We’re were getting a 20 mph limit for most roads in our UK town (until it was scrapped yesterday) and the local Facebook groups are acting like they’re turning us into an open air prison.
Apparently having shops in walking distance is a Chinese conspiracy, and we must reject the climate emergency, and other such frothing at the mouth…
There’s no point to allowing private cars in cities anyway. Just ban the lot of them.
The only exception i can think of are people with impaired movement that are fit to drive though. But for this we dont need full cars.
There are a few others I can think of but most of those revolve around rare events like moving in or out or buying furniture.
So - how do they get in and out of the cities?
Park and ride- I’m struggling to remember if it’s called that in English. They set up a bus line between a car park on the outskirts of the city and the city centre. So you just have to park and then jump on the bus. More specifically to The Netherlands trains and bikes are usually workable options as well.
They work well in the UK for people visiting a city. I’m not sure they work for residents. Parking for around 2 million vehicles surrounding London would be … something. Even 1 million
If you’re living in a city you shouldn’t need, and thus have, a car. Cars are for people living in the middle of nowhere but still needing to get around in a way that isn’t covered by collect taxis, for everyone else there’s public transport and a rental once in a while.
As someone who cycles to work and uses public transport where possible, there are still plenty of occasions where a car is very useful and a rental wouldn’t cut it.
Then public transport infrastructure isn’t good enough. Also things like shop locations, e.g. noone is going to haul beverage crates in a tram so there’s got to be stores with a proper selection within handcart to cargo bike or bike trailer distance, same goes for parcel pickups. And the roads have to be designed so that people feel safe using those methods.
I’d even go so far that in the vast majority of cases where you’d need a motorised vehicle you then want a van, not a car.
Honest question, does London have intercity trains or busses? I mean 2 million sounds like a number for this public transport thingy people sometimes talk about
Amsterdam actually has quite a few of these options dotted around the outskirts of the city, with trainstations and tramlines connecting them to the city.
Public transport?
Man, what an extremist you are
Massive parking lots at the edge of the city. At least this was the recommendation of the Berlin Autofrei initiative.
Schiphol airport is also a train terminal.
City’s like Amsterdam are not build for cars. They are allowed but it is mostly people on foot and bicycles. Going over 30 is not possible and dangerous.
The old center that was built before cars is only a part of the city. The rest of the city has been built with car traffic in mind.
The problem is really that cars are too space inefficient for what they do. Cars travelling at 50km/h should have at the very least 1s of travel distance safety distance between vehicles which is about three car lengths. In other words for the often single person travelling in a car you need about one lane width times 4 car lengths of space which is probably more than your average apartment size in most cities and unlike apartments roads tend to not be stacked 5 or 6 high on top of each other. And that does not even take parking and space to enter and exit each parking space into account. Not to mention that a lot of that space is unused outside the peak usage hours at any given location.
1 second is not 3 car lengths unless you’re going really fast. Also, when pulling away, you shouldn’t sit stationary and wait for the gap to establish, as by the time you’re going you will be even further back. Instead, pull away at the same time as the vehicle in front, but restrain your acceleration so they still pull away from you. When they stop pulling away, you stop accelerating and you’ll have more or less the correct gap.
Standard advice is usually 2 seconds in the dry, 4 in the wet - “only a fool breaks the two second rule” takes about 2 seconds to say, then “but if it pours, make it 4” brings it to 4 seconds.
On the contrary: Amsterdam was rebuilt for cars in the 1950s-1970s, then re-rebuilt for bikes because they realized that they had made a terrible mistake.
So… it’s not currently built for cars.
The point is, it’s not an “oh, it’s just 'cause it’s old and historic and couldn’t possibly be replicated anywhere else” thing. It absolutely can be done everywhere; the only difference is that Amsterdam is one of the few places that’s had the, frankly, good sense to do it. (I almost wrote “political will” there, but when you consider the fact that car-centric design doesn’t even fucking work for car drivers themselves, it really is more a matter of competence than ideology.)
And next step is to enforce a 25km/h speed limit for e-bikes. Those kids on those fatbikes are a menace.
We have that in Germany, 25 for regular e-bikes. Anything above requires you to register and insure your bike, you get an actual license plate and you are considered a vehicle not meant to use regular bike lanes.
Not quite. Only the motor assist has to shut off at 25 km/h. You can go as fast as you want (and your legs allow) with most e-Bikes. The ones which require a license plate are extremely rare.
Fun fact: the default speed limits of 50 in built-up areas and 100 on country roads do not apply to bicycles without license plates. Those, by law, are only for “Kraftfahrzeuge”. Signposted limits on the other hand are for “Fahrzeuge aller Art”, which includes bicycles and horse carriages.
Actually was once caught going 35 km/h in a 30 zone but the police (hunting speeders near a school) were more impressed than angry (mountainbike, doesn’t really have the transmission for speed fastest I ever went with that thing was 38km/h on flat ground). It’s downhill or race bikes where you have to start to worry.
That sounds like a big mistake. I can understand like, 48 km/h per hour in highly populated areas, but going below US school speed limits is going to create lots of offenders (maybe that’s the end game). I can ride faster that 30 km/h on my bike. I can continually do that with as little as a 5% decline from the horizontal axis.
Loudly and visibly changing the rules doesn’t “create offenders”. Offenders aren’t victims of changed rules.
It has been shown time and again that lowering speed limits in cities reduces traffic accidents and emissions at close to no costs to the flow of traffic.
My own city (in Germany, so it really was a heavily-criticized decision) lowered the speed limit on one of the major arterial roads to 30 kph. It is one I have to use regularly, and oh boy, let me tell you: I was soooo opposed to the change. Yet, it really only changed how fast you arrive at the next red light. There is literally no discernable change in how long it takes to pass that street, especially during rush hour. Traffic just got a little more fluid.
It is, however, the street with the most speeding tickets in town. I regularly see one or two mobile speed cameras along the way. And I’ve never been fined. You got to wonder…
Offenders aren’t victims of changed rules.
I’d say they are, if the rules are shit. In this case though the rules are fine imo.
I mean even if this speed limit was shit, it’s not like speed limits in general are invisible and people don’t know what happens if you break them. Every offense in this case is self-inflicted and not caused by the limit itself.
You have clearly never driven anything in The Netherlands then.
Actually, I have…
No
