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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars
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I think a large part of it is inappropriately making 30 mph areas 20mph and also poor enforcement.
I live on a long wide 20mph road and I can't stand the people going at 40, 50 or even 60 or 70 mph at times. But I don't think my road should have been 20mph, it should have been 30mph. It seems it was easier to stick some 20mph signs up to say "we've done something" as a way of discouraging some people going at more rediculous speeds and hope most go at 30mph.
Instead what was needed was actual investment in the road - speed bumps, narrowing the road with choke points and passing points, physical rather than painted cycle lanes - that kind of thing.
Fortunately after years of pressure our road is now going to be in a LTZ (Low Traffic Zone). Both ends of my own long road are blocked off to allow pedestrians and cyclists only through, and my main road is being split into 3rds with X-junctions being turned into filters(Instead of X it's now > and < with no connection). If you're driving you can only turn into one side street while cyclists and pedestrians can pass through as normal. We've had a trial for a while and it's been very effective - my whole block has been split up with filters so you can't use it to pass through to reach the main roads around it - this has stopped the arseholes using my road as a shortcut and speeding at 60 mph.
People are still going at 30mph but the twisting and turning through the block means you can't really get up to anything more than that and also unless you're going to a house in the block it's pointless to even enter.
So while I abhor speeding, I would argue these stats reflect bad road management - over relying on 20mph speed limtis as a cheap alternative to actual road management and redeisgns which are expensive (and difficult in many parts of the UK with lots of very old and narrow streets inherited from previous eras).
Speed bumps are the worst possible solution, they often mean if you're in a conventional car you have to come to a near complete stop and if you're in a large SUV you can cross at 20mph. This reinforces the trend away from conventional cars to higher ride height vehicles which is a disaster for road safety (especially pedestrian and cyclist safety).
They do successfully slow down the flow of traffic (and also cause traffic to follow alternative paths, at least until speed bumps are saturated in the area) but it fucks up emergency vehicle access and damages cars (increases wear and tear). The other road design solutions (more narrow roads, inclusion of roundabouts, addition of choke points etc) all are equally as effective as humps at reducing speeders and diverting traffic away from roads (in some cases they are better) and have none of the negative consequences, speed humps should never be used imo.
The speed bumps are supposed to be tailored to the target speed. There's some 40 km/h streets in my city with regular speed bumps and they're perfectly fine because the speed bumps are designed for that speed. They're quite shallow compared to the kind of speed bump you'd see in a 20 km/h parking lot.
I've never seen or heard of this but I'm skeptical that there is any speed hump design that wouldn't be a negative for emergency services, increase wear and tear to vehicles that cross them and that wouldn't be less of an impact to lifted chassis vehicles. These problems are avoided by the other, better solutions so why are humps even a part of the conversation at all?