The 45km/h are pretty stupid. Of it was 60, there would be less pressure to mod.
With 45km/h you are seen as an obstacle by cars and they overtake you in dangerous ways.
With 45km/h you are seen as an obstacle by cars and they overtake you in dangerous ways.
By the way in cities average speed is very low. For instance in London the average speed within a mile of the city center dropped 1.22mph from an average of 6.35mph in 2016 to just 5.13mph in 2017.
https://fleetworld.co.uk/average-driving-speeds-plummet-in-u....
> Taxi drivers from the Republika Srpska might be unwilling to drive to a destination in the Federation, and vice versa.
https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/bosnia-and-herzegov...
Or Wikipedia
> police conduct around the Inter-Entity Boundary Line separating the two entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, had been the "greatest obstacle to freedom of movement", including intimidation and arbitrary fines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
There are plenty of anecdotes similar to mine on TripAdvisor etc.
Where did you get that?
The reality is that if you are scared to drive or unfocused in a city like Rome or Milan, you are a menace even at very low speed.
At 10 km/h a car kills a pedestrian.
At 15 km/h without safety bells if you hit a wall you're thrown out from the windshield.
I guess you meant the car behind you.
It is called tailgating.
It is very annoying, I agree, but if I can offer en explanation, in those conditions to overtake you wanna cover the less possible distance, being closer to the car in front of you is a way to make it possible.
Having said that: compared to the population the most dangerous cities in Italy are, in order, Genoa, Florence and Milan.
That could explain it too.
To deal with a taligater, according to the experts, you should
> Brake slowly before stopping. Avoid tailgaters when possible by changing lanes. If you cannot change lanes, slow down enough to encourage the tailgater to go around you. If this does not work, pull off the road when safe and let the tailgater pass.
Sadly, that describes all too many drivers. Enforcement and normalization of slower speeds through a critical mass of slower vehicles could change things.
Ultimately, people have shown that the need to be "tamed" while driving cars.
Neither should someone who can't handle going at 5km/h faster than the speed limit.
It will happen one day that they'll need to and maybe that day it will rain and that will be the day they cause an accident, possibly involving others.
Limits are not there because that's the maximum speed you should be _able_ to drive, they are there for pedestrian safety and to reduce the noise.
> . Enforcement and normalization of slower speeds through a critical mass of slower vehicles could change things.
On the contrary, I hope there will be way faster vehicles, underground, only for those trained to drive them or machine operated.
Everyone else should just ride a bike or walk or catch a bus or a (slow) cab.
The need for speed won't go back, we need to move faster and faster, the more our lives go faster.
p.s. before someone says it, I live in a very expensive neighborhood just to be at walking distance from my office. Even though I love driving and are a semi professional trained pilot, I usually don't drive in the city, unless I have to.
But I can understand why people forced to use a car want to drive them as fast as the limit permits.
The average speed in Rome is 8.3 km/h
So yeah, speeding is almost never the problem.
But people doing something else while driving is.
> If you can't wait behind a slow vehicle, unless you have a dying person on your side, maybe you should not drive in the first place...
If you are driving a car to go really slowly, driving in the middle of the streets, because you are too scared to drive too close to the side of the streets, why are you even driving in the first place?
It's like driving a motorbike with the training wheels because you have no equilibrium.
Would you find that acceptable?
And why not?
People can have many reasons to speed, they are not your concern, if you feel to drive slowly, just get out of the way, as experts of road safety suggest to do (that's exactly what I do on highways all the time)
> If someone behind you clearly wants to go faster, remember that it’s not your job to prevent them from doing so. Staying in front of a driver like this when you have space to move over could lead to even more aggressive driving, so it’s best to steer aside and let them drive the speed they’re going to drive (it’s their problem if they get pulled over, not yours!). If you’re genuinely concerned for the safety of yourself or others on the roadway, pull over and call local authorities to report an erratic or unsafe driver.
EDIT:
Some stats regarding Rome (the city where I was born and live)
- Rome has the highest number of accidents per capita, but the lowest mortality per capita in the whole Lazio region
- 75% of the accidents in the region happen in the cities, 25% outside them
- 52% of the accidents on urban roads and 62% of those on extra-urban roads happen on the straights
- most of them caused by distraction
- 45% of the accidents of the year in Rome happen between June and September due to the higher mobility of holiday season
- the two age groups where mortality is raising are 15-19 and over 70. Younger people number one cause of death is speeding (sometimes under the influence), due to inexperience (and the eventual alteration) they can't handle it. For older people is misjudgement: slower reaction times and impaired senses (vision, hearing) lead to deadly crashes.
- 80% of the accidents happen between 8-20, but most of the deadly one happen between 2 and 7 o'clock. Again, most probable causes are: distractions, sleepiness, driver fatigue, DUI.
