Hacker News Reader

Comment by thorin | Hacker News Reader

Wales (UK) did this about a week ago. Setting 20mph as a limit in urban areas. I was there yesterday and now the problem is that it's very unclear where exactly it applies and if it will be enforced. Also satnavs such as Apple and Google maps have not been updated for the new speeds leading to further confusion. There are some areas where this makes sense, but a blanket change seems political. Hopefully it will cause less pollution and accidents in the future and not just be used as a money making scheme for fining people.

View on HN

> now the problem is that it's very unclear where exactly it applies and if it will be enforced.

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.

Less pollution not so much, everyone will be in 2nd gear, less deaths perhaps.

Is demonstrated pollution with such slow speed will increase dramatically. Next stage, take out cars from the center of the cities totally. Good luck if you bought there a house to take your kids to the college or to go to a better supermarket. Airbnb is rubbing hands

So, first of all, realistically most cars in cities are operating at these sorts of speeds for _most_ of the time, anyway. This won't make a huge difference to _average_ speed. But also, this feels like optimising for the past, frankly. Over 50% of cars sold in the EU last year were either electric, or some sort of hybrid (hybrids generally are about as efficient at 30km/h as 50km/h). Netherlands seems to be further along this curve; 45% of cars sold last year were electric or plugin hybrid (stats seem hard to come by for light hybrids), up from 30% the previous year.

I don’t understand this comment. In a city like Amsterdam you certainly don’t need a car to go to the supermarket or college. I’ve lived in cities with far worse public transport and no car and had no issues.

Maybe indirectly. Driving electric at that speed is pretty comfortable and clean.

Less braking will help with pollution a fair bit.

In other news, Amsterdam bans all co2 emitting vehicles from the city starting 2025. Boats and bikes included

Banning CO2 emitting _boats_? That's a much larger change than I expected, because wow there are an awful lot of boats there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com