6 ms·

California Considering Lanes with No Speed Limit

38 points by prostoalex 8y ago

towaway1138 8y ago
What could possibly go wrong?
SamReidHughes 8y ago
That makes a lot of sense for I-5. It's dead straight, and since trucks pass each other, the passing lane is often really slow. A third lane would get bogged down behind slowpokes trying to park their way past the trucks at a comfortable 5 over, when 90 is a perfectly reasonable minimum speed, so having this law might mitigate that.
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  This is also an argument against No speed limit as speed differential is really the more dangerous aspect. It's not safe to drive 100MPH along side semis doing 65MPH .
  - chrononaut 8y ago
    The moments I am most afraid when driving are the times where I am on a multi-lane highway in the left set of lanes and the right set of lanes are creeping along at 5 to 10mph trying to exit the highway on an off-ramp while traffic in my current and other lanes are still going 60 to 70mph.
  - wolrah 8y ago
    It is very safe as long as people have lane discipline. Which is to say slow drivers keep the fuck to the right. See Germany for examples. Unfortunately here in America a lot of slow shitheads have an entitlement complex and think that anyone who wants to go faster than them is evil.
    - xxxdarrenxxx 8y ago
      And then one realizes we should take out drivers, as they are a unpredictable variable. Then ones argues less lanes is less capacity, thus less throughput. Then one argues to up the speed even more. Then one argues speed differential is the most dangerous. Then one argues we should not have the majority of 4-seat-cars driving with 3 empty seats. Then one argues we should go electric. When the solution looks like a train, sounds like a train and acts like a train, then obviously the solution was the car Lolsociety. Entitlement for evahhh
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    That's a rule of thumb that might not apply so well to dead straight roads with long distances between exits. The semis aren't entering the third lane. Other vehicles would be, and the fast lane ought to slow down when passing... of course, some people would, and others wouldn't. More practically it's 100 mph versus somebody changing lanes at 85 mph. Or maybe 120 mph versus somebody changing lanes at 85 mph, at night... As a former I-5 driver I'd like to see this tried; to mitigate the cost of accidents we could build a few mass graves in Cowschwitz.
maxxxxx 8y ago
Funny that at the same time Germany is considering speed limits. American cars also need better tires to go faster, not just all-season tires.
maerF0x0 8y ago
According to the bill, money for construction of two new lanes on each side of I-5 and CA-99 would be drawn from California's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Moorlach doesn't give an estimated cost for the project, but says the state already owns the right of way necessary for the lanes. The bill is being pitched as a way to cut idling in traffic and therefore reduce greenhouse gases, The irony of making a lane unlimited speed when 1) Driving over certain speeds (60?) significantly increases fuel consumption and 2) It's pretty constly, environmentally speaking, to replace cars and people when they inevitably crash at 100MPH
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  " when they inevitably crash at 100MPH" Why would they crash? 100 is not difficult to do.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    Accidents seem to happen at all speeds.
  - huebomont 8y ago
    because they're driven by people.
  - maerF0x0 8y ago
    this was more to emphasize that accidents do happen and that at 100MPH the magnitude of the crash has increased (its more catastrophic)
- soheil 8y ago
  This is why if we listened to people like you we would still be riding horses and buggies. Look at Germany are they inevitably crashing constantly at 100MPH or has the Autobahn maybe to some small extent has contributed to German cars being some of the most efficient and desirable cars in the world and pushed the envelope on what is engineeringly possible.
  - 8y ago
gnicholas 8y ago
> According to Moorlach, the lanes would be kept separate from other lanes, where the speed limit would remain 65 mph. I don't know about CA-99, but I-5 is definitely 70 MPH for stretches. EDIT: looks like both are 70 MPH at various points: http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/roadinfo/70mph.htm http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/roadinfo/70mph.htm
bdamm 8y ago
> According to the bill, money for construction of two new lanes on each side of I-5 and CA-99 would be drawn from California's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Wait, what? > The bill is being pitched as a way to cut idling in traffic and therefore reduce greenhouse gases This looks like next level reality distortion field to me. Increasing speed limits cannot possibly decrease greenhouse gases, nor can adding lanes (which increases capacity and therefore use.) The most optimal speed for reducing greenhouse gasses appears to be 40-60mph, so any discussion of speeds outside that range is therefore not about lowest GHG emissions. Having high-speed lanes seems OK to me, but drawing that effort out of funds tagged for GHG-reduction seems like a court challenge waiting to happen, and is morally unacceptable anyhow.
- soheil 8y ago
  If you're getting when you're going faster there is less congestion on the road therefore less pollution form other cars, there are other advantages too but please do not make this a moral argument.
  - manicdee 8y ago
