Ask Lemmy

Meanwhile Ireland:

Give most humans an inch and they'll take a mile.

I think the dissonance about speed limits is why there are so many awful drivers, at least in my neck of the woods. You go through drivers ed and you're trained to go exactly the speed limit in all circumstances, and then you get let loose and find out on some highways, driving under the speed limit is so slow compared to the actual rate of traffic that doing so would be dangerous. People learn that and figure that all of the rules of the road are stupid and bad and you have a country of awful drivers

it doesn't help that, as another commenter mentioned, you can be ticketed for not moving with the flow of traffic. follow the law, and you're still breaking the law! plus all the asshole drivers who will get right up on your rear bumper if they decide you aren't going fast enough. damned if you do, damned if you don't! although ultimately, going slower is almost always the better choice from a safety standpoint because of that whole "physics" thing

I find it frustrating that in the US at least, people can't do the simple math. Unless it's a very long trip, speeding doesn't save you very much time at all. A couple of minutes at the most for a typical commute.

On countless occasions I've seen some some reckless moron nearly take other vehicles' bumpers off to 'get around' traffic. And then you're right behind that same moron at the next red light.

They are risking everything for little to no time savings.

1. where I grew up, we didn't. I also grew up in a state that was always in the top 3 for speeding fines given.

2. Because, at least in theory, speed limits in the area should be set for safety, not desires. The US is generally really bad at safe road design (e.g. less wide and straight in residential and similar areas) which enables those speeding

3. fees based on things like net worth and/or salary would theoretically help. That will never happen though. Some places use cameras to offer civil penalties, but I'm not sure where camera enforcement is otherwise legal. I haven't lived in the US in over a decade, though.

4. ah, yeah, I wrote my point 2 before this. The US is way too car-brained and me-centric for that in many areas.

That said, where I live in rural Japan, people customarily go 10-15 kph over the limit and pass like idiots even in 30kph residential areas. The police seem to mostly only give a shit during specific enforcement campaigns that happen a couple of times a year. I try to walk, cycle, motorbike, and drive in that order depending upon what I need to do and where. Even on my motorbike, it can be scary on our roads.

85th Percentile Rule (where applicable): In many states, a common engineering principle is to set the speed limit near the speed at which the majority of drivers travel under free-flow conditions. Some states adapt or supplement this approach with safety-oriented judgments.

https://thelegalguide.org/who-decides-speed-limits-federal-state-local-roads/

Because much of your country doesn't enforce speed limits, large portions of your country's population don't believe the Constitution allows speed limit enforcement without reckless driving

And, yes, I know there’s some thing people did long ago to set the speed limit at some percentile of what people were already traveling at, but that’s obviously a stupid way to do it and we did it anyway. So why?

I'm going to disagree about that being a stupid way to do it, for two reasons.

First, there was a time traffic engineering was not a well-developed field. There was no expert who could combine science and best practices to get a good answer about how fast it's safe to drive on a particular road because humanity had not yet learned that skill. Measuring what most drivers do, then reducing it if people crash a lot in a particular place is far from the worst approach.

Second, it's bad to make laws that most people will only obey with heavy enforcement. It's bad for a society to make lawbreakers out of most of its members, and to create pretexts for police to stop people without other evidence of wrongdoing. If there's a reason to make most people drive a particular road much slower than they actually do, any reduction in speed limit should also be accompanied by changes to the road design (traffic calming).

Wealth inequality is so outrageous. I sometimes have to cross a 4 lane road to get to an official bus stop. I mean, they built a fucking bus stop, and the fucking bus stops there multiple times a day, they have to assume people are crossing the street at least once. Signage? None. If I get hit, it's my fault. I sometimes have to wait a few minutes at rush hour for a safe time, and thank god there's a generous median or I'd be just standing in traffic doing hailmary's just to get home.

But I live right near a lake and when those rich fucks want to cross the lakeside road to go from their mansions to their private beach there is a fuckton of signage:

WARNING: CROSSWALK AHEAD

SLOW

CROSSWALK AHEAD

STOP SIGN

BLINKING RED LIGHT

CROSSWALK

And that's when they actually WALK to the beach because most of the time they're taking their little private golf carts.

And all this to cross a lightly travelled 2 lane road with a speed limit of 25MPH.

I understand why the French Revolution went the way it did.

First off you are wrong. I for instance, drive the speed limit.

Secondly, because whatever limit you set, some people will speed, even if it kills them.

Many speed limits are set so that you can still drive the road in adverse conditions. If they chose to ignore that and kill themselves, well then, I hope they enjoy their Darwin Award.

The best illustrations is the current usa situation were about 40% support trump even as he destroys their livelihood and bulldozers the White House.

You will always get a large percent of people who are self destructive, selfish, ignorant and abusive, had a toxic childhood and grew up to be toxic adults.

I had a friend once who rescued a lady who put her car in a ditch driving to fast for the icy conditions. The moment he got her out, she sped off down the road, going way too fast and weaving all over the place.

