Usually these roads are so small, you can barely fit a car and maybe one pedestrian on one / each side. And these streets are quite common in residential area. As in the picture, usually there are light poles along the pedestrian street. the pictures pole is pretty small but normally they're big enough you can only circumvent it by going in the path of the car, and that's a Hotspot when people get hit.
I didn't even know you were allowed to drive 60km/h on those streets. Most people slowed down because the chance of damaging your car is quite high
Edit: also why big American car are not that popular in Japan. You can't even reach your house for many, if you get an American car
The really big thing in Japan is you're not allowed to park ("litter") your car in the street. In fact you can't even buy a car unless you can prove you have somewhere on your own land where you can park it. It makes a big improvement to walkability and general attractiveness of neighbourhoods.
Ultimately the limit is mostly decided by the width of the road. You can set a 10km/h limit but if your road is wide and straight, many will just go at whichever speed they feel comfortable with. The reverse is also true: I can bet it was very rare for anyone to ever reach 60km/h on streets like those shown in the picture.
So to really enforce slower traffic, narrow down your street to the bare minimum required for a car to pass through. Add obstacles as small turns or bumps. You'll also gain space for sidewalks and cycling paths.
Your edit reminds me of some years ago at a conference an American was asking in a boasting way what some European people thought of cybertrucks. I don't know if he owned one or worked on them or just liked them, but he seemed to want some praise on it. They tore into it including how big it was relative to narrow European streets and that they wouldn't be legal to sell in Europe. The guy didn't talk to them after that
In general, all cars are too wide now because they have gradually maximized their width up to a limit. The old Italian Fiat cars were much more nimble, of course.
I saw one in Austria for the first time just a couple of weeks ago. It had Polish number plates, so presumably it is legal to buy and register one there, and to drive it in other EU countries.
I'm surprised the limit was so high on those narrow, low visibility streets to begin with. In many EU countries the limit is 30km/h even on streets that are double the size, if they're in residential neighborhoods to increase pedestrian safety.
All of the posted limits around my area are 30 or lower on this type of street. It seems like the real change is if the limit is unposted the assumed default is now 30 instead of 60, which is probably fair.
Halved? So you could go 60 on narrow city streets?
In Netherland, the speed limit in cities used to be 50, and even in the 1980s, people were complaining that that was too fast. Most residential streets have been 30 (or less; the street I grew up in had a limit of 5 or 10 km/h) for some time, and Amsterdam recently made it the default for all streets with only exceptions for the biggest thoroughfares. They've also experimented with closing some of those thoroughfares.
Cars are bad for cities. It's a simple fact. The big advantage of cities is that everything is within walking or cycling distance, and the density is perfect for dense public transport. The only use for cars is to get out of the city.
Low speed limits make cars safer, but they also encourage safer forms of transportation. It's great to see this insight take hold in more countries.
Machines allow the city to become bigger. Cars are machines. To move stuff. And big machines like buses, trams, subways, planes can move at batch speed. But fail on granularity.
I would not say, cars are bad. For me they are the cells that bring the oxygen, to use another analogy.
What is missing is organization to avoid clogging. And i dislike the noise and the danger one has. This can be done all better.
In cities cars have no reason to exist. You can combine better scalable public transit (light rail, subways, trains) with bikes/scooters and you get best of both worlds.
In my experience, cyclists travel from 15-25 in the city. Very rare to find someone going 60. Even motorcycles don’t usually go that fast. There’s a lot of people on the streets of Amsterdam.
The biggest danger here is not terribly clear. Somewhere in the intersection of people cluelessly walking into the bike lane and bicyclists hitting the clueless.
The headline is a bit misleading because it was already 30km/h on many narrow streets.
Something about speed limits in Japan, almost no one follows them. I’ve seen police cars go past speeding cameras without their lights on while exceeding the speed limit by ~20% and everyone around them was doing the same.
