Vox reports on a new law in New York that gives New York City the authority to lower speed limits:
Sammy’s Law allows city officials — rather than the state’s Department of Transportation — to determine the speed limits on their streets with input from community members. The bill will allow the city to drop the speed limit to 20 miles per hour on some streets in an effort to reduce pedestrian deaths.
I hate hate hate this. 20 mph! You might as well be riding a tricycle.
Also, I hate laws named after a child. It's usually a dead giveaway that it's the product of browbeating by some tiny but psychotic group of parents, not reasoned thought.
And yet, the fact that I hate it doesn't mean it's wrong. In Europe, the normal residential speed limit is 18 mph,¹ and they have way fewer pedestrian deaths than we do. I'm sure we could all get used to it too.
Personally, I still hate the idea. But that doesn't make it a bad one.²
¹That's 30 kilometers per hour in commie units.
²Plus I've never really understood why New York City has so little autonomy in the first place. Why does it have to get state approval for so many things? Good idea or not, I can't think of any good reason why they shouldn't be allowed to set their own speed limits.
Chicago is thinking about lowering the default speed limit in the city from 30 to 25.
I would hope lowering speed limits, and 30 mph on side streets is insane, is done for safety and not to increase revenue from speed cameras.
As for dropping the speed limit 20? I think that might be the average speed on NYC side streets.
I moved to Chicago just a tad over ten years ago and I still think folks up here drive like maniacs. But then again, I migrated from Columbia, MO, not exactly known for it's fast-paced life.
People in Chicago drive like maniacs. In most places, the speed limit is more a suggestion than a rule. In Chicago, it's a work of speculative fiction.
( /^ω^)/
+1
In Texas and Louisiana they cant even read that fiction.
What happens a lot (from memory of when I live in NYC) is that drivers get frustrated with the rest of traffic and anytime they get an open stretch of road, no matter how short it might be, they gun it to make up all the time they lost.
We have lowered the default speed limit to 25 mph on arterials and 20 mph on other streets. It is delightful. I used to zip around without thinking nearly as much as I should. I now am far more aware of the large numbers of kids, parents with strollers, and dog walkers patiently waiting to cross the street. At 20 mph, I see them half a block away and can stop to let them cross. It has made our neighborhood a completely different place, and makes virtually no difference in the time it takes to get from place A to place B—usually, you just get to the next red light a bit later.
20 is too low. 30 and 25 is fine.
"I've never really understood why New York City has so little autonomy in the first place."
You're a left coast guy. If you had been raised around NYC you'd probably have a visceral understanding of NY politics and its long and sordid history - the city, the state, the Port Authority and all the boroughs jealously guarding their little fiefdoms and income sources. For instance, why was the Tappan Zee bridge constructed at the widest spot on the Hudson River? Because the Port Authority gets any tolls on roads within 25 miles of the Statue of Liberty. The Turnpike Authority wanted the toll revenue, so the bridge was constructed JUST OUTSIDE that 25-mile circle. Just one example of the ridiculous situation.
The problem with New York City is that it’s in New York State, which is large and rural and poor; think of how the Feds take tax money from the Blue states and distribute it to the Red states, but on steroids.
Rockefeller and others took advantage of the city’s financial crisis in the 1970’s to transfer as much power as they could to the state and, as a result, there are a whole set of state laws that explicitly apply only to “cities with more than one million people,” I.e. only NYC. The power grab has been kind of blatant.
The only good news has been that as landlords and other bad actors outside of NYC have started to behave more like the landlords of NYC (I.e., if you never allow anything new to be built, whatever rental property you already own goes up in price) alliances like the Upstate-Downstate coalition have formed and the city finally has allies in the hinterlands.
Clearly they should have put the Thruway closer to the Statue of Liberty.
Did the Tappan Zee get renamed to Gov. Cuomo Bridge?!?!?
Yes. Google Maps agrees. Not sure how many people actually call it that though.
Not exactly. The Tappan Zee bridge was replaced, and the replacement was named for Cuomo.
