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Maybe police should try enforcing the traffic laws? I refuse to speed; I think it is immoral. This is because I ride a bicycle everywhere, and the extent to wh

Maybe police should try enforcing the traffic laws? I refuse to speed; I think it is immoral. This is because I ride a bicycle everywhere, and the extent to which people speed on surface streets has an obvious and tangible effect on my safety. My town has a narrow bridge that used to be the only way for cyclists to get across the river, where drivers routinely exceed the 35 mph speed limit by 20 mph or more. It is terrifying, and people have gotten killed. I wish they would put a speed camera on that bridge. The argument that "the speed limit doesn't matter because people will travel the same speed" only makes sense under the assumption that the only people who will use the public roads are drivers who feel like they can do whatever they want. Plenty of drivers feel entitled to run red lights, too, and that causes more collisions.

rand77763 9y ago
You must learn to differentiate legality from morality.
- panglott 9y ago
  Right. It's illegal to exceed the traffic limit. It's immoral to speed excessively in way that causes needless risk of physical harm to other people.
  - tomsthumb 9y ago
    It's immoral to drive at any speed which causes needless risk of physical harm to other people, speeding or otherwise. There are times when speeding does not cause this risk though. The phrase "speed excessively" in your second sentence directly implies that "speeding" leads to the immorality rather than just speed. Additionally, "excessive" is approaching a tautology. In your first comment though you just talk about "speeding" without the excess and then say that's flatly immoral.
    - panglott 9y ago
      Sure, but in my experience people who are speeding at 10-20 mph on 35-mph-limited mixed-user surface streets are doing both. That's true as well on rural highways with hidden curves and possibly animals or tractors, or complex urban interstates with lots of traffic merging. These account for a majority of the driving people do. The case of a rural interstate with few interchanges is what people mostly think of with speed limits, but many of these have already been raised to a limit of 70–80 mph. People are bad at assessing risk and bad at awareness of road conditions. And I think learning to disregard posted speed limits corrodes regard for other rules of the road, like stopping at traffic lights.
  - naravara 9y ago
    >It's immoral to speed excessively in way that causes needless risk of physical harm to other people. Even in jurisdictions that didn't have speeding laws (before we had a national standard) those people were still prosecuted for reckless driving. The standard speeding law is whatever is reasonable and prudent given the traffic, weather, and road conditions. It's a subjective standard that offers police a lot of leeway, but so it goes.
    - username3 9y ago
      Normal traffic is driving up to the legal speed limit. > On the other hand, a New York judge announced that he would not convict drivers for blocking speeding traffic, People v. Ilieveski, 175 Misc. 2d 943; 670 N.Y.S.2d 1004 (Monroe County N.Y. 1998).
  - eridius 9y ago
    The key word there is "excessively". Going faster than the posted speed limit doesn't mean you're endangering others. And, heck, driving at or lower than the posted speed limit also doesn't mean that you aren't endangering others (e.g. under poor weather conditions).
  - jsz0 9y ago
    Failing to keep pace with the flow of traffic is just as much of a safety hazard. I see near misses all the time on the highway due to people make desperate lane changes to avoid getting stuck behind a slower car.
    - panglott 9y ago
      Mostly I'm talking about surface roads, especially where people go at ~50 mph in a 35 mph zone, without regard for road conditions or other road users. But drivers have developed a sense of entitlement to speed at least 10 mph, and regard the posted speed limit as a speed minimum. But if a car is traveling 65 mph in a 65 mph zone in a center or right lane, and a car behind him traveling at 75 mph swerves recklessly into another lane in order to avoid having to slow down to the posted speed limint, then the responsibility for the risk of that unsafe lane change is the responsibility of the driver who did it, not the car driving at the posted speed limit in the right lane.
      - u801e 9y ago
