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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

That's not how it works. It's a 30km/h speed limit for one kilometer in your local neighbourhood until you hit the first through road, then it'll be 50km/h / 60km/h / 80 km/h / 120 km/h as usual, and another one kilometer at 30 km/h at your destination.

In other words, it's 2km at 30km/h plus 48km at 80km/h, versus 2km at 50km/h plus 48km at 80km/h. That's a difference of 1 minute 36 seconds.

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Here for example is a map of Amsterdam (click on Wegcategorie en snelheid). Inside the block it's 15 km/h, on blue roads are 30, red roads are 50. The map doesn't color-code the highways, as they don't belong to municipality, but they are 100. https://maps.amsterdam.nl/30km/

It's like that since last December and was somewhat controversial when introduced (expanded), because muh freedoms, but not the kind of enduring controversy.

That map seems like the thing not to do. They have one section of the city where nearly the whole thing is blue and another section where nearly the whole thing is red, whereas what you would presumably want is to make every other road the alternate speed so that cars can prefer the faster roads and pedestrians can prefer the slower roads, thereby not just lowering speeds near pedestrians but also separating most of the cars from them whatsoever, and meanwhile allowing the cars to travel at higher speeds on the roads where most of the pedestrians aren't.

Amsterdam is an old city. The "everything is slow" part has extremely narrow roads, which were never designed for significant amounts of through traffic and realistically can never be made safe. Ideally they would indeed have a bunch of faster access roads, but that's just not physically possible.

The everything is red part is only red for throughroads and has different density compared to everytging is blue part.

The separating part is already done, so what you see is lowering the speed from 50 tp 30 even on the roads where the cars were funnelef into.

2017 Helsinki speed map for reference: https://www.hel.fi/hel2/ksv/Aineistot/Liikennesuunnittelu/Au...

(in support of the above thesis)

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