In a win for the climate (and safety), urban US speed limits are dropping | Hacker News Reader

In a win for the climate (and safety), urban US speed limits are dropping

yaleclimateconnections.org

22 pointsPaulHoule47 comments

I can logically understand why this is a good thing. I enjoy running and biking myself. I often walk to places instead of drive during the rare times it’s a viable option.

Despite that understanding, I still don’t like it. It’s so incredibly frustrating going 20 or 25mph on a road where most drivers could easily safely drive over double that.

I also often see sections of road with speed limits well below what the road can handle, where EVERYONE is speeding, cops included. This is also frustrating because you’re still paranoid about getting a ticket just for going with the flow of traffic.

> safely

But is it? A 20/25mph speed limit implies a residential street. If you are doing 40 could you stop in time if a kid is hidden by parked cars and suddenly runs out into the street chasing a ball? If not, could you scrub off enough speed quickly enough to get below the ~20mph threshold where a collision with a pedestrian is unlikely to be fatal?

This is a function of the road design. We know based on studies that most folks drive the speed they feel comfortable regardless of the posted speed limits. I live right across the street from a school. It’s naturally a 25mph zone. But the roads are literally as wide as a highway road with perfect sight lines and bike lanes on both sides. It’s a very straight and wide path with clear visibility for about a mile so of course cars are going to fly down that road regardless of the posted limit.

All it would take is some traffic calming measures on each side of the school zone. Chicanes or bollards which narrow the road and force people to slow down and been demonstrated to be highly effective at regulating speed. Roads should be designed for the speeds that motorists are meant to travel if safety is an actual goal.

Yes, that illustrates my point. Road calming doesn't make the road less safe, but drivers slow down because it feels less safe. In other words, drivers don't have a great feel for what speed is actually safe.

> It’s so incredibly frustrating going 20 or 25mph on a road where most drivers could easily safely drive over double that.

It's the minority of drivers that should worry you. Speed limits and road safety aren't only for the ideal conditions and safest drivers. And they aren't just for what drivers feel safe doing but what everyone else is safe with.

Very conservatively and in ideal conditions, at 50mph it takes at least 10m to decide to act, another 10m for your foot to get the signal, and another 30-40m to stop. NHTSA estimates between 260ft-300ft. Do you still think most drivers can safely drive in an urban/residential environment with 60-100m stopping distance?

You say "most drivers could easily safely drive", I say "most drivers dangerously overestimate their ability" and are only prepared for best case scenarios. The rules are for all those other cases. A better option would be to make the road the limiting factor and not just via a rule. Drivers feeling less safe at higher speeds would bring that in line with what other participants to traffic feel and make everyone safer.

> I say "most drivers dangerously overestimate their ability"

I say "most road users dangerously overestimate their ability". At 10mph (about 16 km/h) most bikers dangerously overestimate their ability to safely turn, brake or handle road bumps without invading other lanes, crashing or falling from their bikes.

A bike doesn’t weigh over a ton though, while understandable that some bikers ride rather aggressively their ability to maneuver effectively at speed is far better than a car.

> A bike doesn’t weigh over a ton though

being hit by a bike that broke my leg I would say that bikes having no crumple zones (the opposite is true actually) are not without risks for pedestrians

> their ability to maneuver effectively at speed is far better than a car

I guess that's because biking is a conscious choice, not something you have to do, there aren't hundred millions bikes constantly around on the streets, so usually average bikers are better than the average driver

but having 4 wheels and a differential makes maneuvering effectively at speed much easier than on 2 (very thin) wheels

also the thing is you don't have to stop a car to avoid accidents, ABS and a steering wheel can go a long way.

I think people focus too much on breaking space, reaction times and all of that, but if you see an obstacle and can turn away from it without rolling to the floor or worse, you're 95% done.

two car crashing or hitting a wall with a car is far better than hitting a person.

most of the hit-n-runs happen because the driver pushes the brakes too hard, the wheels block, the car loses directionality and hits straight the pedestrian.

of course lowering speed limits is the easiest choice, you crunch the numbers, at 30km/h there's 50% chances less of a a fatal crash than at 40 km/h, so it seems like the obvious choice, but that also mean that the best choice is no cars at all

In Italy, my country, the average speed for cars in Milan is 9.1 km/h, in Rome is 8.5 in Naples 7.3, hardly high speed.

