Someone has to put a chart near it, describing the decline in driving in the city. When you're limited to 30kmh, you might as well get a scooter...
Someone has to put a chart near it, describing the decline in driving in the city. When you're limited to 30kmh, you might as well get a scooter...
Great, scooters are much less likely to kill pedestrians during collisions. I'm glad more people who didn't actually need 2 ton metal boxes are downsizing to something more practical.
Great, now I'll have the 0.02% chance of surviving a collision with a scooter what slaloms on any possible walkable terrain, instead of a 0.01% chance of surviving a collision with a car that won't hit me because they don't drive on sidewalks.
Careful what you wish for. Make it hard for people to have families and society will collapse.
yes, famously no society has ever managed to have children without widespread private car ownership.
The Nordics aren’t struggling at all in this area, they also have incredibly generous parental leave and subsidised child care systems.
All Nordic countries are well below replacement rates. They are definitely struggling.
So is the States with its car culture. Silly point to spiral around I'd say.
This has to be the most American comment ever.
Society will collapse no less due to minor inconveniences!!
Ah yes, because mowing down kids is somehow pro family?
I live car free in a Dutch suburb with two small kids and do so specifically so our kids could have a better life than crappy American suburbia.
> Make it hard for people to have families and society will collapse
I used to live in Amsterdam which has a great public transport, great cycling paths, and limits of 30km/h. People are going cycling to school, on dates, and picnic with their families. Associating having a 3 ton gas guzzler as a prerequisite of having a family and a roadblock of "society" is only a question of poor imagination.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/six-health-lessons-learn-net...
There are multiple reasons Americans are obese as hell and living shorter than us Europeans, and driving everywhere is one of it.
Some areas such as Amsterdam though are just naturally more ammenable to walking, cycling, and transit. Cycling in 90+ (F) temperatures with high humidity (very common in the summer in the US midwest or south), or even just walking very far or waiting very long for a bus is pretty miserable. I'd arrive at my destination literally dripping with sweat and really unpresentable.
Somehow Singapore being 1 degree from the Equator manages to have a bus network, a metro and practically caps the amount of cars on the roads.
Also, you seems to underestimate how bad the weather in Amsterdam is. Cycling on a bridge through rain against the wind at 5 degrees (C) isn't very fun either.
When I lived in a more hotter climate, 30ish (C) was a-okay for some people to cycle to work and then get a shower at work. It's all about infrastructure really --- be it showers, speed limits or bike paths.
Yes. There were no families before carriages… /s
A carless society/city is way more family-oriented.
Most of your commute through a city is turning, accelerating and waiting in traffic. 30km/h or 50km/h makes every little difference in your commute times.
When getting on a larger road with less twists and turns, the speed is higher and the gains of the speed is higher; but the danger is also lower. Any road that may stop to wait for a turn or red light, could probably be capped to 30km/h without much cost to your precious commute time.
I have a few km getting out of my city to the highway as part of my commute and then quite a few kms in the city I'm commuting to. This is a pretty typical North American experience (I'm in the Greater Vancouver area). There is no realistic transit option, my 30 minute car drive would be 2 hours on transit each way.
So let's say 10km (might be a bit more) in city traffic. 12 minutes of my commute each way [EDIT: impacted by speed limit, not counting lights, corners etc.] Total 24 minutes. That would turn into 20 minutes each way, total 40 minutes. Huge difference.
Most of this "city" driving is in streets that are plenty wide (sometimes 3 lanes each way with a separation between directions) and have minimal to no pedestrian traffic. On the smaller streets you're probably not doing 50 anyways even if that's the limit since it will feel too fast.
Vancouver has been looking at reducing speed in the city to 30km/hr. It's hard to say if it will reduce traffic deaths (maybe?) but it's going to have some pretty negative economic effects IMO. Some of the smaller streets are 30 anyways. There are probably smarter solutions but city and road planners don't seem to be able to find them.
I'm willing to bet Helsinki is denser and has much better transit.
https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/ 30 km/h is equal to 20 min/10km, 50 km/h is 12 min/10km.
So Helsinki city center is at 21km/h travel speeds, metro area at 31km/h. A speed limit of 30 km/h doesn't really affect these travel times much.
I can't find 2023 data to compare, however by other data on the net these are very common average speeds for any city in Europe even those with plenty of 50 km/h speed limits.
If more people take up public transport, bikes or scooters in fear of an average travel speed reduction of 1-2 km/h - that is a total win for everyone involved including drivers.
I live in helsinki and nowhere it is 20 kmh that I know of. Might be some random streets in center. And 30km/h streets are smaller living streets that driving that speed comes almost automatically.
Major ringways and main roads are 80 kmh btw
I have driven in many many countries - Helsinki does not feel slower than any place I have driven, faster in fact because there rarely are traffic jams
I reckon he means that the average speed when driving through the city centre is 21 km/h, given that you’re stopping at lights and stuff.
