cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7658487
For more detailed information: https://www.gov.wales/introducing-20mph-speed-limits-frequently-asked-questions
I’m in favor of lower speed limits, but this will result in a temporary uptick in speeding tickets, followed by loss of interest by local police, which yields no net change. Lowering the speed limit is a band aid fix. It’s quick. It’s cheap. But it can, by no means, be seen as a permanent solution. If you want people to slow down, you need to make a road that will make people want to slow down. So yeah, I like lower speed limits, but they cannot and do not work alone. It’s a step in the right direction, but more should be done.
They’re not just lowering the speed limit. From the FAQ:
Will the roll out involve money being spent on speed bumps?
There is no plan to include traffic calming (including speed bumps) as part of the change to speed limits. There are other ‘softer’ measures that might be introduced, such as using buffer speed limits, removing the centre line, narrowing the carriageway visually, using planting etc.
These ‘softer’ measures (which definitely are traffic calming) will be essential to make this plan a success. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada is going through a similar process of lowering speed limits in residential areas. The planning staff said they needed the speed lowered so they could implement these traffic calming measures, otherwise the speed limit would be higher than the street design can accommodate.
i can understand not strictly calling paint traffic calming, but planters? what galaxy brain definition of traffic calming are they using where placing a box on the road isn’t traffic calming?
My guess is the phrase “traffic calming” has negative connotations with the local general public due to poor implementation.
I’ve driven down streets that are 50km/h and I think most people would gladly do ≤60km/h. If that’s too fast, there’s many ways to ‘softly’ calm the speed like narrowing the road, chicanes, paving stones, etc. Instead, they have speed bumps ever couple kms so drivers slow to a crawl for the bump, then accelerate hard to >70km/h, then brake hard to go over the next bump.
yeah there are places where you can add a hard separated a bike lane and rejig parking - not so much for the bikes, but to narrow the carriage way and reduce the ‘natural’ speed of the road.
While it sounds good on paper, in practice, they’ve screwed it up. They’re putting the new speed limits in place on every 30mph road in Wales before they’ve put the public transport alternatives in place.
There’s currently no reason for someone to switch to public transport, especially if the buses are going to be stuck at the same speed as the cars, but stopping regularly too. Our roads are too narrow to install bus lanes, and barely have enough room for single file traffic through lots of the towns and villages. The trains are being upgraded, but that’s not scheduled to finish until at least next year, and at the moment they’re slow and very unreliable. It feels like every week the trains are cancelled and an inadequate replacement bus service is put on.
I’m disabled, and have to travel from my town, Aberdare, to the main hospital in Cardiff, UHW, on a regular basis. If I had to leave now, it would take 42 minutes by car, or 2 hours and 6 minutes by public transport. The shortest journey is tomorrow morning and would take 1 hour and 31 minutes, more than double the time of the car journey. The closest inpatient hospital is 22 minutes by car, or over an hour by public transport. The difference the new speed limits are going to make is negligible compared to how slow public transport is here.
All this is going to do is annoy and upset people, and turn them off the idea of using public transport, and push a lot of people towards voting for the parties who were against this. Out of the main parties, that mainly seems to be the Conservatives, so that’s going to be bad for all of us.
The FAQ in OP’s link tells you that it is not all 30mph roads, but rather all restricted roads, with a link to a map of all 30mph roads that are staying 30mph as well as the option to see which restricted roads will change to 20mph. “Restricted Roads” is a classification of roads in law that is defined by the lamppost density, so this change won’t affect larger and more rural roads where lampposts are more sparse.
Then they’ve screwed up the marketing. Everything they’ve been pushing out makes it appear that it’s all roads. Not that there’s much of a difference. There’s a grand total of two roads in my area, and five in the Aberdare area that will apparently stay as 30mph.
The Tories originally supported the proposal which is quite hilarious seeing how much stink they are throwing currently.
I do agree public transport needs more funding but they are in a pretty tricky situation where the Gov has very little money to improve the service (partly due to Wales transport funds being spent on HS2) and at the same time bus usage is down and not recovered after lockdowns. I hope the 20mph limits will encourage more onto busses, but I am not confident.
The Tories are bullshitting to gain support? That’s not like them 🤔🤥
At this point it sounds like me on my E-bike would be the fastest thing on the road. It does 25mph/40kph
Which would mean that you would also be speeding, since e-bikes in the UK are required by law to be capped at 15.5mph (technically 25kph).