most of the hit-n-runs are people crossing the streets at night, with low visibility hit by cars that greatly exceed the speed limits, DUIs incidents, old people at the wheel that ran a red light and things like that.

most of the deaths are people literally ran over by the car, not just hit

there are cases of people killed by cars going in reverse, so at very low speed

the point is the drivers mindset should be that speed control happens at the gas pedal, not at the breaking pedal

breaking shouldn't be #1 emergency measure, avoiding the obstacle should, and then brake

how many road users have attempted to pass the moose test? with their car, bike, motorbike, whatever?

how many of them have developed the right mentality for "maneuvering effectively at speed" instead of just doing it without realizing that everything has always gone well until now because luck exists?

> I also often see sections of road with speed limits well below what the road can handle, where EVERYONE is speeding, cops included.

You say "cops included", as if cops speeding was otherwise unusual; it very much is not, and never has been.

Zero measurable impact on emissions. I find myself becoming less climate sympathetic with every article that wants to use it to justify every manner of ostensibly related regulation.

I’ve long wondered whether peak traffic would benefit with lowered speed limits. It’s effectively the same when traffic clogs such that average speed is a crawl. Maybe setting speed lower from the get go would minimize odds of congestion multipliers like accidents and road rage.

This is going to be a comment comparing two insanely hot topic political issues, so it'll be a downvote magnet, but oh well.

I see kind of an analogous situation with gun control. Seemingly every single year a new restriction/fee/ban/permit/etc is passed, under the guise of "saving the children" or a similar feel good excuse that's given at the time. But the question for me is, how do you differentiate between 1) people that are passing such laws truly in attempt to "save the children", and 2) people that are passing the laws because they ultimately just want to get rid of guns, little by little, and are using "save the children" as an excuse to slowly move forward in that direction.

Similarly with cars over the last decade, how do you differentiate between people who 1) truly care about safety/climate and are passing these laws for those reasons, and 2) people who just want to get rid of cars, and so are doing what they can to make driving as difficult, expensive, and miserable as possible year over year, using "save the pedestrians", "save the climate" as an excuse.

I have this cat which started sitting on the couch next to me where my hand would land just above her tail on her back and I would scratch here there and she’d start having spasms (ticklish?) where she would lick or bite anything in front of her. Pretty soon she got really sensitized and even a little bit of irregular petting would cause her to start shaking her head and have another spasm, even being super careful and being perfectly regular would flip her out and we are thinking about what to do about it.

I was in a glass on geoengineering that got dispersed in the first Covid wave and in the last class I described it as “a fire drill for global governance”. Little did I realize how much the pandemic would set us back. We paid for COVID-19 vaccines with being able to vaccinate the population for things like measles in the future. You still find people online who are red-in-the-face angry about decisions that could have been wrong years ago. But they suddenly found meaning in their life when they could wake up every morning and share a bunch of newspaper clippings about how the government was wrong about this and that. Meanwhile, other people wear two masks because somebody else isn’t wearing one and will talk you ear off about how deathly afraid they are they’ll die of covid.

Either way we lived though this crisis but it is not like the Marines where “that does not kill you will make you stronger” but instead the culture has become anti-resilient and ever trauma just makes people weaker.

Right wingers have become like my cat. 5 years ago you could talk about “15 minute cities” and the only one who cared were the people who listen to John Lennon’s Imagine and really believe it. Now that kind of talk immediately brings people with their knives out.

Yet pedestrian deaths keep going up:

""There are more pedestrians being killed today than in decades," Russ Martin, the senior director of policy and government relations at the Governors Highway Safety Association, told NPR.

The organization, which tracks pedestrian deaths in the U.S., estimates that more than 7,500 pedestrians were killed by drivers last year — the highest number since 1981. The final tally may be even greater given that Oklahoma was unable to provide data due to a technical issue."

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...

> Yet pedestrian deaths keep going up:

That's not unexpected. There are factors constantly being ignored, besides speed

- drivers age: the population is getting older everywhere in the west, older drivers pose more dangers.