I'm not an expert, but everything I've seen on the subject suggests that, over the last several decades, the United States—by substantially ignoring or departing from best practices in the area of traffic safety—has compiled a hideously bad record compared to other high income countries. Lower speed limits don't seem like they could do much harm.
And the quote suggests the speed limit in NYC will be dropped to 20 MPH on "some" streets. Seems reasonable.
I would not be surprised, but then again, I suspect I'm just a bit too old for my opinion to matter on this topic.
The 800-pound gorilla in traffic safety is SUVs that are so tall that drivers cannot see anything in front of them. That and higher speed limits are deadly.
A 20 MPH speed limit sounds irritating until one realizes they are talking about New York City, where it is quite reasonable. Most of the time one doesn't need such a speed limit in New York since traffic on the normal streets doesn't go that fast anyway. It is one place where cars going faster than 20 really are a threat to public safety. (I am talking primarily about Manhattan, it probably would still be irritating to have a 20 mph speed limit in most of Staten Island.
Having just returned from NYC I can vouch for that. The actual speed limit during most of the day is somewhere between 5-8mph.
Midtown Manhattan isn't all of NYC, and Manhattan itself is only a relatively small part of it.
There are also three vast boroughs that aren't like Staten Island and have a lot that isn't like Manhattan either.
This would make a difference in pedestrian casualties from motor vehicles if in New York if:
1) Americans obeyed speed limits
2) American cops enforced speed limits enough for #1 to be true
3) American cars/trucks had not bloated in size and weight to their current elephantine proportions.
Bloated in size and weight probably depends on when one picks for a starting point. I don't recall my family's '72 LeSabre being all that svelte.
That would though be an interesting chart - take pedestrian casualties normalized to vehicle miles over time going back to before the '73 energy crisis and see whether there is indeed a strong correlation.
It was svelte compared to a hummer. (or a suburban, or F250. And yes, I have neighbors who use an f250 to solely commute to work.)
No one drives hummers anymore.
They don’t need to, every auto manufacturer makes huge hulking SUVs and trucks that are much more “acceptable”.
American cops don’t have to enforce speed limits. Thats what traffic cams are for.
Maybe I'm just naive, but in my limited experience, the New York City city streets are not the same as the California freeways. I know! Weird, huh?
The Cross Bronx Expressway, Belt Parkway, Grand Central Parkway, Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Jackie Robinson Parkway, Prospect Expressway, Staten Island Expressway, West Shore Expressway and others are though.
Is NYC planning to reduce the speed limit on expressways and parkways to 20 mph?!
Lived ib New York for 30 or 40 years and have never seen the point of owning a car, but 20 seems reasonable to me.
Manhattan ≠ New York City.
The idea that less authoritarian and more autonomous lawmaking will result in browbeating by some tiny but psychotic group, not reasoned thought, is a testable hypothesis.
I've said this before and I'll say it again here. Definitively refuting the "psychotic group" hypothesis is easy. But there is one caveat, which is that people have to be willing to talk and listen to people they disagree with. When enough people do, we end up with something like what is described in the following podcast.
The link is https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/passion-isnt-enough/. I'm referring to the "Boston's Ukrainian Boss" story, which starts about 20 minutes into the podcast.
Why do you care? It's NYC. Your lifestyle and habits are clearly not suited for there, which has a density 15x that of Irvine in Manhattan and 5x that of Irvine in Queens.
But perhaps your hatred for this kind of law is a clue that explains why you're so mystified about pedestrian deaths.
20 mph on dense urban streets is fine. In fact, looking at a map of Irvine and how close together the houses are on curving, unconnected streets, I'd posit that 20mph would be appropriate for much of Irvine as well.
Even if you have to drive a mile at 20mph, it's only 36 seconds slower than going 25mph. This is a small price to pay for killing fewer people, but attitudes like "I hate hate HATE going 20mph because I feel slow" (because the roads are designed for speeds higher than they should be) are part of why we have so many pedestrian deaths.
In any event, at least on Manhattan, if you want to go faster than 20mph, you can take the subway. That is what it is for.