    You won’t get where you are going faster just because a lane has no speed limit. There’s a reason the other lanes are moving at 5mph or less. Congestion isn’t about what happens on straight stretches of road, it’s about what happens at exits and junctions. I mean sure, you get “standing waves” is traffic caused by people changing lanes or braking suddenly, but when an exit lane is full because the traffic ahead is held up by a red light or a busy stop/yield intersection, no speed limit is going to help. What will help is fewer (yes, fewer) lanes on the main road, more lanes (or “holding space”) at intersections, and mechanisms for allowing exiting traffic to enter side roads without using intersections.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 8y ago
    It's just physics, not a moral argument. Drag increases as a function of velocity squared, and increasing speeds above some point requires more energy per mile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation If there isn't a lot of traffic on a section of road, people can move through that section faster at higher speeds, so there can be less congestion. On the other hand, if there is enough traffic, high speeds reduce the throughput of a given section of road because braking distances as a function of speed increase faster than speed. https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/Safety1nNum3ers/august2015/S1N_Speeding-August2015_812008.pdf https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/Safety1nNum3ers/august2015/S1N_S...
crowdpleaser 8y ago
Good! I blast between LA and SF on a regular basis with my motorcycle. The bike and tires are good for cruising at 160 mph, but with all the trucks in an elephant race, I'm lucky to average 80 mph. I'd pay a small ransom in tolls to drive on a road with no trucks and no speed limit.
- asteli 8y ago
  I did that trip south on the 5 once. Initially I was impatient and tried lanesplitting between semi trucks. After doing this about 4 times, rationality kicked in and I decided that waiting the extra 30 seconds it takes for a semi to pass another was worth it to not have "he was smooshed to death by a truck, the idiot" in my obituary.
Gene5ive 8y ago
The autobahn is safer because the drivers have better training. If we are not willing to train drivers just as well or better then we might want to stick with the train, which the Germans also have. While we're at it we can ask them how they managed to actually follow through and finish building it.
- soheil 8y ago
  If we were riding horses and buggies we would not need to even go to driving school and get a driver's license. Only when something is a necessary condition it happens, to have the same level driver-education here as in Germany first you need higher speed limits.
- baxtr 8y ago
  To put this in perspectives I paid around 2k for my German driver’s license and had a 8 week course including theory and practical lessons. In contrast, the American one was 80 bucks or so? No lessons, just the tests
  - zdragnar 8y ago
    Where I grew up, pretty much everyone in the area who wanted to drive took a one semester "driver's ed" course in high school. Driving practice with the instructor was extensive, covering pretty much every common driving scenario short of hitting a deer. To even take the test, you had to have X hours logged driving with an adult who had a license. Yes, the license is substantially cheaper, but it was also a very rural area- driving a car is just a fact of life out there, and 2k for the license would probably have cost more than quite a few of the cars.
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      I didn't have a semester-long driver's ed, but there was a class for a series of Saturdays at a local AAA office, with a guy who spent much of the time showing us old-school Cosby stand-up, and four sessions of driving instruction with an AAA instructor. This was worth the money to my parents because they got a savings on insurance.
jacobolus 8y ago
Not “considering” in any serious way. Proposed by one wealthy GOP State Senator from an area full of wealthy anti-tax hard liners who like to speed around unsafely in their sports cars, and don’t like the concept of a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Here’s the district: https://calwatchdog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/37th-District.jpg https://calwatchdog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/37th-Dist... This bill is never going anywhere. The GOP is now 10/40 seats in the CA State Senate (2 seats vacant), and 19/80 in the CA State Assembly.
- ddoolin 8y ago
  Yep. I live in said district and this could not be any more true. I don't have just one or two anecdotes, but hundreds and I've only lived here for a relatively short amount of time. I drive a red Model S and people attempt to race all the time (once out of every few times I go out, or more often), and even then they drive super aggressively and fast. On YouTube, many of the high speed driving videos are filmed here, too. I'm not going to say this should have any bearing on the merits bill at hand, but your characterization is absolutely correct.
  - dsl 8y ago
    > I drive a red Model S and people attempt to race all the time I saw a documentary about this once called 'Fast and Furious'. You just need to find the fastest guys and beat them.
- badmadrad 8y ago
  "wealthy" is bad I guess..your socialist stripes are showing...that being said, i know plenty of poor people that would love to speed. another benefit is that this would help with unclogging the courts with tickets and reduce the strain on the criminal justice system.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Wealthy people are not inherently bad. But this part of Orange County has a culture of extremely aggressive and entitled driving by folks in very expensive cars. Among the most dangerous and unpleasant driving I have experienced anywhere in the USA.
SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
Does "lanes" mean whole roads, or just that, single lanes on a highway composed of many? The first option seems acceptable, but the second seems like a nightmare.
