Quote:
Originally Posted by soundman98
+1
i know we've all seen the statistics of 'speed kills', but we all seem to ignore a lot of other factors that are always at play.
the first real question that people are scared to talk about are creating and establishing realistic speed limits, but also creating roadways that reinforce those realistic limits.
a few roads near me growing up are dead straight for over 10 miles, and 5 lanes wide(2 lanes each way, with a turn lane in the middle). early on, they were a 45mph speed limit. now there's added sidewalks that few use, and some growing residential area's off the the sides that used to be corn fields, and they spontaneously dropped the speed limit to 35.
with no alterations to the roadway, traffic still flows at 40-50mph through that road. but we're blaming the drivers/traffic, not the roadway for that, despite the entire rest of our legal/roadway system creating laws reinforcing the concept that we as people/drivers/citizens have zero self control, and laws are set to the lowest common denominator.
the reality is that the speed isn't the problem. it's the roadway design.
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I've watched several videos from this guy's channel. He talks about city design. Our cities are poorly designed in general. We have huge retail centers separated by miles of roadways and highways to suburbs (R2 housing). The roads are made for people to travel fast like you said. The problem is that the wide lanes and roads give us a false sense of safety and security. Speed dramatically increases the forces in a crash (1/2mv^2) and distance to stop, so even if something has multiple lanes or wide lanes, that doesn't really mean someone can stop in time for a child running into the street or a bicycle crossing the road or someone backing out of their driveway. It provides a little shoulder space, but less speed would be better. As the video says, we tend to respond only when things are bad with speed bumps, a new traffic sign, lowering the speed limits.
As a former EMS worker of four years, an ED Tech of ten years, and now as an orthopedic nurse, and as a person familiar of the car community, someone could say that I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly on both sides. My brother is a cop too. I'm aware of what speed does to bodies and lives when people try to play race cars too much on the street. It is one thing to hammer it on some empty canyons, but there is no point in flying around like people do in traffic, whether that is speed at 10+ over the speed limit in city areas (not talking highways), weaving, following closely, etc.