Usually these roads are so small, you can barely fit a car and maybe one pedestrian on one / each side. And these streets are quite common in residential area. As in the picture, usually there are light poles along the pedestrian street. the pictures pole is pretty small but normally they're big enough you can only circumvent it by going in the path of the car, and that's a Hotspot when people get hit.
I didn't even know you were allowed to drive 60km/h on those streets. Most people slowed down because the chance of damaging your car is quite high
Edit: also why big American car are not that popular in Japan. You can't even reach your house for many, if you get an American car
I’m kidding of course but I see many people do this and it’s super frustrating.
Also fyi, you can buy a kei car without a parking certificate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street#Around_the_world
(thank you, cassepipe)
Consider at least giving the title of what you want to share and even to add a small description as to why this is worth anyone's time
Not a lot at announcement and even less now, not seen one in the UK (they aren't road legal).
>...
> From our limited information it appears that everywhere in the world, after some vehicle broke the speed barrier of 15 mph, time scarcity related to traffic began to grow. After industry had reached this threshold of per capita output, transport made of man a new kind of waif: a being constantly absent from a destination he cannot reach on his own but must attain within the day.
https://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1973_energy_equity.html
So to really enforce slower traffic, narrow down your street to the bare minimum required for a car to pass through. Add obstacles as small turns or bumps. You'll also gain space for sidewalks and cycling paths.
In Netherland, the speed limit in cities used to be 50, and even in the 1980s, people were complaining that that was too fast. Most residential streets have been 30 (or less; the street I grew up in had a limit of 5 or 10 km/h) for some time, and Amsterdam recently made it the default for all streets with only exceptions for the biggest thoroughfares. They've also experimented with closing some of those thoroughfares.
Cars are bad for cities. It's a simple fact. The big advantage of cities is that everything is within walking or cycling distance, and the density is perfect for dense public transport. The only use for cars is to get out of the city.
Low speed limits make cars safer, but they also encourage safer forms of transportation. It's great to see this insight take hold in more countries.
In my area, I can’t think of a an example of a road that would be affected by this law change that didn’t already have a 30 km/h posted speed limit.
I would not say, cars are bad. For me they are the cells that bring the oxygen, to use another analogy.
What is missing is organization to avoid clogging. And i dislike the noise and the danger one has. This can be done all better.
But i like cars. I like my bike also.
And after all, i like technology. :)
And then there is also the question of the environment on that public transport. IME "good enough that complaints remain manageable" seems to be the target here unlike a car where you can have private entertainment and air conditioning (not to mention sufficient ventilation) to whatever level you wish.
And even for relatively frequent public transit routes you end up wasting quite a bit of time waiting. Even more so if your start and destination don't happen to be close to the same route.
The biggest danger here is not terribly clear. Somewhere in the intersection of people cluelessly walking into the bike lane and bicyclists hitting the clueless.
Looks like bicyclists are the clueless...bordering on criminal:
Have you tried biking at 60km/h? Even on a very good bike with a gigantic gear ratio I don't think you'd manage to get close to it on flat ground.
Quick edit: just to give you some figures, if the bike + cyclist weighs in total about 80kg the cyclist needs to sustain an output of about 1000W (on an aggressive position down on the drops) without wind to ride at 60km/h on flat ground. Very few people on Earth can do that...
I used to cycle and I don't think I could achieve 60 on flat ground like Amsterdam. That's very solid sprinting that even the best cyclists in the world can only achieve for short periods of time. On narrow Amsterdam streets with cobblestone? Impossible...
And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:
https://youtu.be/FdoViT8-s5I?t=47
you get hit by one of these silent missiles, with an 80kg passenger on it, you spend weeks in hospital...you are older person, its life threatening...
Amsterdam bikes are terrifying :-))
These bikes are not going at 36 km/h, whatever device she is using to measure it is incorrectly calibrated or simply not made to measure people on bikes.
"Cyclist" and "someone on an illegal e-bike" are not one and the same thing.
> And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:
No, those people freewheeling on a regular city bike on relatively flat ground are not doing 36 km/h. That's around 20 km/h by my somewhat well tuned eyeballs. Have you never been on a bike and measured your speed?