        > drivers have developed a sense of entitlement to speed at least 10 mph, and regard the posted speed limit as a speed minimum. This is the result of underposting highway speed limits for decades. Had that not happened, then dotted limits would have a lot more respect today.
        panglott 9y ago
        The National Maximum Speed Limit law was passed in 1974 and repealed in 1995. It's been repealed for longer than it was in effect. Virtually all of the lower 48 US states have an interstate speed limit on the order of 70-80 mph.
        u801e 9y ago
        Yes, though a lot of them have 85th percentile speeds more than 5 mph above the speed limit. And they still have a tendency to randomly reduce the speed limit to 55 mph without any obvious difference in road design (Pennsylvania and Maryland for example). Also, a lot of those states only recently allowed speed limits above 65 mph (far more recently than 1995). So you basically have a generation of motorists who grew up and spent a substantial portion of their driving years with highway speed limits that virtually no one complies with, and that it was okay to drive 5 to 10 mph above the speed limit. This attitude spread to other road types as well meaning that even appropriately posted speed limits (e.g., 25 mph residential streets) have a high degree of noncompliance. It's going to take a while to undo the damage, but that's what happens when traffic control devices are effectively used to "cry wolf". Edit: s/compliance)/noncompliance/
lacker 9y ago
The point of this article is that often, speeding is safer than obeying the speed limit. In those cases it seems moral to speed.
- trgn 9y ago
  For drivers, I'm sure. Not for cyclists or pedestrians. Depends on the street of course. In general, I think speed limits can be higher on highways, but should be much lower and actually enforced in town. Fast cars are absolutely terrible for the safety and comfort of walkers and bikers.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    I think the article was about highways specifically (the arguments do not really hold up in an urban environment), but I don't think it said so specifically.
    - tuxdev 9y ago
      The paragraphs under the "Slowing Down" heading kind of imply that they think the argument also applies in an urban environment. It's incredibly frustrating and infuriating to read such an utterly anti-bike anti-walker policy get advocated like this.
    - panglott 9y ago
      Probably, but the title of the article is "Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?" People seem have a bias towards thinking about speed limits in terms of interstate travel speeds, which frequently have been raised to 70–80 mph anyway. Perhaps this is because most speeding enforcement is on interstates and there is relatively little enforcement of speed limits on surface streets unless they are very egregious.
  - vizeroth 9y ago
    Mixed-use streets and a mis-guided desire to build urban and suburban areas on grids of wide straight roads are the root cause of the problem. Fast cars are just a symptom. In my area the state and/or county went to great lengths to create a bidirectional bicycle highway alongside (but physically separated from) some of the freeways, but the city can't be bothered to provide bicycle lanes and street lights along the full length of any of the major roads through town. During most of the year I prefer to stick to the major roads in the early morning hours because the vehicle traffic usually keeps the coyotes away. The only thing more likely to cause a driver to hit me than swerving to avoid an animal (assuming I'm complying with the laws while riding my bicycle in the street) would be if the driver is impaired or passes too close, either of which is a law I would be much happier to see an officer enforce than the speed limit. Every time a car, train, boat, or plane crosses paths with one of the other modes of transportation on that list we make sure that someone has to have a lapse of attention, poor judgment, or some form of vehicular malfunction to violate the right of way. When it comes to a car, bicycle, or pedestrian, though, we tell them it's ok to share the same road and pretend that there's nothing wrong with that assumption, even when more people every year seem to be completely unaware that they're supposed to share the road with bicycles (and more cyclists seem to be unaware of which side of the road they're supposed to be on or that any laws regulate them).
ynniv 9y ago
If you want people to drive slower, there are effective ways of doing that. Changing the speed limit is not one of them. Try removing the lines, removing the curbs, sporadically insetting curbs, adding trees, etc.
