Look, you’re not wrong from a moral perspective; it’s just that your sentiment isn’t useful either.
When roads are designed appropriately, the vast majority of people don’t speed and the ones that do are incorrigible. In this, case, trying to shame the latter group to stop speeding is ineffective.
Conversely, when roads are designed inappropriately, the vast majority of people do speed. In this case, successfully shaming a few of them into driving the speed limit only makes the situation worse because having a wide disparity of speeds is even more dangerous than everybody uniformly exceeding the speed limit.
The bottom line is that, from a traffic engineering perspective, trying to shame people into not speeding simply doesn’t ever improve the situation. Moreover, bringing it up in a discussion of how to fix speeding is actively unhelpful because it’s a distraction that serves to dissuade policymakers from forking out the money for the solutions that do work!
@grue Yes, yes, yes. I agree with all of this. But I also think people should realize that speeding is bad and that lowering car speeds is good, so all these changes can be implemented. I’m tired of people getting angry because they got a fine for speeding because they were, you know, speeding and putting people in danger.
No, see, that doesn’t follow because not “all” changes are good. Only modifying the geometry of the street is good. Changing the number on the speed limit sign should only ever be done in conjunction with that geometry change, and even then it’s just an afterthought.
It’s really, really, really important not to give the people in control of the budget any excuse to think that they can cost-cut “fix the geometry” down to “install lower speed limit signs” and still have it count as accomplishing something!
@grue I 100% agree with you. Still, people shouldn’t speed. And they should know that if they speed they’re more likely to kill someone.
Look, you’re not wrong from a moral perspective; it’s just that your sentiment isn’t useful either.
When roads are designed appropriately, the vast majority of people don’t speed and the ones that do are incorrigible. In this, case, trying to shame the latter group to stop speeding is ineffective.
Conversely, when roads are designed inappropriately, the vast majority of people do speed. In this case, successfully shaming a few of them into driving the speed limit only makes the situation worse because having a wide disparity of speeds is even more dangerous than everybody uniformly exceeding the speed limit.
The bottom line is that, from a traffic engineering perspective, trying to shame people into not speeding simply doesn’t ever improve the situation. Moreover, bringing it up in a discussion of how to fix speeding is actively unhelpful because it’s a distraction that serves to dissuade policymakers from forking out the money for the solutions that do work!
@grue Yes, yes, yes. I agree with all of this. But I also think people should realize that speeding is bad and that lowering car speeds is good, so all these changes can be implemented. I’m tired of people getting angry because they got a fine for speeding because they were, you know, speeding and putting people in danger.
True.
Also true.
No, see, that doesn’t follow because not “all” changes are good. Only modifying the geometry of the street is good. Changing the number on the speed limit sign should only ever be done in conjunction with that geometry change, and even then it’s just an afterthought.
It’s really, really, really important not to give the people in control of the budget any excuse to think that they can cost-cut “fix the geometry” down to “install lower speed limit signs” and still have it count as accomplishing something!
@grue We agree on everything, I don’t know why you keep arguing.