Driving is a very complex operation, that requires skills and focus, and engage all the body, especially when using manual gears, it is very similar to playing drums.
If people don't give full attention on what they are doing it is very easy to make mistakes that could lead to very bad consequences or even death.
Hoping that other drivers will compensate for my own lack of focus, it's not the safest of the bets.
So, in my opinion, being a driver concerned of the safety yourself and others, means focusing on what you are doing and preventing potentially dangerous situations.
Blaming other drivers will not help you if you don't look twice before crossing a large street late at night or if you speed up to catch the yellow at the traffic-light.
I started driving when it was the same really bad mentality of people having to make place to the one who wants to go fast. And it wasn't great at all, safety records show it.
When i started to understand that the best thing to do when I had such a "pilot" behind me was to slow down until the situation could be less dangerous, I just found myself in way less dangerous situations.
So no, you can be the best driver of the world, 50 km/h in a city is already way too dangerous for pedestrian, with a high death rate in case of accident. The unconfortable slow driver you hate ? Maybe not as dangerous as you are... Actually maybe making road safer.
You want to drive "fast"? Think about the safety of other people it involves.
There is not.
There is a clear correlation between speed and deadly accidents.
But most of the accidents happen in the cities and most of them happen at low speed.
The most probable cause is disrespect of priority, due to distractions (watching the phone is very common nowadays)
I posted some stats for the city of Rome, taken straight from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT)
> I started driving when it was the same really bad mentality of people having to make place to the one who wants to go fa
Those bad mentality people are experts in road safety.
If you are one of them I'd like to know where you work.
My fiancé worked here https://www.fia.com/road-safety
> So no, you can be the best driver of the world, 50 km/h in a city is already way too dangerous for pedestrian
Nobody has ever said the contrary...
> The unconfortable slow driver you hate ? Maybe not as dangerous as you are
Maybe is a no until you prove it.
Meanwhile I can show you that the categories that suffer more deaths per capita are really young and inexperienced people and older people with slow reaction times and impaired vision (the traffic light was red but they didn't see it).
> You want to drive "fast"? Think about the safety of other people it involves.
I never said that.
I've said that if you can't handle to drive fast (fast as in slightly above the speed limits), you are dangerous even at low speed.
If you can't swim in a swimming pool, will you be a better swimmer in the Ocean?
As an example: my dad never liked driving, he never learned to be a good driver and as a result now that he is older his driving skill have lowered so much that he is a danger to himself.
He could drive meh at 50kmh when he was 40, barely when he was 50, now that he is 75 at 30kmh everything looks too fast for his reflexes. He breaks in the middle of the straight because he sees shadows, wait too long at crosses but then he passes in the wrong moment because he gets frustrated that other cars behind him are forming a long line because of him.
He never had to challenge his mediocre driving skills, because they were almost good enough and now he can't drive safely anymore.
Driving is like a muscle, if you don't exercise it and stimulate it, it will atrophy.
Cities like Rome, with the highest number of cars per capita in the West (73 cars every 100 people) need to either remove cars from the streets entirely or deploy large programs of safe driving because the population is getting older and their driving skills are not getting better.
Forcing everyone to go by bike or at 10kmh is not a solution.
At 20kmh a delay in reaction times of just one second means 6 meters.
It is a lot!
And I repeat it to be clear: I don't even drive anymore in Rome, I simply walk, because it's too frustrating as an experience.
Slow drivers need to learn how to drive safely without pretending that their insecurities become everyoneś problem.
Especially in large cities where there are a pletora of alternative ways to move around.
> That's really the root of the safety problem that is big powerful cars.
It is not.
In Rome, where there are around 27 thousands car crashes every year, the number one cause of accidents is distraction.
Most of them happen at low speed.
The second is driving under the influence.
The third is road conditions.
Last comes speeding.
Driving under pressure because you don't feel confident behind the wheel is like DUI, you make mistakes and cause crashes.
Too many people obtain the driving license without having the necessary skills to handle the traffic flow of a large city.
Most people don't respect the strict speed limits in Europe. As long as there's no radar and no heavy traffic around I can guarantee cars will go faster than 50km/h.
Every major vehicle manufacturers is working on self-driving. So just how difficult would it be for them to make cars now as an intermediate step that actually obeyed the speed laws?
In the UK, The National Police Chiefs Council stated that speeding is believed to be a significant factor in 17 fatalities and 126 serious injuries on the country's roads each month. Globally ...
I don't know how many people the vehicle makers should be allowed to kill and maim because of a speeding problem that is entirely technically preventable. But at the moment it feels like they are getting away with something that is uncomfortably close to murder.
