Amsterdam preparing to lower speed limit to 30 kilometers per hour
nltimes.nl
nltimes.nl
I think this is a good continuation of what's proven to be effective policy. Cars cause accidents, but slower cars cause less fatal accidents. Cars have always been a poor way to get around the city, and that was the case long before Amsterdam started putting bike infrastructure ahead of car infrastructure. But Amsterdam has been making that increasingly explicit in recent years: your car is just for getting out of the city, or for moving big stuff.
Back in the UK, there was someone I knew who absolutely loved to go fast. He had a story about red-lining his (Lexus?) across northern France to get back to the ferry before it's last crossing for the day (and how he wasn't caught in France, but almost immediately hit a speed trap when back in the UK). I was in his car for a two-vehicle "convoy" from a restaurant to an indoor race track for a mutual friend's stag do, where the other car was driven by someone who followed the speed limit, and when I asked this guy why he was doing 97 mph on the A14, his answer was "if I was going faster I might have to waste time in court proving that's not dangerous driving" rather than to slow down.
But that guy, when he was on the maximum number of points on his licence before they'd take it away, was very careful to… not get caught.
The car speedometer is conservative so it is several kilometers behind, and the speed camera allows in the Netherlands about 3 kilometers margin. In practice this means you can drive about 107km/h indicated car speed on a 100km road.
That said, lowering the speed on a road should not only be achieved with different signs but also with traffic calming - so redesigning the layout of the road.
drove in the center of Bucharest, Romania, where drivers constantly go over 70kmh (yes through the city center). then drove in London where 20-30mph felt ridiculously slow.
Don't try this at home.
People in Amsterdam tend to behave the same as how you describe the people in Seattle.
How is 5000 signs 'slowly' ?
They're not starting something new; they're expanding it even further. Probably because of the experience they have acquired with slower speeds over the past decades.
When I was a kid (in the 1980s), 50 km/h was standard everywhere in cities and towns. Around that time, protesters started demanding lower speeds for cars with the slogan "50 is the veel" (50 is too much). Ever since, they've been reducing speeds in more and more places (except motorways, which increased from 100 to 120 and then 130).
And consistency is also important. Having some streets 30 km/h while similar streets in other places are 50 km/h can be confusing.
As someone who is mostly by bike and by foot, sometimes in public transports and occasionally in a car, that has been a good thing.
The city is small and full of traffic lights, and there's a ring road, 50 to 30 km/h inside the city can't be increasing travel time too much for cars. I don't think it was possible to drive at 50 km/h in most of the city anyway.
(and the city could use less air pollution, I guess it helps a bit on this aspect in addition to the noise and the safety).
Congratulations to Amsterdam :-)
Makes it so that no through traffic at speed goes through the areas where people live and stay.
I think you have to reduce car-dependency first, afterwards you can roll them out because the acceptance is higher and advocacy groups form.
Maybe it works out if it's a matter of fact and you move there and can find some place to live with awesome public transport but while I think ours is generally good there are some real holes in the coverage, especially the more you go towards the edge of the city. it's just not comparison. Subway stations are not 800m apart but more like 3.5km
https://www.nullvisjonen-agder.no/images/grafikk/dodsrisiko-...
Speed in km/h vs death rate. From about 10% death (90% survival) at 30 km/h (~18mph) to about 80% death (only 20% survival!) at 50 km/h (~31 mph)
Also, as someone who is both a cyclist and a driver, there’s a bit less urgency and frustration to pass a 15-20 km/h bicycle when you’re only allowed to do 30 anyway than when the limit is 50.
I default to doing both on bike, because the convenience outweighs any safety concerns, now that my neighborhood (suburban Nürnberg) is all 30 km/h.
And my kid will be able to be more independent at age 10 than I was at 15 growing up in car-bound Texas.
Also, no, ICE cars generally don't pollute less at 30km/h, compared to 50km/h. Engine does the same work, just at lower gear.
It depends on how the street is used. There are places where maximum speed is 10 km/h. I grew up in the street like that: a "woonerf", a residential area where the street is explicitly meant for playing children, and cars have to go at pedestrian speeds of 5 or 10 km/h. The goal these is to not lock up kids in their homes, but encourage them to play outside, which is great. These were fairly new but popular in the 1980s and late 1970s, but not so common anymore, sadly.