I cannot say I have ridden the NYC subway. I have ridden the DC Metro. To the extent the two are comparable, does one even achieve 20 MPH effective speed? Lots of stops on Metro at least.
DC Metro, like BART, is more of an automated commuter train with stops in the downtown closer together to act more like a local subway. But they are still mostly farther apart than most NYC subway stations.
The overall speed of the NYC subway is 17.4 mph. There are different speed limits in different places, even sometimes differing within in a stretch of track between stations. The highest speed limit is 45 mph.
Is that 17.4 mph the average speed of a trip on the NYC subway - as in board at point A, go some number of stops, and deboard at point B, or the average speed of a train while it is actually moving?
At least in the suburbs, the DC metro does get up to speeds faster than cars. You can see this on any line that is in the center of a freeway. Eventually the cars end up looking like they’re standing still, so either they’re going well below the speed limit or the train is going like 55+ mph. The problem of course is the stops: the train makes more of them because, duh, everybody inside the vehicle isn’t going to the same destination like they are in a car. I still find it faster than driving because I don’t have to search for parking at the end (which can also be a time suck in metro DC) but if you’re used to abundant parking everywhere like in Irvine CA, your experience may differ.
It's 55mph, not 55+.
If you go 55mph on I-66 you can see this for yourself.
American cars/trucks had not bloated in size and weight to their current elephantine proportions.
This is the root cause of so many accidents, IMHO. It's not just that smaller motorized vehicles take up less room on the street; it's also that current boats insulate their drivers from any and all kinds of traffic awareness.
Modern trucks have a high and *vertical* face which means the pedestrian will not slide off the vehicle, but instead, be thrown down making it likely the head will hit the road at high speed.
There should be speed limits for large trucks in urban areas.
All roads have a "natural speed" at which most people would travel if there were no speed laws. Traffic engineers are well familiar with this.
Speed limits seem to be set five to ten MPH lower than these natural road speeds. I suspect it is to make everyone guilty, and thereby enable the police to stop anyone, anytime, for any reason that they wish.
The city recently installed speed bumps in my neighborhood and called them "traffic calming devices" to get around calling them "speed bumps". I guess this was in response to all the dead pedestrians littering the roads in my neighborhood, and not because a paving company was able to somehow influence the liberals on city council to legislate morality.
God, the city council in Ann Arbor is relentless at legislating morality.
In the UK they call them "sleeping policemen".
Not sure about how NYC would do this, but I know a number of cities which would use it to raise revenue by further putting the speed limit below the "natural speed" and then putting speed cameras up and watch the $$$$$ roll in. I know from personal experience that Washington DC is particularly egregious on this matter.
Try the Speed Bump Olympics Youtube channel.
Sparks literally fly.
You can always reassure yourself, Kevin, there is no war on cars: https://jabberwocking.com/the-war-on-cars-is-going-very-badly-indeed/
My residential street used to be three lanes wide, with huge trees on the edges of the street. The city decided that cars are bad, so they re-formed the curbs to turn one lane into street parking, then they created two bicycle lanes out of the second lane in order to serve the three cyclists per day who use the street, and this reduced the street to one lane.
It makes it extremely difficult for two cars heading in different directions to pass each other, because they both occupy the one remaining lane.
This is why I tend to want to run over cyclists.
A small kvetch. I’m in the habit of setting cruise control to the speed limit (OK, the limit plus what I feel is a reasonable overage). Then I can keep my eyes and my attention out of the cabin and on the road and my surroundings. Watching people drive I have to concede most never check the speedo and have no idea of their speed. But most cars won’t take a cruise setting as low as 20, so I’d find this a pain.
There are virtually no NYC city streets where you can safely drive with cruise control on.
Well, not counting expressways (which do exist) there are some streets where the adaptive cruise might work for a minute or two. I do use it on some expressway type roads, partly to make driving more interesting.
I've sometimes fantasized that people who make laws could be given credit for the good they do, and fined for the damages.
One million dollars credit for every life saved, and fines set at the average wage per hour for every minute they cause to be wasted in the lives of the people subject to the laws.
