The title makes it sound like streets in Amsterdam currently don't have a 30 km/h speed limit, and after December, they will all have a 30 km/h speed limit. The reality is that a lot of streets already have a 30 km/h speed limit, and have had them for years. It's been slowly expanding, and clearly will continue to expand even more. There will still be roads with higher speed limits, but their number will shrink. I expect they'll be limited to roads where cars don't interact with other traffic at all.
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.
They’re doing this in Reykjavik as well which is great, although enforcement is poor so on the larger roads that are now 50km/h everyone is still driving 70km/h as they were when the limit was 60km/h. Going back to the UK where a twisty road through my parents village with tiny pavements was 30mph was pretty shocking with how much more dangerous that felt.
As an aside, speed-limit enforcement in Iceland outside of Reykjavik is almost nonexistent. On the ring road, which goes around the whole country and has a strict but reasonable limit of 90 km/h (few cars but tons of bumps and sudden turns + a lot of low visibility due to bad weather), there are no more than 10 speed cameras, so everybody is driving at their own discretion.
Yes, they do exist, but they are clearly marked, including on the maps, so you need to do only a minimum amount of adaptation. On the other hand, most of the examples of egregiously bad driving I noticed were in Reykjavik, and in the countryside drivers are generally very careful (modulo tourists who suddenly slow down, stop, or even reverse a bit to take a photo or smth).
The stats I've seen say that they do both, to varying degrees depending on the quality of enforcement. If you're absolutely certain to get a ticket for speeding, and you are somewhere that will take your licence away for breaking road traffic rules too often, you're not going to do it again — not twice more, anyway.
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.
> They’re doing this in Reykjavik as well which is great, although enforcement is poor so on the larger roads that are now 50km/h everyone is still driving 70km/h as they were when the limit was 60km/h.
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.
from my experience the level of perceived dangerousness is proportional to your most recent experience.
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.
For those who haven't seen it, may I present https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilR93GwSYEA : "C'ETAIT UN RENDEZ-VOUS" - Claude Lelouch (1976), a short film of driving from the north of Paris to Montmartre in eight minutes. The title card says "no trick photography and the film has not been sped up".
IMO it's not just about reducing the severity of accidents, but also what the experience of sharing the road with cars is like. It's way less comfortable cycling somewhere when cars are passing by at 50 km/h, whereas 30 is way more doable.
Does changing the number on the sign actually cause the cars to move more slowly, in Amsterdam? That's not been the case where I've seen it done here in Seattle; people simply drive as fast as the road design makes it comfortable to drive.
There are also plans to change the road designs. First some new painted lines, later, when the road is up for renovation, a redesign to make it more obviously 30km/h.
People in Amsterdam tend to behave the same as how you describe the people in Seattle.
Seattle did this a few years ago, but without bothering to do much of any of the rest of the infrastructure changes. Without enforcement, the speed limits largely just get ignored. If we had enforcement, you can bet it would immediately become a selective enforcement issue.
Thanks for adding this. It's going the right direction. Personally I'm baffled the speed limit on the (for instance) Rozengracht - Raadhuisstraat is still 50km/h. Crazy.
5000 signs at once is not slowly, but this isn't new. It wouldn't surprise me if Amsterdam already had 5000 30 km signs before this (I'm trying to find data but I can't find anything). The street I live in is a 30 km zone, as are most other residential streets in the city.
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).
It wouldn't surprise me either about the 5000 signs already there. Except you are presenting this new 5000 signs as something incremental while at the same time arguing it might be a doubling.
These 5000 signs are absolutely a big move, no doubt about that. I'm just saying it's not something that comes out of nowhere, but it's part of a change that's been going on for decades. They're probably confident enough about the results that it's time to pick up the pace and do more at once.
And consistency is also important. Having some streets 30 km/h while similar streets in other places are 50 km/h can be confusing.
Let's say the city has 100 maintenance workers (surely it has more than that?) At five a day per person (assuming there are existing posts, this feels on the low side) you'd be done in two weeks.
My city has been limited to 30 km/h for a few years now.
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).
I'm fan of the concept of superblocks. You can drive inside them, but not between them. Want to go from block A to D? Can't drive through B and C. Need to drive out to the ring road, then follow it and into block D.
Makes it so that no through traffic at speed goes through the areas where people live and stay.
The mere suggestion of this in Oxford has caused people to go completely mental and invoke all sorts of WEF conspiracy theories. It might work but the public transport alternatives need to be the working default first.
