alt Hacker NewsIf you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed.
One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time.
For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7km/h) near where I live, they intentionally added large obfuscating objects on the road that limited visibility and harder to navigate. This forces drivers to drive very slow, even when alone on the road, as they can't see if a car or person may be behind the next object.
In an other road they added several tight S curves in a row, where if you drive anything faster than 20km/h you will fail the turns and drive onto the artificial constructed curbs.
In other roads they put a sign in the middle of two way roads while at the same time drastically limiting the width to the curb, forcing drivers to slow down in order to center the car in the lane and squeeze through.
In each of those is that a human driver with human fear of crashing will cause drivers to pay extra attention and slow down.
Replies
It's a runaway process of prioritizing safety over convenience -- and it's wrecking their road base just before self-driving cars would allow them to have both.
It's fairly common at least in the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland too. In Switzerland they also place street parking spots on alternating sides on narrow streets, which also makes you more attentive and lower your speed.
I've heard that that is why roundabouts are safer than their alternatives: counterintuitively, they're safer because they're less safe, forcing the user to pay more attention as a result.
Does it actually work though?
Many roads in London have parked cars on either side so only one can get through - instead of people cooperating you have people fighting, speeding as fast as they can to get through before someone else appears, or race on-coming cars to a gap in the parked cars etc. So when they should be doing 30mph, they are more likely doing 40-45. Especially with EVs you have near-instant power to quickly accelerate to get to a gap first etc.
And putting obstacles in the road so you cant see if someone is there? That sounds really dangerous and exactly the sort of thing that caused the accident in the story here.
Madness.
why not just put in speedbumps if all you're trying to do is slow people down? Are you sure this was the purpose of these designs? sounds a little too freakonomics to me.
In Bulgaria we have a similar speed reduction strategy but we are a bit ahead of Sweden: We use medium-radius but very deep potholes. If you lose attention for even a split second, you are forced to a full stop to change a tire. Near schools it gets more "advanced": they put parked cars on both sides of the road, and the holes positioned so you can't bypass them. For example, two tire-sized holes on both sides of the road right next to the parked cars. You have to come to a complete stop, then slowly descend into the hole with the front wheels, climb back out, and repeat the process for the rear wheels. Occasionally, even though we (technically) have sidewalks, they are covered in mud or grass or bushes, so pedestrians are forced to walk in the middle of the road. This further reduces driving speed to walking pace and increases safety in our cities. Road markings are missing almost everywhere and they put contradicting road signs so drivers are not only forced to cooperate but also to read each other minds.