- panglott 9y ago
  Changing the speed limit isn't the question, since the speed limit is low enough but simply not enforced. Enforcing the existing speed limit is a strategy that can be tried. but yes, most streets are built to encourage fast auto traffic, and need physical changes to calm the street down. Some cannot.
Neliquat 9y ago
Your argument just tells me you need a ped bridge, not slower speed limits. Even as it is, bikes are traffic, and drivers can wait. The differential is not the root issue in your case.
- panglott 9y ago
  The problem isn't that the posted speed limit was too high, it's that the road mean is 55 mph in a 35 mph zone with little room to pass. Then they built a ped bridge, and threatened to kick off cyclists because cyclists are vehicles that travel 10-20 mph faster than pedestrians (and don't integrate well with pedestrian traffic generally).
tbihl 9y ago
Your counter argument only makes sense under the assumption that there is no other way to change travel speeds. As others have mentioned, narrow lanes do wonders, as do trees near the roadway and shorter sight lines. The trees are even more effective if they become mature enough to form a canopy across the top of the roadway. You can also achieve these changes with more temporary measures, such as paint and cones. Your situation sounds ripe for change. Look into street calming demonstrations, and seek neighborhood support to do one as well as possibly painting lines to narrow the lanes for drivers. Just don't be surprised that drivers try to drive highways like highways, even when you try with signs to tell them that it's a low speed road.
rconti 9y ago
Speed limits are about all I ever see the police enforcing, which is yet another reason to do away with them or raise them.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
Our community is a short cut. Its 25Mph even outside school hours. Its at the bottom of a hill. Someone blew by me this morning doing easily 50Mph. We've had someone roll their SUV onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing my wife and kids - and that driver was going uphill! So totally get it. I've usually got the fastest car in sight, and I'm doing the speed limit through town. On the freeway I go the same speed as everyone else. Sometimes a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower. Data shows that driving at the speed of traffic, or slightly faster, is less dangerous than driving 5mph slower. Where I live, the freeway is regularly 75mph, even though the limit is 65mph. With the obvious exception of rush hour, when I encounter a traffic knot, its because two people are driving slower than the rest of traffic wants to, and everyone has to negotiate around them. One could view the 50 people wanting to pass the two as the problem, or we could criticize the two traveling the speed limit. In the absence of those two people, the safety of the other 50 would increase. Conversely, in the absence of those other 50 people, the safety of those two would increase. Seems an obvious choice to me. Its easy to point out yahoos who run red lights or speed through town, but these are not representative, and doing 10 mph over the limit through a school zone is not remotely like doing 10mph over the limit on a freeway.
- panglott 9y ago
  Where I live, running red lights, easing through right-on-red turns without stopping or looking, and speeding in school zones are very common. In my view, these are related problems: people develop an entitlement to speed 10-15 mph on the interstate, broaden that to speeding 10-15 mph everywhere, and start disregarding traffic laws more generally.
  - lowbloodsugar 9y ago
    If one views the problem as one of lawlessness, then it certainly looks that way, and certainly there are people like that. I view the problem as one of safety: drive 25mph through school zone because kids, drive 80mph on freeway because safe. Regardless, if you continue to drive at 65mph when everyone else is doing 75mph, then you are making accidents more likely. This is no longer the moral choice. This is just righteousness.
u801e 9y ago
I ride as well (about 1000 miles a year) and normally will not exceed speed limits on surface streets while diving. In some cases, I'll actually ride faster than I drive on some roads. I practice vehicular cycling when riding. But when driving on a limited access highway,I will speed most of the time because the speed limit is based on a now defunct national motor vehicle maximum speed law that was repealed over 20 years ago instead of an actual traffic and engineering study.