I heard the one about 15 minutes cities. Which is like normal quality of life aspiration, but then tinfoil hat goes “… and then they will put a wall around it”. It’s ridiculous
The crazy thing is this conspiracy is being spread by the people who bemoan the loss of freedom for their children/grandchildren -- it's not safe for children to play outside like we did, too many cars; used to be able to send the kids down to the shop to buy pop, etc.
It's also being rolled out in berlin and what I saw it's really, really great. But there are drawbacks. People living on the main streets get more traffic and pollution and some violently oppose it. Public transit and emergency vehicle access can be solved. It's really not that easy to implement because car drivers will try to drive through anyway, so you have to install modal filters everywhere (elements that bike traffic can flow through but not car traffic). But then you have to think hard about public transit and emergency vehicles. So it's not really that cheap.
I think you have to reduce car-dependency first, afterwards you can roll them out because the acceptance is higher and advocacy groups form.
Yeah, that makes a lot more sense to me. I'm 90% a bike person and still I am against a blanket 30kph speed limit in my city. I'm not against making all smaller residential streets a 30 zone, but the ring roads and the radial ones going to the center are kinda long.
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
It will be interesting to see how this all spans out, it can happen in 50 years that downtown areas will be less polluted and more silent than suburbs.
We've had a 20mph limit in towns here in Wales for a couple of weeks now. It seems to be going well where I am; the traffic is noticeably slower during the day (though the people who hoon about at night are still doing it) and the only negative effect I've noticed so far is it might be fractionally harder (as in one has to wait longer) to cross the road at places other than designated crossings, presumably because the traffic is now distributed slightly differently.
Yeah I moved a short distance in London to an area that is all 20mph and for me the most noticeable change is the reduction in noise levels (the limits in the previous area were generally 30mph). The new area feels so much more peaceful. It surprised me how much difference a 10mph drop makes.
A 30 km/h car is also a lot less likely than a 50 km/h one to hit a cyclist or pedestrian in the first place - far shorter braking distance, and longer time for the slower mover to spot and avoid them.
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 think this is by far the biggest reason for the preference for 30 km/h. Reduced noise and pollution are certainly nice, but killing far less people is huge.
It also gets people like me who are scared to ride a bike on the 50 km/h street to reconsider how they’re going to run to the grocery store to pick up stuff that can fit in a backpack, or to daycare.
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.
Sure, as a sometime cyclist I am not discounting that as a reason. I made the comment above as I found it was something that perhaps isn't mentioned as much but really does give an immediate quality of life improvement.
Why not reduce speed to 10km/h then? Even fewer people will be killed! This is the covid logic all over again. Let's lock everyone in their homes, we can't afford to have old people dying!
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.
> Why not reduce speed to 10km/h then? Even fewer people will be killed!
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.
Let's make it so that cars don't have to dictate peoples movements so that people won't feel personally attacked by regulations slowing card around pedestrians, kids, and elderly in residential areas.
Did you see the graph in my comment? There's a steep curve beginning a bit over 30 km/h. Hence great impact per km/h reduction at those higher speeds. Not as much when going even even lower. Most people don't think in extremes, and are actually capable to think of the various tradeoffs. No need to be so hyperbolic..
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.
I saw the graph. It's probably crap, given that there is 5% death rate at 0km/h but let's take it at face value and let's say we implement 30km/h limit. Then there will inevitably be people claiming "death rate can be reduced by another 40% if we were just responsible enough to reduce the limit even further, to 10km/h". That's not hyperbole, that's exactly the way events unfolded near the end of the covid epidemic. Under the "every life is important" slogan, there was massive strain imposed on everyone, just to have a tiny % of old people die next year instead of this one.
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.
At ~0km/h kids are unfortunately still dying, mainly being backed over by their own family.
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.
your first paragraph is a needless exaggeration, and your second is demonstrably untrue. Calm down and recognise that this change will result in quieter, safer streets. There’s nothing to be threatened by.
I wish they would actually explain some of the decisions - I think everyone would understand and even perhaps advocate and wish for changes like this, instead of immediate pushback.
Even in the most transparent of places, I don't really see decisionmakers explaining their decisions.
The decisions haven't really been explained by the standards of explanation you might expect for such a move, at least not everywhere.
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.
Point 2 is nitpicking. Obviously every trip is different, but a reduction from 30 to 20 mph does not have nearly as big a difference on travel times as your proposal to reduce all the way to 10 or 5 would have.
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 first paragraph contains a one sentence explanation they could have easily chosen and presented, but they didn't. That's the complaint.