You're not going to be seeing cyclists going 36 km/h beyond significant downhills or sporty people on drop bar bikes putting in significant effort.
I live in a French town where the default speed limit is 30 km/h instead of the national 50 km/h. In the street where I live, the drivers that willingly (sometimes they can't overtake bikes and slow cars) observe that limit are a tiny minority. Why would they, since there are no automated controls in the city, and police sets manual controls once in a blue moon.
My street was already at 30 km/h in 2016 when the global speed limit was introduced by the city council. I'm pretty sure the mean speed has increased since then, though I don't have hard facts to prove it[^1]. At first I thought that, since all road signs were removed except on the city borders, the drivers needed a constant reminder of a limit that they'd prefer to ignore. Now I just think that people soon saw that there was almost no risk in breaking the law.
[^1]: There was a study, but the methodology was so poor that it was inconclusive. They monitored the speed in a dozen streets before and after the change, but it was done for different lengths of time (one or two weeks), at different times of the year, and with explicitly no attention payed to potential popular events or roadworks. So the average speed was globally lower after the change, but in most streets it had increased!
Street bumps are a discomfort even for those who respect the speed limit, and sometimes for residents (more noise) so they don't have popular support unless it's a problematic area, with a low safety record. There are high tech bumps that incorporate a radar sped detector and instantly raise in front of speeding cars but there are costly and require more maintenance.
Instead they create bottlenecks and turns to force cars to slow down.
Asphalt and concrete street bumps seem to be legal in 30 km/h zones.
Here's an offer from Citroen which is free and "open to all 34000 French mayors via an online form": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-AI70ImUgE
Something about speed limits in Japan, almost no one follows them. I’ve seen police cars go past speeding cameras without their lights on while exceeding the speed limit by ~20% and everyone around them was doing the same.
This sounds like it would be a super dangerous place to drive then, but the speed limits are pretty low on local roads, and instead of driving the speed limit, people drive at a speed more similar to what you’d find for a similar road in most countries.
If you ever have the opportunity to drive in Japan, just drive at a speed you’re comfortable at and not faster than most of the traffic around you, and you’ll be fine. This isn’t legal advice though.
The one place I wouldn’t recommend exceeding the speed limit are those very narrow roads, many accidents happen there, though they’re rarely fatal.
Source: I’m working for a rental car company in Japan
Then you should know the posted speed limit is low for enforcement reasons. And yes, the Japanese government and society decided to have a fake speed limit and a real speed limit, rather than change the threshold at which speeding is a prosecutable crime.
Because of that de facto speed limit in streets was 70km/h. So to combat this, currently we have speed limit 50km/h in cities, which translates to de facto 60km/h
For example here, Willis St in Wellington:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8hHCLxCDK4C8U8Tz9
You can see it is already 30 km/h in the first streetview capture in 2008.
> applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media report
>The measures apply to about 870,000km of roads that are less than 5.5 metres wide and do not have centre lines or median strips, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. They account for about 70% of the country’s general roads, the newspaper said.
So basically they went from no effective speed limit (since most people will probably not drive 60kmh on those kinds of roads if left to their own devices) to a specific speed limit on a bunch of tiny roads that the overwhelming majority of people were probably already going pretty darn slow on for the most part.
I suspect this will just result in a bunch of roads that really were overdue for it getting center lines and specific posted limits getting them and not much change anywhere else.
So I’m pretty optimistic about this change, better than they way things are now at least.
It feels like these traffic laws and the local conditions really go hand in hand with that.
Frankly, anyone driving at 60km/h through narrow streets isn't driving with due care and consideration for the surroundings anyway.
> The introduction in 2011 of “zone 30” areas on a limited number of residential streets and along school routes resulted in a 30% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries
This benefits everyone.
Unfortunately that doesn't facilitate bad people's need to stomp other people with the state and without bad people who want to stomp people with the state there wouldn't be enough people on the bandwagon to get anything done. That's the unfortunate deal with the devil that is faced in pretty much every area of public policy.