This sounds like it would be a super dangerous place to drive then, but the speed limits are pretty low on local roads, and instead of driving the speed limit, people drive at a speed more similar to what you’d find for a similar road in most countries.
If you ever have the opportunity to drive in Japan, just drive at a speed you’re comfortable at and not faster than most of the traffic around you, and you’ll be fine. This isn’t legal advice though.
The one place I wouldn’t recommend exceeding the speed limit are those very narrow roads, many accidents happen there, though they’re rarely fatal.
Source: I’m working for a rental car company in Japan
Maybe in Japan it will be effective. Since their "zone 30" creation was apparently a success, it seems probable that people will generally comply. My experience in France differs.
I live in a French town where the default speed limit is 30 km/h instead of the national 50 km/h. In the street where I live, the drivers that willingly (sometimes they can't overtake bikes and slow cars) observe that limit are a tiny minority. Why would they, since there are no automated controls in the city, and police sets manual controls once in a blue moon.
My street was already at 30 km/h in 2016 when the global speed limit was introduced by the city council. I'm pretty sure the mean speed has increased since then, though I don't have hard facts to prove it[^1]. At first I thought that, since all road signs were removed except on the city borders, the drivers needed a constant reminder of a limit that they'd prefer to ignore. Now I just think that people soon saw that there was almost no risk in breaking the law.
[^1]: There was a study, but the methodology was so poor that it was inconclusive. They monitored the speed in a dozen streets before and after the change, but it was done for different lengths of time (one or two weeks), at different times of the year, and with explicitly no attention payed to potential popular events or roadworks. So the average speed was globally lower after the change, but in most streets it had increased!
Street bumps are much more efficient in lowering speed than either "automated controls" or "manual controls". You (plus neighbours, probably) could petition your council to put one (or several) on your street.
The elegant way to implement such a speed limit is to have the driver do a "slalom" between things like trees or parking spots set alternatively between the two sides of the street. It forces a low driving speed without the discomfort and potential damage caused by speed bumps.
Street bumps are a discomfort even for those who respect the speed limit, and sometimes for residents (more noise) so they don't have popular support unless it's a problematic area, with a low safety record. There are high tech bumps that incorporate a radar sped detector and instantly raise in front of speeding cars but there are costly and require more maintenance.
I pass three speed bumps on my street every day. I'm driving at low speed, and the bumps are designed so to not create discomfort at these speeds. I don't even brake before them. They only create discomfort to people who drive way above the limit, which is the whole purpose, and the bumps are very effective at that.
Street bumps damage cars, make noise and create even more pollution. I head of a neighborhood action were drivers were honking on newly installed speed bumps. Until they got removed.
Reducing the speed limit often does little in itself because the v85 (85th percentile of speeds) is more dependent on how fast drivers feel it is safe to drive. Streets should be (re-)designed so that the limit and drivers’ intuition match, but that, of course, takes time and money (and will). Still, it’s much more economical in the long run than active monitoring/enforcement.
It will probably never happen, but maybe it's a way to facilitate the creation of traffic calming infrastructures (chicane, bump)? There's not better way to reduce the average speed than being forced to pay attention to not ruin your car (see the sibling comment with a picture of a narrow Japanese road)
Good. Everywhere in the cities the speed limit in residential areas should be 30km/h and 60km/h for everything else. No need for higher speeds in dense urban environments.
Fun fact. In Lithuania there was a standat speed limit 60km/h. But we have this curiosity that if you exceed speed limit by less than 10km/h, there is no fine, just a warning. Basically "hey, could you please not"
Because of that de facto speed limit in streets was 70km/h. So to combat this, currently we have speed limit 50km/h in cities, which translates to de facto 60km/h
It's been the same in Germany. Literally everyone drives over the speed limit all of the time. 30km/h is somewhat stuck to when it's near a school but everywhere else people just drive faster because the fines were ridiculously low for the longest time.