> 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 :(
I can understand the situation is different in the UK. It's certainly seen some big decisions that weren't rooted in any kind of reality. And of course many other countries also suffer from the occasional decisions made for completely the wrong reasons.
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.
It's pretty obvious what's going on, as this is one of several related actions all of which are intended to penalize or restrict car usage. We know the safety argument isn't the real reason because nothing has changed about safety lately that would trigger a sudden re-think here, they weren't talking about it before and the actual expected changes are in the order of single digit deaths per year. If it was a genuine concern about safety they'd have been pushing for this limit 50 years ago.
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.
Yup. Another data point from someone driving in Wales at the moment :
- 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.
I'm an American but I'm into British motorbikes so I watch guys like Stuart Fillingham on YouTube. It's predominantly a motorbiking channel but he talks a lot about local politics and he's been all over these laws and the Net Zero laws in general. You should check him out because if even half of what he says is true then you folks are about to get whacked upside the head!
> 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.
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.
Fine, but none of that is how the policies are being justified, which is what the actual complaint is here. It's not that no justification can be conceived of.
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.
Well, from where I sit it looks like one formerly popular political party has seen what's coming up in its horoscope and has pinned its last hopes on turning these quality-of-life measures -- which it previously vociferously supported -- into a wedge issue by whipping up a frenzy around ThE wAr On DrIvErS!11!
Weird culture-war stuff (some of which it feels like they've more or less invented for the purpose) appears to be pretty much the entire Tory manifesto nowadays.
Sorry just seen your post. Driving from Wrexham to Bala and back on the early hours of Sunday in the rain is probably not a reflective test. There were no changes to road signs that I could see.
Sirens are _necessary_; being noisy is the point. Probably not a huge amount you can do there (beyond enforcing that they are only used where appropriate, but in most well-run emergency services that's largely not an issue). Anecdotally, living in a medium-sized (~1.5 million people) city, I don't hear them that much, except when walking along a road near my house that leads to a major hospital.
Pure-tone sirens are necessarily noisy; a while back there was an attempt to replace them with alternating white noise and a more normal siren sound, the reasoning being that sirens only needed to be so loud because they were serving two different goals at the same time, to identify the existence and location of an emergency vehicle, and that white noise could be played at a much lower volume while making it easier to locate the vehicle relative to your own.
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.
Same in NL. Sirens are only turned on in the most extreme cases. In most cases lights seem to be enough. I do get the impression that firefighters are a bit more likely to use sirens than police and ambulance are, but I'm fine with that.
this is absolutely not the case in Amsterdam. 90% of ambulances/firefighter cars have their sirens on full blast. this is especially noticeable in summer nights when they can be heard from quite far away
Cities arent noisy?? where do you live lucky mate?
I feel you guys live in an echo chamber full of avocado toasts and cappuccinos.
Cities are crowded places full of noise pollution produced by humans being humans. Thats all. If people require silence go to the deep country.
Next step, everybody shut the f... up to not bother the Karens.
"City" is a broad term, encompassing e.g. NYC, but also Amsterdam, with a population of a mere 900k. Most parts of Amsterdam are really pretty quiet when there are no/few/slow-driving cars.
Its so funny everybody is talking just about Amsterdam. Try this in Rome and then lets talk again.
Guys, you´re forgetting cities are cultural places not robot factories. Cultural and existential differences are real and shouldn't be imposed by law just to recall quietness in a crowded place like a city in Europe where people live in the streets as a cultural thing.
We´re constantly educating the population by law and not by the example and it´s to retrograde.
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.
Plenty of people living in the streets in Amsterdam as well (and that number is only rising as cars are made less prominent), but that "noise" is of a significantly different quality than car noise is.
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.)
You're fighting shadows again. The human noise of people as in Rome is the kind of thing people are trying to optimize _for_, because there's an inherent tension between high speed cars and pavement cafes. Admittedly Rome has both, but not on the same streets.
My limited experience with cities in the Middle East and Asia is that the noise there also comes first and foremost from traffic, and those cities could also benefit from a less car-centric design.
Yes - bikes and people honking senselessly is incredibly noisy. In Asia, a lot of shops simply blast music in hopes of attracting customers (not sure how that works)
The city I live in enacted 30kph limits at night this year, throughout the city, which is nice.
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.
if anyone is interested in a comparison, Paris has had this for some months now. The main idea was to slow / limit traffic through the residential areas (which is most of the city center). There has been an initial wave of skepticism, but things have calmed down somewhat as people seem to have gotten used to it.
