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Lowering urban speed limits an exercise in futility

Driving.ca

Lorraine Sommerfeld1 day ago

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Driving.ca

Across Canada, the default urban speed
limit is 50 km/h. It drops in school zones and construction zones, but by and
large 50 it is.

You can read years of arguments for
raising the limits on our major highways — nobody drives the limit anyway, and
if they do, you know where to find them: in the passing lane. In some denser
residential areas in parts of Toronto, limits are already at 40 km/h, but some
want to lower these to 30 km/h.

Dueling agencies are at work here. The
Toronto Board of Health relays the sobering fact that if a person is hit by a
car going 50 km/h, they have an 85 per cent chance of dying. If that same car
were only going 30, the risk falls to five per cent. It’s hard to argue the fact
that going slower would save lives.

Read more: Why
no one drives like a saint all the time

Except this argument is being made in a
fact vacuum, and it’s unrealistic and probably unviable. Slapping up signs
telling everybody to now go 30 would have as much impact as telling people on
the highway to go 80 km/h. Drivers aren’t computer models. Drivers aren’t
mathematical equations. And quite honestly, humans in general, whether they’re
pedestrians, cyclists or drivers, aren’t the most predictable lot, either.

Human behavioural studies (NYU, Yale
among them) present some fairly obvious and consistent findings: people obey
laws that make sense to them. Having the majority of a populace obeying the laws
makes everyone happier and safer. Make laws that make sense and you’ll spend
less money enforcing them and have more people voluntarily following them.

Const. Kevin Woytas trains a radar gun
on vehicles along Alberta’s Highway 63.

Get in your car and drive 30 km/h.
You’ll see immediately why this will be a ridiculous law. Unless you’re in a
parking lot or a school zone, it’s ludicrous. Politicians love to look like
they’re scoring points with this kind of thing, but giving your constituents a
false sense of security is a terrible way to chase re-election.

Those who work in transportation in
Toronto know simply dropping speed limits to crawl levels won’t achieve much.
While not refuting the Board of Health’s numbers, they’re tasked with the bigger
problem of explaining there are many moving parts to this issue. The goal is to
make sure no car makes contact with a pedestrian or cyclist — at all. Speed
traps, traffic calming medians, and speed bumps all have limited effect: police
can’t monitor thousands of residential streets, and owning your home doesn’t
mean you own the road it sits on. They say reducing speeds will have to come
with more speed bumps and increased enforcement. Cha-ching.

Speed bumps make people erratic; they
speed up in between and then nail their brakes to tackle the bump. Irritated
drivers are dangerous too. High clearance SUVs can absorb the bumps, but if you
think it’s a pain getting your low-clearance car over them, imagine emergency
vehicles loaded with life-saving equipment trying to race against a clock down a
street littered like an obstacle course.

Police regularly set up speed traps in
school zones, where the limit is 30 km/h to protect children walking to and from
their classrooms.

Discussion about lowering inner city
speed limits is almost always predicated by a death, usually of a child. It’s
understandable, but it’s also not the reason to change laws. Human pain does not
make for good law, just as piles of soggy teddy bears and clutches of dead
flowers do not make for noble tributes. It does not make you cold to want to
base governance on good practice rather than emotion. The sad truth about any
law is that “good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while
bad people will find a way around the laws.” Plato said that, and he’d never
even seen a car. The people who are going to speed down your street are
still going to speed down your street.

Also read: Distracted
driving is the real danger, not speed

We also have to consider the other side
of the urban equation: pedestrians and cyclists have an obligation to be aware
of their surroundings. Parents have a duty to teach their kids how to safely
cross a street and obey traffic signals. People walking along, head tucked down
into their phone are nearly as dangerous as drivers doing the same thing.
Cyclists who want to be counted under the protection of traffic law have to obey
it. The vehicle will always inflict the most damage, but that doesn’t mean the
driver was always in the wrong.

I live in a dead end court, and
successive generations of kids have always been taught that a street is not a
playground, no matter how it appears. The worst offenders for speeding have
always been people who lived here. Always.

I’ll wager a bet the biggest problem
isn’t how fast people are travelling, it’s what they’re doing while driving.
Stop texting. Stop turning to look at your passengers. Stop trying to broker a
deal over your Bluetooth. Stop punching the buttons on your GPS.

Better yet, stop speeding on local
streets so neighbourhood petitions and grandstanding politicians don’t have the
ammunition they need to lower them to a crawl.

http://www.lorraineonline.ca/

@TweeetLorraine

Related: Motoring TV looks at
all-weather tires

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