I was going to post a stupid comment about lowering the road under the school zone. I didn’t expect to find a real-world fail along those lines first.
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I am going to have to respectfully disagree with you.
Driving a car — a 1 to 3 ton battering ram — is a privilege, not a right. Most people receive classroom instruction, behind the wheel instruction, and even take a driving test. In getting a license, drivers are all agreeing to obey posted speed limits, posted traffic signage. Cars are so dangerous most jurisdictions mandate insurance in order to operate one.
If there is a sign that says: “school zone 15mph” then drivers know to drive 15mph. It doesn’t matter if it is a narrow winding country lane with a speed bump every 6 feet or a 6 lane highway. The speed limit is 15mph. To imply it is the fault of whatever agency is responsible for building and maintaining roads is bumping up against victim blaming.
Personally, I would prefer jail time for people who drive over the speed limit or recklessly. I may, however, be biased because my father was nearly killed by a driver who ran a stop sign at 40mph in a 30 zone because she had forgotten to buy her Halloween candy. 15 seconds additional time could have saved my family years of suffering.
Cars are dangerous, cars are deadly. Drivers should be keenly aware of this and behave accordingly.
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As I said, drivers need to be held accountable for their bad decisions. That doesn’t change anything about what I said about designing safer streets.
If city planners and traffic engineers know that Road Design A is statistically much more likely to contribute to fatal collisions than Road Design B and they go with Design A anyway, then they bear some responsiblity for the subsequent traffic deaths.
A similar example is gun policy: I think everyone who harms another person with a gun deserves to be held accountable to the full extent of the law, but I also recognize that the most effective way to reduce gun deaths in this country would be to address the issue at a national level through new legislation and regulation. Is that “victim blaming?”
I haven’t finished this book yet but it’s an excellent primer:
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Unfortunately, in many areas there’s little opportunity for change or new construction. I’m in an area where street redesign is highly unlikely. The roads date to colonial times. Existing schools are very old. For example, the elementary school in my town was built in 1902. Redesigns and expansions to buildings are from the '50s and '60s when everything was built too close to the roads to widen them in any way.
I doubt that funding for road redesign is in the cards, especially when this is a problem created by the behavior of a small percentage of drivers. What they’ve done in the past decade is to add more signage, different flashing lights, and crosswalk painting. The state has also changed the law for pedestrian crossings, and vehicles are supposed to yield to everyone regardless of age. Drivers still ignore it. 
A lack of focus on safety might be in the design, but as @MagicFox pointed out, those are the same conditions in which generations of new drivers have been trained. IMO, the problem has been increasing because of lack of enforcement. Those roads haven’t changed, but the behavior of the drivers is getting worse. If the carrots of education and basic concern for others isn’t working, it’s time for the stick of fines, points, and loss of privileges.
When there’s a pattern of bad behavior, scofflaws who drive without a license, and cases of serious injury or death because of a driver’s negligence, I agree. Change is slow in many states, though. I can’t believe the DUI/points system in PA was so bad, or that it took 3 years for Deana’s Law to be enacted:
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On the plus side, most such roads are already at least partly designed for traffic calming by default. Narrow, rough, often not straight, roads and city plans that pre-date the easy availability of cars do well to keep traffic slower than modern suburban roads.
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Yes in my area the “old town” sections of many cities aren’t where the worst cases of speeding tend to happen, it’s the modern multi-lane straightaways that attract the leadfoots (just like the area shown in the video accompanying this story).
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a couple caveats to that maybe, because a few thing have changed other than the individual drivers:
- cell phones
- increased numbers of vehicles
- cars able to accelerate faster than they used to
- larger vehicles – the taller perspective leads a person to think they are traveling slower, so they speed up. plus they tend to be more isolated from the conditions of the road surface.
there have been a few studies that larger vehicles are the biggest new contributor to accidents. it’s unfortunately late to start regulating them… but we should really start sometime.
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The US has also made policy choices that increase risk compared to other countries, such as not building roads particularly well or funding adequate maintenance, as well as bare-minimum driver training and minimal vehicle safety inspections.
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It’s a bit of a Catch 22 when it comes to residential areas with schools in them. You both want roads that will allow speedy and efficient transportation and off-loading of kids and staff, and roads that by design require slow movement. All at a cost that’s affordable to build and maintain (busses are heavy — my kids’ elementary school drop off circle gets waves every few years).
It seemed to work at some point in the past. As you say, society has changed. In addition to lack of enforcement and the fine reasons mentioned by @gatto there is a growing sentiment in a portion of the population that anything to do with the public good or people being courteous to each other is a sign of weakness and wokeness.
Which is why I said close. As @PsiPhiGrrrl mentioned, many of those roads have been around for a while — 50, 60 years or more. They were built when people could be “trusted” to obey traffic laws, especially around kids and schools. Saying someone who planned a road in the 1950s or 1960s (or earlier) didn’t do a good job in the design is unfair. There are limited affordable options for retrofitting roads, even when they undergo major repairs.
Additionally, new roads are built to accommodate current realities while trying to predict traffic patterns and driving habits decades from now. We know people are driving more like assholes now, but what will it be like in 50 years? Will we finally have efficient and safe self-driving cars? Will everything be electric? Will cars become so expensive that they are infrequent luxury goods and the majority of people use public transport like in Japan? Will the population begin declining and there be fewer drivers than now?