30 km/h is roughly the speed bicycle of bicycles and similar vehicles. Not suitable for playing kids, but more suitable for mixed through traffic. Driving through an entire city at 10 km/h would be as tedious as walking that entire distance, but 30 km/h is very doable.
I'd like some streets to be 20 km/h as well, though. But that is because those streets should be for pedestrians / kids / those living there, and not for traffic.
Of course there should be 10 or 20km/h limits on certain streets, no one is arguing about that. We're talking about city-wide limits. Here, if I was driving at 30km/h on a main city road, I'd be lynched and rightfully so.
The rest of your argument is basically a slippery slope fallacy and not even close to what's happening in any urban planning discussion I've ever been a part of. And I'm on the board of an organization discussing these things.
https://www.amsterdam.nl/verkeer-vervoer/milieuzone-amsterda...
Even in the most transparent of places, I don't really see decisionmakers explaining their decisions.
In all these cases the decisions have been explained, in the normal place, but that's too boring to share on social media so nobody hears it.
In Wales the official explanation is: Welsh ministers said a 20mph (32km/h) limit would reduce deaths and noise and encourage people to walk or cycle [1]. Drakeford elaborated by saying "It's going to take you a minute longer to make your journey, and we will save 10 people's lives in Wales every year as a result of that one minute contribution - it doesn't seem an unfair bargain".
This explanation is nonsensical:
1. It could just as well apply to a limit of 5mph, or 10mph, or banning cars completely. It explains the desire to lower the limit but not the choice of 20mph vs 30mph.
2. The claim is that it adds a "minute longer" to make your journey, a clearly confabulated number. Not all journeys are the same and lowering the speed limit nationally will clearly be a scaling factor to your journey time, not a constant minute regardless of distance.
3. The justification is a 100% subjective feeling that "it doesn't seem unfair". This isn't an explanation, just an emotion.
When politicians serve up gibberish explanations, people tend to split down the middle. One half will assume that politicians are just being really stupid. Others will say that nobody can be that stupid, so there must be some alternative agenda at work.
Certainly this looks to people like "post-evidence politics" albeit not in the way you probably imagine.
It doesn't help that these people are socialists who have a long history of presenting one explanation for their policies whilst actually having another. When they're in friendly territory they tend to talk about how much they strongly desired things like enforced equality of outcomes, degrowth and reducing CO2 emissions, but they never talk about pedestrian safety. So when they impose policies that will clearly have the effect of reducing growth and car usage, but justify it with some new cause they hardly talked about before, it doubles up suspicion again.
BTW the 20mph limit didn't appear in any manifesto. More people have now signed a petition against it than voted Labour in the first place. So they can't claim these policies are popular or democratic.
Everything is a compromise. 30 mph was a bad compromise because it's a deadly speed that will kill people in a collision. 20 mph is significantly safer. Reducing further to 10 mph or even 5 mph would not have a significant further effect on safety in normal traffic conditions, but would have a significant impact on travel times if people have to drive at that speed for a significant part of their trip.
I think it's your complaints that are 100% subjective. There is evidence for these policies. Politicians rarely go into that evidence for public announcements because most people aren't that interested in the evidence, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You're suggesting that politicians randomly pick some numbers out of the air just to upset people, but the opposite is true; you generally need an excessive amount of evidence to get politicians to do anything at all, especially when it even slightly inconvenience the oil and car lobby. I mean, look at the lack of action to mitigate climate change despite the excessive amounts of evidence.
> your proposal
I haven't made any proposals. My proposed alternative would be for the Welsh government to focus on much bigger problems that they may actually have a mandate for. The alternatives were just examples to illustrate the point. Ask yourself why 20 and not 25, if it helps.
> you generally need an excessive amount of evidence to get politicians to do anything
What an amazing country you must live in. For the schmucks like us in the rest of the world, we have the politician's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done. Evidence-based policy making is the exception not the norm :(
But I'm not yet convinced that's the case here. I don't know the details of what's going on in Wales, but the Amsterdam decision to go from 50 to 30 makes a lot of sense. According to the graph matsemann posted (https://www.nullvisjonen-agder.no/images/grafikk/dodsrisiko-...), 30 is significantly safer than 50, whereas 40 is still in the middle of that curve.
Also, in Netherland, 30 is already a standard speed limit in many places, and it doesn't make sense to confuse the situation by introducing new speed limits in between the existing ones unless there's a really good reason to do so.
