Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets

Usually these roads are so small, you can barely fit a car and maybe one pedestrian on one / each side. And these streets are quite common in residential area. As in the picture, usually there are light poles along the pedestrian street. the pictures pole is pretty small but normally they're big enough you can only circumvent it by going in the path of the car, and that's a Hotspot when people get hit.

I didn't even know you were allowed to drive 60km/h on those streets. Most people slowed down because the chance of damaging your car is quite high

Edit: also why big American car are not that popular in Japan. You can't even reach your house for many, if you get an American car

In Netherland, the speed limit in cities used to be 50, and even in the 1980s, people were complaining that that was too fast. Most residential streets have been 30 (or less; the street I grew up in had a limit of 5 or 10 km/h) for some time, and Amsterdam recently made it the default for all streets with only exceptions for the biggest thoroughfares. They've also experimented with closing some of those thoroughfares.

Cars are bad for cities. It's a simple fact. The big advantage of cities is that everything is within walking or cycling distance, and the density is perfect for dense public transport. The only use for cars is to get out of the city.

Low speed limits make cars safer, but they also encourage safer forms of transportation. It's great to see this insight take hold in more countries.

I live in a French town where the default speed limit is 30 km/h instead of the national 50 km/h. In the street where I live, the drivers that willingly (sometimes they can't overtake bikes and slow cars) observe that limit are a tiny minority. Why would they, since there are no automated controls in the city, and police sets manual controls once in a blue moon.

My street was already at 30 km/h in 2016 when the global speed limit was introduced by the city council. I'm pretty sure the mean speed has increased since then, though I don't have hard facts to prove it[^1]. At first I thought that, since all road signs were removed except on the city borders, the drivers needed a constant reminder of a limit that they'd prefer to ignore. Now I just think that people soon saw that there was almost no risk in breaking the law.

[^1]: There was a study, but the methodology was so poor that it was inconclusive. They monitored the speed in a dozen streets before and after the change, but it was done for different lengths of time (one or two weeks), at different times of the year, and with explicitly no attention payed to potential popular events or roadworks. So the average speed was globally lower after the change, but in most streets it had increased!

Something about speed limits in Japan, almost no one follows them. I’ve seen police cars go past speeding cameras without their lights on while exceeding the speed limit by ~20% and everyone around them was doing the same.

This sounds like it would be a super dangerous place to drive then, but the speed limits are pretty low on local roads, and instead of driving the speed limit, people drive at a speed more similar to what you’d find for a similar road in most countries.

If you ever have the opportunity to drive in Japan, just drive at a speed you’re comfortable at and not faster than most of the traffic around you, and you’ll be fine. This isn’t legal advice though.

The one place I wouldn’t recommend exceeding the speed limit are those very narrow roads, many accidents happen there, though they’re rarely fatal.

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

For example here, Willis St in Wellington:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/8hHCLxCDK4C8U8Tz9

You can see it is already 30 km/h in the first streetview capture in 2008.

> applies to residential roads with no centre line or maximum speed signs, media report

>The measures apply to about 870,000km of roads that are less than 5.5 metres wide and do not have centre lines or median strips, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. They account for about 70% of the country’s general roads, the newspaper said.

So basically they went from no effective speed limit (since most people will probably not drive 60kmh on those kinds of roads if left to their own devices) to a specific speed limit on a bunch of tiny roads that the overwhelming majority of people were probably already going pretty darn slow on for the most part.

I suspect this will just result in a bunch of roads that really were overdue for it getting center lines and specific posted limits getting them and not much change anywhere else.

It feels like these traffic laws and the local conditions really go hand in hand with that.