In Sweden it's commonly 30-50km/h for inner city streets, I think it's a good sweet spot, 60km/h has 44% more kinetic energy than 50km/h, and since most time lost in urban areas is due to stoppage (traffic lights, intersections, etc.) there's minimal change on travel times at the lower speed.
> applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media report
>The measures apply to about 870,000km of roads that are less than 5.5 metres wide and do not have centre lines or median strips, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. They account for about 70% of the country’s general roads, the newspaper said.
So basically they went from no effective speed limit (since most people will probably not drive 60kmh on those kinds of roads if left to their own devices) to a specific speed limit on a bunch of tiny roads that the overwhelming majority of people were probably already going pretty darn slow on for the most part.
I suspect this will just result in a bunch of roads that really were overdue for it getting center lines and specific posted limits getting them and not much change anywhere else.
Anec-data, but I was in japan recently on my honeymoon, was in some big and small cities, and I was shocked at how fast people were driving on exactly these types of roads. I grew up in a neighborhood where the speedlimit is 20mph, which is slightly higher than this new regulation, so fwiw I think I can recognize when cars are going faster than that as they wiz by me.
So I’m pretty optimistic about this change, better than they way things are now at least.
The sign of an area with a dense population where people operate within close proximity to people-squashing-machines, and the people have rightly decided that reducing the severity of any potential people-vs-people-squashing-machines incidents is worth far more than the modest reduction in travel time for the occupiers of the people-squashing-machines, most of which never spend much time at 60km/h anyway due to congestion.
Frankly, anyone driving at 60km/h through narrow streets isn't driving with due care and consideration for the surroundings anyway.
> The introduction in 2011 of “zone 30” areas on a limited number of residential streets and along school routes resulted in a 30% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries
Not really. Taipei is basically a geriatric colony. You can tell because every year they shut down or limit the hours of nightlife districts, slow the MRT escalators down (more), spend public money on geezer karaoke social hours, etc. But not speed limits. It’s always the senile farts blasting their Mercedes down the street at high speed, losing control and plowing into school kids. There’s absolutely no political will to reduce speeds on residential streets.
Worse than that, driving can be a partially subconscious activity and people tend to drive at the speed that "feels" right. It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.
> It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.
Unfortunately that doesn't facilitate bad people's need to stomp other people with the state and without bad people who want to stomp people with the state there wouldn't be enough people on the bandwagon to get anything done. That's the unfortunate deal with the devil that is faced in pretty much every area of public policy.
The article don't have a good picture of a small road. Here's an example https://kuruma-news.jp/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/20230214_g...
Usually these roads are so small, you can barely fit a car and maybe one pedestrian on one / each side. And these streets are quite common in residential area. As in the picture, usually there are light poles along the pedestrian street. the pictures pole is pretty small but normally they're big enough you can only circumvent it by going in the path of the car, and that's a Hotspot when people get hit.
I didn't even know you were allowed to drive 60km/h on those streets. Most people slowed down because the chance of damaging your car is quite high
Edit: also why big American car are not that popular in Japan. You can't even reach your house for many, if you get an American car
The really big thing in Japan is you're not allowed to park ("litter") your car in the street. In fact you can't even buy a car unless you can prove you have somewhere on your own land where you can park it. It makes a big improvement to walkability and general attractiveness of neighbourhoods.
There’s a hack though, just put on your hazards and you can park wherever you like!
I’m kidding of course but I see many people do this and it’s super frustrating.
Also fyi, you can buy a kei car without a parking certificate
"The Secret to Japan's Great Cities" (Not Just Bikes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlwQ2Y4By0U
(thank you, cassepipe)
The Secret to Japan's Great Cities - Not Just Bikes
Consider at least giving the title of what you want to share and even to add a small description as to why this is worth anyone's time
In a street like that the even 30km/h is too fast.
In Germany that would probably be a "verkehrsberuhigter Bereich", Traffic calming area with a speed limit of 7 km/h.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street#Around_the_world
Even 30 seems a bit optimistic and 60 is insane.
