Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

The guy at Not Just Bikes will tell you that enforcement will never work nor happen and that the only way to get people to slow down is to design the road so it doesn't feel safe to drive fast.

The road next to my house has a speed limit of 20mph but most cars go 45mph because it's a straight road 4 lanes but space for 6. No bumps, no curves, wide. Effectively it feels like you should be driving fast. If I go the speed limit in the center lane because I'm going to turn left people will get angry and speed around at 60mph pissed off

Just out of curiousity, do you signal that you are going to turn left when you slow down compared to the average of the other drivers?

I don’t know about this person’s experience, but there are an overwhelming number of drivers here that don’t notice signals. I can be in the right lane (two lanes in both directions), signal a right turn, slow to turn and they’ll still ride right up on me and look pissed rather than go around.

It gets worse, some drivers seem to adopt an adversarial attitude towards the usage of turn signals and will deliberately accelerate or do something else to make things more difficult to you.

Yeah, unfortunately this is true. A street near my house has a limit of 40mph and people would regularly drive 60 mph+, sometimes someone would pass me doing 65+mph (it's a no-passing residential road).

Eventually someone died, and they added a lot of traffic-calming changes to the road. It's much nicer now, but a shame that someone had to die to change it.

>The guy at Not Just Bikes will tell you that enforcement will never work nor happen and that the only way to get people to slow down is to design the road so it doesn't feel safe to drive fast.

This makes sense. Though annoying to drive over, speed bumps work. Also, my parents small town converted their main street from a four lane to a slalom-style two-lane and it so much nicer to walk around because people have to drive slowly. Not quite car-free, which I'd prefer, but it's a decent compromise.

Agree, but also disagree.

Our neighboring town has a beautiful system in place. It tracks your average speed over +- 100m. If you speeded, you get a fine and even better: the light always turns red and you have to wait for a minute. If you run that red light, you get another (heftier) fine. If you drive normally, the light is always green.

It's beautiful. People actually drive slowly and safely there. And good, because that system is installed perfectly around the school and doesn't hinder anyone else. If they did this anywhere else you'd argue it's a moneygrab, but this is imo a great way to actually get people to drive slow in a school zone.

In contrast the only thing our town has done is install a bunch of big concrete flower boxes (?) that hinder your vision and causes conflicts on the road. The idea being that you'd have to slow down and that you're no longer on a straight wide road. It's absolutely only made things worse. You need to give way to others but you literally can't see them, or you need to pull weird manoeuvers to let them pass. And in the meantime cyclists need to swerve around them or are hidden behind those boxes. It's terrible.

If they’re behind me, they’re risking their own liability.

Otherwise (changing lanes, left turn across traffic), I think it’s more “not ahead of ME!” than about the signal itself.

If two cars travelling the same direction contact each other such that the front axle of one car bumps the rear axle of the other (the car in front), it's usually the car in front that has the safety problem. This is the same principle behind the PIT maneuver.

Speed bumps are a crazy invention because they tell you what humanity is like. Let's make this road worse for driving because many drivers don't care about safety but do care about damaging their cars. I am reminded of this every time I see a speed bump.

>Our neighboring town has a beautiful system in place. It tracks your average speed over +- 100m. If you speeded, you get a fine and even better: the light always turns red and you have to wait for a minute. If you run that red light, you get another (heftier) fine. If you drive normally, the light is always green.

I have never seen a system like that. What town? Or what system?

Irrelevant. They're going 45+ in a 20mph zone.

Sounds great! Now if I could just get that installed in 100% of California

ATM we basically have lawless highways in California. Every time I go out I see outrageous traffic violations. People driving 15-20 mph over the speed limit on the freeway, weaving in and out of the carpool lane. People pulling into the left turn lane at a signal, then just crossing on a red light as soon as they think it's safe. People passing in the gutter (no lane). People cutting across 3-4 lanes of the freeway at ~70mph, across the painted barrier to exit a freeway.

I'd say the average of these incidences I see is 3 per drive and that doesn't include just you average weaver or tailgater. In other words, I take my car out for a 10-15 minute drive, (so 20-30 mins round trip) and see someone do something outrageous endangering other people's lives 3 times per drive on average.

Many places on California are more or less lawless, not just the freeways...

It's a basic trajectory control system (using ANPR cameras), combined with a red light camera. They read your license plate twice in different locations to determine how long you took to drive a section of road. They're very common here in Belgium, but it being coupled to a red light is not that common. They even have a sign that says "too fast = red light + fine".

Sounds like it's an issue with the speed limit.

I am not from the US but have driven a lot more in the US than the average tourist (maybe x0,000 miles). What amazes me is not only those traffic violations but how often they're justified on forums (including HN) because of things like 'it's unsafe to drive the limit when everyone's going faster'. Over there, people seem to drive with a deathwish.

It's quite jarring to come home and drive an expressway in South Australia where the "speeders" are doing 105 km/h on a 100 km/h route. Someone doing significantly more is a rarity where I live.

I don't think that's necessarily true if it's a street also being used by cyclists, crossed by pedestrians, etc.

If there's a rear end collision severe enough that the axles are contacting each other, both parties have a safety problem.

I wasn't talking about that. I meant lateral motion

Is it really a beautiful system if it involves adding and maintaining a completely unnecessary traffic light? That isn’t free and costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over its lifetime.

I’m not saying it’s not worth it, even 1 life saved would make it worth it, but it’s not beautiful.

No, they're going 20-something mph in perhaps a 20mph zone: the author stated kilometers per hour.

I didn’t mention safety issues

I remember in Europe saw a lot of roads constructed that way to prevent fast driving, e.g. lots of small roundabouts. It works pretty well.