gyrgtyn 8y ago
Cool! can't wait to be crushed by a 5000 pound tesla going 100MPH faster than me.
glitchc 8y ago
The obvious place to start are commuter lanes, especially those with specific entry-exit points that are otherwise shouldered off. Remove the maximum and introduce a 100 mph minimum.
koboll 8y ago
>local reports indicate the lanes would run from Stockton to Bakersfield, a distance of approximately 240 miles via I-5 or 230 miles via CA-99. I've driven these probably 30 times each. The standard minimum speed there in the daytime is already 80-90 mph in the fast lane. Getting stuck behind some asshole who actually goes the speed limit in the fast lane isn't just annoying (it can add an hour to an SF => LA trip), it's also dangerous. It encourages people to pass by dodging and weaving through the line of much slower semi trucks in the slow lane. Also, CHP likes to hide under overpasses to hand out tickets, so people tend to slow down before them and then speed up again after them. All these lane changes and speed changes are much, much likelier to cause accidents than high speed is. The road would be a lot safer if people in the fast lane were encouraged to all drive at the same high speed. This bill is a fantastic idea.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Cars driving slowly in the left lane is occasionally annoying, but in my experience the much more common problem with the 5 is that with 2 lanes and lots of semi trucks, there are frequently trucks passing trucks, and a lot of entitled car drivers will see the left lane moving slowly and try to pass on the right.... which of course they can’t actually do because there was a truck passing a truck, so you get lots of unsafe leapfrogging.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cozos 8y ago
  I've gotten pulled over on the SF <=> LA I-5 before for going 91 MPH (somewhere in the middle on a steep downhill). The policeman told me with a straight face that I should go no faster than 65 MPH.
dsl 8y ago
Per California law the speed limit is supposed to be set at the 85th percentile of speed as measured by a traffic engineering study (operating speed), not the rate of travel the roadway was designed for (design speed). The idea behind the law is that the majority of people are lawful, and that we are in fact "voting" for the right speed to be set by traveling at that rate. Rather than creating lanes with no speed limit, we just need to force Caltrans and local municipalities to enforce this standard.
- hanging 8y ago
  And to legally use radar enforcement, there has to be a current survey affirming the limit.
unethical_ban 8y ago
The practical speed limit is 100 MPH, and in Texas, we have 75-85 MPH in a lot of sparse areas. And if it's a clear day, that 75 MPH is effectively 85. So from a safety perspective, there is nothing wrong here. The logic of pulling from a greenhouse emission reduction fund is bonkers.
watsocd 8y ago
I have always lived in the US and Canada but was on a driving vacation in Germany in the past year. I did hours of Autobahn driving at 160kMh/100MPH. The drivers are MUCH more courteous in Germany. ALL Trucks are in the right most lane as are cars pulling ANYTHING. That alone will never fly here. This means that the only vehicles in the two left lanes are cars and some small trucks. Even then most vehicles stayed well away from the far left lane. Mostly because the cars were not capable of courteously driving in the left lane. What this all means is that I saw no acts of aggression on the roads that are very common on US freeways. Acts of aggression can include driving at the speed limit or less in the left lane because "I can and it's not against the law". Speeding cars approaching other cars quickly, tailgating, and flashing headlights when they are maybe already exceeding the speed limit and have not had a chance to move over yet. In summary, it was much more comfortable driving in Germany at 100MPH than driving on US roads at much lower speeds.
- jjcm 8y ago
  If this did go live in California, it would need to be policed in a different way. The “left lane is for passing only” would have to be enforced strictly before it would operate efficiently, and a minimum speed limit would have to be posted.
- Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
  > Acts of aggression can include driving at the speed limit or less in the left lane because "I can and it's not against the law". What's especially shitty about this is that in many states, it actually is against the law, but since it's so poorly enforced, people either don't know or don't care.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    I'm not a left lane parker, but isn't driving above the speed limit also against the law?
    - Spartan-S63 8y ago
      Yes. In some (most?) states, the leftmost lane on a motorway above 65MPH is supposed to be used for passing only. What makes highways dangerous are large speed gradients and this is an issue caused by drivers both on the high end and the low end of speed. Hence why most highways have a minimum advertised speed. The issue is that no one respects the speed limits anymore which often expands the gradient and makes the highway less safe. Left lane or not, you shouldn’t exceed the speed limit.
skookumchuck 8y ago
I'd require drivers in such lanes to have a special license and the cars pass an inspection that they are sound enough to drive faster.
dmode 8y ago
This will never happen because 1. There is no appetite for increasing speed limits due to increase in emissions and increase in enforcement costs 2. Drivers here are simply not disciplined enough to make a no speed limit lane successful 3. Our roads are not engineered to support that kind of speeds, both in terms of pavement conditions as well as merge and off ramp designs. 4. There is no funding to build new lanes to I-5