I’m in the US, but fair point
Ah, that makes sense. For what it’s worth I think you guys are on the right track with e-bikes; allow more powerful motors but give them a different classification.
What are things like on that side of the pond? The “20’s plenty” campaign is well underway over here, do you have similar movements in the US?
We are basically ignoring that they exist. There’s a law being floated in CA that would prevent teens under the age of 16(?) from driving them, but I suspect that will die in the State Assembly.
and i think the 20mph limit would also apply too - so even if the cap were lifted, you can’t go breaking the speed limit just because it’s a bike.
All this is going to do is annoy and upset people, and turn them off the idea of using public transport, and push a lot of people towards voting for the parties who were against this.
Bingo. But they don’t care who they hurt in the process. “Fuck cars = fuck lives”
It’s a regressive tax on people to generate revenue disguised as a public safety measure
Surely it only generates revenue if people decide to break the law?
That’s… how speeding tickets work, yes.
Thus, it is a tax on commuters, who tend to be people who can’t work from home, and also tend to be poorer, making it regressive… Which is why Tories came up with it.
- This change came from the Welsh Labour government, it is not a tory policy (though they apparently initially supported it)
- Again, it’s an entirely avoidable cost by simply obeying the law. If you’re poor and can’t afford to pay speeding fines, don’t speed.
My point being that they won’t generate any revenue if people actually follow the rules of the road. Revenue only when people break the law is not how taxes work.
Might wanna dig into what classes of people pay the overwhelming amount of traffic citations to see why certain groups prefer this method of revenue-raising over just normal taxation.
Might wanna dig into what forms of transportation the very poor use! Hint: it’s not driving.
Traffic safety laws protect the most vulnerable members of society: the very poor, very young, very old, and very disabled (all populations that can’t drive and are more likely to become trapped in their own homes when streets are unsafe for those outside motor vehicles).
so it could be describes a tax on commuters who choose to drive over the speed limit - fuck them hower poor they are. poor people are capable of committing crimes just like non-poor.
poor people can also drive slower, or take the bus, train, (and many can ) bike, walk . . .
personally i find bike/bus/train way cheaper than car.recycle the revenue into bus service and its probably neither progressive or regressive,but sways people out of cars, and reduces the danger to people not in cars.(however poor they are)
I wish my neighborhood would do this. 25mph feels really fast on my street. I usually hover around 15-20 when I’m not paying attention to my speed.
Edit: I am surprised that this was my third most controversial comment since I’ve joined
It’s been surprising to see just how many pro-car users seem to lurk on these anti-car/pro-alternative transport communities.
This community regularly makes it to the front page of Everything. It’s really not that isolated from the rest of Lemmy
I guess that’s the difference in scale between here and Reddit. r/fuckcars was tiny compared to the whole of reddit, but I guess this is large enough to be prominent in Everything.
I dunno, I didn’t subscribe to /r/fuckcars on reddit, but I got their posts all the time on /r/all back in the day. I think a lot of people just don’t like having to rely on cars 😅
They’re probably imagining me as that Prius or something slowing them down in traffic. My neighborhood is basically one lane when people are parked, and there are a lot of kids, so if they drove the road they’d understand.
Fuck cars is regularly in my “everything” feed. And most of these measures aim to reduce traffic, which ultimately benefits the remaining car drivers.
That’s cool. One of the advantages of lower speed limits is that while they slightly improve safety, they massively improve the perception of safety. When people feel safe walking and cycling, they’re more likely to do it. So, lower speed limits decrease the subjective desire to drive, and thereby reduce car dependency.
Do you have numbers on this?
I saw a study a long time ago, but I’m afraid I can’t find it now! I think it was UK-based, possibly by TfL or the DfT.
Amazing news, can imagine how much quieter Wales will become as a result of this
I mean. Before this all you could hear was crazy “oooooooo” “oooooooooooo” sounds under the water. Wasn’t that bad.
naah, all those bloody gangs of orcas, bombing aroung the neighbourhood at 30+mph, right by schools too , about time someone put a stop to it.
https://a-z-animals.com/blog/how-fast-do-whales-swim/Ah shit man I thought cthulu agreed to be chill for a bit longer
I thought this said whales for a second, and I was very intrigued how whales were causing the speed limit to be lowered. Maybe a whale carcass nearby at risk of exploding? Maybe a bridge that whales like to spout on?