What's actually changed in the last few years is the new political obsession with net zero. Politicians don't have a mandate for that and haven't won the argument for it, which is why these measures are facing so much resistance.
- People seem fixated on their speedometers rather than the road, which isn't great for safety.
- I'm spending way more time in third gear when I would have previously been in fourth, meaning the engine is revving higher, thus consuming more fuel, thus releasing more emissions.
- The rollout has been utterly chaotic. They first released an interactive map, which bore little resemblance to the changes to the speed signs on launch day, and councils are still tweaking the opt-out status of individual roads.
Personally, I think safety goals could have been met by building way more zebra crossings. In my experience, motorists do slow and stop for them, and they would have a natural traffic calming effect at the times when pedestrians need them the most. However, that wouldn't help with bullet point #2 on the Welsh Government website, which is to encourage more people to walk and cycle. Much of Wales is rural, and for those people a car is a necessity rather than a luxury. When I lived in London, many buses were every three minutes. Where I live at the moment, it's two a day on many routes. Regardless, if cycling and walking is the true agenda then they should have had the guts to be open about it. Instead, they hide it behind think-of-the-children, which mainly has big support from people who drive SUVs for the school run. Despite the fact their vehicles are much heavier, ride higher, and have an angular front that would be much worse for anyone (especially children) that they might collide with.
Banning cars completely wouldn't be particularly practical. Death rate increases pretty dramatically after about 20mph/30kph. Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good, here. 30kph in urban areas is about a sweet spot; it makes things a _lot_ safer but doesn't impact the utility of the cars that much.
You don't get to kvetch about how boringly logical and evidence-based the explanations are so it's just the prole's being stupid, when the people creating policy aren't justifying their policies with evidence or logic in the first place.
Half the crap is people ranting about the speed limit in Wales, the other half is vandalism of low emission zone cameras and signs in London.
Also anecdotally: I live on a busy cross-roads in Berlin, and I've had half a dozen so far today… and one more while writing this line. The exact number varies a lot from one day to the next, so I'm not sure the overall count, but the new one is still going on by the time I get to this word ← here even though the road was fairly clear at the moment.
Sometimes I even get them in stereo as multiple vehicles go past with a gap between them; and I've witnessed at least one occasion where different services passed the junction in different directions within a few seconds of each other.
The sirens are the only bit about this place that I really dislike; but enough of a problem that I'm looking for a suburban place next even though that will probably mean a longer walk to shops and restaurants.
I also live in 1.5 mil city and I haven't got used to how many there are after moving here almost a decade ago.
The vast vast majority of noise comes from vehicles and power tools.
But Amsterdam also has plenty of noise that doesn't come from cars. Some bars and and similar venues can produce quite a lot of noise. You don't want to live upstairs from one of those if you're a light sleeper who goes to bed early. People living there also complain a lot about tourists in the red light districts.
But all of that noise is very local. The people living there know that this is an issue, but it's only an issue for people in the immediately vicinity. Of course tourist hotspots will be noisy, but cars go everywhere.
The amount of noise coming from car traffic is significant, and it's directly related to the speed of cars. The A10 ring road around Amsterdam is 100 km/h in most places, but the west ring goes straight through a very dense residential part of the city, and for that reason, it's I think the only snelweg in the country that's limited to 80 km/h. Which still produces a lot of noise, so it's also surrounded by massive sound barriers. Somehow we don't put those sound barriers around every cafe.
When I said "pretty quiet", I didn't mean "completely silent", I just meant that it doesn't feel noisy.
(Though I don't recall anyone suggesting the law should be used to enforce people to be silent.)
What you’re describing sounds more like the Middle East or Asia to me.
Most of the roads aren't that congested where I am already, I think the road I live on used to be a major through road, it's wide with multiple lanes, but hardly any traffic so I think it benefited from some previous work. But still, it's even quieter in the evening now
They also turn off traffic lights out of peak hours, this gives priority to pedestrians but doesn't hold up the odd car.
Personal (anecdotal) experience : -cars now go about as fast as some bikes. Makes it easier for cyclists to merge / left turn through even some of the bussier intersections.
