cars

Speed Cameras = Safer Streets

- Adam Clare

small car
I live in a city where the police stopped enforcing traffic laws, so we’ve seen increased harm done by car drivers on people outside of cars. When the laws of the road aren’t enforced then drivers will break them – and more! So to make our streets safer politicians have turned to cameras.

Speed cameras automatically take a photo of a speeding car’s licence plate and send a fine to the owner. It’s a good simple system which generates revenue for cities while also encouraging drivers to not break the law and endanger their fellow citizens.

A systematic review published by the Cochrane Library in 2010 analyzed 35 separate studies from around the world and found average speeds in the vicinity of ASE cameras dropped by up to 15 per cent.

In some places, the proportion of motorists exceeding the posted speed limit declined by as much as 70 per cent, although most jurisdictions reported a reduction in the 10 to 35 per cent range.

The review also found a general reduction in collisions near speed cameras, with most jurisdictions reporting a drop of 14 to 25 per cent. There was a corresponding reduction in injuries and deaths.

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Humans Should Rank Higher Than Drivers

- Adam Clare

In North American cities the disease known as Car Brain infected urban planners and today we are dealing with the side effects. Cars have been purposefully prioritized over other forms of transportation from walking to gondolas to the point that some people think they “need” cars. What we ought to do in the 21st century is bring rational thinking into urban planning by gibing space to sustainable, future proof forms of urban transportation solutions. For now we need to change the conversation to be about people moving instead of car moving.

In theory, creating alternatives to driving is a win–win situation. The number of cars on the road increases each year, creating more traffic and pollution. Building more lanes for vehicles only makes things worse, while investing in transit and dedicated infrastructure for bicycles improves safety and reduces congestion. Driving makes people miserable, exacerbates climate change, and causes thousands of preventable injuries and deaths each year. While witty replies were piling up under Bennett’s tweet, three people were hit by a car in the Downtown Eastside; days later, a woman was struck at an east Vancouver crosswalk and was critically injured.

The case for modifying roads to encourage other modes of transport makes itself. We should all want fewer cars on the road as well as alternatives to spending hours of our lives (around 144 hours, or six days, each year, according to recent data from TomTom) inching through rush-hour traffic. So why don’t we? Because infrastructure, of all things, elicits not rational responses but deeply emotional ones. Changing our roads, even slightly, feels like an exhortation to change ourselves, because how we get around says a lot about who we think we are.

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People Who Ditched Their Car Are Happier

- Adam Clare
small car

There’s are individuals who advocate against making our cities better places to live because they fear losing their dependence on their automobile (car marketers encourage this too). We need to let car-brained individuals know that their lives will be better if they have more transportation options and that they will be happier too. People who got rid of their car for non-monetary reasons increased their happiness!

to reduce energy and resource consumption beyond technological modifications. One way to do this is to forgo ownership of certain consumer goods, such as cars. Although proponents of sufficiency claim that car shedding (i.e., giving away a vehicle so that the household no longer has its own car) might increase subjective well-being (SWB), there is little empirical evidence supporting this. This paper aims to help fill this gap by adding empirical evidence on the relationship between car shedding and SWB. Data from the Swiss Household Panel is used (2006–2017) with a fixed-effects model assessing the year-to-year changes in evaluative and affective well-being (life satisfaction, leisure satisfaction, joy, and anger) before and after car shedding. Separate analyses for non-affordability-driven and affordability-driven car shedders were conducted. Results show that non-affordability-driven car shedding has a positive effect on feelings of joy one to three years after the event. Affordability-driven car shedding, in contrast, is associated with a decrease in leisure satisfaction and feelings of joy up to three years later. Levels of positive affective wellbeing already decrease in anticipation of affordability-driven car shedding. A sufficiency measure like non-affordability-driven car shedding is not associated with reducing SWB, and this may have policy implications.

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Another Urban Myth Busted

- Adam Clare
small car

Road users always complain that other people are breaking the law, every group of road users accuess another of breaking the most traffic rules. Truckers think cars are the worst, car drivers think cyclists are the worse, and cyclists think all vehicles are bad.

When it comes to an objective analysis of which category of road users are the worst: it’s the car. Bicyclists are the least likely to break laws.

Welcoming the new video study, the Danish Cyclists’ Federation tweeted its pleasure that, again, evidence showed that “cyclists are not lawless bandits.”

Studies elsewhere in Europe have previously found that the image of the law-breaking “Lycra lout” is wrong. A Transport for London study investigated the “hypothesis that the majority of cyclists ride through red lights” and discovered that 84% of cyclists stopped on reds. The study concluded that the “majority of cyclists obey red traffic lights” and that “violation is not endemic.”

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Why 30 km/h is Best for Every City

- Adam Clare

People move through cities in whatever mode of transportation gets them from point A to point B efficiently. Car focussed developments restrained people’s freedoms by focussing only one form of transport, today cities need to incorporate as many forms of movement as possible. To help with this transition speed limits in cities ought to be limited to 30km/h. At that speed car drivers are less likely to kill with their vehicles and thereby ensure a safer city for all. What’s more it makes non-car based transit more efficient and thus reduces a city’s carbon footprint. There are so many benefits to limiting how fast a metal box can go!

When it comes to urban travel, 20 mph is a kind of magic number. It is under most scenarios the natural limit of how fast people can move through dense urban areas at an average clip. The New York City subway, which can and will go 55 mph on long straightaways—like the run on the 2 or 3 line from Times Square to 72nd Street—travels at an average speed of about 17 mph when taking into account time spent at stops, slowing down for curves, and the occasional delay due to train traffic ahead of us (other systems go faster, but they tend to be ones with longer distances between stops serving primarily suburban commuters; but by way of comparison, the London Underground’s average speed is, you guessed it, 20 mph). The average urban biking speed is something like six miles per hour when factoring in stops, but closer to 11 to 18 mph when in movement. E-bikes—which have the potential to revolutionize urban transportation and already have in many global cities—typically have a top speed right around 20 mph.

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