one thing I don't understand is the claim that the average speed in city driving is 14 miles an hour, and therefore reducing the speed limit to 15 wouldn't affect things greatly; if 14 mph is an average, presumably that's largely due to the need to stop regularly... wouldn't a 15mph speed limit further reduce the average automobile's speed in the city to a crawl?

In the UK the posted speed limit does not apply to bicycles. If you go too fast you have to be done for "cycling furiously" which is discretionary.

Chris if I could afford it I would be more than happy to provide you with a round trip ticket to demonstrate how the hell you cycle on an 8 lane wide road with both right and left merges (remember we drive on the right hand side of the road) occurring within a few hundred yards of each other, it also has entering side streets, dedicated left turn and right turn lanes and traffic is moving at 45-50mph+ with cars dodging in and out of the various traffic lanes in a vain attempt to get ahead of everyone else, or make last minute merges.

You assume I haven't already ridden in such an environment before. Hint: The place I live is not the only place I've ever ridden a bicycle.

Now to try to keep this on topic, what are the prospects of this law actually being enforced? I ask this because most of the time, lower speed limits come about as a result of low complaince with existing speed limits.

I don't see too many pedestrians walking down the middle of the road. Most of them are on the sidewalk, where the speed of drivers on the road just isn't an issue. Frankly, if someone's too stupid to look both ways before they walk across the road, it's their problem, not that of those who are using the road.

Are you sure your local laws would agree with you? Where I live it is your problem if you hit a pedestrian with your car. It's a big problem unless it's clear that the pedestrian crossed illegally and the driver had no chance to see them. In my county and city the laws usually favor the pedestrian, and more of a burden is on the driver to pay attention. On the other hand our laws say the pedestrian must yield to vehicles if crossing in the middle of a road with no crosswalk. At an intersection, cars here must yield to peds even if there is no light, stop-sign, or crosswalk. Of course both sides have a responsibility, and having the law on your side does you no good if you get flattened by an SUV while crossing the road. Pedestrians should always look both ways and use crosswalks when available. Drivers should pay attention and yield to pedestrians in crosswalks.

When I lived in Washington, DC I was amazed at the number of pedestrians who were hit... and often killed, by cars. In some cases the pedestrian was crossing a dark multi-lane road in the middle of the road (not at an intersection or crosswalk), but in other cases the car failed to stop at a red light or crosswalk and struck the pedestrian in the crosswalk. The speed of the car was often a factor... traveling too fast to react in a high population area. There just is no need for that, and it's a good reason why cars should be kept to low speeds in areas with a lot of pedestrians. It's almost always the same story... pedestrian thought they were perfectly visible. The driver says they didn't see the pedestrian until it was too late to react. If they had been driving at a reasonable speed (10, 15, or even 20mph) perhaps they could have reacted in time.... but I have seen cars traveling through busy pedestrian areas at speeds more like 40-50mph in both Washington, DC and in the smaller city where I live today.

Personally I'm a big fan of speed humps (not the short but shocking bumps, but the wider and less annoying humps). Some neighborhoods around here have them, and they really do seem to keep cars at around 15mph. On my bicycle I barely notice them. My urban residential street is long and straight, and I regularly see cars going 40 or 50mph because there are no speed humps and no stop signs. There are also some streets with decorative roundabouts... where cars just have to slow down to turn around a small garden in the middle of the road.

Sean

Maybe so, since speeding fines are meaninglessly low now.

My system would slow people down alot.

1st ticket any speed over the limit- 1 year suspension $3000 fine.
2nd ticket any speed over the limit-5 year suspension $7000 fine.
3rd ticket any speed over the limit- lifetime ban, seizure of automobile
DUI/driving without a license-seizure of automobile, automatic 6 month home incarceration.
multiple DUI/driving without a license-seizure of automobile, 12 month incarceration.

That would slow people down, and probably save alot of the 43,000 people that are killed on the roads now.