You can't cure stupid. Just obey the speed limit and try and stay out of the crazy people's way.

Why does everyone drive 10-15 miles above the speed limit?

Because speed limits are not strictly enforced

Why don’t we raise the speed limit if that’s how fast everyone wants to go?

Because if that happens that any per-textual stop the police want to do needs an another actual crime being committed before they can stop you.

Why is traffic enforcement given to very expensive and ineffective police instead of cheaper and more automated traffic cameras?

I reject the premise. Traffic enforcement isn't very ineffective because the majority of people aren't driving 50+ MPH over the speed limit. Also, its not that expensive because your premise suggests that if we had cameras, we'd need fewer police. I don't think that's the case. When an emergency response is needed we need X number of police to respond. Therefore X number need to be employed and on shift at all times. If we have the expense of traffic cameras, its not going to reduce headcount below X, and we now have the additional expense of purchase, install, and maintenance of all those traffic cameras. The cameras have an headcount overhead of staff of their own.

Traffic cameras also introduce mistakes of their own including misreading plates, or thieves using stolen/copied plates, which would otherwise ensnare innocent citizens.

It’s a serious confusion I have about how society is supposed to operate because it seems like a complete and total breakdown of logic and sense.

I think you're looking at the rules and assuming the logical outcome is the desired result. Change your mindset. The desired result is what happens when human society is given a set of rules and reacts to them. The reaction is the actual desired result. The set of rules is simply one step to get there. In short, humans aren't 100% logical nor are they 100% rule following, knowing that, you establish a set of rules that you know will have some violation and you account for that in rules.

Genuine answers from what I've heard regarding laws at least in CA:

1. There is a precedent that you should be going with the flow of traffic, which is technically safer than going the speed limit when everyone else is faster-- but mostly only on freeways; I rarely the flow going that fast on streets, so the rule doesn't apply to that one jackass going 60 in a 40 zone. And yes, you'll just get to the red faster (good cities time popular traffic lights to the speed limit so it's even stupider to speed).

2. I'm pretty sure they also set the limit to what older vehicles can pull off safely (assuming you don't tailgate, anyway). They have upped the limit in some areas, however, which I found upsetting. Like, 70mph up from 55mph over a few decades, which feels fast.

3. Traffic cameras are used, but there's an interesting issue on legality. If you don't acknowledge them, they can't actually say you got the ticket (they come in the mail). I forget the details, but something about seeing your accuser? LA itself more or less decriminalized them, but your mileage may vary based on local government.

4. Places do, in the form of speed bumps, stop signs and curved roads. Not using those is probably more a mix of old roads and poverty-- new suburbs use windy, wide roads. Wealthy neighborhoods install speed bumps and add tons of stop signs. I don't see it in my neighborhood because "it'll hurt business" which feels like code for "you don't matter enough for safety," hence I think it's a wealth inequality issue like most things in this country.

Anyway, that's the best of my knowledge as a CA resident. Honestly, the bigger danger to me are people who tailgate, road rage, drive on sidewalks, and do stupid things to get to an offramp. That last one? Just last Wednesday I saw a guy, car totaled, who tried to hit an offramp they missed by sharp turning into it, going up a 55 degree slope, and getting t-boned by another guy going up the normal way.

Idiots, I swear...

In Canada, its kph, but theres a sign when entering Ontario from Manitoba, where the speed limit is 90 kph, "fines starting at 100 kph" and it lists how much the fine is for doing 100, how much for 110. So the Ontario gov basically sanctions doing 99 in the 90 zone, just dont do 100.

Speed limits are designed for suboptimal road conditions. Since dynamic speed limits weren't even possible until relatively recently, they figured out how quick you could safely travel on a road when it is nice, and again when it's crappy, and set it somewhere between those values.

It’s one of those areas where we want to regulate something we don’t really want to, so we’re stuck at a compromise that nobody says they are happy with but also nobody wants to change.

We set speed limits (so we did something about traffic deaths), but we don’t enforce them, because drivers would hate that. The upside of the existence of speed limits is that reckless drivers can be charged with speeding if they cause an accident. The downside is that police departments make a revenue stream of ticketing citizens driving at completely safe and reasonable speeds.

Some parts of Europe have automated average speed cameras. That’s way more draconian than a speed camera: they take a pic at each checkpoint, they know the distances between them, if your time is better than what you could do by driving at speed limit, you get a ticket. I would go nuts if I had to drive like that. It would work for autonomous vehicles, so I expect that systematic speed limit enforcement will coincide with the rollout of autonomous cars, which will be the time to stop driving on public roads anyway.

Another similar area is immigration, sorry for the off topic tangent, but I think it’s a similar dynamic. Anti immigration politicians say they want to make tough laws that keep immigrants out, but the laws are not enforced, because without immigrants entire sectors of the economy would stop working. Progressive politicians say they want lax laws so everyone is welcome to enter, but that would be a shitty law because you can’t run a country without borders. So the likelihood that we end up with regulations that allow the right amount of migrant workers and respect refugee rights, and then are actually enforced, is about zero.