You say you want to slow down traffic? Fine. Calculate the extra commuting time that the slower speeds will cost, multiply that by the wage rate of the person, and give credit for the lives saved. If the benefits outweigh the costs, then do it. Otherwise, no.
My fantasy can be criticized from a number of standpoints, including "what about Grandma being hit by a speeding truck? She is priceless", but in fact, human life is very quantifiable. We make those calculations every day.
The VOX article has this misleading and misguided statement:
"In the US, speed cameras tend to be unpopular both with politicians and the public, in part because no one likes getting a ticket."
It's not just because people don't like being ticketed. It's because of potential Constitutional violations, unreliability, and the general sense of invasion of privacy.
Cops handing out speeding tickets present an even greater likelihood of constitutional violations, inaccuracy and invasions of privacy. But they are less likely to catch you speeding.
We should try to be more honest with our objections.
A cop is a person making an accusation against you, unlike an automated system where there is no accuser to face in court. That's the main Constitutional violation, though there are others.
What is your opinion of the likes of automatic speed governors such as proposed in: https://sd11.senate.ca.gov/news/20240124-senator-wiener-introduces-groundbreaking-bills-slash-california-road-deaths-epidemic#:~:text=Senate%20Bill%20961%20requires%20changes,miles%20above%20the%20legal%20limit.
I wonder if Kevin's fondness and looking-forward-to self-driving cars includes their likely being programmed to not even go 10 MPH over the speed limit.
If you lived, worked, or just plain drove a car in New York City, you might not hate 20 mph so much. In some parts of the city, without congestion pricing yet, you would be happy to be able to drive as fast as 20 mph!
Needless to say, the 20 mph will not be applied to highways which allow for higher-speed travel over longer distances.
It’s NYC Jake. Fuggataboutit
Most police jurisdictions, including the one where I live (Northern Virginia), have a buffer of 10mph in giving out speeding tickets. A police official confirmed this at a town meeting I went to recently.
OK, maybe the difference between 55 and 65 doesn't seem like much, but the difference between 25 and 35 is a lot. I think the move to lower residential speed limits to 20 is based primarily on the hope that actual driving speeds on residential streets full of kids will remain under 30 rather than 35 or 40.
Most comments ever !!
I’ll admit I took the bait.
“Commie Units “
Bin living in Europe for a while, Western Europe, nato allies, and metric is just so much better. More refined. Elegant. Opposed to imperial (that word alone merits getting rid of it…didn’t we do away with royalty ??) which seems clunky and large. Like everything in the US ????
Have u noticed the US military adopted metric for a while now ?
Ponder that….why does an institution that relies heavily on precision use metric instead of imperial ?
????
Get over your old timey backwardness.
Thank you. Ever since learning about "the metric system" and how it works in grade school, I've been bewildered why anybody would cling to imperial units.
In the field events, I was one of the few who could handle the measuring tapes, which were metric. And parents always clamored for what it was "in feet and inches." Adjusting recipes is an annoyance: three tsp per T? 16 T per cup? Two cups per pint, 2 pints per quart -- but four quarts per gallon? Who thinks up this stuff?
And let's not even talk about ounces weight v fluid ounces...
You should have left out gallons, quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons and fluid ounces as the US never used imperial units for those. (In the imperial system there are 10 ounces per cup.
There are multiple imperial systems of measurement. England used to have two different sizes of gallon, one to measure wine and the other to measure water (other liquids were arbitrarily assigned to one or the other). When the time came to rationalize the system and go to just one size of gallon, the UK and its colonies chose the water gallon at 160 oz. and the US chose the wine gallon at 128 oz. just to be different. Both sizes of gallon are imperial measures. In both cases, there are two pints to the quart and four quarts to the gallon, but the pints and quarts are smaller in the US.
As for cups, my time in pre-metric Canada taught me that a cup has 8 oz. just like the US but a pint has 2.5 cups rather than the 2 cups that the US pint has.
And British Imperial measures are often different from America Love It Or Leave it units.