38 points by prostoalex 8y ago

What could possibly go wrong?

That makes a lot of sense for I-5. It's dead straight, and since trucks pass each other, the passing lane is often really slow. A third lane would get bogged down behind slowpokes trying to park their way past the trucks at a comfortable 5 over, when 90 is a perfectly reasonable minimum speed, so having this law might mitigate that.

maerF0x0 8y ago
This is also an argument against No speed limit as speed differential is really the more dangerous aspect. It's not safe to drive 100MPH along side semis doing 65MPH .
- chrononaut 8y ago
  The moments I am most afraid when driving are the times where I am on a multi-lane highway in the left set of lanes and the right set of lanes are creeping along at 5 to 10mph trying to exit the highway on an off-ramp while traffic in my current and other lanes are still going 60 to 70mph.
- wolrah 8y ago
  It is very safe as long as people have lane discipline. Which is to say slow drivers keep the fuck to the right. See Germany for examples. Unfortunately here in America a lot of slow shitheads have an entitlement complex and think that anyone who wants to go faster than them is evil.
  - xxxdarrenxxx 8y ago
    And then one realizes we should take out drivers, as they are a unpredictable variable. Then ones argues less lanes is less capacity, thus less throughput. Then one argues to up the speed even more. Then one argues speed differential is the most dangerous. Then one argues we should not have the majority of 4-seat-cars driving with 3 empty seats. Then one argues we should go electric. When the solution looks like a train, sounds like a train and acts like a train, then obviously the solution was the car Lolsociety. Entitlement for evahhh
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  That's a rule of thumb that might not apply so well to dead straight roads with long distances between exits. The semis aren't entering the third lane. Other vehicles would be, and the fast lane ought to slow down when passing... of course, some people would, and others wouldn't. More practically it's 100 mph versus somebody changing lanes at 85 mph. Or maybe 120 mph versus somebody changing lanes at 85 mph, at night... As a former I-5 driver I'd like to see this tried; to mitigate the cost of accidents we could build a few mass graves in Cowschwitz.

