Comment by BolexNOLA
3 days ago
It may feel like you aren’t going very fast, but at the end of the day you’re probably only arriving at your location a couple of minutes later than you normally would and when applied at scale this could potentially save thousands if not tens of thousands of lives a year depending on how widely this is adopted. Hell maybe hundreds of thousands, but I don’t know the numbers well enough to make a claim that high, seems steep at first glance.
Surely we can agree the pros outweigh the cons here? I can wake up 5-10 minutes earlier for safer roads.
> you’re probably only arriving at your location a couple of minutes later than you normally would
That depends on the total journey distance.
No, it doesn't. Those low speed limits are only used for smaller residential streets. It only impacts the part of your journey from your home to the edge of your neighbourhood, and the same at your destination. Regardless of journey distance, the vast majority of your trip will be spend driving on roads intended for through traffic - which will of course still have a higher speed limit.
Percentage-wise it is only going to meaningfully impact your travel time if you stay within your own neighbourhood. At which point the only logical response can be: why are you even taking the car?
Fwiw, this is how my American neighborhood is set up and it's completely tolerable. Nobody is more than 5 or 6 blocks from a "through traffic road".
It's also got stop signs on virtually every intersection, so speeding is basically gone. A lot of people ignore speed limits, but I've never met anyone that blanket ignores stop signs on 4 way intersections. You're not getting much faster than 20mph in a single city block without making a very obvious amount of noise (at least in an ICE).
If you have to go a meaningful distance you are going on highways, interstates, etc. where this is irrelevant. Anywhere super dense where this would matter likely has a more robust train/subway system than other parts of the country. The % that falls in between is likely very small.