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Comment by cm2012 | Hacker News Reader

cm2012

“I don’t want to lie to people,” lieutenant Megge tells us. It may make parents feel better if the speed limit on their street is 25 mph instead of 35 mph, but that sign won’t make people drive any slower. Megge prefers speed limits that both allow people to drive at a safe speed legally, and that realistically reflect traffic speeds. People shouldn’t have a false sense of safety around roads, he says."

This is likely false.

NYC changed the speed limit to 25 mph in Nov 2014. Pedestrian deaths have been sharply reduced:

1) https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/8/16863408/nyc-vision-zero-traf...

2) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/nyregion/nyc-pedestrian-d...

At the same time pedestrian deaths in the US as a whole have increased:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/01/pedestrian-deaths-rea...

The data is clear that lower speeds means accidents are less dangerous: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/31/3-graphs-that-explain...

View on HN

You can see the Vision Zero data here: http://www.nycvzv.info/

I don't think your interpretation about speed limits is correct compared to other factors mentioned in the nytimes article:

> more stringent enforcement of moving violations, revamping hundreds of street corners to slow down turning cars and rejiggering crossing signals to give pedestrians a head start.

For one, traffic in NYC just doesn't move that fast, especially on the streets where most of the accidents happened. It's not really appropriate to extrapolate NYC data to the rest of the United States unless you focus only on urban centers.

Second, almost all of the fatalities seem to happen around intersections. I'd expect to see more jay walking deaths in the years before the speed limit change if your interpretation was correct.

>revamping hundreds of street corners to slow down turning cars

This is probably the biggest one. Lots of pedestrians and get hit by people turning right who can't see them until the last second because of other things on the street corner (like people waiting to cross in the other direction).

Also drivers who roll through a right-turn-on-red while looking the other way for cars. By the time they see the person walking, they've already slammed on the gas so they don't miss their opening.

There are a few intersections in my city that are notorious for this; I have an extremely loud airhorn on my bike that I use to blast drivers who allow their vehicle to move forward without looking where it's going.

I no longer believe RTOR can be performed safely by the majority of drivers— it should be banned.

New York City agrees with you.

Right turn on red has never been legal in NYC. There are specific exceptions that are always clearly marked.

Would this not also apply to right turns at stop signs? I think there is a deeper problem that needs fixing and even if we banned RTOR, it will still impact people waiting at stop signs.

Having recently been teaching someone to drive, I have strongly encouraged them to not engage in right turns unless it is clearly safe and there is no on coming traffic. Better to wait a minute than to risk hitting someone. The problem is there parents feel differently, as do the drivers waiting behind us. If people were more patient drivers, less pedestrians (and drivers) would die.

RTOR doesn't exist in France and was a source of stress when I started driving here (to not do it), and then again when back in the US (drivers honk if you don't).

My point though is that people do just fine without it.

I was almost hit when jogging through a crosswalk from this, but I saw the driver was looking left as he came rolling through the stop sign ... in his police cruiser.

That's so enraging. Honestly if I caught that on video, I would absolutely go to war to get that cop disciplined or fired, along with anyone else in uniformed who tried to defend them or pat me on the head with the usual "Hey man, relax— at least no one was hurt. Can't you let this go?"

100% agree, both as a pedestrian and as a driver. RTOR introduces deadly ambiguity in exchange for marginal convenience. It's not worth it.

I would like to be able wait for the light to change without feeling like I'm being an asshole to other drivers behind me.

I think left turns are the most dangerous for pedestrians, since the driver is focused entirely on timing oncoming traffic and performs the turn with a sense of urgency.

All major pedestrian intersections should be "all walks," where a period of time is established where no cars may enter the intersection.

I remember being in Japan and seeing these "all walk" signals, including crosswalks that went diagonally through the intersections. Brilliant.

I fully agree. I had two situations in the past 2 years where cars almost ran into me (as a pedestrian) doing a left turn, with screeching tires just barely avoiding me. In both of these cases I probably got out without an accident because I expect drivers to be idiots and was careful enough to act accordingly.

You summed it up when you said you expect drivers to be idiots. This is what I teach my kids. I say the cross walk does not mean a thing. One person looking at their phone and you are dead in the cross walk. I always tell them look and keep looking and expect that even if the car in front stopped be ready for the car behind him to hit him and push him into you (something that I’ve had happen personally).

The crosswalk's only purpose is to determine who pays for your funeral.

A big frustration of mine are people who used the bike lane in the wrong direction.