maxxxxx 8y ago

Funny that at the same time Germany is considering speed limits. American cars also need better tires to go faster, not just all-season tires.

maerF0x0 8y ago

According to the bill, money for construction of two new lanes on each side of I-5 and CA-99 would be drawn from California's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Moorlach doesn't give an estimated cost for the project, but says the state already owns the right of way necessary for the lanes. The bill is being pitched as a way to cut idling in traffic and therefore reduce greenhouse gases, The irony of making a lane unlimited speed when 1) Driving over certain speeds (60?) significantly increases fuel consumption and 2) It's pretty constly, environmentally speaking, to replace cars and people when they inevitably crash at 100MPH

maxxxxx 8y ago
" when they inevitably crash at 100MPH" Why would they crash? 100 is not difficult to do.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  Accidents seem to happen at all speeds.
- huebomont 8y ago
  because they're driven by people.
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  this was more to emphasize that accidents do happen and that at 100MPH the magnitude of the crash has increased (its more catastrophic)
soheil 8y ago
This is why if we listened to people like you we would still be riding horses and buggies. Look at Germany are they inevitably crashing constantly at 100MPH or has the Autobahn maybe to some small extent has contributed to German cars being some of the most efficient and desirable cars in the world and pushed the envelope on what is engineeringly possible.
- 8y ago

gnicholas 8y ago

> According to Moorlach, the lanes would be kept separate from other lanes, where the speed limit would remain 65 mph. I don't know about CA-99, but I-5 is definitely 70 MPH for stretches. EDIT: looks like both are 70 MPH at various points: http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/roadinfo/70mph.htm http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/roadinfo/70mph.htm

bdamm 8y ago

> According to the bill, money for construction of two new lanes on each side of I-5 and CA-99 would be drawn from California's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Wait, what? > The bill is being pitched as a way to cut idling in traffic and therefore reduce greenhouse gases This looks like next level reality distortion field to me. Increasing speed limits cannot possibly decrease greenhouse gases, nor can adding lanes (which increases capacity and therefore use.) The most optimal speed for reducing greenhouse gasses appears to be 40-60mph, so any discussion of speeds outside that range is therefore not about lowest GHG emissions. Having high-speed lanes seems OK to me, but drawing that effort out of funds tagged for GHG-reduction seems like a court challenge waiting to happen, and is morally unacceptable anyhow.

soheil 8y ago
If you're getting when you're going faster there is less congestion on the road therefore less pollution form other cars, there are other advantages too but please do not make this a moral argument.
- manicdee 8y ago
  You won’t get where you are going faster just because a lane has no speed limit. There’s a reason the other lanes are moving at 5mph or less. Congestion isn’t about what happens on straight stretches of road, it’s about what happens at exits and junctions. I mean sure, you get “standing waves” is traffic caused by people changing lanes or braking suddenly, but when an exit lane is full because the traffic ahead is held up by a red light or a busy stop/yield intersection, no speed limit is going to help. What will help is fewer (yes, fewer) lanes on the main road, more lanes (or “holding space”) at intersections, and mechanisms for allowing exiting traffic to enter side roads without using intersections.
- omgwtfbyobbq 8y ago
  It's just physics, not a moral argument. Drag increases as a function of velocity squared, and increasing speeds above some point requires more energy per mile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_equation If there isn't a lot of traffic on a section of road, people can move through that section faster at higher speeds, so there can be less congestion. On the other hand, if there is enough traffic, high speeds reduce the throughput of a given section of road because braking distances as a function of speed increase faster than speed. https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/Safety1nNum3ers/august2015/S1N_Speeding-August2015_812008.pdf https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/Safety1nNum3ers/august2015/S1N_S...

crowdpleaser 8y ago

Good! I blast between LA and SF on a regular basis with my motorcycle. The bike and tires are good for cruising at 160 mph, but with all the trucks in an elephant race, I'm lucky to average 80 mph. I'd pay a small ransom in tolls to drive on a road with no trucks and no speed limit.

asteli 8y ago
I did that trip south on the 5 once. Initially I was impatient and tried lanesplitting between semi trucks. After doing this about 4 times, rationality kicked in and I decided that waiting the extra 30 seconds it takes for a semi to pass another was worth it to not have "he was smooshed to death by a truck, the idiot" in my obituary.

