Traffic Calming is Everywhere in the Netherlands

What people said

broguinn · 2025-05 · Recommendation

The above comment is getting downvoted, and I suspect it's due to a misunderstanding of their intent. Yes, high speeds can make collisions (especially, as another commenter points out, to pedestrians and cyclists) more dangerous. However, just as human drivers subconsciously speed up when part of a group of cars, they are not often conscious of the environmental queues informing the speed at which they drive. Given the poster's allusion to 'stroads', I suspect that they're in favor of traffic engineering patterns that encourage speed reduction based on safe context queues without solely relying on an unenforced and often unobeyed traffic speed. Consider this video on Dutch traffic calming: [VIDEO] . Lane narrowing, raised walkways, curves in the road (chicanes), etc. are all environmental queues that enforce safe traffic speed based on context, without relying on conscious human compliance.

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oblio · 2023-03 · Recommendation

If I'm reading it right, the advice in your comment is basically "Bad Infrastructure Planning 101" in 2023. The right way to do it is what the Dutch do: [VIDEO] It's called "traffic calming". Oh, and underground pedestrian walkways, skybridges, etc are absolutely horrible long term solutions. If you'd use one of them for extended periods of time, you'd know. They're generally under maintained over the decades, they tend to get dirty and attract homeless people as shelter (I don't want to get into the debate of why homeless people need to use them as shelter), they're for various reason a top target for muggings, they inconvenience the people you should be encouraging (pedestrians) by greatly increasing the distances they have to walk, which means that people will just stop walking when their 500m straight line walk becomes a 1.2km runaround, etc.

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palijer · 2022-02 · Recommendation

And that still doesn't seem to stop reckless driving from killing pedestrians. The only thing that will slow drivers down is when they feel unsafe themselves, or have a risk to their vehicle. Adding signs or automatic fines doesn't do anything. You need narrower streets utilizing actual traffic calling techniques. It's such a sad sight to see signs with a "traffic calming zone" sign, but absolutely zero traffic calming done. It'll be a wide open street, we'll paved, no trees right against the road or bollards in the middle or speed bumps. Watching this video feels like an alternative reality that never happened and it seems great. [VIDEO]

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