The Tom Tom data is interesting, but time taken for 10 km is not really an appropriate metric. In a more densely populated city, journeys are likely to be shorter.
Average speed means you have both above and below speeds? When you lower the speed limit, the average will also go down?
But yes, in a city cycle time of traffic lights has a larger effect than max speed.
Yes that's probably the point. Cars kill many more people than scooters.
Not per mile driven.
Most scooter and bike deaths are from being ran over by a car going too fast for the zone. If you take that into the equation of the car (instead of the scooter or bike); then you probably only have heart attacks from warm weather left as a mortality cause for the bike.
So no, even per mile driven, cars kill people and bikes pretty much don't. And you should take the buss or train everywhere if you follow that logic to the extreme.
This is not exactly true. First, many (most?) cyclists do not respect basic road safety rules, such as signaling when you turn, or respecting red lights. Let's not talk about safety behavior, such wearing a helmet or repressing the urge to listen music while riding a bike (I know, crazy, right?).
In France, each dataset shows consistently that accidents are very often caused by cyclists. 35% of the deadly accidents involving another road user were caused by cyclists, and if you consider serious accidents, in 2/3rd of the cases, no cars were involved.
Many deadly accidents are also caused by...a stroke (22% of the deaths), especially for older cyclists. This contradicts your point, as 1/3rd of the "solo deaths" are not caused by strokes. Indeed, 35% of the cyclists dying on the road do not involve another road user.
Hence, when you consider the total amount of cyclists killed on the road, less than half are in accidents where the car is responsible. In the case of suicide-by-redlight, is the car really to blame honestly? [0]
Hence, when accounting for minutes spend on the road, bikes are by far the most dangerous (excluding motorbikes, which at this point is a public program for organ donation).[1]
[0] https://www.cerema.fr/system/files/documents/2024/05/3._2024...
[1] https://www.quechoisir.org/actualite-velo-infographie-plus-d...
A 30 km/h limit and decline in driving means zero people have to die. If enforcing scooters meant zero people have to die, I'm not sure what the objection is, truly.
Scooters kill people too (often the drivers themselves but not always).
The problem with escooters is that basically any accident is "bad" since you have no protection while you toodle along at 15.5mph. Not just slamming into the ground, but into street furniture, trees, building, bikes - you name it. A helmet (which no one wears) is not going to help you if you wrap your abdomen around a solid metal bench at 15.5mph. The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules, so I guess crash I to a stationary car is your best bet)
It's a bloodbath in London.
Not sure I’d say blood bath but here’s some data
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
> The problem with escooters is that basically any accident is "bad"
Factually false. Out of well over 1000 annual collosions in GB in 2023 there were a a handful of deaths but they were all the e-scooter riders.
> The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules,
The most dangerous parts of the streets for scooters are the cars, not the other "sticky-out" bits that don't move and are pretty easy to avoid if you aren't drunk or on your phone or not looking forward. Less than a quarter of e-scooter accidents involved no other vehicle and I'd be willing to bet those tended to be less serious.
E-scooters are great because they aren't as dangerous to other people. People get to make their own choices about risk tolerance, speed and gear all while presenting less hazard to the public when they make bad choices.
> you have no protection
The protection you get in a car comes from the added mass that also makes you so much more dangerous to other road users.
Maybe enforce pedestrian crossings instead. Zero deaths without annoying anybody.
Do you think people rightfully crossing crosswalks never get hit, or do you include the cars in the equation too? What about every other type traffic accident that could be prevented from being fatal by just lowering the speed?
They had pedestrian crossings already, and that was not the deciding factor. It was the speed limit that kept people alive.
If people like you getting annoyed by having to drive slower is the price for just one person not dying in traffic, that’s already a win in my book.
I somewhat doubt that scooters are a significant portion of traffic, given that the Finnish warm season is very short. Maybe Finns drive more carefully, drive less, and take alternative transport more often to avoid the ice and snow of half the year?
Based on my experience living here in Helsinki for 30 years, people drive cars _more_ in the winter rather than less. That’s because the alternative is usually some combination of walking and public transit, and walking is uncomfortable in the winter and public transit is a bit less dependable, too.
But altogether people mostly still use public transit, there’s not a whole lot of driving per capita and the traffic is relatively slow and non-chaotic. I think that’s the core reason for the road safety.
Also, the requirements for getting a driver’s license here are stricter than it sounds like in other countries, with a high emphasis on safety; that probably contributes to the non-chaotic traffic
Helsinki public transport is stellar, so there are few benefits from driving.
bzzzzt WRONG taking the limit from ~30mph to ~20mph does not significantly impact overal journey times.
And move six people in the same amount of space as one before, and for 1/10th as much energy use?
This is a bad thing how?