This is complete bullshit. Do you live in NYC?? No, of course you don't, which is why you have no f'n idea WTF you're talking about. I do, and especially Manhattan is dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists alike. People get hit all the time. The singular thing that keeps speeds sane is all the traffic. So when there's little traffic on a single lane side street, let alone the avenues, it's taxis and Escalades busting 40+ always. This town is adult Disney Land, and as such every vehicle should have a tracker, charging tax by the f'n mile and minute, and tracking speed and charge disproportionately for speeding - 5mph over leeway and after that it's $500 automatic account fine per mph over that. Dicks. This city is a f'n goddamn shithole mainly because of all the insane amounts of traffic. God I love this town... but it is a shithole and cars are far far far more dangerous than anything else around here. Except maybe falling cranes. And the police. OK that's not fair, I'm white I have no room to complain.
> So when there's little traffic on a single lane side street, let alone the avenues, it's taxis and Escalades busting 40+ always.
While the taxis are a separate kettle of fish, the existence of off-hours speeding by local traffic f'n tells me that your own f'n neighbors do not agree with you. I suggest you f'n take it up with them.
In spite of what you think, speed cameras will only be a temporary solution if people do not think the speed limit is fair. This happened in California with red light cameras. Once enough people knew someone who got busted and thought it was unfair, there was enough political will to scrap them altogether even though there really were intersections that desperately needed them.
This also happened in Pittsburgh with parking boots. Once the city got the biggest scofflaws, they didn't have the usage they expected. So, they started using them for even first time offenders. Well, people didn't find that very fair, so cottage businesses to acetylene torch the boot off sprung up and cost the city a lot since they now had to buy a new boot every time one got torched. Very quickly, the city figured out that over-use of that enforcement tool cost more than it helped.
Enforcement does not create compliance. Enforcement is simply an adjunct to something that most people are complying with already.
If you want people to slow down, you have to engineer the road so that they want to slow down. Speed humps, roundabouts, curb extensions, etc. are all tools to make that work.
For city streets, it doesn't matter what speed people _want_ to drive. You need to be able to come to a stop when kids playing ball on the sidewalk run out in front of your car chasing the ball.
Of course, most of the time, there is nothing out of the ordinary happening, and so people happily drive 45 in residential zones. The one time something out of the ordinary happens, you have dead pedestrians. Hundreds of them a year in NYC alone.
So, what you are telling me is that we need to put fences on all sidewalks except at the crossings to prevent pedestrians from doing something stupid that could get them killed? That would save hundreds of lives a year, right? Much easier than getting millions of drivers to comply with speed limits they don't agree with, right?
Everything has a cost, and it's very easy to blow that off if you don't have to pay it.
And, before you suggest that no one would ever put up a fence like that, California actually does occasionally. Generally where pedestrians try to cross a 12-freakin'-lane-superhighway on foot.
These are city streets. They can't put up fences because the UPS guy couldn't unload, your trash couldn't be picked up, you couldn't get to the sidewalk after parking your car, etc.
> These are city streets. They can't put up fences because the UPS guy couldn't unload, your trash couldn't be picked up, you couldn't get to the sidewalk after parking your car, etc.
Exactly. There is a cost, and you're not willing to pay it. Fair enough.
However, that also holds for speed limits. There are costs. In this instance the costs probably appear as clogged courts. If you make traffic regulations too stringent or too punitive, everybody starts to fight them in court.
Who says? You?
What's the percentage of drivers violating the speed limit? Maybe that limit IS too low.
A speed limit is supposed to be set such that 85-90% of the drivers obey it naturally.