Even with the caveats about limited data and untangling causation and correlation, the statistics are striking: the first year of a scheme in Wales where the speed limit on urban roads was lowered to 20mph resulted in about 100 fewer people killed or seriously injured.
In my home town ALL roads are 30kph, and like 50% of the intersections are roundabouts. The result is traffic just continuously flowing and you arrive much faster than before with the roads at 50kph. Other side effects are less gasoline use, less pollution from gas and tires, less accidents, less noise, basically less bad and more good.
Add to that the great cycle and walking infrastructure and yeah, of course I’m talking about the Netherlands
Queue the replies with "but you could nevah do this in [Canada | United States | England | Mexico | Russia | China | whatever] because [too cold | too many mountains | too large distances | whatever]
To be fair in NL a lot of people ignore the speed limits if the road invites you to drive faster (not enough traffic calming stuff). Not a lot and still driving safely but for example there’s this huge straight road near my house that they changed to 30 recently but didn’t make any changes to the infrastructure and pretty much everyone still drives 50 on it. Also on highways it’s 100 everywhere during the day but you see a lot driving 110/120 where there’s no speed control.
We actually have pockets like this in the US. A small town nearby has nothing but roundabouts and max 30mph and it’s makes the area very walkable. Parts of Pasadena CA is similar. It does happen but not on a grand scale. The areas we have adopted this method are very pleasant.
Which always makes me wonder why, if it’s so nice, this isn’t done everywhere
I wonder what the optimal speed is to maximize speed and flow while minimizing accidents.
By that logic we need to lower it down to 1kmh so we’re going to arrive to the destination even faster
