5 ms·
1. Do you want to be the local politician who says "hey, let's raise this to 55 MPH" and then on a bad weather day or just out of sheer bad luck soon after ther
by chx 9y ago
1. Do you want to be the local politician who says "hey, let's raise this to 55 MPH" and then on a bad weather day or just out of sheer bad luck soon after there's a major pile up and then said politician gets roasted?
1. The traffic lights need to be coordinated and that means presuming a certain speed. Now the problem is a lot of traffic lights are close enough that changing the programming of just one should ripple through the entire system and this recently (especially on a regulation making time scale) was a problem consuming extraordinary amounts of computing power.
- Reason077 9y agoSpeed limits aren't just about safety. Lower speeds mean less noise, which is desirable to local residents in residential areas. They're the ones who local politicians are accountable to.
- dfox 9y agoDecreasing speed limits is something that local politicians can use to demonstrate to their constituents that they care about them, but very rarely has net-positive effect on noise and polution.
- GuB-42 9y agoPollution too. Speed limits are sometimes lowered when it is a problem. Temporary, during peaks, or permanently. The other, more cynical reason for lowering speed limits is that in many countries now, speed traps are a significant source of income for the state. Making the speed limit significantly lower than what the standard 85% rule says is a good way to extract money from unsuspecting drivers.
- notatoad 9y agobut this is exactly the sort of political cover the politicians need. nobody wants to be the politician that says "lets raise the speed limit here to 55MPH", but if everybody drives 55 and all of a sudden there's a bunch of self-driving cars going 50 and people are getting annoyed at the road getting blocked up, changing traffic rules to conform to reality becomes a lot more possible.