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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

As a pedestrian, I'm not ok with someone overtaking me at 30km/h with a 0.5m gap.

See? It's all discretionary. As should speed limits be (at the discretion of the driver, based on the current road conditions).

The problems you mention have other, better, actual solutions (e.g. cycling lanes, speed bumps before road crossings, ...).

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> at the discretion of the driver

Doesn't the cyclist get a say? Or the pedestrian? Why should just the driver get to decide how much risk to impose on everyone else?

In my city, cycling lanes are never going to happen. And even if they were to happen, I would never ever want cars driving 100km/h through cities.

Cars drive through cities at that speed regularly. They use highways. That’s what the people are saying. With better strategies for putting cars and non-cars at decent distances, we can allow for cars to go faster with the same or lower risk. The issue right now is that people in cars want higher speeds and pedestrians/cyclists want to go all over the road like cars don’t exist. These two things don’t work and thus we have to go with whatever is the slowest of the equation here (people jumping into the street). The annoying part is when there are low speed limits but almost no pedestrian or cycling traffic on such roads. Highways are frequently an example of that in the US. (Literally no pedestrians or cyclists anywhere near but speed limits are frequently 55mph in some places but 80+ in others - no reasoning for the difference)

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