I disagree. There are two roads near me with a limit of 55 mph, and traffic on those roads regularly moves at 75-80. Driving 55 becomes dangerous when all of the other traffic is going so much faster, because nobody expects you to be that slow. You risk getting rear-ended, and if traffic is heavy, people who end up behind you now have to merge into a much faster lane of traffic to get around you.
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MycarHolmes@quokk.au 1 day ago
70 in a 50 zone. Doesn't matter if its km/h or mph, that's just idiotic.
klemptor@startrek.website 1 day ago
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Why don’t they confiscate driving licences and imprison all the criminals who are driving 20-25mph dangerously over the limit?
skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
You ever tried to pull over an entire freeway full of cars at once?
AreaKode@lemmy.world 1 day ago
A single cop car on the side of the road can get everybody to magically follow the speed limit.
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 21 hours ago
Not personally, no - but the police would only need to catch a handful each day to get things moving a little more safely in the area.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
If everyone is driving that fast and there aren’t accidents happening consistently then the posted limit does not reflect the reality of the road.
teuniac_@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Or the road design doesn’t facilitate compliance with the speed limit. This is how policy and guidance on road infrastructure talks about these issues.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Because the road design at fault, not people.
Make roads narrower, and people will drive slower
klemptor@startrek.website 1 day ago
Throw people in jail for driving too fast? That seems pretty extreme.
It’s hard to police speeding on a highway. Typically if you do get pulled over for speeding, it’s because you’re going way faster than those around you. So even in a 55, if everyone’s doing 80, you’ve gotta be doing 95 or more for a cop to single you out and arrest you. (Or maybe the cop has a quota to meet.) And where I live, local cops can’t use radar, so it’s hard to prove how fast you were going.
And then if you do get arrested, you’re most likely to get a ticket and points on your license. Get enough points and they’ll take away your license, but that means you’ve been caught repeatedly. And points expire eventually, plus if you go to your court date and plead not guilty, a lot of the time the judge will just remove the points. So a speeding ticket from years ago generally won’t have any bearing on your life except for the cost of the ticket.
So within reason, you can pretty much speed all the time consequence-free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 2 hours ago
All fair points for a motorway/highway/freeway/whatever. I’d mistakenly thought the previous post was referring to a smaller local road with a 55mph limit.
I don’t really care so much about what speed people do on motorways, but I have a massive problem with people doing 40-60mph in a 20-30mph limit residential area. Bear in mind where I live in the UK, the cars are driving 2 metres from the front door of everyone’s houses.
sunbrrnslapper@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I live out in the sticks, and if I don’t go 70, it will take me forever to get where I need to go. Also everyone else is going 70, so the people doing 50 are creating an unsafe situation. It’s the wild west out here.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
exactly, the engineers should never have made a road with that big of a discrepancy between safe speed and listed speed limit
Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
The engineers only make the listed limit speed. Government officials make the listed limit. It used to be EXTREMELY popular for government official to knock 20-25% off the design limit of the road, ironically so they can tell everyone how safe they were.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Traffic engineers in the US make too wide roads that psychologically encourages speeding, the posted speed limit doesn’t matter unless police dedicates significant resources to enforcing it
theangryseal@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Everywhere in my town was 25mph until about 10 years ago.
A local politician got a few speeding tickets and went nuts over it, now it varies from 25-60mph. Engineers were brought in to advise on safe limits.
Him getting those tickets was one of the best things to ever happened to me. It was so miserable driving so slow on big open roads. I could probably sit down and figure up an insane amount of time I’ve saved over the last decade (if I weren’t an idiot).
teuniac_@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Not so great for people walking or cycling though. Higher speeds mean more serious and fatal collisions.
Where these modes of transport mix, 20mph is becoming the default choice in western European countries, there is a global declaration on this. If roads feel like they’re made for higher streets: that’s bad infrastructure design.
fiafoundation.org/…/stockholm-declaration-focuses…
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
Was gonna cite 85th percentile speed but TIL on drawbacks
Screenshot of redirect from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V85_speed
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Engineers should absolutely include traffic calming features to get people to naturally slow down, but everyone should drive the limit.
Speed kills, kinetic energy is not linear.
Cars are tonnes of metal hurtling down the road. Thousands upon thousands die every year, and since the increased prevalence of massive US style trucks fatalities have RISEN, undoing decades of progress. (Both in the US, and elsewhere)
People driving 20 over the limit are arseholes (or have been influenced by car centric infrastructure and culture). Change my mind.
Speeding is never okay. Just that lots of people have convinced themselves it’s no big deal.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
20 over the speed limit? that’s ridiculous no one should be driving over 25
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MisterFrog@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I get this is a joke, but speed limits shouldn’t be set by politicians (which I’m hearing apparently is/was a thing?). Politicians have a role to play in getting regulations standards re-written by people who understand the decades of research on this.
Speeding is mostly a design issue, but I still expect people actually follow the rules.
Strong Towns, NotJustBikes, City Beautiful, Practical Engineering, among others have made great videos on this topic.
A lot of people justify speeding, and it’s kinda dumb, if you ask me.
Just because you “feel” it’s safe, doesn’t mean it actually is.
Plus, there’s a fantastic way to reduce road deaths, just have fewer cars, switch to public transport, but that takes a long time to implement if the political will doesn’t exist.