from Hacker News

Paris speed limit falls to 30km/h

by nmc on 8/30/21, 2:07 PM with 55 comments

• by greatgib on 8/30/21, 5:34 PM

  Here in Paris, it is becoming a nightmare.

  The cityhall is led by incompetent and for a few years now they have started to do "media visible" demagogic actions without real thinking or discussion with the population.

  For cars for example, they don't really try to be intelligent and have the most efficient and fast mix of transportation. They just try to annoy as much as possible the car drivers even when it was not justified.

  And now Paris is dying, it becomes derelict and ugly, and it is losing inhabitants every year. And let's not speak about the abysmal debt that was created in a few years. So much debt, in fact, that the city hall is not anymore able to pay for maintaining the city, like fixing pot holes and city furniture.

  It is easy to think that the car is bad, and people are angry because they don't want to lose their egoistic comfort. But here you should see the overall situation:

  Except during the covid period, Metro and regional trains are most of the time in over capacity, late and unreliable. In addition to be dirty and sometimes dangerous.

  With the stupid urban changes, the BUS are blocked by the car policies and not able to operate well, efficiently and safely anymore. (For example, having bus stop in the middle of a street in a middle of a busy bicycle lane).

  Some commercial area are dying because no one away more than 15 minutes by feet could by anything there and be able to transport it back home.

  And for bonus point of idiocracy, it is said that Taxi prices will raise a lot now, because the taxi fares are calculated like this: higher than 30km/h, price per distance. Lower than 30 km/h price per minute.

• by chobytes on 8/30/21, 5:04 PM

  Sounds amazing. Wish we could get them that low here. Biking on the road next to multiple ton, blocks of metal going 30mph (48km/h) is never pleasant.

• by speeder on 8/30/21, 7:37 PM

  I live in a city with low-ish speed limits and recently they added radars everywhere.

  It is just a nightmare, because the country is big and hilly, cars tend to have gear ratios optimized to 100km/h, my car is a Peugeot 206 and it stalls often if I go slow as the speed limit on some roads, and it stalls hard, as in the engine stops so suddenly that the car was moving and suddenly it isn't, had people almost crashing on my rear multiple times, and I almost crashed on other people rears multiple times.

  Also some roads with low speed limit NOBODY drives inside the limit, because the limit is impratical so people use it as license to actually go faster than average, and when you are on those roads you are forced to go faster, if you obey the limit people WILL crash on you, and I am not kidding, I saw flipped cars there from crashes like that.

  And finally, to keep under the speed limit I must stay wiht my eyes glued on my speedometer and RPM meter, to make sure I can stay under the limit without stalling, multiple times I almost crashed because of that, and I believe the same applies to other drivers, because in the same places where this happened to me, I saw other drivers not seeing thigns and almost crashing or... actually crashing.

• by t-writescode on 8/30/21, 6:22 PM

  Honestly, for city centers, I'm pretty okay with this.

  Highways are for fast traffic (and in many cases, imo, should have higher speed limits here in the US); but cities should be way slower.

  Americans seem to like high (and still violated) speeds in cities and slow (legal but always violated) speeds on highways.

• by cm2187 on 8/30/21, 5:20 PM

  To be honest it is little more than symbolic. The traffic is so bad in Paris (traffic jam engineered by the same mayor) that the average speed must be well below that.

• by 1-more on 8/30/21, 5:39 PM

  Kinda want to go rip around Paris in the middle of the lane on my bike now. Look you can't get mad I'm going over the limit!!

• by josephcsible on 8/30/21, 2:40 PM

  To put how slow that is into perspective, it's slower than the speed limit on most residential streets in America, and it's about the same as the school zone speed limits that are only used at the beginning and end of each school day.

• by pkaye on 8/30/21, 6:31 PM

  My city in the bay area has been switching to more bike friendly roads. Mainly narrowing down the car lanes (or removing one lane) to expand the bike lanes. Also intersections are narrowed down to make them pedestrian friendly. In some areas the bike lanes have physical separation. But they just started this conversion and its a work in progress. But to be honest, I don't see a lot of bikers in our area using it and people complain but the work goes on.

  https://www.fremont.gov/3274/Walnut-Ave-Bikeway-Improvements

• by usrme on 8/30/21, 5:27 PM

  This is something I would more than welcome in my home country. A speed limit of 50 km/h is too damn high when people see it more of as a suggestion and regularly drive at 55 or slightly above.

• by ZeroGravitas on 8/30/21, 7:07 PM

  I wonder how much this eases the problem of self driving, if the car itself and other cars are all moving slower.

  Feels like you could reduce speed yet increase throughput.

• by freemint on 8/30/21, 10:07 PM

  I wonder what impact that will have on congestion, as capacity is lowered but also induced demands gets lowered.

• by mrlonglong on 8/30/21, 4:20 PM

  Lowering sped limits within towns and residential areas increases the chances of a pedestrian surviving a collision with a vehicle, especially heavy good vehicles. Too many kids and old people are dying just because they walk out into the road without looking.