DCC want to *expand* the 30km/h limits

Iwannahurl wrote: »

Traffic speed has a much stronger relationship to road fatalities than traffic volume. Which is not to say that road collisions are not multi-factorial.

I agree, but if traffic is 10-100 times greater, then it has implications, both for collisions and street habitability. Traffic volume and speed also cause community severance and isolation.

I'm not justifying poor observation skills, but the top picture, has a completely non-expected design; it doesn't look like a speedlimit sign.

The middle picture has the dark car, turning left. The signs are out of the line of the driver's sight. The left sign will be missed, while the right sign is high and likely out of the line of sight also.
When I drive ( as i cycle a bit) I "watch the wheels" and the drivers. I don't look at stuff above my focus too much, and peoples vertical focus is much less than their horizontal focus, maybe 25 degrees V vs 100 degreesH with an amount of curvature in the corners to give an oval focus of vision.
These signs would be well suited for trafic coming from Georges quay.


The sign from Berlin, is well designed, and considerably harder to miss, but if placed on Burgh quay, will suffer the field of focus issue.

In France, speed ramps, or road paintings or the 'x' junction sign are used to indicate the 30 limit.

In Luxemburg, the 'priorite a droit' is used to calm traffic; this means traffic pulling out onto a road from a junction has right of way. So through traffic has to go slowly, to avoid getting sideswiped, and trafic pulling out has to take it handy to avoid through traffic drivers being careless.

Carawaystick wrote: »

I'm not justifying poor observation skills, but the top picture, has a completely non-expected design; it doesn't look like a speedlimit sign.

The middle picture has the dark car, turning left. The signs are out of the line of the driver's sight. The left sign will be missed, while the right sign is high and likely out of the line of sight also.
When I drive ( as i cycle a bit) I "watch the wheels" and the drivers. I don't look at stuff above my focus too much, and peoples vertical focus is much less than their horizontal focus, maybe 25 degrees V vs 100 degreesH with an amount of curvature in the corners to give an oval focus of vision.
These signs would be well suited for trafic coming from Georges quay.


The sign from Berlin, is well designed, and considerably harder to miss, but if placed on Burgh quay, will suffer the field of focus issue.

In France, speed ramps, or road paintings or the 'x' junction sign are used to indicate the 30 limit.

In Luxemburg, the 'priorite a droit' is used to calm traffic; this means traffic pulling out onto a road from a junction has right of way. So through traffic has to go slowly, to avoid getting sideswiped, and trafic pulling out has to take it handy to avoid through traffic drivers being careless.

Directly in front of the first signs are two standard speed limit signs.

SeanW wrote: »

The flip side of this is that in order to be fair, a MSL must be absolute limit beyond which a motorist will cause danger at any time of the day or night.

I think that might be too high a test. Would you say that you should be able to fire your gun anywhere you want, any time of day or night, however you want and the only restriction should be when you absolutely would kill someone?

While most of them are indeed very good guides to the appropriate street or road conditions (noting the substantial difference in functionality of a street versus a road), many of them are not, and as far I am concerned, there is no moral onus on motorist to obey those that are too low for the conditions, which I would say is roughly 10% of roads.

Then report those roads.

Additionally, because "It's a limit, not a target" is the unofficial mantra, by definition it is very difficult to have a speed limit that is too high, because if conditions do not permit safe travel at the speed limit, a motorist should know better than to go anywhere near it - for example narrow, twisty rural laneways with 80kph limits - those are entirely theoretical MAXIMUM speed limits because in practice to do so would be suicidal.

What about the "twisty rural" national routes with 100km/h?

The penchant for treating the default as absolute in Ireland even goes to the extent of downgrading a speed limit along with its classification when an alternative route, e.g. motorway is built alongside it.

Ther are a few things at play there:
* That is the way the law is structured.
* Councils are lazy.
* Councils usually get it wrong anyway.
* There is a change in the profile of drivers on those roads - the percentage of novice and 'Sunday' drivers increase, as does the % of cyclist and pedestrians.
* And indeed those roads should be disincentivised for long distance drivers.

I'm not against 30kph limits on principle but a more considered way to do it would be to leave the 50kph default but allow the case to be made for 30kph. The rules would be very simple;
1 ) You would have to show that the road/street has little or no "through" usage, i.e. people driving from one place to another have no reason to use the route in question, unless as explicitly part of the start or end of their journey. In the case of a town or small city, failure on this point would be a provokation to construct a bypass or ring-road to satisfy the condition, prior to the 30kph limit being re-proposed, and then accepted.
2 ) There will be an explicit beneficiary, either local residents in a residential area, or beneficiaries in a highly central urban area, parkland etc.

Take a look at the attached and tell me which bits are unreasonable. The first attachment is a submission I did to Dublin City Council, the second and third to Fingal County Council.

Victor wrote: »

I think that might be too high a test. Would you say that you should be able to fire your gun anywhere you want, any time of day or night, however you want and the only restriction should be when you absolutely would kill someone?

No, but your example is hyperbolic for a number of reasons:

1. Most people don't have guns
2. Use of guns is limited by both tradition and law to limited purposes, e.g. hunting or target shooting, on ones own land, or that of another with explicit permission. In rare cases, guns are used in self-defence and as a last resort use of force against tresspassers.
3. If you were to use a gun outside of those tightly defined contexts you would be almost 100% certain to cause problems, panic, damage, and casualties would be very likely.
4. Use of motor cars is also very heavily restricted and partly for good reason, before you can take a car out on the roads:
   1) You have to have a driving license
   2) The car must be taxed
   3) Insured
   4) NCT'ed most likely
   5) Meet a whole plethora of EU regulations, many of which are matter of extreme concern to those who like having cars that actually work.