If you're turning right onto a road from a private residence, then you're probably only looking in the direction traffic is coming from. Someone biking the wrong way could easily be hit.

Ah yes, 'salmoning'[1]. Clearly dangerous for interactions with cars, and also a real headache for cyclists going the right direction in the bike lane - who gives way, and how?

1: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/05/15/3124556...

>revamping hundreds of street corners to slow down turning cars

To slow down local neighborhood traffic my neighbors put out an old single construction cone (someone has a source of heavily used cones so when they're stolen no big deal) in the middle of the road.

Folks slow down and easily drive around it. It is highly effective even when it isn't there as I suspect the local speeder folks anticipate the random construction cone might be back at anytime...

The data in your links is inconclusive. It is improbable that the 25mph speed limit, in effect for only 2 months, accounts for the drop in fatalities from 2013-2014. There were lots of other Vision Zero things happening in 2014 that likely had a bigger effect. 2015 was the first full year with the speed limit, and it looks like no real impact from 2014.

2014 (2 months of 25mph) : 140 pedestrian fatalities

2015 139 pedestrian fatalities

2016: 148 pedestrian fatalities

Came to say this. The 25 limit was set at November 2014.

There are two kinds of safety: collisions between cars and cars, and collections between cars and everything else (pedestrians, bicycles, children).

For a limited-access road or grade-separated road (especially electronic toll roads), simply minimizing the speed difference between cars is enough.

For the pedestrian case, you want to minimize the speed difference between cars and pedestrians. Speed limits are only part of a plan to accomplish this goal -- instead, you want affordances that make people naturally drive slower: removing car lanes (replacing them with trees or sidewalk or protected bike lanes), narrower lanes, adding curves to the road (but without adding blind corners), adding pedestrian crossings, and so forth.

I like this guy's take:

"The common US rule requiring speed limits to be set at 85% of actual average car speeds amounts to crowdsourcing the value of human life, on a platform where only motorists have a voice."

(https://twitter.com/humantransit/status/1123264831790899200)

I like the sentiment but I don't like that it's blatantly lying to express it. Just because I'm walking right now doesn't mean I never drive. Or the reverse.

You are missing the context of what Megge is trying to say, even though it is right there in your quote: if you want people to slow down use engineering to design a street where people will drive slower.

is there any evidence that traffic speeds have actually reduced due to the speed limit change? the vision zero project includes a whole bunch of stuff, including redesigning dangerous intersections, which the decline in pedestrian deaths could be attributed to.

Sure, it's possible that pedestrian deaths can be reduced by lower speed limits.

But in busier roadways, what I've observed is that slow drivers tend to be biggest danger now - and that is naturally because slow drivers tend to also be distracted drivers (by cellphones or otherwise). Naturally, such distraction is a bigger and bigger phenomena and dealing with them by making it clearer how they ought to drive seem OK.

Driving too slow results in more accidents.

Driving too fast results in more fatalities.

It might be nice to decrease both, but I know what I care more about reducing.

Sure but the argument is what can be controlled. The major portion of drivers are going to be driving as fast as the road allows, some portion faster and some will drive as fast they read on the sign (as they tap on their phones). We can ticket the reckless drivers, maybe have devices to reduce the average but raising the speed limit to the speed of the bulk of traffic makes sense, as per argument in article.

Kinetic energy = 1/2 m*v^2 is all I kept thinking reading this article.

Perhaps what we need to do is make roadways more dangerous for motorists, so they'll slow down and not kill as many pedestrians.

Is there any data showing that people are actually driving slower in NYC as a result of the speed limit decrease?

How much of this is due to safety features to reduce pedestrian injury in accidents?

Devil's advocate, but crash fatality rates have been on a downward trend for decades.

Some safety features like automatic emergency braking, abs, stability control, and modern (more powerful) headlights protect pedestrians as well as drivers

Somewhat recently, many cars have been specifically designed to reduce injury when colliding with pedestrians, and these models have become more common in the 2014-2018 window.

I wouldn't completely discount the research, but the majority of the reduction could be that newer cars are simply safer for everyone

It's highway speeds that are too low. Street speeds are mostly OK, though the best way to fix speeding on city streets is to have speed limiting devices rather than lower speed limits.

Regarding your last link - lower speeds and lower speed limits are not the same.

Also, your claim that it’s lower speed limits that reduced deaths seems not entirely honest - the articles say that there were more things that changed besides speed limits.

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