- cars are getting bigger for no real reason, bigger cars means they are more dangerous even at lower speeds

- urban areas are flooded by very large commercial vehicles, the "instant delivery market" wasn't a thing 20 years ago, trucks and vans weren't as ubiquitous as they are now and they are obviously not really "urban vehicles".

a couple more less obvious

- less people driving increases the risks of driving, people are less experienced or are forced to drive when they don't feel safe doing it. When my grandma was the age my father is now, we told her her car broke to stop her from driving. Now my dad, who never really liked driving much, has to keep doing it because my sister doesn't want to drive herself, but she has a small daughter and with children there are always emergencies that require to drive a car

- related to the previous one: the European Commission concluded that "In general, drivers travelling fewer kilometres have increased crash rates per kilometre compared to those driving more kilometres". People drive shorter distances, it means they are less exposed to different scenarios, which in turn means drivers react poorly to unknwon or lesser known circumstances. One of the most common being driving fatigue.

In my opinion driving tests should become harder to pass, more frequent (no more lifetime licenses) and should include some basic course of safe driving and simulated environment for weather conditions and high speed driving on track, to compensate for the loss of real life practice and urban areas should be restricted to urban vehicles. A pickup truck or an SUV do not fall in the category.

It’s 2024. Why not just rip the band aid off and outright ban private transportation already? People should subscribe to transportation options from approved commercial providers, and they can pay for it with government-backed digital currency (assuming their social credit score is high enough.)

I don't think there's a reason to ban bicycle ownership.

Wouldn't commercial providers still be private transportation? Public in public transportation is public ownership.

Public transportation is public in the same sense as a pub. The service is available to anyone willing to pay, without any membership or other special requirements. Some systems are fully government-run, some have a public authority and private operators, and some are for-profit companies that make their money in real estate.

That's just a transit company then. It might not be said that way colloquially, but it's very much where the public comes from. Uber isn't public transit, it's just transit. Neither is bright line or Waymo or Uber.

I have used car sharing for ~10 years and its been great not owning a car. Until I got a kid. Car seats are not made for carrying around and storage I'll tell you that.

Now I have a second kid. It's a complete nail in the coffin for not owning a car. Two seats!?

Ive been a bespoken car sharing advocate until I got kids, and there are probably lots of other lives being lived where cars are a must unless every need I'm similarly unaware of are met by car sharing businesses.

Proper research into the needs will have to be done before we can do any such thing as banning private cars. But I agree with your premise. Softly.

For the half of the US population not having kids (or having no additional kids), private vehicle sharing is still sound policy.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/11/19/growing-s...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/07/with-a-po...

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...

And for the other half, requiring vehicle sharing (the original proposal) is terrible policy.

Depends if you know going into living in the jurisdiction that's the regulation.

https://culdesac.com/ comes to mind.

Why hello there, authoritarian dystopia aspirer. What, might I ask is it you hope to gain out of said state of affairs?

I can't tell if this post is satirical or not.

"It's 2024" isn't an argument, an explanation, or a justification. It's saying "I'm on the right side, the side that history is moving toward, and if you disagree with me, then you're not". That works great for smugness, and it may move the go-the-way-the-wind's-blowing types, but it doesn't persuade very many people.

I could just as easily say: "It's 2024. Why not just ban "approved commercial providers" already?" Notice how that didn't change your mind?

If you've got anything to support your position, give that, rather than the year. We know what year it is; that doesn't make us agree with the rest of what you say.

You’re correct. The whole point of saying “it’s [current_year]” is to a) imply consensus without providing justification, and b) imply that anyone either in _disagreement_ or _just wanting additional information_ is “backwards thinking,” and thus potentially a low social credit-scorer. Those in the latter category are discouraged from speaking up lest they violate the consensus implied in a) and those in the former category are pitiably irredeemable.

That is also why I won’t provide justification. Also because my post was written as satire.

When I'm out walking (neighborhood, no sidewalks) I wish drivers would drive the speed limit and get by me faster.

The problem drivers slow down on approach and then slow down some more - for no meaningfully useful reason at all. They turned a brief, predictable event into a longer and now unpredictable one.

At night, the worst of them decide to blaze the landscape with super high-beams; their pointless slowness makes that experience last as long as possible.

I feel much safer around 8 seconds of competent driving than I do with 40 seconds of behavior that easily passes for creepy hostility.

