In an effort to make walking safer in NYC, the NYC City Council is set to vote on an ordinance that will reduce the residential speed limit from 30 mph to 20 mph. 128 pedestrians were killed last year in NYC. As expected, the City's transportation department has opposed the move. However, the part I am ashamed of are the reader comments citing everything from a covert attempt to write more speeding tickets, to a communist take-over, to just a stepping stone on the way to banning driving completely. I am scared to death that these dumbasses are part of the Tea Party with me.

Council Working to the Reduce Speed Limit on City Streets | Politicker (http://politicker.com/2013/11/council-working-to-the-reduce-speed-limit-on-city-streets/)

It would help if people didn't decide to cross the street wherever they please. It is dark by the time we leave work now and just outside of downtown people cross in the middle of the street between traffic constantly. Monday after work people dressed in all dark colors are just standing in the middle of the left turn lane (fifth lane) on Colfax waiting for traffic to clear when there is a light and crosswalk 30 feet away. The Denver Post had a story a year or so ago about the pedestrian-car fatalities, something like 70% of them were not at crosswalks.

It would help if people didn't decide to cross the street wherever they please. It is dark by the time we leave work now and just outside of downtown people cross in the middle of the street between traffic constantly. Monday after work people dressed in all dark colors are just standing in the middle of the left turn lane (fifth lane) on Colfax waiting for traffic to clear when there is a light and crosswalk 30 feet away. The Denver Post had a story a year or so ago about the pedestrian-car fatalities, something like 70% of them were not at crosswalks.

Ahh, but what if there aren't enough crosswalks? Or if they aren't marked or made in some way more visible?

In NYC last month a cab almost struck me. While I was on the sidewalk. The roadrage of those cabbies is astounding. I was about a foot or so in on the curb waiting to cross. (Busy sidewalk so I couldn't stand any further back as about 50 other people were also waiting to cross). A car was blocking the middle lane. Cab driver gets angry and swerves around him jumping his tire up onto the curb and coming about 2 inches away from running my foot over.

Doesn't matter what they lower the speed limit to...a 20 mph collision will feel just as good as a 30mph one.

cafeboeuf beat me to it. That statistic is a little (okay - a lot) miss leading because the vast vast vast vast majority of intersection don't have crosswalks at all.

Doesn't matter what they lower the speed limit to...a 20 mph collision will feel just as good as a 30mph one.

Trust me - you feel the difference between 20 mph and 30 mph.


According to the group Transportation Alternatives, pedestrians have an 80 percent chance of surviving being hit by a car traveling 30 miles per hour and a 98 percent chance of survival if the car is traveling 20 miles per hour.

Either way, I don't want to be hit. There is a problem in NYC, but I don't think the speed limits are the problem.

Having spent way more time in a body cast as a child than I care to recall, speeds way, way under 20 can muck up a Christmas. On the bright side, Santa really steps up his game if you're a kid in a hospital bed on Christmas and the cool nurses actually give you back the Star Trek flying disk ammo no matter how many times you shoot at them.

Either way, I don't want to be hit. There is a problem in NYC, but I don't think the speed limits are the problem.

The speed limit reduction is just part of the equation in NYC to undo what Robert Moses did to it.

In residential area you should be just idling through just like one would through a parking lot. I do that based on the fact that very few parents teach their kids street safety anymore. I can't count the number of time times I have seen a kid step out in to traffic. I was driving down Air Depot one afternoon and the fire department was doing a safety demonstration for the kids with the fire trucks. All the kids had their little fire helmets on and one kids blew off. He actually tried to chase it into traffic on Air Depot. Luckily Day Care Workers were there to grab him just with in micro second of him setting foot into the street.

Ahh, but what if there aren't enough crosswalks? Or if they aren't marked or made in some way more visible?
Just east of Downtown Denver (a very dense residence/retail area) there are crosswalks pretty much every block and a light about every 4 blocks (or so it seems) and I would think the majority of the people crossing are residents in the area and not tourists who wouldn't know a crosswalk is nearby. It is more due to laziness than lack of crosswalks.

Depends on which streets though. The E/W one-way roads are the worst. 17th for example. It is silly how fast cars drive down 17th and crosswalks aren't at every block and are poorly marked where they exist. So people leaving downtown on 17th use it as a mini free-way and speed way too fast.
This was on Colfax but I have seen it elsewhere. My wife works at 16th & Penn and there are bike lanes on both sides and I am used to having to watch out for pedestrians and cyclists in that area (a few coworkers live in the area as well). When I am driving I pick her up on 16th and head south to Colfax. The thing is if people are driving way too fast (i.e. well above the speed limit) as it is a lower limit probably isn't going to make them go slower. I do agree that people for the most part drive too fast for the area but in many cases the speed is not the cause of the accident in auto-pedestrian cases here that have made the news. Some of the fatalities have been people standing in the fifth lane waiting to cross rather than walking a block to a crosswalk. I feel the ultimate responsibility lies with the pedestrian to use their brain, maybe too many years of riding motorcycles (40 years now) has taught me regardless of the law size has right of way. Crossing in traffic leaving downtown in the evening (it gets dark here at 4:30 now) and crossing between traffic isn't the smartest thing to do, in most areas a crosswalk is not that far away and most of the people doing the illegal crossings aren't exactly the ones where another block is going to be a laborious exercise. It is the younger people (mostly in their 20's) who tend be the ones doing and the ones that get killed when crossing illegally.

Trust me - you feel the difference between 20 mph and 30 mph.

That was one of the main ideas behind a video I posted several months ago -
Complete Streets: It's About More Than Just Bike Lanes on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/22886687)
It would be a smart cheap way to protect pedestrians here as well.