Safe speeds are not whatever speed is comfortable to drive a given street. Part of the posted limit is considering how much of a wrecking ball a vehicle would be if it suddenly left the road.
The limits in suburbs where I live is 50km/h. The roads are wide enough to land a plane on and you could very easily drive most of them full throttle as they are flat and straight. With that in mind I still think it should be 30km/h.
When I was a kid a car hit a snowbank and was launched straight into someone’s living room not far from my house. If they were driving 30km/h, that nightmare scenario pretty much becomes an impossibility.
We just need to stop making residential roads that look like drag strips. More curves, more trees close to the road, more speed bumps. I’ve driven in some places in Europe where it’s very clear that it’s unsafe to drive any faster than about 30 km/h due to roadside obstacles. I think that design is much safer than the NA standards.
Speed limits are not for how fast any particular vehicle and driver could negotiate the road. They are for all the other factors in road use. How many roads/driveways intersect the road, what are the sightlines, what other users (bikes, pedestrians) use the road. Does weather make a difference? How homogeneous are the vehicle types and driving ability of those users? People who speed usually vastly overestimate their abilities to react - and then blame the other guy for what would have been prevented had they been driving at the speed limit.
Safe speeds are not whatever speed is comfortable to drive a given street. Part of the posted limit is considering how much of a wrecking ball a vehicle would be if it suddenly left the road.
The limits in suburbs where I live is 50km/h. The roads are wide enough to land a plane on and you could very easily drive most of them full throttle as they are flat and straight. With that in mind I still think it should be 30km/h.
When I was a kid a car hit a snowbank and was launched straight into someone’s living room not far from my house. If they were driving 30km/h, that nightmare scenario pretty much becomes an impossibility.
We just need to stop making residential roads that look like drag strips. More curves, more trees close to the road, more speed bumps. I’ve driven in some places in Europe where it’s very clear that it’s unsafe to drive any faster than about 30 km/h due to roadside obstacles. I think that design is much safer than the NA standards.
Speed limits are not for how fast any particular vehicle and driver could negotiate the road. They are for all the other factors in road use. How many roads/driveways intersect the road, what are the sightlines, what other users (bikes, pedestrians) use the road. Does weather make a difference? How homogeneous are the vehicle types and driving ability of those users? People who speed usually vastly overestimate their abilities to react - and then blame the other guy for what would have been prevented had they been driving at the speed limit.