Road safety activists and some states are pushing to depart from a longstanding rule that sets speed limits in the United States based largely on how fast drivers actually travel.
Speed limits should be set by road design. Slapping a 25 mph speed limit on a section of road doesn’t actually change how fast people drive on it, it just creates potential revenue.
Applying normal engineering practices where human lives are at stake, you build in a safety factor. Your design speed is 25 but it’s built to be safe to drive at 50. Drivers figure this out and do 50. Now you have no more safety factor.
If you can’t rely on signage, then you need to design roads that aren’t safe. There are some obvious ethical considerations with this plan.
Then there’s those spots where the speed limit is 25mph, but they throw a few “safety humps” in there, and you have to slow down below 10mph or you’ll throw out at axle. First time visitors always hit too hard, because they’re traveling at the speed limit, and the humps look gentle. Wonder what the city will do when someone loses control and hits a pedestrian while doing nothing wrong.
Properly designed speed tables should be able to be safety traversed at speed. Speed bumps force you to slow down to under the speed limit, sometimes far under, in order to traverse safely. That said, I’ve seen many many many more examples of things like: speed bumps with signs for speed tables, poorly designed humps that are neither speed bumps nor speed table, poorly designed speed bumps that are dangerous at practically any speed, or speed bumps without proper warning signs or paint to warn drivers, speed bumps in parking lots that just encourage people to drive wrecklessly around them. The absolute worst are those bolt-on DIY atrocities. Really, I’ve only ever seen properly designed speed tables in the richest of neighborhoods. All the other HOAs and towns seem to think they can get away with just hiring an asphalt guy or sending out a road maintenance crew to throw a speed bump and some paint down without any kind of survey, design, or traffic study.
UK has it with 60-70mph highways that resemble American city avenues. Much less room for error - oh and a roundabout every so often to switch things up. Between that and on/off ramps designed for golf carts, i think we could really learn the average idiot driver.
Afaik there’s only 1 motorway in the UK with a roundabout and it’s at the end where it becomes a normal road again. Usually if there is a roundabout on a dual carriageway it’s because it’s connecting to a single carriage way that could be anything from a 60mph bypass road for a town to a 20mph residential street.
In Buffalo, NY the Scajaquada or 198 I think was a barrier lined 50mph byway that connected 190 to 33 (I might be fucking these exact roads up its been a while). It cuts thru Deleware Park. There had never been a single accident involving a vehicle and someone at Delaware Park in the 50 years it was like this. Then 1 driver with narcolepsy falls asleep and kills someone at Delaware Park. The dumb as fuck Byron Brown spear heads the change reducing the entire 198 to 25 fucking miles per hour. NEVER. NOT ONCE has a single cop enforced it, nor a single drive abide by it. Everyone still goes 40-50 like nothing changed but the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent repainting and redesigning the markings of the 198 but nothing done to change it from a barrier lined 50-65mph designed roadway.
Speed limits should be set by road design. Slapping a 25 mph speed limit on a section of road doesn’t actually change how fast people drive on it, it just creates potential revenue.
Applying normal engineering practices where human lives are at stake, you build in a safety factor. Your design speed is 25 but it’s built to be safe to drive at 50. Drivers figure this out and do 50. Now you have no more safety factor.
If you can’t rely on signage, then you need to design roads that aren’t safe. There are some obvious ethical considerations with this plan.
Then there’s those spots where the speed limit is 25mph, but they throw a few “safety humps” in there, and you have to slow down below 10mph or you’ll throw out at axle. First time visitors always hit too hard, because they’re traveling at the speed limit, and the humps look gentle. Wonder what the city will do when someone loses control and hits a pedestrian while doing nothing wrong.
Properly designed speed tables should be able to be safety traversed at speed. Speed bumps force you to slow down to under the speed limit, sometimes far under, in order to traverse safely. That said, I’ve seen many many many more examples of things like: speed bumps with signs for speed tables, poorly designed humps that are neither speed bumps nor speed table, poorly designed speed bumps that are dangerous at practically any speed, or speed bumps without proper warning signs or paint to warn drivers, speed bumps in parking lots that just encourage people to drive wrecklessly around them. The absolute worst are those bolt-on DIY atrocities. Really, I’ve only ever seen properly designed speed tables in the richest of neighborhoods. All the other HOAs and towns seem to think they can get away with just hiring an asphalt guy or sending out a road maintenance crew to throw a speed bump and some paint down without any kind of survey, design, or traffic study.
UK has it with 60-70mph highways that resemble American city avenues. Much less room for error - oh and a roundabout every so often to switch things up. Between that and on/off ramps designed for golf carts, i think we could really learn the average
idiotdriver.Afaik there’s only 1 motorway in the UK with a roundabout and it’s at the end where it becomes a normal road again. Usually if there is a roundabout on a dual carriageway it’s because it’s connecting to a single carriage way that could be anything from a 60mph bypass road for a town to a 20mph residential street.
In Buffalo, NY the Scajaquada or 198 I think was a barrier lined 50mph byway that connected 190 to 33 (I might be fucking these exact roads up its been a while). It cuts thru Deleware Park. There had never been a single accident involving a vehicle and someone at Delaware Park in the 50 years it was like this. Then 1 driver with narcolepsy falls asleep and kills someone at Delaware Park. The dumb as fuck Byron Brown spear heads the change reducing the entire 198 to 25 fucking miles per hour. NEVER. NOT ONCE has a single cop enforced it, nor a single drive abide by it. Everyone still goes 40-50 like nothing changed but the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent repainting and redesigning the markings of the 198 but nothing done to change it from a barrier lined 50-65mph designed roadway.