-during the bussier parts of the days, speed limit is useless. Nobody is doing 50 on Monday afternoon and it seems that the 30 helps with fluidity / merging. Which (at least in my experience) means that though the traffic jams still exist, they're moving somewhat faster
Efficiency here primarily refers to km/unit of energy. So if you care about minimising pollution in the city centres it's much better if all cars can drive either 70 km/h or not at all through city centres.
You also see asphalt in use more and more often in streets where the number of cyclists are significant enough that cars are forced to drive slowly anyway.
The lines between the lanes are made from much smoother stone though, so when I'm in a hurry, I just ride on those lines.
30 kph = 18.64 mph
20 mph = 32.19 kph
So safety rules around the world are based on arbitrary length systems. I'm all for lower speed limits for safety but I feel there is still things to be worked out in suburban settings where long arterial(?) roads carry large amounts of traffic in large cities.
We could have public transit <> inter area rail / road / airport hubs that allow for higher speed transit between urban centers and the storage of cars / etc outside of the residential areas.
I have never seen anyone get a ticket on a bike for anything. It would be more like a badge of honour I think.
(the only two tickets I got in my life were on bike)
Sounds like they're trying to encourage public transportation usage
Isn't this quite clear in the highway code? If there are no signs, use street lamps -- they're the proxy we're generally given for this.
It is also launching a campaign with the slogan: “We drive 30 for each other.”
Not surprisingly, the socialism is blatantly obvious.
Seeing as the social democratic[0] PvdA is currently the largest political party in the Amsterdam city council[1], with the greens a close second, that's all in line with what the people of Amsterdam want.
This is Europe. Socialism isn't a scare word here. If anything, it's a rallying cry.
(FWIW I don't agree that this does make it less desirable to live in cities; it will tend to reduce noise and improve the efficacy of the bus system, both of which make living in cities _more_, not less, desirable anyway.)
I wouldn't have thought most people living in central Amsterdam have parking, anyway? Generally people who actually live in cities are far less likely to have cars than those who live in suburbs (if it's a remotely dense city there simply wouldn't be _space_ for everyone to have a car...)
For what it's worth, I live in Dublin, in the city. Dublin brought in a 30kph limit on most roads around me in 2020; it really didn't change that much. The on-street residents' parking on my road is still generally mostly full. Things are a bit quieter, particularly at night. The bus system works somewhat better, though that one's multifactorial. The number of idiots driving far too fast down my road (it's narrow enough that 50kph was never remotely safe) has fallen off almost entirely, and when it happens now it's always non-Dublin-registered cars.
People who don't have a car aren't real people?
Of course boomers love capitalism when in the 60s a factory worker could easily pay off a huge house, two brand new cars every 3 years, and support a family of 5 on a single income.
But that isn’t capitalism today. Young people are working themselves into the ground just to share a room in a house with 6 other people, barely able to put food on the table.
What do you suppose the current generation will say about capitalism when they get old?
Wealth is flowing from poor people to rich people at an ever increasing rate. It’s no wonder alternative economic systems are gaining in popularity.
Guess what, the same generation born in ussr (mostly urban and either russian or conformist enough to benefit from the system) liked the system too, while it worked. Hell, who would not like state-provided housing, public transport childcare and all the nice things, while they last, even if the system as whole isn't sustainble enough.
It seems that now, based on your comment, it’s in vogue to call it socialism.
At this rate, in a few years it’ll be called democratic socialism and not long after it’ll be called social democracy.
I guess you gotta keep that Overton window moving.
As an aside, what is often overlooked when someone brings up the point you do, is that communist nostalgia[0] is a real thing.
You can get into endless arguments about how they are No True Socialists but it just ends up being like a word game.
That's why the European parties that lean in that direction tend to cast themselves as "social democratic", a different term.
You’re just continuing on the path of self-identification. Would you call North Korea democratic just because that’s what they call themselves?
If not, then why not when you seem to have no qualms calling them socialist because on the basis that they call themselves that in their constitution?
> You can get into endless arguments about how they are No True Socialists but it just ends up being like a word game.
You paint it as some sort of semantics game, meanwhile both socialism and communism are well defined.
Notwithstanding the different flavors, they all have certain elements in common as a fundamental requirement and no amount of trying to fit the Soviet shaped peg into a round hole changes that.
> That's why the European parties that lean in that direction tend to cast themselves as "social democratic", a different term
I understand that you use the word “tend” to hedge your bets, but your comment here implies a certain amount of ubiquity and lack of parties trying to distance themselves.