Its not for precision its so they can integrate with the weirdoes like you who live in fucking Ultramar.
Build streets for this speed and it won't seem like a snail pace.
Devoting huge 50-foot wide swaths of our neighborhoods to cars and expecting them to not speed is our own fault.
Then you can make specific streets designed for higher speeds that have grade-separate and protected bike and walk paths. These streets shouldn't have endless driveways but be connected to their own neighborhoods.
My street is narrow, one lane, limited on-street parking, and is 15mph.
Europe does have a Pedestrian Safety Law that requires vehicle’ s front ends to be less threatening and to include a “crush” space between the sheet metal and whatever hard structure is under it. The Cybertruck is the poster child for American vehicles that are not allowed in Europe due to all its sharp edges.
"Plus I've never really understood why New York City has so little autonomy in the first place. Why does it have to get state approval for so many things?"
New York state operates under a system of representation in the legislature known as "One Cow, Two Votes."
Ha! Actually the whole country including Presidential elections has an element of that system.
I live in an east coast city. I'm active in the neighborhood association, and the most complaints we get are about traffic issues, especially speeding. We did an online survey and people wanted speed bumps on their side streets. We asked the Dept of Transportation for speed bumps on 8 streets. Yet when the city did traffic calming on a major street near us, changing it from 4 lanes to 3, there were tons of complaints. Some people liked it but the complainters were more vocal. I guess something about you can't please all the people all the time, etc
"You might as well be riding a tricycle."
As other have said, the limit would only apply to some streets, it's actually faster than what you can drive in many streets due to traffic, and more to the point, while it sounds slow relative to a typical car speed, 20 mph is about the speed of an average man at full sprint, so please, spare us the "you might as well be riding a tricycle" drama.
If an average man were to run into you at that speed you'd likely end up with some bad scrapes, and broken bones, or even a serious head injury would not be out of the question. Now imagine getting hit by a 2-4 ton vehicle at that same speed.
This blog post is how I can tell that Kevin has never talked to a traffic engineer. Almost any of them will tell you that speed limits across the USA are too high in cities and too low on rural highways.
Here in Minneapolis, they made the speed limit on most city streets 20 mph several years ago. It works fine.
I wonder if dropping speed limits like this actually helps? There is talk of doing something like this in SF. It seems that when I read about traffic deaths it’s because the driver was speeding or drunk or high or on their cellphone. You can lower the speed limit and nice people will slow down but the scofflaws will still speed.
I think even the scofflaws reduce their speed to some extent. Meaning at a 50mph limit they'll go 70mph, at a 30mph they'll do 40 or 45, so at a 20mph they'll probably still do 30mph, however for a vehicle, stopping when doing 30mph will still be quicker than when doing 40 or 45mph, so it still decreases the likelihood of an accident, or the severity of one.
Santa Fe: not just a general 20mph limit for most residential streets, but also speed bumps all over many of those same streets.
People here bitch about all the crazy drivers, but I've never felt safer on those streets, as a pedestrian or as a cyclist.
First, I wonder how many pedestrian deaths are from the last left turning car jetting around the corner to get in a split second before (or just after) the light changes, plus cars that are just plain speeding above the 25 mph limit. For trucks, it's also big trucks with hoods that block the driver's view. Flat front cab over trucks are a thing for every size of truck.
Also NYC (five boroughs) has all kinds of streets. One way residential blocks with a stop sign at every intersection to streets like Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn where I live - three lanes in each direction, left turn bays, a planted median on each side and a one way street after that. It got lowered to 25 mph and it's a crawl in that situation. Slower speeds mean more cars on the road causing more congestion.
The real unaddressed problem here is double parked cars and trucks on pretty much every block, including on major through streets with one or two bus routes, and left turns allowed almost everywhere. Getting anywhere in a car is a slomo gymkhana. Drivers are so confident in getting away with it that half the double parked cars have no driver inside.
In Australia a federal agency sets speed limits on federal highways, state government agencies do it on state-funded roads, and local authorities do it on their roads (i.e. the majority of suburban streets). The system seems to work OK.