Secondly, there's a more fundamental issue. Most people are not going to be ok with the lawmaker exerting that level of control over their cars, because it's 1984-y.
Just because something kills people doesn't mean it always has to be completely stopped and eradicated. People die from eating too much junk food, should we forbid it? People die to stairs, are you going to legally force constructions to pad any staircases with cushions? People ruin their lives due to alcohol. People drown in pools. Kids get injured on playgrounds - think of the children.
There's a line where you need to leave things up to individuals, even if some of them are going to fuck up, because otherwise you end up creating a draconian state, which is way worse than any possible outcome created by people misusing their agency. Trying to enforce speed limits this hard is way over that line.
Junk food, too, is the target of similar restrictions in several countries now. Also, playgrounds have been scaled down in the last couple of decades for safety reasons, and in the USA that wasn’t due to draconian laws, it was due to fear of lawsuits.
> It is definitely possible for a large enough group of citizens to be so concerned about the harmful effects of something that they do not believe it should be left to the individual.
True. Everyone is fine with heroin being illegal. That's why I said that there is a line and not that you should leave everything to the individual.
> in the USA that wasn’t due to draconian laws, it was due to fear of lawsuits.
Is that not the same? Just that the US already has draconian laws?
The big difference is that speeding puts others lives at risk. Someones heroin addiction for the most part will themselves at risk (except where keeping it illegal pushes people into crime to finance their addiction, which is another reason to provide legal access)
Hence it's important to get people to stop seeing opposition to legalisation of these drugs as "obvious", because opposing legalisation of these drugs is extremely irrational.
Current laws on this are immoral and deeply harmful. The vast majority of drugs should be fully legalised and regulated, not decriminalised. The only reasonable exceptions are possibly things like fentanyl and "synthetic cannabis" variants that few people use because they want just those drugs but because of poor availability of safer drugs.
Any evidence-based drugs policy would involve full legalisation of most drugs - there's simply nothing that suggests the current laws achieve their claimed intent, and plenty that demonstrate they are causing massive harm both to addicts and to victims of related crime.
Decriminalizing heroin possession and use, while keeping production and sale illegal, has already resulted in absolutely massive reduction of heroin use in several places. Sometimes to the point that there’s only a few elderly addicts hanging on but virtually no younger users are taking up the drug. I’d say that the policies achieved their claimed intent. What more do you want?
However that’s understating the difference. It’s common to be breaking just before impact at higher speeds you have less time to react and thus break less. If you go from 50MPH to 30 MPH that’s likely a completely survivable collision. Breaking from 60MPH to 50 MPH is less so as your dealing with V^2 = ~2.8x the energy. Similarly, many accidents are simply avoided...
I found one thing which is a bit counter to this, but not directly relevant to cities. Germany manages to have no speed limit on the majority of the Autobahn without a higher rate of accidents compared to surrounding countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Anyway, overall safety of a given road is a separate factor. Germany has approximately 650,000 km of roads and only 12,996 kilometres (2016) where part of the Autobahn. So while per mile the Autobahn is safer than the older parts of the German road network, speed is hardly the only factor involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Germany#Roads
They have very high standards for what constitutes a no speed limit zone and such roads are safe enough to offset the added dangers of such speeds.
If it is technically preventable without impeding the lawful usage, why is it assumed that the killing or maiming of even one extra person is okay?
> That kind of driver is just going to go for used cars if new cars won't let you drive as you wish
Perhaps, but isn't being surrounded by vehicles driving at the legal speed going to slow them down? And if that doesn't slow them down, then aren't the police likely to have more resources to deal with them?
(each death on UK roads is estimated to cost over £2 million pounds https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/ras60-av... , I'd imagine the figures are similar for most Western countries - that's a lot of resources freed)
> the lawmaker exerting that level of control over their cars, because it's 1984-y.
And having our roads festooned with cameras and number plate readers while still suffering the deaths and injuries is not a worse vision of dystopia?
> because otherwise you end up creating a draconian state, which is way worse than any possible outcome created by people misusing their agency. Trying to enforce speed limits this hard is way over that line.
I know what Top Gear and the rest of the industry with the largest advertising budget on the planet might like us to think. But speeding is not a human right. It's not much like freedom of speech; is it? So just how would preventing law-abiding citizens from being killed or maimed by illegal driving bring about a "draconian state"?
When science and technology make it preventable, why should it be acceptable to allow our loved ones to continue to be killed and maimed just so that some people can continue to break the law and drive dangerously?
You mentioned free speech, so here's an analogy: Even with free speech, there are certain things you're not allowed to say, and most people agree that's reasonable. Imagine someone is bullied into suicide by hate speech, and we have the technology to implant people with chips that make it impossible for them to say these things.