YMMV, but the areas where I’ve lived that are attracting leadfoots were designed and built mostly 50 to 80 years ago. I’m currently living in a cul de sac hell that is very traffic calming. Unfortunately that is an unexpected benefit to its original racist design of making public transport impractical and the area unattractive to “those people.”
Good road design going forward is also important. In my section of Maryland I’ve noticed the newer roads are being built with more safety in mind — notably with more curves and bends and lots, and lots of traffic circles. But as @PsiPhiGrrrl mentions, we also need carrots and sticks.
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The studies I’ve read pin the blame for increasing pedestrian traffic deaths since 2010 on the prevalence of large vehicles (as @gatto mentioned) along with poor infrastructure planning. It’s not just a matter of everyone turning into assholes all of a sudden.
Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars, according to Martin.
Rigorous enforcement is an important part of the solution but it’s not enough to fix the underlying problems. That multilane highway-style road by the school in this story? No way it looked like that 80 years ago.
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seriously. Our school zones are 20.
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We’re on a small residential street a block and a half N from a V large & busy main drag. At the corner of our street and the big road is a 24hr gas station. People going to the gas station went tearing up and down our street, ignoring how narrow it is, not to mention the kids and pets. This is a neighborhood, after all.
The city began an experimental sleeping policeman program in early spring a couple years ago, installing speed bumps in a handful of well-known areas of driving fuckery.
Late spring came, and the residents’ opinions were gathered, the experimental part ended, and the program became official. Residents requested speed bumps’ installation by filling out an online survey form, informing the city of their neighborhood’s traffic calming needs.
That summer, workers quickly and efficiently installing sleeping policemen in neighborhoods all over Detroit. There are now many speed bumps - at least one per block - in our neighborhood, including one right in front of our house.
Traffic on our little street has declined by at least 75%, and the speeding’s down by at least 95%.
It’s pretty cool, being able to hear that most satisfying CRUNCH whenever some now-rare speeding dumbfuck hits the bump right outside.
Sleeping policemen are not an option when a school was built on a main road with lots of other traffic, but there are other solutions. There are bollards which can be raised and lowered as the need also ahem arises, ferinstance.
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I hope they are the speed “hump” style rather than the “bump” style. My daily-driver sport sedan has to crawl over the bumps while lifted trucks ignore them. Speed humps are much more egalitarian in how they slow different vehicles.
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Yes. I forgot they were called ‘speed humps’ in the online form and news stories.
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I like speed humps but hate speed bumps with a passion.
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I hate the asshole drivers of lifted trucks and suvs who still manage to bounce over them with impunity.
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I hadn’t clicked the link before, but was curious about what this might have looked like in the past. Looking at it, if this was in at least 3 of the states I’ve lived in, it wouldn’t have been a school zone at at all.
I had to click on a link in the article to the prior one, which listed where the camera and the school are located. The camera is on Orange Avenue, which is clearly a major East-West thoroughfare. The road doesn’t go past the school but is a block, 400 feet, away from the school. The school zone looks like it’s about 100 feet long on Orange Avenue, about 50 feet either side of the intersection with Prescott Street.
The only imaginable reason for this, is because they require elementary kids from North of Orange Avenue to walk to school and cross at this intersection. This is a ridiculous decision. Everyplace I’ve lived, no kids from North of Orange Avenue would be allowed to walk to elementary school. That road is not safe to cross for those kids. They’re not going to all cross at that intersection, which means a bunch of them are crossing a major thoroughfare not in a school zone.
The camera to control speeding in a school zone is the wrong design solution here. Stop requiring kids to cross that road. That eliminates the need for the school zone completely. Then you no longer have a mile+ long 40 MPH that drops to 20 MPH for 100 feet. You can’t even see the school from that spot. This is a policy failure, designed to fail.
Edit: If they really want to make it safe for kids, and encourage them to cross at this intersection, they should install a stop light with cross walk activation button. Right now they’re like “walk to school, you should cross here where we’ve tried to make cars slow down, but you’re own your own to dodge them. We don’t care that you’re in 3rd grade.”
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Something like this happened in my small suburban “city” when they installed red light cameras at its major 4-way intersection. In the first few months, the revenue was high enough that they were able to hire two new cops.
After about one year, the locals were savvy enough that ticket revenue dropped and they had to let go the two new hires. 
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There’s probably a John Oliver segment about this. Red light cameras are basically a scam that targets cities. The city is on the hook for the system regardless of whether it pays for itself, but if it makes a lot of money, the company, usually out-of-state, gets a hefty cut. And they don’t work.
There’s an infamous intersection near where I used to work where they installed a red light camera system that has lost the city a ton of money. Why? Because the intersection is so badly designed, the local judges have basically told the city not to bother. You see, right before the intersection, each approaching road curves hard to the left. If you were viewing it from above, it looks like a spiral. So when people approach the intersection, they are looking at the light for other lanes, not the lane they are in. So, of course they run red lights - their actual light isn’t in line with where they are facing until they are already at the intersection.
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