rand77763 9y ago

You must learn to differentiate legality from morality.

panglott 9y ago
Right. It's illegal to exceed the traffic limit. It's immoral to speed excessively in way that causes needless risk of physical harm to other people.
- tomsthumb 9y ago
  It's immoral to drive at any speed which causes needless risk of physical harm to other people, speeding or otherwise. There are times when speeding does not cause this risk though. The phrase "speed excessively" in your second sentence directly implies that "speeding" leads to the immorality rather than just speed. Additionally, "excessive" is approaching a tautology. In your first comment though you just talk about "speeding" without the excess and then say that's flatly immoral.
  - panglott 9y ago
    Sure, but in my experience people who are speeding at 10-20 mph on 35-mph-limited mixed-user surface streets are doing both. That's true as well on rural highways with hidden curves and possibly animals or tractors, or complex urban interstates with lots of traffic merging. These account for a majority of the driving people do. The case of a rural interstate with few interchanges is what people mostly think of with speed limits, but many of these have already been raised to a limit of 70–80 mph. People are bad at assessing risk and bad at awareness of road conditions. And I think learning to disregard posted speed limits corrodes regard for other rules of the road, like stopping at traffic lights.
- naravara 9y ago
  >It's immoral to speed excessively in way that causes needless risk of physical harm to other people. Even in jurisdictions that didn't have speeding laws (before we had a national standard) those people were still prosecuted for reckless driving. The standard speeding law is whatever is reasonable and prudent given the traffic, weather, and road conditions. It's a subjective standard that offers police a lot of leeway, but so it goes.
  - username3 9y ago
    Normal traffic is driving up to the legal speed limit. > On the other hand, a New York judge announced that he would not convict drivers for blocking speeding traffic, People v. Ilieveski, 175 Misc. 2d 943; 670 N.Y.S.2d 1004 (Monroe County N.Y. 1998).
- eridius 9y ago
  The key word there is "excessively". Going faster than the posted speed limit doesn't mean you're endangering others. And, heck, driving at or lower than the posted speed limit also doesn't mean that you aren't endangering others (e.g. under poor weather conditions).
- jsz0 9y ago
  Failing to keep pace with the flow of traffic is just as much of a safety hazard. I see near misses all the time on the highway due to people make desperate lane changes to avoid getting stuck behind a slower car.
  - panglott 9y ago
    Mostly I'm talking about surface roads, especially where people go at ~50 mph in a 35 mph zone, without regard for road conditions or other road users. But drivers have developed a sense of entitlement to speed at least 10 mph, and regard the posted speed limit as a speed minimum. But if a car is traveling 65 mph in a 65 mph zone in a center or right lane, and a car behind him traveling at 75 mph swerves recklessly into another lane in order to avoid having to slow down to the posted speed limint, then the responsibility for the risk of that unsafe lane change is the responsibility of the driver who did it, not the car driving at the posted speed limit in the right lane.
    - u801e 9y ago
      > drivers have developed a sense of entitlement to speed at least 10 mph, and regard the posted speed limit as a speed minimum. This is the result of underposting highway speed limits for decades. Had that not happened, then dotted limits would have a lot more respect today.
      - panglott 9y ago
        The National Maximum Speed Limit law was passed in 1974 and repealed in 1995. It's been repealed for longer than it was in effect. Virtually all of the lower 48 US states have an interstate speed limit on the order of 70-80 mph.
        u801e 9y ago
        Yes, though a lot of them have 85th percentile speeds more than 5 mph above the speed limit. And they still have a tendency to randomly reduce the speed limit to 55 mph without any obvious difference in road design (Pennsylvania and Maryland for example). Also, a lot of those states only recently allowed speed limits above 65 mph (far more recently than 1995). So you basically have a generation of motorists who grew up and spent a substantial portion of their driving years with highway speed limits that virtually no one complies with, and that it was okay to drive 5 to 10 mph above the speed limit. This attitude spread to other road types as well meaning that even appropriately posted speed limits (e.g., 25 mph residential streets) have a high degree of noncompliance. It's going to take a while to undo the damage, but that's what happens when traffic control devices are effectively used to "cry wolf". Edit: s/compliance)/noncompliance/

lacker 9y ago

The point of this article is that often, speeding is safer than obeying the speed limit. In those cases it seems moral to speed.

trgn 9y ago
For drivers, I'm sure. Not for cyclists or pedestrians. Depends on the street of course. In general, I think speed limits can be higher on highways, but should be much lower and actually enforced in town. Fast cars are absolutely terrible for the safety and comfort of walkers and bikers.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  I think the article was about highways specifically (the arguments do not really hold up in an urban environment), but I don't think it said so specifically.
  - tuxdev 9y ago
    The paragraphs under the "Slowing Down" heading kind of imply that they think the argument also applies in an urban environment. It's incredibly frustrating and infuriating to read such an utterly anti-bike anti-walker policy get advocated like this.
  - panglott 9y ago
    Probably, but the title of the article is "Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?" People seem have a bias towards thinking about speed limits in terms of interstate travel speeds, which frequently have been raised to 70–80 mph anyway. Perhaps this is because most speeding enforcement is on interstates and there is relatively little enforcement of speed limits on surface streets unless they are very egregious.
- vizeroth 9y ago
  Mixed-use streets and a mis-guided desire to build urban and suburban areas on grids of wide straight roads are the root cause of the problem. Fast cars are just a symptom. In my area the state and/or county went to great lengths to create a bidirectional bicycle highway alongside (but physically separated from) some of the freeways, but the city can't be bothered to provide bicycle lanes and street lights along the full length of any of the major roads through town. During most of the year I prefer to stick to the major roads in the early morning hours because the vehicle traffic usually keeps the coyotes away. The only thing more likely to cause a driver to hit me than swerving to avoid an animal (assuming I'm complying with the laws while riding my bicycle in the street) would be if the driver is impaired or passes too close, either of which is a law I would be much happier to see an officer enforce than the speed limit. Every time a car, train, boat, or plane crosses paths with one of the other modes of transportation on that list we make sure that someone has to have a lapse of attention, poor judgment, or some form of vehicular malfunction to violate the right of way. When it comes to a car, bicycle, or pedestrian, though, we tell them it's ok to share the same road and pretend that there's nothing wrong with that assumption, even when more people every year seem to be completely unaware that they're supposed to share the road with bicycles (and more cyclists seem to be unaware of which side of the road they're supposed to be on or that any laws regulate them).