It is insane that 60 was ever considered a limit :P 20 seems much more than needed
Ultimately the limit is mostly decided by the width of the road. You can set a 10km/h limit but if your road is wide and straight, many will just go at whichever speed they feel comfortable with. The reverse is also true: I can bet it was very rare for anyone to ever reach 60km/h on streets like those shown in the picture.
So to really enforce slower traffic, narrow down your street to the bare minimum required for a car to pass through. Add obstacles as small turns or bumps. You'll also gain space for sidewalks and cycling paths.
Your edit reminds me of some years ago at a conference an American was asking in a boasting way what some European people thought of cybertrucks. I don't know if he owned one or worked on them or just liked them, but he seemed to want some praise on it. They tore into it including how big it was relative to narrow European streets and that they wouldn't be legal to sell in Europe. The guy didn't talk to them after that
In general, all cars are too wide now because they have gradually maximized their width up to a limit. The old Italian Fiat cars were much more nimble, of course.
I saw one in Austria for the first time just a couple of weeks ago. It had Polish number plates, so presumably it is legal to buy and register one there, and to drive it in other EU countries.
There are some loopholes that exist for many european countries. The Netherlands has one cybertruck afaik.
> was asking in a boasting way what some European people thought of cybertrucks
Not a lot at announcement and even less now, not seen one in the UK (they aren't road legal).
I'm surprised the limit was so high on those narrow, low visibility streets to begin with. In many EU countries the limit is 30km/h even on streets that are double the size, if they're in residential neighborhoods to increase pedestrian safety.
All of the posted limits around my area are 30 or lower on this type of street. It seems like the real change is if the limit is unposted the assumed default is now 30 instead of 60, which is probably fair.
Halved? So you could go 60 on narrow city streets?
In Netherland, the speed limit in cities used to be 50, and even in the 1980s, people were complaining that that was too fast. Most residential streets have been 30 (or less; the street I grew up in had a limit of 5 or 10 km/h) for some time, and Amsterdam recently made it the default for all streets with only exceptions for the biggest thoroughfares. They've also experimented with closing some of those thoroughfares.
Cars are bad for cities. It's a simple fact. The big advantage of cities is that everything is within walking or cycling distance, and the density is perfect for dense public transport. The only use for cars is to get out of the city.
Low speed limits make cars safer, but they also encourage safer forms of transportation. It's great to see this insight take hold in more countries.
Machines allow the city to become bigger. Cars are machines. To move stuff. And big machines like buses, trams, subways, planes can move at batch speed. But fail on granularity.
I would not say, cars are bad. For me they are the cells that bring the oxygen, to use another analogy.
What is missing is organization to avoid clogging. And i dislike the noise and the danger one has. This can be done all better.
But i like cars. I like my bike also.
And after all, i like technology. :)
In cities cars have no reason to exist. You can combine better scalable public transit (light rail, subways, trains) with bikes/scooters and you get best of both worlds.
Its ironic, because the biggest danger in Amsterdam are cyclists doing well over 60 inside town narrow streets.
In my experience, cyclists travel from 15-25 in the city. Very rare to find someone going 60. Even motorcycles don’t usually go that fast. There’s a lot of people on the streets of Amsterdam.
The biggest danger here is not terribly clear. Somewhere in the intersection of people cluelessly walking into the bike lane and bicyclists hitting the clueless.
You probably mean over 30-40 km/h, not 60.
No I mean up to 60... km/h
https://youtu.be/aEHIqqaPIqI
And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:
https://youtu.be/FdoViT8-s5I?t=47
you get hit by one of these silent missiles, with an 80kg passenger on it, you spend weeks in hospital...you are older person, its life threatening...
Amsterdam bikes are terrifying :-))
more like 15-20 km/h
It’s not ironic. Once you remove the biggest danger (fast cars), fast bikes take the top spot.
The headline is a bit misleading because it was already 30km/h on many narrow streets.