Gene5ive 8y ago

The autobahn is safer because the drivers have better training. If we are not willing to train drivers just as well or better then we might want to stick with the train, which the Germans also have. While we're at it we can ask them how they managed to actually follow through and finish building it.

soheil 8y ago
If we were riding horses and buggies we would not need to even go to driving school and get a driver's license. Only when something is a necessary condition it happens, to have the same level driver-education here as in Germany first you need higher speed limits.
baxtr 8y ago
To put this in perspectives I paid around 2k for my German driver’s license and had a 8 week course including theory and practical lessons. In contrast, the American one was 80 bucks or so? No lessons, just the tests
- zdragnar 8y ago
  Where I grew up, pretty much everyone in the area who wanted to drive took a one semester "driver's ed" course in high school. Driving practice with the instructor was extensive, covering pretty much every common driving scenario short of hitting a deer. To even take the test, you had to have X hours logged driving with an adult who had a license. Yes, the license is substantially cheaper, but it was also a very rural area- driving a car is just a fact of life out there, and 2k for the license would probably have cost more than quite a few of the cars.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    I didn't have a semester-long driver's ed, but there was a class for a series of Saturdays at a local AAA office, with a guy who spent much of the time showing us old-school Cosby stand-up, and four sessions of driving instruction with an AAA instructor. This was worth the money to my parents because they got a savings on insurance.

jacobolus 8y ago

Not “considering” in any serious way. Proposed by one wealthy GOP State Senator from an area full of wealthy anti-tax hard liners who like to speed around unsafely in their sports cars, and don’t like the concept of a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Here’s the district: https://calwatchdog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/37th-District.jpg https://calwatchdog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/37th-Dist... This bill is never going anywhere. The GOP is now 10/40 seats in the CA State Senate (2 seats vacant), and 19/80 in the CA State Assembly.

ddoolin 8y ago
Yep. I live in said district and this could not be any more true. I don't have just one or two anecdotes, but hundreds and I've only lived here for a relatively short amount of time. I drive a red Model S and people attempt to race all the time (once out of every few times I go out, or more often), and even then they drive super aggressively and fast. On YouTube, many of the high speed driving videos are filmed here, too. I'm not going to say this should have any bearing on the merits bill at hand, but your characterization is absolutely correct.
- dsl 8y ago
  > I drive a red Model S and people attempt to race all the time I saw a documentary about this once called 'Fast and Furious'. You just need to find the fastest guys and beat them.
badmadrad 8y ago
"wealthy" is bad I guess..your socialist stripes are showing...that being said, i know plenty of poor people that would love to speed. another benefit is that this would help with unclogging the courts with tickets and reduce the strain on the criminal justice system.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Wealthy people are not inherently bad. But this part of Orange County has a culture of extremely aggressive and entitled driving by folks in very expensive cars. Among the most dangerous and unpleasant driving I have experienced anywhere in the USA.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

Does "lanes" mean whole roads, or just that, single lanes on a highway composed of many? The first option seems acceptable, but the second seems like a nightmare.

gyrgtyn 8y ago

Cool! can't wait to be crushed by a 5000 pound tesla going 100MPH faster than me.

glitchc 8y ago

The obvious place to start are commuter lanes, especially those with specific entry-exit points that are otherwise shouldered off. Remove the maximum and introduce a 100 mph minimum.

koboll 8y ago

>local reports indicate the lanes would run from Stockton to Bakersfield, a distance of approximately 240 miles via I-5 or 230 miles via CA-99. I've driven these probably 30 times each. The standard minimum speed there in the daytime is already 80-90 mph in the fast lane. Getting stuck behind some asshole who actually goes the speed limit in the fast lane isn't just annoying (it can add an hour to an SF => LA trip), it's also dangerous. It encourages people to pass by dodging and weaving through the line of much slower semi trucks in the slow lane. Also, CHP likes to hide under overpasses to hand out tickets, so people tend to slow down before them and then speed up again after them. All these lane changes and speed changes are much, much likelier to cause accidents than high speed is. The road would be a lot safer if people in the fast lane were encouraged to all drive at the same high speed. This bill is a fantastic idea.