That would eliminate a lot of city income from fines. With the low fines now, everyone is willing to risk
a speeding ticket. Cops can just write tickets like shooting fish in a barrel.

Those suggested high fines would probably cause near total auto driver compliance.

Other sources of local tax revenue would have to be found.
Theres no telling what new taxes would be created to cover this loss- maybe a tax on bikes.

But why? It is afterall a British unit of measurement.

The United States couldn't quite manage to completely shake off the shackles of occupation :rolleyes:

And why the smaller pints over here? Is that a blue law?

Besides the smaller pints the alcoholic content has also been significantly reduced since we know you can't handle the hard stuff in any quantity.

:lol:

When I watch car adverts on the telly they always have a driver driving the whizz-flash car in question at speed on a totally empty road which is just sooooooo silly because it's rarely true. Back when I did have to commute by motorcar I drove a 1954 Morris Minor and I found that the only real upgrade I had to do to drive safely in modern traffic was to upgrade the brakes. Speed was never an issue because traffic at rush hour never went that fast anyway, though I often did see following drivers almost frothing at the mouth at being stuck-behind-this-slow-old-bomb when I was actually travelling at exactly the same speed as everyone else. The most disruption to traffic came from drivers trying to out accelerate each other, running red lights and changing lanes at the last moment in a fruitless effort to get ahead. It seemed to me that all that was needed to get by in commuter traffic was a good sized radiator to stop the engine overheating in stop-start slow traffic, a really good strong clutch and useful 1st and 2nd gear ratios. The other thing that was great about Morrie was that she was much smaller than most of the overblown modern cars on the road which made her very easy to park because she would fit where the bemoths couldn't.
So from all this I find that I can readily embrace any proposed option to limit speeds in cities/towns/built up areas to 15mph as being a very good thing. Lower speed limits change thinking about urgency and having to be somewhere immediately. I would've thought that the electronic miracles of the 21st Century would've taken away a high percentage of the need to physically be somewhere in a particular timeframe. If people do their best to work and shop locally in their neighbourhood instead of driving miles and miles away to do the same thing life becomes a whole lot more simple. As much as possible I only buy what I can go and fetch on my tricycle. There are huge shopping malls and hardware barns in neighbouring towns, but I couldn't give a fig whether they're there or not and if giant Space Bunnies from Saturn came and stole them away in the night I couldn't really care less.
The first cars travelled at the same speeds as the horse and buggy that they replaced and I happen to think that it was a very good thing indeed.

Are you sure your local laws would agree with you? Where I live it is your problem if you hit a pedestrian with your car. It's a big problem unless it's clear that the pedestrian crossed illegally and the driver had no chance to see them.

Most of the cases of pedestrians being struck by cars don't get a mention on the news in this part of the world, but I remember one case from last year where a driver was travelling 70km/h above the posted speed limit and killed a pedestrian. He wasn't charged at all (not even a speeding ticket). That's a pretty accurate representation of the level of law-enforcement in this part of the world, which illustrates one of my big issues with the whole "lower speed limits" argument.

It seems to me that in most cases, the real motivation for lowering speed limits comes not from the desire to encourage people to walk or cycle more (which is a waste of time unless they already have the basic desire), but largely because nobody enforced the old laws, and so it's thought that some new laws might encourage them to slow down. If drivers didn't restrict themselves to the higher speed, I'm not sure what makes anybody think they're going to make any effort to restrict themselves to the lower speed.

Surely a better option is to first ensure that there is some level of compliance with existing speed limits (by punitive measures if need be). That would better determine whether a lower limit is necessary, or even desirable. Simply lowering speed limits without the enforcement achieves nothing, other than creating a more onerous compliance obligation and thus providing an incentive for those who now comply to start breaking the law.

I definitely agree with you Chris with the enforcement issue. Over the limit and you're toast, - that's how it should be. As for the issue of killing people with a car somehow being a softer crime than manslaughter or murder, - oy vey, don't get me started :rolleyes: