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Comment by pharmakom | Hacker News Reader

It’s time for pedestrian infrastructure that is safe by design. Most of these fatalities could be prevented by lowering the speed limit.

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Lowering the speed limit doesn’t make sense if there are wide streets with wide lanes (more comfortable to drive in) and no enforcement.

In SF it would be preferable to reduce street width in reality or artificially with protected bike lanes, bus/muni right of way, etc on wide streets like Geary or Van Ness .

> In SF it would be preferable to reduce street width

Absolutely. It seems like the best way to reduce speeds in cities is to make it uncomfortable to drive fast in them. Big wide streets make it feel like you're going "slow" at 25mph, so people go faster.

Of course, we could also slowly carve out areas of cities where cars are not allowed, but how will businesses survive if people can't park directly in front of them? /s

It’s funny that in my city, the most active retail area is a pedestrian only street. Anything with heavy car traffic tends to have more intentional destination type stuff.

> Anything with heavy car traffic tends to have more intentional destination type stuff.

Is it possible that the intentional destination is the pedestrian street, to do your shopping ? Remove the heavy traffic lanes around it and people will go shopping somewhere else or go to amazon instead.

In my city that's what's happening, the pedestrian only street used to be the place to go shopping for clothes/luxuries. Now it's impossible to get there so people go to off city malls instead (which are thriving) or online (also thriving), and street stores are slowly dying.

This street has many highrise offices, universities and residential buildings around it so its a destination of a lot of foot traffic from buildings, not so much somewhere you drive to access. There are also multi level parks on the ends, you just can't drive through it.

I really like seeing streets that have seating where parking spots used to be. Some popular areas have whole blocks converted. They really make it hard to jaywalk, and offer lots of barrier between sidewalk and cars. That said, it probably sucks for bicyclists.

In Bangkok the roads are very wide and busy. Every couple hundred meters they have bridges that go over them. It's an interesting solution to the problem. It's nice that you just walk up the stairs and cross, no need to worry about the traffic.

They're all over the place, most of them much more minimal, but similar to this: https://previews.123rf.com/images/ruslan_kokarev/ruslan_koka...

sucks if you're mobility impaired ( wheelchair ) , and with ADA the costs will be too prohibitive for most locales, so they'll just paint some zebra stripes and put up a flashing light

Also sucks if you have a stroller, luggage, pets, small kids, a bum leg, if you're old or just tired.

There are crosswalks on street level, you have to go further and wait though.

Some of them have escalators or elevators.

Why should pedestrians be inconvenienced? Make the cars wait or send them the long way around.

In Karachi too IIRC

The speed limit is 25 mph through most of San Francisco, even some of the major routes (like 19th Avenue which is 6 lanes wide with its own divider) are limited to 30 mph. Narrow alleys are 15 mph by default, Market Street is 20 mph, Van Ness is 25 mph. This city probably has the lowest speed limits I've ever seen, and I've lived on 3 continents.

https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/Map-of-Speed-Limits/tt...

Well, in Spain it's 30km/h max in the whole city, 18mp/h.

Thing is, nobody normally goes that slow, from a point on drivers will start ignoring it and decide on a speed themselves.

My observations in Europe are pretty much opposite to this.

Many EU cities are max 30 kph (18.5 mph) on most roads.

https://qz.com/2056530/european-cities-are-slowing-down-thei...

You have to separate the road from the stroad. Roads in Europe might be up to 60-70 kph even in a city center, but they also have calming intersections with roundabouts and to get on an off regularly or even ramps. Streets tend to be 30-40 kph depending on the place with lots of calming.

The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

signs and fines have minimal impact on driver behavior. Apply treatments to the road that alter driver behavior - the perception of danger is quite a motivator in reducing speeds (tullock's spike for instance).

Speed limits are set in part by how fast people actually drive on a street. You need to go further up-funnel and redesign streets so speeding doesn’t feel safe.

If the physical design of the street says that it expects to be traversed at 40mph, people will drive 35 to 45mph on it even if the posted speed limit says 25.

This situation offers tremendous benefits to traffic police officers a bit behind on their ticket writing, but minimal benefits for pedestrian safety, because the people likely to notice the sign and slow down were already the people likely to notice pedestrians and drive defensively.

Is this satire?

The speed limit has barely anything to do with pedestrian infrastructure. It's the interaction points between the two where the problems are (intersections, crossings, etc).

Give people (both pedestrians and drivers) the opportunities to get where they need to go without getting in each other's way and 99/100 they'll pull it off successfully.

Is this satire? Vehicle speed is one of the best predictors of pedestrian fatality and injury severity in an accident. When a pedestrian is struck by a driver, almost nothing else matters as much as the vehicle's speed.

> speed is one of the best predictors of pedestrian fatality and injury severity

True, but a total red herring. Speed might be the main factor affecting severity of injury, but it's not the main factor affecting probability in a left-turn scenario. Remember left turns? It's what OP is about. Very few people are going the speed limit while turning left, and that would remain true even with lower limits. Visibility is the dominant factor here - around other vehicles, around the A-pillar, etc. The least severe accident is the one that doesn't happen. "Lower speed limits" is a great hobby horse, but not one that belongs here.

speed limits... doesn't work.

I live in a city where they lowered the speed limits heavily, the result is law abiding drivers constantly almost crashing because they have eyes glued on the speedometer to keep themselves under the speed limit while on roads that "feel" faster.

And the non-law abiding drivers that will happily crash into the rear of law abiding ones, since everyone is same speed, when someone DO obey the speed limit, that person gets rear ended as the other drivers get surprised.

Instead you need better road design. (also, putting speed bumps after long wide straights is just a retarded idea, saw a bunch of times people going airborne on those, including one time where a guy managed to leave his wheel STUCK INSIDE a wall, at the exact height a person head should be...).

They could have just as easily (easier, even) been avoided if pedestrians followed the law and used the existing infrastructure.

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