And on the cons side… hurts oil execs, national and international retailers, and people who define freedom as having to pay $5 to exxon to get groceries.

For example in Switzerland on some highways during rush hour the speed limit goes down to 80km/h. They analyzed it and it turns out it's an optimal speed limit for throughput.

Suppose a trip is 5km.

At 50km/h, that trip takes 6 minutes.

At 30km/h, that trip takes 10 minutes.

In practice, this naive way of calculating this doesn’t even reflect reality, because odds are the average speed of a driver through Helsinki was around 30km/h anyways. Going 50km/h between red lights doesn’t actually make your trip faster.

I’m an avid cyclist in a US city. There’s a pretty large radius around me in which driving is <= 5 minutes quicker, not counting time to park. Plus cycling often leaves me directly by my destination. I can’t imagine how much more convenient it would be in a dense European city.

Anyways, what the hell is everyone in such a hurry for? Leave five minutes earlier. Cars are absolutely magical. Drivers sitting on mobile couches while expending minimal effort? Magical. So, ya know, adding a few minutes should really be no big deal. Which I doubt it does.

Big, open highways are different. Or at least I’d imagine them to be.

It’s city centre driving that the article talks about.

In other words, it's 2km at 30km/h plus 48km at 80km/h, versus 2km at 50km/h plus 48km at 80km/h. That's a difference of 1 minute 36 seconds.

It's: "I'd rather have other people have higher risk of dying than me having to do something I'd kinda of not want to do even though the inconvenience is minimal".

Me, me, me, me and me. Fuck the rest.

Alternatively, driving is sometimes necessary to deliver goods and travel. But the funny thing is, is that I would GLADLY ban cars in all cities and heavily invest in high speed rail. Cars would still be needed in this world, but again it's the relative change.

So no, it's not a strawman. If anything it was an ad hom.

For example, they might be of the opinion that danger doesn't increase linearly with speed, but more aggressively. This would result in a scenario where they could argue for lower speed limits without having to argue for complete car elimination. Case in point, this piece of news.

Of course in general you can avoid potential bad consequences of a thing by not doing the thing but that's just a tautology.

We don't even ban drugs here and cars are more useful than drugs. It's all about harm reduction and diminishing returns. Also, autoluwe (but not autovrije) districts exist and are a selling point when buying/renting a house, so your attempt at a strawman is rather amusing.

Heck, just leave the ALPR part out of the cameras altogether in order to save costs: have them upload the images to an ALPR service running somewhere in the cloud. You're probably already going to need the uploading part anyways in order to provide evidence, so why even bother with local ALPR?

s/will/are/

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

Factually false. Out of well over 1000 annual collosions in GB in 2023 there were a a handful of deaths but they were all the e-scooter riders.

> The real world has a lot of hard sticky-out bits (and perhaps ironically cars don't due to crash testing rules,

The most dangerous parts of the streets for scooters are the cars, not the other "sticky-out" bits that don't move and are pretty easy to avoid if you aren't drunk or on your phone or not looking forward. Less than a quarter of e-scooter accidents involved no other vehicle and I'd be willing to bet those tended to be less serious.

E-scooters are great because they aren't as dangerous to other people. People get to make their own choices about risk tolerance, speed and gear all while presenting less hazard to the public when they make bad choices.

> you have no protection

The protection you get in a car comes from the added mass that also makes you so much more dangerous to other road users.

If people like you getting annoyed by having to drive slower is the price for just one person not dying in traffic, that’s already a win in my book.

So no, even per mile driven, cars kill people and bikes pretty much don't. And you should take the buss or train everywhere if you follow that logic to the extreme.

A carless society/city is way more family-oriented.

I used to live in Amsterdam which has a great public transport, great cycling paths, and limits of 30km/h. People are going cycling to school, on dates, and picnic with their families. Associating having a 3 ton gas guzzler as a prerequisite of having a family and a roadblock of "society" is only a question of poor imagination.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/six-health-lessons-learn-net...

There are multiple reasons Americans are obese as hell and living shorter than us Europeans, and driving everywhere is one of it.

Society will collapse no less due to minor inconveniences!!

I live car free in a Dutch suburb with two small kids and do so specifically so our kids could have a better life than crappy American suburbia.

For the standard US road with 12-foot-wide lanes and generally straight-ahead routes, 20mph does feel very slow. I've driven on some roads though where narrower lanes, winding paths, and other "traffic calming" features contribute to a sense that 20mph is a reasonable speed.

Surely we can agree the pros outweigh the cons here? I can wake up 5-10 minutes earlier for safer roads.

Shouting and middle fingers are still common.

... which is why you have to do actual road design. You can't just put up a speed sign and hope people will magically abide by it. Roads need to be designed for the speed you want people to drive. When done properly the vast majority of drivers will follow the speed limit without ever having to look at the signs, because it'll be the speed they will feel comfortable driving.

I have no idea about your stats on driving without a licence being more of a problem than speeding, accidents on roads that got the speed reduced to 20mph or 30mph decreased by 19% YoY, that's a big impact for mostly no additional policing needed.

So no, what you're saying is bollocks. And no one ever claimed that speed limits are the only solution.

I believe there is cultural issue with boys’ upbringing. Recently my 8-year-old daughter was spending a week with her mother’s relatives in middle Finland. One day she sent me a picture of an old Volvo in a ditch. “Guess what dad, my cousin drove it off the road and I was in the car!”

The cousin in question is ten years old. I was absolutely furious that they let the boy drive a real car and that my little girl was in it with no adult supervision. But my in-laws didn’t see a problem: “He was only driving on a private road — there’s no risk — everybody does it here — this is the best way to get the boys used to engines and driving.”

In my opinion this is how you train teenagers to think that safety and rules don’t matter, and that they’re invulnerable. But I can’t change these people’s views, so all I can do is try to make sure my daughter doesn’t ride with her cousins from now on.

Here in San Francisco (and much of California), things are incredibly complicated.

Take this example: in SF, there’s a policy that prevents kids from attending elementary school in their own neighborhoods. Instead, they’re assigned to schools on the opposite side of town. In places that are practically inaccessible without a car. And there are no school buses.

Changing that policy has proven nearly impossible. But if kids could actually attend local schools, biking or walking would be realistic options. That one shift alone could make a huge difference in reducing car dependence.