1. Why does everyone drive 10-15 miles above the speed limit?

Because speed limits are designed for the largest, clunkiest vehicles on the road (semi trucks, specifically). If they can't handle the road at a certain speed, then the speed limit is dropped to a level that can be comfortably driven by them.

This means that the average car can drive comfortably 10-15 MPH faster than the posted limit. And a lot of drivers feel that desire to drive faster.

Also, I don't know if it's still a thing, but in my childhood (roughly the '90s), cops wouldn't pull you over for speeding unless you were going at least 10 MPH over the limit. The reason being, the speed detector equipment they used had about a 10 MPH margin of error. If they pulled you over for driving 7 MPH over the limit, you could argue in court that their equipment was faulty and you were being unfairly assessed. You could sew seeds of doubt and get the traffic ticket stricken down. So cops just didn't bother unless you could be positively identified, without a doubt, as speeding.

I don't know if the accuracy of their equipment has improved since then, but the mentality back in the day was that you had some leeway with how fast you were driving, leading to people driving faster than the limit in most places.

2. Why don't we raise the speed limit if that's how fast everyone wants to go?

Because it risks all vehicles - including semis, RVs, delivery trucks, etc. - driving too fast for their large, heavy, awkward bodies to handle. Then they become a hazard on the road. You ever see a semi tip over because it took a corner too fast? If you're in a car next to it, you're pretty much toast.

It's like queueing in line. Sure, it would be faster to crowd toward the front, but you're pushing people out of the way; people who may have been there first and deserve a turn before you. And depending on how aggressively they're crowded out, it may become hazardous for some people.

In the interest of fairness, everyone queues and respects the line, so the system stays safe and orderly. Same with speed limits. Everyone is expected to stick to the limit so ALL traffic on roads are safe and orderly. But sometimes, people are people and will do whatever they want, even at the expense of their fellow human beings.

3. Why is traffic enforcement given to very expensive and ineffective police instead of cheaper and more automated traffic cameras?

This is a discussion that's been going on for decades now. I know traffic cams are set up in some European countries and work pretty well, but here in America, historically, we've had a thing against being recorded publicly. Traffic cams haven't taken off here because the idea of a small camera recording data about our cars without our knowledge freaks us out.

Heck, we had to create entrapment laws to prevent cops from hiding while checking speed limits. If you watch old cop movies, they'll sit behind billboards and catch speeders who fly by. That's illegal in the US nowadays; cops have to be out in the open and visible if they're going to watch traffic for speeding. It gives a fair chance for drivers to check their speed and adjust before the cop records them speeding and gives them a ticket.

But most people will miss a camera in the wild. There's no chance to argue a speeding incident in the moment. You get a ticket in the mail a few days later, then need to think back to that day and try to remember where you were and what speed you were going. You can fight it in court, but good luck having any evidence to counter a camera, unless you were recording the interior of your vehicle that day.

With all that said, Flock cameras sprouted practically overnight here in the US and have set off distopian levels of surveillance paranoia. Especially since their setup was so fast that no laws or safety measures have been respected in their usage and the system is already being abused to watch and track people in unprofessional capacities. We kind of skipped the whole traffic cam issue and went straight to 1984 levels of public surveillance. So we'll see how that plays out over the next few years.

4. Why do we refuse to ever use ANY traffic calming measures?

What kind of traffic calming measures do you have in mind? You mentioned the flashing speed limit signs, but that's not going to stop some people. Speeders are gonna speed. It's just human nature. The system we have is ineffective in a grand scale, but it works as a mental deterrent for most people. The fear of being pulled over by a cop for speeding keeps a lot of drivers in line.

I once drove in the small African country of Djibouti, where the government had to post signs every mile to remind drivers which side of the road they should be driving on. Driving education was available, but most people just hopped in a car and took off; no license or training. There were accidents every couple miles. Trucks flipped over and abandoned on almost every sharp corner. Potholes so big you might lose a car in them.

The system in America isn't perfect, but it's a whole lot better than it could be. You're never going to stop people from speeding, even if we did set up cameras everywhere.

My final thought on the whole matter is that speeding tickets should be based on a percentage of annual income. Say, 5% or so. Because a flat rate for speeding is just a punishment for poor people. Rich folks can afford to pay a fine with what amounts to pocket change for them, so there's no incentive for them to correct the behavior. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it was Steve Jobs who refused to get a driver's license or plates for his car or something? Every time he got pulled over, he just paid the fine and continued on with what he was doing. Meanwhile, someone living paycheck to paycheck is going to have their life ruined by a fine. If you ask me, making fines a flat percentage rate is the first step to curbing bad driving practices. Punish people fairly across the board.

Because we are very weird about our collective/individual sense of entitlement.

You really wanna start digging into that? it’s fucking bananas.