Would you argue in the same way that "if it is technically preventable without impeding the lawful usage, why is it assumed that the killing or maiming of even one extra person is okay?"
In any case it should be clear that that would be a rather extremist position.
Is not every bought or sold item or service subject to some form of "government" regulation? Looking at Lead for instance; isn't it materially beneficial to a society that it is no longer a routine constituent of our gasoline or drinking water pipes? Is our health not better? Isn't stopping companies selling vehicles that can break speeding laws the same?
> re: mind-control chips. Would you argue in the same way that > "if it is technically preventable without impeding the lawful usage, > why is it assumed that the killing or maiming of even one extra > person is okay?"
When, or if mind-control chips come into being, then it'll be up to the societies of which we are all parts to decide how, or if they want to use them. It'll be one heck of a debate; freedom of internal thought vs stopping rapists and serial killers.
Now, if they screw up, and "bad" mind-control comes to pass, will anyone seriously be saying? "you know what; it was because they stopped speeding cars on public roads". Would that be likely? Or are neural links, miniaturization, better batteries, etc and a sh*tty society misusing them more likely to be orders of magnitude more culpable?
So when science and technology make it (where "it" is speeding) preventable - who wouldn't want to use it to prevent theirs and other's loved ones from being killed and maimed?
No, because you can just not speed, whereas you can't just not drink the lead in your tap water. Your proposal is a different, far more extreme form of regulation.
> So when science and technology make it (where "it" is speeding) preventable - who wouldn't want to use it to prevent theirs and other's loved ones from being killed and maimed?
You keep repeating this thing about saving your loved ones, but it's not as simple as that. You have tunnel vision on the death toll and don't consider what other consequences you're creating. Reasoning that "if technology allows it and it can save a life, it's automatically worth doing" can justify a lot of hamfisted measures.
> It'll be one heck of a debate; freedom of internal thought vs stopping rapists and serial killers.
Here you even acknowledge that there is something to be lost in exchange for stopping bad things. That's my entire point. The speeding issue is exactly the same, just with smaller stakes.
Take away people's agency piece by piece to prevent speeding, murder and rape, and you end up with a society where everyone can live to 100 but no one is even human anymore.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to try and reduce speeds. Speed kills, and that’s a fact. A lot of the killing is externalized as well.
I’ve said it before, but people who drive public streets like a track should either get themselves to a track, or internalize their risk-taking by buying a motorcycle. As a motorcyclist, I’m very aware of safety trade-offs I’m making. Oddly enough, not being inside a steel cage is a pretty good reminder to keep safety very high on the list of things I think about while riding.
Most European city centers do not have four lane straight-as-a-line roads with only a sign "restricting" the speed. On tight, winding roads with near-zero visibility at junctions, it's rare to even hit the speed limit. Driving faster doesn't happen because it feels (and is!) dangerous.
That's the kind of road this vehicle is designed for.
With bicycles it makes even more sense - since the reality is that despite what the law says, many people ride them on pavements - so the speed should be limited to what is safe for pedestrians.
Also, if people are riding bikes on the pavement, it's a clear signal that they don't have a safe alternative.
Wait, I'm confused now, are you arguing for or against this thing then? You do realize that the Ami is made by Citroen, which is a car company, right? So....which way is this alleged bribe supposed to flow, exactly?
And really, like you can't see any reason at all? Just off the top of my head - legislators say, for the sake of safety, that if a vehicle of any type can reach 50km/h or higher, it's a car. That's a car speed, therefore it should require a car licence. Because of that, manufacturers artificially limit the speed to 45km/h, so you don't need a licence to drive one of these. I'm not sure how would the car manufacturers bribe here - for? Or against this law? Because honestly, I can make an argument for either.
>>Also, if people are riding bikes on the pavement, it's a clear signal that they don't have a safe alternative.
You're stating the obvious here. Equally obvious is that the councils "should just build more bike paths". But in reality there is no money to do this. Local councils have barely enough money to clean the streets and patch the worst potholes, and building new bike lanes is a far higher expenditure than this. The problem might be solved with time, or it might not. The law should reflect reality(and it does), not some made up utopia that doesn't exist.
How much do you imagine that costs?
If you are going to compare "infrastructure" then you have to compare everything, including how many people benefit - everyone who shops at a supermarket benefits from the road system even if they own no vehicle.
speed limits is usually 50km/h and there are 30km/h zones.
These cars are not allowed on high speed roads, such as highways.
When I used to ride a MB in London I did not hug the gutter that's asking to hit a grate or debris - I rode in the lane 1-2 feet from the kerb just like your supposed to.
oh and I didn't not undertake other vehicles that's just asking to be killed (90%) of bile deaths are undertaking related in London