Comment on Welcome to petty lane
klemptor@startrek.website 3 weeks agoI 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.
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago
You ever tried to pull over an entire freeway full of cars at once?
AreaKode@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
A single cop car on the side of the road can get everybody to magically follow the speed limit.
Einstein@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
That’s really dependant on location. I have had plenty of road trips up and down the I5 where groups of cars pass cops on the side of the road going 80, and no one slows down and the cops do nothing. Source: I’m one of those drivers.
Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
For a minute, maybe. Foot goes back down when the cop’s out of view in the mirrors.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
nah, it just gets them to slow to 20 over the limit here
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 3 weeks 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.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Because the road design at fault, not people.
Make roads narrower, and people will drive slower
klemptor@startrek.website 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.