Something about speed limits in Japan, almost no one follows them. I’ve seen police cars go past speeding cameras without their lights on while exceeding the speed limit by ~20% and everyone around them was doing the same.
This sounds like it would be a super dangerous place to drive then, but the speed limits are pretty low on local roads, and instead of driving the speed limit, people drive at a speed more similar to what you’d find for a similar road in most countries.
If you ever have the opportunity to drive in Japan, just drive at a speed you’re comfortable at and not faster than most of the traffic around you, and you’ll be fine. This isn’t legal advice though.
The one place I wouldn’t recommend exceeding the speed limit are those very narrow roads, many accidents happen there, though they’re rarely fatal.
Source: I’m working for a rental car company in Japan
Maybe in Japan it will be effective. Since their "zone 30" creation was apparently a success, it seems probable that people will generally comply. My experience in France differs.
I live in a French town where the default speed limit is 30 km/h instead of the national 50 km/h. In the street where I live, the drivers that willingly (sometimes they can't overtake bikes and slow cars) observe that limit are a tiny minority. Why would they, since there are no automated controls in the city, and police sets manual controls once in a blue moon.
My street was already at 30 km/h in 2016 when the global speed limit was introduced by the city council. I'm pretty sure the mean speed has increased since then, though I don't have hard facts to prove it[^1]. At first I thought that, since all road signs were removed except on the city borders, the drivers needed a constant reminder of a limit that they'd prefer to ignore. Now I just think that people soon saw that there was almost no risk in breaking the law.
[^1]: There was a study, but the methodology was so poor that it was inconclusive. They monitored the speed in a dozen streets before and after the change, but it was done for different lengths of time (one or two weeks), at different times of the year, and with explicitly no attention payed to potential popular events or roadworks. So the average speed was globally lower after the change, but in most streets it had increased!
Street bumps are much more efficient in lowering speed than either "automated controls" or "manual controls". You (plus neighbours, probably) could petition your council to put one (or several) on your street.
The elegant way to implement such a speed limit is to have the driver do a "slalom" between things like trees or parking spots set alternatively between the two sides of the street. It forces a low driving speed without the discomfort and potential damage caused by speed bumps.
Street bumps are a discomfort even for those who respect the speed limit, and sometimes for residents (more noise) so they don't have popular support unless it's a problematic area, with a low safety record. There are high tech bumps that incorporate a radar sped detector and instantly raise in front of speeding cars but there are costly and require more maintenance.
I pass three speed bumps on my street every day. I'm driving at low speed, and the bumps are designed so to not create discomfort at these speeds. I don't even brake before them. They only create discomfort to people who drive way above the limit, which is the whole purpose, and the bumps are very effective at that.
Street bumps are no longer allowed in France. Existing ones can stay, but cities can't create new ones.
Instead they create bottlenecks and turns to force cars to slow down.
My street has speedbumps since a few years and its been an amqzing improvement
Street bumps damage cars, make noise and create even more pollution. I head of a neighborhood action were drivers were honking on newly installed speed bumps. Until they got removed.
Reducing the speed limit often does little in itself because the v85 (85th percentile of speeds) is more dependent on how fast drivers feel it is safe to drive. Streets should be (re-)designed so that the limit and drivers’ intuition match, but that, of course, takes time and money (and will). Still, it’s much more economical in the long run than active monitoring/enforcement.
It will probably never happen, but maybe it's a way to facilitate the creation of traffic calming infrastructures (chicane, bump)? There's not better way to reduce the average speed than being forced to pay attention to not ruin your car (see the sibling comment with a picture of a narrow Japanese road)
France has much more black people than Japan, that's why.
Many rather wide streets in the centre of New Zealand cities have had 30 km/h speed limits since ... I think the 1990s.
For example here, Willis St in Wellington:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/8hHCLxCDK4C8U8Tz9
You can see it is already 30 km/h in the first streetview capture in 2008.