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
I wonder if car manufacturers are working with this limitations in mind.
I feel cars with combustion engines suffer at 20-30 km/h but electrics seems to be okay with that.
Am I right?
Current petrol engines are designed operate at optimal efficiency in the 60-90 km/h range. Electric cars on the other hand can operate efficiently at much lower speeds due to how electric engines work.
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.
And of course regenerative braking greatly enhances electric car efficiency in city driving. The flip side is that the battery gauge usually drops alarmingly fast on the highway if you're mostly used to city driving.
Look up the efficiency curve for you engine. To get the most of it you should be driving at the highest gear at around 70-90 km/h. Driving in lower gears is obviously not a problem, but that doesn't make it efficient.
In many (also newer) urban areas in the Netherlands, narrow streets and cobbles are used intentionally to encourage lower speeds. The "30" sign is more of a last resort in that sense.
cycling on cobblestone sucks though, so not sure how that really works out :P (Let's assume there's no dedicated cycle path next to the cobblestone road, guess it depends)
Ah sorry, I was actually thinking of paving stones - but it still holds that those are usually used to encourage lower driving speeds than asphalt, and are way more comfortable than cobblestones for cycling.
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 Dam square in the centre of Amsterdam has extremely bumpy cobblestones. It's not impossible to bike on, but even for bikes it's more comfortable if you go a bit slower than usual, which might be the intention.
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.
I think it's really funny how humans can't help but use round numbers.
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.
2 km/h when you're reducing from 50 to 30 is a negligible difference, and round numbers are easier to keep to on analog/digital speed gauges, and easier to set manually on cruise control systems
That 'roundness' can be a pain. E-bikes are generally limited to an arbitrary 25kph (eu) - 5kph slower than a car at 30. Constantly in the way...it's one of two negatives I have regarding e-bikes: too slow for traffic, too fast for pedestrians/ shared paths.
It is just that Americans are tougher people. That's why during the height of covid, Americans could safely stand 1.829 meters from each other without getting infected while the rest of the world required 6.5616 ft for the same level of safety.
I'd rather they just finished the job and installed higher speed people mover belts everywhere like in Caves of Steel (Asimov).
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.
That's getting close to something reasonable to achieve on a (non-"e") bicycle. I have always wanted to get a speeding ticket on my bike, but never have.
Once I had a cop point a speed gun on me when I rode in deep outskirts of Poland on a road limited to 30kmh. I think he was just joking and passing time seeing that in the hours I rode on that road maybe 10 cars passed me by.
(the only two tickets I got in my life were on bike)
encouraging public transport use is only one reason to lower the speed limit. Noise and safety are others and maybe even independent of the will to encourage public transit use
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.
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.
"noise pollution" from cars driving 50 kmh vs 30 kmh isn't much (especially in the Netherlands where most cars are new and/or electric) but scooters on the other hand... I hate those things.
TL;DR:
1. bicycles people want the cities for them
2. cars people want the cities for them.
3. Amsterdam is so f...g great that God decided to impose it to all of us.
4. Lets take back horses to the cities. They are so cute. We can also eat avocado toast while observing them.
Pedestrians, kids, residents, this isn't just bicycles vs cars. The status quo for years have been cars get all the priority, to the detriment of everyone else, and actually making it a necessity to own a car, why is that a good thing?
There's probably a huge cultural difference here, but the image there sure does not look like a 30km/h street to me --- more like a 30mph one. That said, I've seen pictures of other European streets, far narrower and meandering, where even 30km/h would seem too fast.
It is also launching a campaign with the slogan: “We drive 30 for each other.”
Not surprisingly, the socialism is blatantly obvious.
> 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.
Something inside me tells this won't happen everywhere. Real people with problems to pay rent and buy a house cannot afford (like us) live in the center of a city anymore and wont be in the near future.
Mandating 30kph everywhere will make people more and more resistant to live in the cities moving out and leaving the center for the hipsters with their avocado toasts. This is gentrification.
... Hold on, making it _less desirable_ (and thus cheaper) to live in cities would be _gentrification_? How's that work?
(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.
His argument is that "everybody" would move out, and that somehow this would push "up" prices?? Possibly it's a complaint that the "wrong sort" of people (younger) would move in?
Maybe you should ask some older eastern Europeans what they think about socialism, before haughtily speaking for everyone who lives in Europe. Socialism and its national variant wrecked Europe in the 20th century. People celebrated when it ended. To call it a rallying cry given that history is quite gross.