> I wish drivers would drive the speed limit and get by me faster.

that's a very good point IMO

There is a missing piece of information here. Lower vehicle speeds are actually worsen pollution per mile. The optimum fuel economy for most ice vehicles is around 40 miles/hour. Anything below or above that will increase the pollution per mile. So what cities should do is: lower speeds for all personal transport. Speed up busses to 40miles/hour. Give the busses special lanes everywhere. Increase the amount of public transport. Increase it so much that you can just travel without an itinerary. Make public transport faster that private transport.

This is immaterial considering EV ramp rate and overall fleet turnover trajectory. Public transportation is also non existent in most of the US. Agree with your mass transit points where density and planning allows (bus lanes, fast busses, even free bus rides). Importantly, an EV rideshare fleet should be considered where using bus routes is inefficient to due low density. Congestion charges are also likely helpful where there is high density (Manhattan, Chicago Loop, parts of they Bay Area, Washington state, Philadelphia, Washington DC, etc).

TLDR: Mass transit, lower speed limits, and traffic calming in urban (and suburban, where reasonable) areas. Electrification for middle of nowhere.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/electric-vehicles-EVs-new-c...

https://www.atlasevhub.com/weekly-digest/one-million-evs-sol...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...

https://vividmaps.com/public-transportation-in-the-united-st...

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-t...

How about an automatic transmission that can upshift to top gear even at modest speeds, and the tradeoff is that very little additional torque-on-demand is available ?

They do, they just unlock the torque converter or downshift as you accelerate. They shift to top gear before the equivalent manual does, and you'll find automatics have significantly lower gear ratios than the manual transmission of the same vehicle. This is the only reason their gas mileage is close to manual transmissions, because manual is ~97% efficient while automatics are 85-90% -- planetary has 3x the mating surfaces plus there are three (or more) sets of them. Typically third gear is straight through and what you get when you disengage OD, which is half the reason you use it when towing.

While manuals may be more efficient, most cars with automatic transmissions now have the same or even slightly better estimated gas mileage than cars with manual transmissions, assuming you can even find the latter.

Yes, because the lower gear ratio of the automatic allows the gasoline engine to operate in a more efficient portion of the bsfc curve, which makes up for the substantially higher transmission losses.

In my anecdotal experience drivers in Seattle have become less predictable. The reduction in speed limits has caused a bifurcation where some drivers go the new speed limit and others continue to drive at whatever speed they feel safe going/whatever the old speed limit was.

I wish Seattle would actually design roadways that cause people to inherently go slower, rather than tell drivers to go slow simply because a sign says so.

This is definitely a touchy and political topic for sure. I live in Seattle and a while back I made the decision to start ignoring any speed limit changes that were done for political/social reasons rather than for safety reasons. I still try to drive at a safe/reasonable speed, I just rely on myself now to determine what that speed is, depending on the condition/visibility of the road, whether people are nearby, the weather, my vehicle's condition, etc., rather than relying on a speed limit which no longer has any connection to what a safe speed to drive is.

My city debated re-designing the main road in our neighborhood to carry less traffic, but instead opted to lower the speed limit and install speed cameras. Makes sense from their point of view: one costs money, the other brings in a reliable stream of revenue. Unfortunately people keep getting hit in the crosswalks, mostly by drivers from other neighborhoods who don't know about the cameras and see the wide streets (not unreasonably) as an invitation to drive fast.

Hefty fees and wide adoption of such practices could help to adjust drivers' behaviour. By adoption I mean both in more areas and make driver license exams harder.

When I moved to NL I was at first annoyed by the speed limits of 30km/h in residential areas but after a while I understood and started respecting the limits.

Shouldn’t they start at this intersection?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C56ZLKceTPI

(Video of cars spinning out because they enter a sharp curve too fast.)

I care alot about the local impact of lower speed; less noise, road wear and tire wear generating unhealthy stuff in the air and water.

Driving slowly sucks, and I assume has costs like lost productivity. But the public good of lower speed seems to win in my book

Or just build smaller cars.

How would you force automakers to do so if Congress or executive branch agencies won’t change light vehicle and truck regulations? Some change is happening, albeit slowly (with regards to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways).

https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/31/1222174861/road-street-design...

Scale registration cost by vehicle weight and size. Could similarly scale speeding tickets.

Introduce sane driver’s license weight limits. 26k pounds on a standard license? Crazy. This is why “cars” like the electric hummer and cybertank (written like this on purpose) exist. Neither can be reliably operated in Europe.

And build smaller cars

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