort of useless since drivers like to speed up between them, and slow down only just before they hit the bump. But a raised crosswalk really does magic in increasing the proportion of drivers that actually stop for crossing pedestrians.

Why not have traffic lights with cameras to catch offenders

The same problem. Drivers would just speed up between them. Plus I think there are better ways to get drivers to slow down then catch and punish all offenders.

There are average speed cameras now to get round that issue.

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