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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

> I'm all for 'shared roads' with a speed limit reduced to 20km/h which makes it unnecessary for cars to overtake scooters/cyclists.

1. People don't obey speed limits

2. In the US at least, there are people who aren't very wealthy living outside of cities.

They may commute 20+ miles into the office. Their retirement may depend on their house retaining its value.

Drastically reducing throughput of streets is nice for people who are only traveling a mile or two, but it hurts long-distance commuters.

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People don't perfectly obey speed limits, but lowering speed limits does lower average traffic speeds. When limits were reduced from 30 mph to 20 mph in much of Cambridge (the original one), local news reported that average traffic speed in those areas reduced from 35 mph to 25 mph.

Also in Cambridge, there’s a thing called “park and ride”. I have no idea how common park and ride in the USA, but Wikipedia says it exists. Summary of the idea [1]: out-of-town car park with a good public transport link to where commuters need to go.

Unfortunately, people whose retirement depends on their house retaining its value are probably screwed regardless — what happens when self driving, self-charging, solar covered RVs/mobile TinyHomes/seasteads can be mass produced (including interiors) by the sort of robots currently used for cars? Material costs for those should only come to about $35k, most of which is the battery, which doesn’t need to be as large as the one in a commuter vehicle like a Tesla.

[1] implementations vary in quality.

Well, at least here in Switzerland (where you would expect things to be done perfectly), Park & Ride are often half-assed effort that doesn't work that well.

Yes there is some obscure remote car parking. It takes 6-12 months to get through the queue of getting a spot (or more, depends). While waiting you have no idea how long till you get a place. They are almost as expensive as renting a private parking spot in the center. Then there is public transport - there is some, but far from ideal, and very far from motivating commuters to use this system, since it adds so much overhead that they prefer driving straight to the center of the town, even in densest traffic hours.

The message from city government cannot be more clear - we ticked a checkbox, but in reality we couldn't care less. City I am most familiar with this issue - Geneva.

There's the same situation in Europe too.

One option is to build large car parks on the outskirts of cities close to the highways and with good access to public transport.

This way people living outside the city center can still use their cars to get to the city, but can bike/escooter/walk or take the subway/bus/tram to get to work.

Even in Marseille, a city with terrible public transport, there are some of these, with new ones in construction or planning stages.

Parking is free or heavily discounted if you have a transit pass.

I believe this could work well in major US cities with a dense downtown area.

At least in the bay area this does exist. Many caltrain/bart stops have big park&ride parking places next to them.

This should be a several-story parking structure to minimize footprint.

The area next to rail/metro stations is the most valuable place to put higher-density housing. Surrounding the stations with giant surface parking lots is a horrendous waste of space.

Several places, like Daly City, it is.

1. And this should be what? An argument to against speed limits in general? 2. You read that this was a case for speed limit IN cities? No one said you should drive 20km/h on highways or country roads.

Just park your car at a P&R just outside the city and use a scooter / public transportation for the last mile.

The goal is to reduce instantaneous speed, not throughput (or even necessarily total travel time).

Because people don’t obey speed limits, the roads must be physically redesigned. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

Urban streets should be limited to 15–20 miles/hour. Any faster and cars are grossly unsafe for everyone else on the road.

On my street the average speed is something like 40 mph (despite a speed limit of 25 mph), and some cars drive 55 mph. At that speed cars can’t react in time to avoid obstacles in the road, and if a pedestrian (e.g. young kid) or cyclist gets hit by a car, they are almost certain to die. And yet this is perceived by Americans as perfectly normal and acceptable.

1. Is quite true, but you can improve compliance by designing streets in ways that encourages low speeds.

2. Can be solved with park & ride. Just make sure that the park & ride is significantly cheaper than driving/parking in the city.

If we believe we can have driverless cars in 10 years, I don't understand why we can't have smart speed limiters as a first step now.

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