If you are sweriously comparing exceeding an idiotic speed limit on a road to going out onto the road and wildly firing a gun around the place, I'm not really sure what the potential for intelligent debate is. I hope I missed something here.

Then report those roads.

Right, who do I report these roads to? The NRA? The Dept of Transport? Local authorities? What is the procedure for this? It should also be remembered that many of the limits I refer to are there intentionally as the result of the policymaking. If it were easy to "report these roads" I would expect one of the following things to happen.

1. Absolutely nothing
2. A response stating that the speed limit makes sense in theory and if I break them I've statistically killed 10 people and made 1000 fluffly kittens cry little kitten tears - according to some gob****es calculator.
3. The report would be passed on to the guards and GoSafe who would respond by putting on speed traps (an option that would be the preferred choice of some people here).

The rarest sound in nature is that of a government admitting "This regulation is too much." and it usually requires the government imposition to have some catastrophic consequence (like the Prohibition of alcohol in the US in the '20s) for it to happen, and even then only in the past as modern governments seem to be immune to logic at times and theres a view in many more quarters nowadays that more government is better government. So you will have to forgive me if I don't take your "report it" advice all that seriously.

What about the "twisty rural" national routes with 100km/h?

"It's a limit, not a target"

Ther are a few things at play there:
* That is the way the law is structured.

Yes, that's how the law and general practice works in Ireland. "Default" == "More or less absolute"

Take a look at the attached and tell me which bits are unreasonable. The first attachment is a submission I did to Dublin City Council, the second and third to Fingal County Council.

Some of that makes sense. The problem is that your documents contradict themselves, fundamentally and irreconcilably.

On the one hand, you have a map showing 30 kph limits applying to side-streets only, leaving Dorset St. the North/South Circular Roads, the Wetern section of the quays, and many parts of the old National road-streets unchanged. This I could actually agree with.
On the other, your documents claim the need to include arterial streets in a 30kph downgrade, as you have done here, with that map of the streets in London.

These positions are fundamentally irreconcilable ... which are you actually advocating? I'm asking because I don't know - on this particular point your documents are so incoherent they raise many more questions than they answer.

While there is much in those documents I might agree with, you lost me on two specific points:

On certain routes, e.g. the twisting sections of the Chapelizod Bypass, the existing limit may be inappropriate, especially in the narrow bus and cycle lane (formerly a hard shoulder), which has poor line of sight due to the relatively sharp bends and steep verges. It is exceptionally unsafe and discouraging for cyclists to be passed by buses and taxis at much higher speeds at close distance. It may be appropriate to have a 50 or 60 km/h limit in those lanes, as provided for in Section 9(1) Road Traffic Act 2004 and as adopted by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council on the N11.

If I understand correctly you would like to have 50kph and 60kph limits appled PERMANENTLY on the Chapelizod Bypass?

I admit that my experience of the CB is primarily in the off peak hours, when I lived in Dublin and used to drive between my "gaf" and Longford, I would use this road primarily after 8 PM and sometimes well after it, and the prevailing conditions at those hours dicated that even 80kph would have been a little bit conservative for what is at that hour and virtually abandoned grade separated dual carriageway. (Ditto for the Lucan Bypass).

You lose my support also with this:

However, there will still be some housing estates and a large number of country laneways with extensive ribbon development that will remain at 80km/h.

I don't know what kind of ribbon developments you are used to seeing in North Co. Dublin, but a lot of my problems are with urban peripheries that have a few houses side by side, so the deifinition of the "town" goes with these houses miles into the countryside. Much of the "ribbon development" was done in the 70's and 80's under the explicity understanding that the houses were being built along main roads.

Additionally, in most of these ribbon developments that I am familiar with, drivng your car past them you are more likely to be hit by lightening than even meet a pedestrian, or a cyclist, let alone be any kind of danger to one.

All the roads that you called for to be reduced from 80kph to 50kph may well be part of my problem I find whereby a speed limit makes sense in some bizarre theory, but is totally unrelated to anything that could be considered safe or considerate driving.

Victor wrote: »

Guess the speed limits on these roads:

Goodie, this should be fun

1. My guess (related to the motorway widening works that may still be ongoing) 60kph.
2. 80kph.
3. Either 50 or 60kph
4. 80kph
5. 50kph
6. 80kph
7. 50kph (due to its proximity to a more built up area to the South)
8. 30kph
9. 50kph
10. Either 30 or 50 kph

SeanW wrote: »

Additionally, in most of these ribbon developments that I am familiar with, drivng your car past them you are more likely to be hit by lightening than even meet a pedestrian, or a cyclist, let alone be any kind of danger to one.

This may well be true in some cases. But why? One of the main things stopping people from walking and cycling more on their everyday journeys is the fact that they would probably encounter quite a few motorists who consider meeting a pedestrian or a cyclist more unlikely than being struck by lightening and drive accordingly. I was at the athletics track at Skreen in Sligo last year for a running seminar. Over the course of the afternoon, as we were out on the track doing a few drills, people kept showing up in their cars, parking and walking round the track. Seemingly they were afraid to just go and walk on the country roads around their houses. I thought it was utterly bizarre. I cycled back to Sligo town in the dark afterwards. Nearly every oncoming driver I met was courteous enough to dip their lights, but a few weren't, and not everybody who passed me gave me much clearance (worrying at the best of times, but especially on a frosty January night). In general, I could see why a lot of people don't feel confident walking or cycling in rural and semi-rural locations in Ireland, especially after dark, lights or no lights. That doesn't mean that there's no demand for walking for cycling, it's just that it's latent or supressed demand that isn't met by current conditions. How on earth can parents let teenagers - never mind younger children - walk or cycle on roads used by drivers who think pedestrians and cyclists are rarer than lightening strikes?