You can put up all the signs in the world, but only effective design changes habits.
Stanley Park, the most iconic green space in Vancouver, British Columbia, has a ring road around it with a 30 km/h speed limit. It’s a park, right? Such a school-zone speed makes sense.
And on the east side, most people follow it. It’s busy; lots of pedestrians. There are horse-drawn carriages. Speed humps. And the road is generally narrow.
But on the west side, all that changes. A steep downhill, away from most pedestrian traffic and tourism attractions, combined with two wide-open lanes, screams “floor it.”
Cyclists know this well. As we ride the downhill—admittedly breaking the 30 km/h rule ourselves—cars whip by, often doing 60 to 80 within the park boundary.
Why? The speed limit hasn’t changed. And it’s a park for crying out loud!
Easy—the road design says “go fast.” And that’s all people pay attention to.
It’s akin to the design flaw seen in “Norman Doors.” (If you’re not familiar, it’s a door that visually tells you to pull, when in fact you should push. Or vice-versa. We’ve all encountered them.)
If you create wide-open roadways, people drive faster. Like a freeway—where speeds should be faster.
On residential roads, or within a park, the wider to roadway is, and the fewer impediments to speeding there are, the faster people will drive.
Even when it puts safety is at risk. It’s irrelevant. Open roads make slower speeds seem unbearably slow and provide the illusion of safety by freeing up your peripherals and requiring fewer micro-adjustments and less overall driver attention.
So you can put a “School Zone” sign out 10 times on one block, but if it’s a four-lane road with no speed humps and a straight-track to a thoroughfare—people will floor it.
This is why modern road design is changing, and needs to change, depending on the use-case of the road.
Residential areas must have roundabouts, traffic diverters, speed humps, narrower roadways, medians and other items of hard infrastructure to not only dissuade rat-running but to force drivers to the speed limit.
If you make it comfortable to drive 30 km/h, people will do so. It will route, or re-route, drivers back onto thoroughfares where they belong. And it will quiet down our residential roads and bring back outdoor play, bikes and block parties.
But if all your city is doing is posting “slow down” signs while building residential roads that looks like Route 66… well, good luck.
It’s just not human nature.
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