This will hopefully ensure less people get hit by cars when the fights inevitably break out on the roads near pubs after Wales lose to Fiji and Australia and exit in the group stage of the Rugby World Cup this month
Ouch!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Welsh parliament has passed a law bringing down the speed limit on all residential roads and busy streets to 20 mph (30 km/h).
Wales will introduce a default speed limit of 20 mph (30 km/h) in built-up areas from next year, in a bid to lower road collisions and noise pollution, as well as encourage people to walk or cycle.
The Welsh parliament voted on Tuesday to back the plan, which will bring down the speed limit currently set at 30 mph (50 km/h) on most busy streets and residential roads.
Both Labour and Plaid Cymru, who have a cooperation agreement and hold almost three-quarters of the 60 Senedd seats, backed the plan, but it has been met with criticism too.
Reasons for opposing the scheme ranged from concerns it could “annoy” drivers to an increase in journey time and congestion.
“They are quite rightly very concerned as they believe that pollution is increasing because cars have to drive in a lower gear and wait longer at traffic lights, there have also been more accidents,” he said.
The original article contains 609 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It could “annoy drivers”? Believe me, so many things do.
Also, it’s very likely that due to lower speeds, less congestion will happen and so, travel time will actually be shorter.When I drive nothing annoys me more than other drivers.
Also way to make money from the shitload of speeding tickets lol
Mph. It says so right in the title
Yes, for bicycles too. But there is no mechanism to enforce speed limits for them.
Make cars use more gas by having operate at speeds they aren’t meant to operate at constantly. Check.
Make people sit in cars longer resulting in longer commutes and more pollution. Check.
Claim that some number printed on a sign magically saves lives. Check.
Do literally anything to actually address the issue at hand. Not check.
Wouldn’t this, in the end, make cars have to shift to a lower gear, thus keeping about the same RPM, and thus eating about the same amount of fuel, which results in about the same volume of the sound produced by the car?
This feels like a terrible fix.
afaik most of the sound comes from the tires, not necessarily the engine or the exhaust. obviously not the case for every car, but for most commuter cars it is. the faster the tires are rolling, the louder the sound.
i think at higher speeds the wheel and road noise drowns out the engine noise, but at lower speeds its the engine, especially during acceletation.
in the region of 20-30mph i’d think the engine is probably the louder part.
While this is a point the naysayers brought up, the slower speeds during the trial period reduced accidents, the severity of accidents, and the slower speeds encouraged more foot and bicycle traffic on those roads
Do you know when the trial period was?
I ask because the Welsh government apparently carried out a pollution test to justify the lowered speed limit on the main road into the capital, but did it during the Covid lockdown, when most cars were off the road.
Wouldn’t this, in the end, make cars have to shift to a lower gear, thus keeping about the same RPM, and thus eating about the same amount of fuel
That’s not how cars work, they definitely don’t use the same fuel in different gears at the same RPM. See this Wikipedia article for a discussion of speed vs fuel economy.
And as pointed out by the the FAQ, that’s doesn’t not factor in acceleration:
Will driving at 20mph mean I use more fuel?
No. Fuel consumption is mainly influenced by the way we drive – driving at a consistent speed is better than stopping and starting. Accelerating up to 30mph can take twice as much energy as speeding up to 20mph.
A default 20 mph limit and a smooth driving style, can help avoid unnecessary speeding up and slowing down, saving fuel.
Most cars, at least in NA, have excessively large engines. It is crazy that we use 2L engines to carry one person around, when their own legs would suffice.
Studies have been done on this, and lower speeds correspond with less noise pollution.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412022005785
A lot of cars can cruise at 20-25mph just idling in Drive, foot completely off both gas and brake. The RPMs don’t get much lower than that.
My forester, when the engine is cold, will idle at about 25 mph :v, it calms down once it’s warm, but still. I wouldn’t be driving around with my foot on the brake
if the cars are designed to use the same fuel for less useful output power, then they’re very badly designed.
i’m sure they might be less efficient in terms of miles per gallon. but they surely can’t be so bad as to waste absolutely more fuel at lower speeds.if they are, fuck them.
People have a misconception that cars waste more fuel at lower speeds, but it’s really due to where the lower speeds are happening. Fuel is mostly wasted due to constant stopping and acceleration, like in a city environment with traffic lights and stop signs. On a highway, it’s actually more efficient because you aren’t stopping so often.
good on them for using real units of measurement for their speed limits.
