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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

My city has been limited to 30 km/h for a few years now.

As someone who is mostly by bike and by foot, sometimes in public transports and occasionally in a car, that has been a good thing.

The city is small and full of traffic lights, and there's a ring road, 50 to 30 km/h inside the city can't be increasing travel time too much for cars. I don't think it was possible to drive at 50 km/h in most of the city anyway.

(and the city could use less air pollution, I guess it helps a bit on this aspect in addition to the noise and the safety).

Congratulations to Amsterdam :-)

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I'm fan of the concept of superblocks. You can drive inside them, but not between them. Want to go from block A to D? Can't drive through B and C. Need to drive out to the ring road, then follow it and into block D.

Makes it so that no through traffic at speed goes through the areas where people live and stay.

The mere suggestion of this in Oxford has caused people to go completely mental and invoke all sorts of WEF conspiracy theories. It might work but the public transport alternatives need to be the working default first.

I heard the one about 15 minutes cities. Which is like normal quality of life aspiration, but then tinfoil hat goes “… and then they will put a wall around it”. It’s ridiculous

The crazy thing is this conspiracy is being spread by the people who bemoan the loss of freedom for their children/grandchildren -- it's not safe for children to play outside like we did, too many cars; used to be able to send the kids down to the shop to buy pop, etc.

it's not just tin-foil-hat loons, it's now also the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: https://uk.news.yahoo.com/rishi-sunak-claims-15-minute-10263...

It's also being rolled out in berlin and what I saw it's really, really great. But there are drawbacks. People living on the main streets get more traffic and pollution and some violently oppose it. Public transit and emergency vehicle access can be solved. It's really not that easy to implement because car drivers will try to drive through anyway, so you have to install modal filters everywhere (elements that bike traffic can flow through but not car traffic). But then you have to think hard about public transit and emergency vehicles. So it's not really that cheap.

I think you have to reduce car-dependency first, afterwards you can roll them out because the acceptance is higher and advocacy groups form.

Yeah, that makes a lot more sense to me. I'm 90% a bike person and still I am against a blanket 30kph speed limit in my city. I'm not against making all smaller residential streets a 30 zone, but the ring roads and the radial ones going to the center are kinda long.

Maybe it works out if it's a matter of fact and you move there and can find some place to live with awesome public transport but while I think ours is generally good there are some real holes in the coverage, especially the more you go towards the edge of the city. it's just not comparison. Subway stations are not 800m apart but more like 3.5km

It will be interesting to see how this all spans out, it can happen in 50 years that downtown areas will be less polluted and more silent than suburbs.

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