ynniv 9y ago

If you want people to drive slower, there are effective ways of doing that. Changing the speed limit is not one of them. Try removing the lines, removing the curbs, sporadically insetting curbs, adding trees, etc.

panglott 9y ago
Changing the speed limit isn't the question, since the speed limit is low enough but simply not enforced. Enforcing the existing speed limit is a strategy that can be tried. but yes, most streets are built to encourage fast auto traffic, and need physical changes to calm the street down. Some cannot.

Neliquat 9y ago

Your argument just tells me you need a ped bridge, not slower speed limits. Even as it is, bikes are traffic, and drivers can wait. The differential is not the root issue in your case.

panglott 9y ago
The problem isn't that the posted speed limit was too high, it's that the road mean is 55 mph in a 35 mph zone with little room to pass. Then they built a ped bridge, and threatened to kick off cyclists because cyclists are vehicles that travel 10-20 mph faster than pedestrians (and don't integrate well with pedestrian traffic generally).

tbihl 9y ago

Your counter argument only makes sense under the assumption that there is no other way to change travel speeds. As others have mentioned, narrow lanes do wonders, as do trees near the roadway and shorter sight lines. The trees are even more effective if they become mature enough to form a canopy across the top of the roadway. You can also achieve these changes with more temporary measures, such as paint and cones. Your situation sounds ripe for change. Look into street calming demonstrations, and seek neighborhood support to do one as well as possibly painting lines to narrow the lanes for drivers. Just don't be surprised that drivers try to drive highways like highways, even when you try with signs to tell them that it's a low speed road.

rconti 9y ago

Speed limits are about all I ever see the police enforcing, which is yet another reason to do away with them or raise them.

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

Our community is a short cut. Its 25Mph even outside school hours. Its at the bottom of a hill. Someone blew by me this morning doing easily 50Mph. We've had someone roll their SUV onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing my wife and kids - and that driver was going uphill! So totally get it. I've usually got the fastest car in sight, and I'm doing the speed limit through town. On the freeway I go the same speed as everyone else. Sometimes a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower. Data shows that driving at the speed of traffic, or slightly faster, is less dangerous than driving 5mph slower. Where I live, the freeway is regularly 75mph, even though the limit is 65mph. With the obvious exception of rush hour, when I encounter a traffic knot, its because two people are driving slower than the rest of traffic wants to, and everyone has to negotiate around them. One could view the 50 people wanting to pass the two as the problem, or we could criticize the two traveling the speed limit. In the absence of those two people, the safety of the other 50 would increase. Conversely, in the absence of those other 50 people, the safety of those two would increase. Seems an obvious choice to me. Its easy to point out yahoos who run red lights or speed through town, but these are not representative, and doing 10 mph over the limit through a school zone is not remotely like doing 10mph over the limit on a freeway.

panglott 9y ago
Where I live, running red lights, easing through right-on-red turns without stopping or looking, and speeding in school zones are very common. In my view, these are related problems: people develop an entitlement to speed 10-15 mph on the interstate, broaden that to speeding 10-15 mph everywhere, and start disregarding traffic laws more generally.
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  If one views the problem as one of lawlessness, then it certainly looks that way, and certainly there are people like that. I view the problem as one of safety: drive 25mph through school zone because kids, drive 80mph on freeway because safe. Regardless, if you continue to drive at 65mph when everyone else is doing 75mph, then you are making accidents more likely. This is no longer the moral choice. This is just righteousness.

u801e 9y ago

I ride as well (about 1000 miles a year) and normally will not exceed speed limits on surface streets while diving. In some cases, I'll actually ride faster than I drive on some roads. I practice vehicular cycling when riding. But when driving on a limited access highway,I will speed most of the time because the speed limit is based on a now defunct national motor vehicle maximum speed law that was repealed over 20 years ago instead of an actual traffic and engineering study.