The really big thing in Japan is you're not allowed to park ("litter") your car in the street. In fact you can't even buy a car unless you can prove you have somewhere on your own land where you can park it. It makes a big improvement to walkability and general attractiveness of neighbourhoods.

In Germany that would probably be a "verkehrsberuhigter Bereich", Traffic calming area with a speed limit of 7 km/h.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street#Around_the_world

Your edit reminds me of some years ago at a conference an American was asking in a boasting way what some European people thought of cybertrucks. I don't know if he owned one or worked on them or just liked them, but he seemed to want some praise on it. They tore into it including how big it was relative to narrow European streets and that they wouldn't be legal to sell in Europe. The guy didn't talk to them after that

"The Secret to Japan's Great Cities" (Not Just Bikes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlwQ2Y4By0U

(thank you, cassepipe)

Even 30 seems a bit optimistic and 60 is insane.

In a street like that the even 30km/h is too fast.

I'm surprised the limit was so high on those narrow, low visibility streets to begin with. In many EU countries the limit is 30km/h even on streets that are double the size, if they're in residential neighborhoods to increase pedestrian safety.

Back in the early 00s my host family had an imported left hand drive chevy blazer, and it felt enormous there. I can only imagine in the years since how ridiculous it would be with ballooning SUV sizes.

Machines allow the city to become bigger. Cars are machines. To move stuff. And big machines like buses, trams, subways, planes can move at batch speed. But fail on granularity.

I would not say, cars are bad. For me they are the cells that bring the oxygen, to use another analogy.

What is missing is organization to avoid clogging. And i dislike the noise and the danger one has. This can be done all better.

But i like cars. I like my bike also.

And after all, i like technology. :)

If there is no posted speed limit then the default is (was) 60. Now narrow roads have a default of 30.

In my area, I can’t think of a an example of a road that would be affected by this law change that didn’t already have a 30 km/h posted speed limit.

Its ironic, because the biggest danger in Amsterdam are cyclists doing well over 60 inside town narrow streets.

Street bumps are much more efficient in lowering speed than either "automated controls" or "manual controls". You (plus neighbours, probably) could petition your council to put one (or several) on your street.

Reducing the speed limit often does little in itself because the v85 (85th percentile of speeds) is more dependent on how fast drivers feel it is safe to drive. Streets should be (re-)designed so that the limit and drivers’ intuition match, but that, of course, takes time and money (and will). Still, it’s much more economical in the long run than active monitoring/enforcement.

I'm a busybody. I have bought radar guns from eBay. I have lightly shamed the local authorities with data. There are now more physical speed controls (more signs, speed bumps, one way roads) in my local area. Perhaps my nagging helped. I like to think it did. Start chipping away at it. If not you, then who?

It will probably never happen, but maybe it's a way to facilitate the creation of traffic calming infrastructures (chicane, bump)? There's not better way to reduce the average speed than being forced to pay attention to not ruin your car (see the sibling comment with a picture of a narrow Japanese road)

[flagged]

> Source: I’m working for a rental car company in Japan

Then you should know the posted speed limit is low for enforcement reasons. And yes, the Japanese government and society decided to have a fake speed limit and a real speed limit, rather than change the threshold at which speeding is a prosecutable crime.

Fun fact. In Lithuania there was a standat speed limit 60km/h. But we have this curiosity that if you exceed speed limit by less than 10km/h, there is no fine, just a warning. Basically "hey, could you please not"

Because of that de facto speed limit in streets was 70km/h. So to combat this, currently we have speed limit 50km/h in cities, which translates to de facto 60km/h

In Sweden it's commonly 30-50km/h for inner city streets, I think it's a good sweet spot, 60km/h has 44% more kinetic energy than 50km/h, and since most time lost in urban areas is due to stoppage (traffic lights, intersections, etc.) there's minimal change on travel times at the lower speed.

Anec-data, but I was in japan recently on my honeymoon, was in some big and small cities, and I was shocked at how fast people were driving on exactly these types of roads. I grew up in a neighborhood where the speedlimit is 20mph, which is slightly higher than this new regulation, so fwiw I think I can recognize when cars are going faster than that as they wiz by me.

So I’m pretty optimistic about this change, better than they way things are now at least.

The sign of people that live in a city that understand how dangerous cars are in a shared space with people.

The sign of an area with a dense population where people operate within close proximity to people-squashing-machines, and the people have rightly decided that reducing the severity of any potential people-vs-people-squashing-machines incidents is worth far more than the modest reduction in travel time for the occupiers of the people-squashing-machines, most of which never spend much time at 60km/h anyway due to congestion.

Frankly, anyone driving at 60km/h through narrow streets isn't driving with due care and consideration for the surroundings anyway.

From the article:

> The introduction in 2011 of “zone 30” areas on a limited number of residential streets and along school routes resulted in a 30% reduction in fatalities and serious injuries

This benefits everyone.

Not really. Taipei is basically a geriatric colony. You can tell because every year they shut down or limit the hours of nightlife districts, slow the MRT escalators down (more), spend public money on geezer karaoke social hours, etc. But not speed limits. It’s always the senile farts blasting their Mercedes down the street at high speed, losing control and plowing into school kids. There’s absolutely no political will to reduce speeds on residential streets.

They're old because they didn't get hit by a car.

What? It’s the children who get run over by speeding assholes.