Comment by bluescrn
7 months ago
Zero MPH = zero traffic = zero road deaths.
But without transport significantly more people will die from other things, due to reduced access to healthcare, employment, food, etc.
In a modern society, road transport is a critical part of our life support system. Those pushing for a what they see as a car-free utopia tend to ignore this.
30 km\h limit in densely populated and heavily used by pedestrians first\last 2-5 minutes of your travel does what? Extends your travel time by 1 minute? At the same time making it nearly impossible to kill a kid, cat, dog or human in these places.
Same goes with the right of way in these places. You're in a car, you're getting where you're going much faster anyway, so you let pedestrians go first. On pedestrian crossings, and often even without them in such "last leg" places.
It's completely logical. You don't go faster in places where somebody can suddenly walk out from behind a parked car, bush, whatever. But it's a cultural thing in Scandinavia.
You, just like the grandparent, confuse egregious 0% tolerance speed enforcement with speed limits. Speed limits dictates stopping distance and is a key factor in collision avoidance. No one is asking to abolish speed limits.
The problem is when passenger cars that require a fraction of stopping distance of a truck at given speed limit are fined for going 3-4 km over limit. Essentially, fined for driving at a speed where they can stop many meters before a truck going the sign posted limit. Revenue raising in the name of safety, down playing other factors like attention, driver training, road design, maintenance, and so on, but they don't bring as much money.
I don't see anything in the parent comments referencing or advocating for 0% tolerance speed enforcement. In the UK speed limits are typically enforced with a 10% grace factor.
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So, assuming you do support some enforcement for passenger cars, at what speed would a ticket be warranted? Because this is exactly the dumb setup they have in California for example.
Speed limit is 65, everyone is doing 80. When you pull over someone how do you explain why only that person gets a ticket?
A limit is only a limit when it's enforced. Anything else will become arbitrary.
You go 30 km/h. A kid runs on the street. You manage to stop just in front of it.
You go 40 km/h. The same kid runs on the same street. You brake the exact same way. You hit the kid with over 30 km/h. You just killed a kid.
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> cars that require a fraction of stopping distance of a truck at given speed
You may want to update your knowledge on the stopping distances of modern trucks.
> are fined for going 3-4 km over limit
Obviously. Is there anything confusing about the word "limit" in particular that you don't understand?
> Essentially, fined for driving at a speed where they can stop many meters before a truck going the sign posted limit.
It is not your job as a driver to decide whether to stick to a particular traffic rule or not. The limit is there, so follow it.
There was a study [0] in Paris that demonstrates a signifiant life expectancy and positive benefit/risk ratio of bicycling or commuting by public transports: the effect on physical and psychic health largely outweighs (sometimes to x30) the risk of accidents and pollution disease.
> without transport
Nobody argues to remove all cars altogether, and certainly not other forms of transport. However we certainly can rethink the millions of individual cars in each cities: does everybody needs its own 1ton vehicle to bring food back from the local supermarket? To go to work 2-20km away?
[0] (2012, french) https://www.ors-idf.org/nos-travaux/publications/les-benefic...
It's almost as if a balance could be achieved, both by reducing the number of cars and increasing the number of trains/busses.
Yep. Something worth considering is also building long-term parking spaces to the outskirts of cities, accessible with public transport. I know lots of city-dwellers who pretty much never use a car for intra-city transport, but need to own one anyway to reach other important places that are beyond reach of public transport.
In case of Finland summer cottages are one such case. They're extremely common, and located in areas that usually have no public transport. Lots of people have also older relatives who live in middle of nothing.
Surely car hire would make more sense for that type of usage
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Only in cities. And a lot of people don't want to live in ever-denser cities.
A lot of people seem to want to live in cities though. Scroll through this graph, especially the broad categories at the bottom of the page, and there is a consistent global trend to urbanisation: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...
House prices are almost far higher in big dense cities, so people are clearly willing to pay a premium to live there.
People either want or need to live in big cities.
I live in a small village on top of a hill. Most people drive, but I don't. When I need to get some heavy stuff up the hill once a month or two, I get the bus. The rest of the time I walk.