The reality is that that Europe has a slew of socialist parties that aren’t hiding it either, they’re often called “Socialist Party” in their respective language. Hell there are even some communist parties.
And it’s not like they don’t occupy any seats in the respective parliaments either. Most of these parties have significant presence in parliaments and at other levels.
The science as well, the dependency between impact veolocity and severity of injury and risk of survival of pedestrians and cyclists is fairly well studied and known.
the image there sure does not look like a 30km/h street to me
I've been there (or somewhere in Amsterdam where it looks exactly the same) and at peak hour 50km/h passing by a crowded bicycle path while at the same time there's a tram next to you surely does not feel appropriate. But yes, that could be cultural.
> I mean, not everyone has the possibility of walking a couple of streets to buy a cappuccino and then take an elevator to the office. Try having kids in a city today and then let's talk.
I don't get this comment. Is there no cafe near you? Also, you still shouldn't speed in residential or mixed neighbourhoods, regardless of where you live. Even if your office is further away. People live there. A highway and ring road usually takes you reasonable near you office, for most cities in europe and I bet every city in the US.
> Try having kids in a city today
What's the difference to having a kid in a city in the past? Cars certainly grew bigger and that's strictly worse for having a kid in the city.
I get not wanting your kids to grow up in the city, but that's also your own decision. And if you end up with a long commute others shouldn't bear unreasonable consequences. Others might raise their kids in the city and the kid might want to cross the road (assuming it is old enough) without a fear of death from thousands of cars speeding by.
Need to get on the public transport building first.
It's pretty clear to me that automobiles and urban life basically don't coexist. They tragedy of the commons'd every city they touched. A car is great if only you have one, but not so great when everyone has one. This realization is not socialism, but more like rolling back a failed experiment. You can still drive your pickup truck 300 miles per hour on your farm or whatever if you want. Just not through dense cities, where most people are walking or cycling.
If you need to cover longer distances, you can likely go slowly towards some sort of transit hub and then take a faster vehicle to your final destination. (This is why people fly instead of drive across the country. In the cities, you can run trains underground and not conflict with anything else going on in the city! Many cities have tried this with great success; the only complaint is not doing enough of it.)
Everywhere that has tried this has regretted it, because the volume of traffic induced is so high that the average journey speed ends up below 30km/h anyway. What a city needs to get millions of people across it is high volume public transport.
Amsterdam _has_ a ring road, you know.
> Not surprisingly, the socialism is blatantly obvious.
Because God forbid that people care about others in traffic.
Of course you care about the safety of others while driving. I shudder to think what traffic would be like in a country where people don't.
It’s a policy on vehicle speeds, one that could be implemented in any political-economic system, or not. I don’t see the connection to social ownership of the means of production.
Luckily in some countries governmental organisations protect their citizens from inconsiderate people who lack empathy. You can call that socialism, no one cares.
>Not surprisingly, the socialism is blatantly obvious.
You do the speed limit only for yourself?
Is "for each other" really so triggery?
Middle class loves socialism.
Someone else commented here that when hit by a car at 50 kph, there's a 20% chance of survival, and at 30%, there's a 90% chance of survival. So in the best case, this might save 35 lives per year. Not to mention the reduction in noise, pollution, and damage to vehicles. I think that's easily worth it.
I posted a graph in another comment here about the drastic effects such a small speed change has for survival rate.
This can have a huuuge impact.
It would seem likely to be a massive economic drain, quite apart from the sheer waste.
Here in NZ for a road toll of 300, 4000ish serious injuries and 30k minor injuries, the cost was $4.6 billion in 2019.
That doesn’t cover lost tax take etc. Reducing that number down is obviously helpful.
https://www.transport.govt.nz/about-us/news/social-cost-of-r...
Keep in mind the massive number of minor and serious injuries that accompany that stat.
It's ok if you guys feel this is normal but for me it´s too much. Cities were vibrant places to share experiences that today are a complete mess of zombies taking pictures for the trendy social network. And this is just one more drop to make cities more soulless and "2030 ready" for people who does not really exist. I cannot say this is useless, it's just another politically correct decision to deal with. Too much already for me at least.
Like, was an important part of your urban experience traffic noise, or the sound of ambulance sirens going to pick up a dead pedestrian? I'm genuinely a bit baffled by where you're coming from here.