Good. Everywhere in the cities the speed limit in residential areas should be 30km/h and 60km/h for everything else. No need for higher speeds in dense urban environments.
Fun fact. In Lithuania there was a standat speed limit 60km/h. But we have this curiosity that if you exceed speed limit by less than 10km/h, there is no fine, just a warning. Basically "hey, could you please not"
Because of that de facto speed limit in streets was 70km/h. So to combat this, currently we have speed limit 50km/h in cities, which translates to de facto 60km/h
It's been the same in Germany. Literally everyone drives over the speed limit all of the time. 30km/h is somewhat stuck to when it's near a school but everywhere else people just drive faster because the fines were ridiculously low for the longest time.
In Sweden it's commonly 30-50km/h for inner city streets, I think it's a good sweet spot, 60km/h has 44% more kinetic energy than 50km/h, and since most time lost in urban areas is due to stoppage (traffic lights, intersections, etc.) there's minimal change on travel times at the lower speed.
In Spain it's 30km/hr in the city on most one-lane roads. Most people comply, maybe people will go 40 but I can't imagine people going 60 down them.
I remember reading a news story about how popular kei cars (compact cars) are in Japan.
It feels like these traffic laws and the local conditions really go hand in hand with that.
>slashed from 60km/h (37mph) to 30km/h
> applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media report
>The measures apply to about 870,000km of roads that are less than 5.5 metres wide and do not have centre lines or median strips, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. They account for about 70% of the country’s general roads, the newspaper said.
So basically they went from no effective speed limit (since most people will probably not drive 60kmh on those kinds of roads if left to their own devices) to a specific speed limit on a bunch of tiny roads that the overwhelming majority of people were probably already going pretty darn slow on for the most part.
I suspect this will just result in a bunch of roads that really were overdue for it getting center lines and specific posted limits getting them and not much change anywhere else.
Anec-data, but I was in japan recently on my honeymoon, was in some big and small cities, and I was shocked at how fast people were driving on exactly these types of roads. I grew up in a neighborhood where the speedlimit is 20mph, which is slightly higher than this new regulation, so fwiw I think I can recognize when cars are going faster than that as they wiz by me.
So I’m pretty optimistic about this change, better than they way things are now at least.
The sign of an area run by old people
The sign of people that live in a city that understand how dangerous cars are in a shared space with people.
The sign of an area with a dense population where people operate within close proximity to people-squashing-machines, and the people have rightly decided that reducing the severity of any potential people-vs-people-squashing-machines incidents is worth far more than the modest reduction in travel time for the occupiers of the people-squashing-machines, most of which never spend much time at 60km/h anyway due to congestion.
Frankly, anyone driving at 60km/h through narrow streets isn't driving with due care and consideration for the surroundings anyway.
From the article:
> The introduction in 2011 of “zone 30” areas on a limited number of residential streets and along school routes resulted in a 30% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries
This benefits everyone.
They're old because they didn't get hit by a car.
Not really. Taipei is basically a geriatric colony. You can tell because every year they shut down or limit the hours of nightlife districts, slow the MRT escalators down (more), spend public money on geezer karaoke social hours, etc. But not speed limits. It’s always the senile farts blasting their Mercedes down the street at high speed, losing control and plowing into school kids. There’s absolutely no political will to reduce speeds on residential streets.
What? It’s the children who get run over by speeding assholes.
that might be news to you but those people don't give a shit about speed limits
Worse than that, driving can be a partially subconscious activity and people tend to drive at the speed that "feels" right. It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.
> It's why the best approach to slowing motor vehicles in places with people walking is to physically design the road to feel uncomfortable driving too fast, rather than slap a 20mph sign on a wide straight road.
Unfortunately that doesn't facilitate bad people's need to stomp other people with the state and without bad people who want to stomp people with the state there wouldn't be enough people on the bandwagon to get anything done. That's the unfortunate deal with the devil that is faced in pretty much every area of public policy.
Arrest them, take away their cars. Repeat until they do "give a shit".