Sounds terrible. I wouldn't want to live in that city.
Amsterdam on the other side is really not your average city.
Efficiency matters.
The speed limit is 20mph on most roads, no matter how many lanes of empty tarmac there is, what time of day it is, with how much visibility, how straight the road is, etc. It's a blind political statement with no regard to the actual roads and their circumstances.
Basically, it's irresponsible to drive faster than 30 km/h anywhere with a significant number of pedestrians. The risk of serious injury and death rises quickly above that speed, and human drivers cannot react quickly enough at higher speeds. You can justify a bit higher speed limits on major streets with significant traffic, as pedestrians tend to be more attentive when crossing them. But even then, the limit should be 40-50 km/h, as road capacity decreases and noise level becomes unacceptably high at higher speeds.
You sound mad. Like a frustrated child. Is it really that hard driving a bit slower?
It worked!
Or are you saying that you don't like me, personally, and want me to leave?
Also also: if so, then yes. To hell with efficiency and productivity. If they can't share, I don't care.
However safety benefits and noise reduction are an asset. But those can easily be reduced in better more environment friendly ways.
What happens in the US when speeds are too low, is you get half the people obeying it, and half of them driving way faster. It creates a dangerous conflict q lot of times. People road rage like crazy in some areas and will do dangerous shit like pass slower cars in unsafe places, tailgate, cut people off, etc.
It looks like they're going to start using speed cameras now instead of police enforcement (they certainly don't want to use police enforcement here, that would clearly turn out badly). They're trialing "racing cameras" to supposedly catch the kids drag racing at night, but it is obviously a way to introduce enforcement of the 25 mph limits without doing road redesign and to generate revenue.
The result is pretty obviously going to be regressive taxation, because Seattle/Washington State runs everything via regressive taxation. So the traffic cameras are not being setup on W Seattle Bridge to catch white collar people commuting to the office, but are put on W Marginal Way which are going to catch blue collar workers.
I'm just waiting for liberal Seattle to wake up one morning and realize the DOT is funding their bike lanes by regressive taxation through traffic camera enforcement, falling on the lower class and minorities, and see if their heads explode or not.
There's a way to do it right like Amsterdam where they've already built all the infrastructure and done all the road diets, we're doing it the ass-backwards way by dropping the speed limits and setting up traffic cameras.