This argument is often brought up as “proof” that socialism doesn’t work, yet completely ignores the reality of late-stage capitalism.
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.
>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.
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.
I’m old enough to remember when people called what you’re referring to “communism”, similar to how one might call the Democratic People's Republic of Korea “democratic”.
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.
I mean, arguments about the difference between the two are interesting in an academic sort of way if you're into Marxist theory, but the USSR called itself a union of socialist states. North Korea's constitution says it's a socialist state. Etc. They are very clear on this point. They are socialists, these are countries run by scholars of Marx and that's the term they use.
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.
> I mean, arguments about the difference between the two are interesting in an academic sort of way if you're into Marxist theory, but the USSR called itself a union of socialist states. North Korea's constitution says it's a socialist state. Etc. They are very clear on this point. They are socialists, these are countries run by scholars of Marx and that's the term they use.
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.
Not surprisingly, the socialism is blatantly obvious.
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.
It´s like mixing pedestrians with heavy construction machines. Wouldn´t be better to separate both of them for the good of everyone?
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? Separating what? Pedestrians and cars? Cars and bikes? Isn't this also mostly done? I mean that's the idea behind bike lanes for example. There are limits to the amount of separation possible though.
> 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.
Again Amsterdam. Amsterdam is just an example for Amsterdam. Try this in Rome, Buenos Aires, Mexico DC and lets talk again mate.
The problem, the real one, is we have cities not prepared for this generation
Ultimately the safest ways to prevent traffic deaths are to redesign the street so that drivers don't feel safe exceeding the speed limit. Amsterdam is certainly working on that, but it takes time to rebuild a street. The speed limit is a nice way of saying "if you're paying attention, you can be safer by doing this thing" while waiting for city-wide roadwork to complete.
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.
Wow this is so retrograde that I feel I cant answer. To produce insecurity and danger to other human beings without understanding the necessity of moving fast in a crowded place like a city is the most inhuman solution I've heard in a long time.
Why not better to create specific and separated fast lanes for those who have to move from one side of the city to the other to have normal lifes like taking kids to the school or attending a meeting with a client?
Why is there a necessity to move fast? Things are close together, so the need for speed is actually decreased. If you're willing to tolerate a 20 minute commute, that might be a 1 mile walk in the city compared to a 20 mile drive in the middle of nowhere. It ends up working out; people put stuff close together specifically so that you can easily travel between those places without burning dinosaurs or running over the local children whose ball went into the street!
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.)
> Why not better to create specific and separated fast lanes
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.
> Not surprisingly, the socialism is blatantly obvious.
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.
Did you mean to say "communism"? "Socialism" has a different connotation in Europe: it often means something softer, like just "social in nature" or "socially just".
You can drive as fast as you want if you drive on a private road in the middle of nowhere with nobody else around. If you don't want to care about other people, cities are not the right places to go.
The roads are narrow and meandering for a reason: cars are just one type of traffic and in cities it's generally the most inefficient, even when the roads were optimised towards cars. So there's no reason to optimise for cars at all.
Luckily in some countries governmental organisations protect their citizens from inconsiderate people who lack empathy. You can call that socialism, no one cares.
There are about 40 traffic deaths per year in Amsterdam.
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.
Just in the UK it's like 5 road deaths a day or so. A pedestrian being killed by a car every single day. I've also read they've somewhere reduced speeds.
I posted a graph in another comment here about the drastic effects such a small speed change has for survival rate.
When it’s your life it makes a world of difference. Public space is shared space, the car lobby has tricked you into believing it’s primarily for cars, but it’s wrong. Free up your mind, drive slowly, be kind.
Kindness is not a matter of speed. Kindness is a matter of comprehension with a bit of investment into creating cities for everyone. I want cars to be there, maybe it's just me, but why my desires are lesser than yours?
Cities are not a place for me live anymore. Airbnb, Uber, Uber-eats, delivery robots, security cameras everywhere, gentrification, poverty...
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.
Wait, reducing the numbers of cars in the city makes it _more_ soulless? How on earth does that work?
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.
You got cause and effect completely backwards. The "soulless" cities are the cities full of cars and asphalt. The nice cities are the ones where people can use the city, where communities gather outside, there are markets, people eating by the curbside, kids playing. Where the city isn't dominated by the cars.
It goes far beyond directly saving lives. Cities with slower traffic are more pleasant for pedestrians and cyclists, which is good in itself, but also encourages more active transport. More active transport means a healthier population which is also good. Reduced noise levels also is a consequence of slower traffic, which has plenty of benefits.
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.