jacobolus 8y ago
Cars driving slowly in the left lane is occasionally annoying, but in my experience the much more common problem with the 5 is that with 2 lanes and lots of semi trucks, there are frequently trucks passing trucks, and a lot of entitled car drivers will see the left lane moving slowly and try to pass on the right.... which of course they can’t actually do because there was a truck passing a truck, so you get lots of unsafe leapfrogging.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cozos 8y ago
I've gotten pulled over on the SF <=> LA I-5 before for going 91 MPH (somewhere in the middle on a steep downhill). The policeman told me with a straight face that I should go no faster than 65 MPH.

dsl 8y ago

Per California law the speed limit is supposed to be set at the 85th percentile of speed as measured by a traffic engineering study (operating speed), not the rate of travel the roadway was designed for (design speed). The idea behind the law is that the majority of people are lawful, and that we are in fact "voting" for the right speed to be set by traveling at that rate. Rather than creating lanes with no speed limit, we just need to force Caltrans and local municipalities to enforce this standard.

hanging 8y ago
And to legally use radar enforcement, there has to be a current survey affirming the limit.

unethical_ban 8y ago

The practical speed limit is 100 MPH, and in Texas, we have 75-85 MPH in a lot of sparse areas. And if it's a clear day, that 75 MPH is effectively 85. So from a safety perspective, there is nothing wrong here. The logic of pulling from a greenhouse emission reduction fund is bonkers.

watsocd 8y ago

I have always lived in the US and Canada but was on a driving vacation in Germany in the past year. I did hours of Autobahn driving at 160kMh/100MPH. The drivers are MUCH more courteous in Germany. ALL Trucks are in the right most lane as are cars pulling ANYTHING. That alone will never fly here. This means that the only vehicles in the two left lanes are cars and some small trucks. Even then most vehicles stayed well away from the far left lane. Mostly because the cars were not capable of courteously driving in the left lane. What this all means is that I saw no acts of aggression on the roads that are very common on US freeways. Acts of aggression can include driving at the speed limit or less in the left lane because "I can and it's not against the law". Speeding cars approaching other cars quickly, tailgating, and flashing headlights when they are maybe already exceeding the speed limit and have not had a chance to move over yet. In summary, it was much more comfortable driving in Germany at 100MPH than driving on US roads at much lower speeds.

jjcm 8y ago
If this did go live in California, it would need to be policed in a different way. The “left lane is for passing only” would have to be enforced strictly before it would operate efficiently, and a minimum speed limit would have to be posted.
Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
> Acts of aggression can include driving at the speed limit or less in the left lane because "I can and it's not against the law". What's especially shitty about this is that in many states, it actually is against the law, but since it's so poorly enforced, people either don't know or don't care.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  I'm not a left lane parker, but isn't driving above the speed limit also against the law?
  - Spartan-S63 8y ago
    Yes. In some (most?) states, the leftmost lane on a motorway above 65MPH is supposed to be used for passing only. What makes highways dangerous are large speed gradients and this is an issue caused by drivers both on the high end and the low end of speed. Hence why most highways have a minimum advertised speed. The issue is that no one respects the speed limits anymore which often expands the gradient and makes the highway less safe. Left lane or not, you shouldn’t exceed the speed limit.

skookumchuck 8y ago

I'd require drivers in such lanes to have a special license and the cars pass an inspection that they are sound enough to drive faster.

dmode 8y ago

This will never happen because 1. There is no appetite for increasing speed limits due to increase in emissions and increase in enforcement costs 2. Drivers here are simply not disciplined enough to make a no speed limit lane successful 3. Our roads are not engineered to support that kind of speeds, both in terms of pavement conditions as well as merge and off ramp designs. 4. There is no funding to build new lanes to I-5