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Good. I don't understand why speedometers go up to 130 mph. I don't know why Americans feel they have a God-given right to break the speed limit. If you aren't
by Cheer2171 2y ago
Good. I don't understand why speedometers go up to 130 mph. I don't know why Americans feel they have a God-given right to break the speed limit. If you aren't going 10-20 mph over the speed limit, you're not following the flow of traffic. I will be going the posted speed limit of 65 mph (and not in the far-left "fast lane") and have had so many insane aggressive drivers tailgate me and road rage. The de facto speed limit is always higher than the posted one. If they update the posted limit to match what is followed and enforced, then the de facto speed limit will increase.
Laws that are on the books but rarely enforced is a recipe for abuse. It is unjust that I, as an immigrant to this country who can be deported if I commit crimes, have to violate the posted law in order to keep up with the flow of traffic.
Edit: Actually, it looks like this just informs the driver that they are going over the speed limit. Not good. It needs to physically restrict the speed of the car.
- hooo 2y agoIs this satire? 10mph and over is usually with the flow of traffic. Many speed limits are artificially low and that’s why traffic flows faster.
- zdw 2y agotraffic flows faster because the roads widths and other affordances are designed for high speed, even on low speed roads. If you want people to go slower, make the roads/lanes narrower.
- Cheer2171 2y agoI am 100% serious. It is unjust that I, as an immigrant to this country who can be deported if I commit crimes, have to violate the posted law in order to keep up with the flow of traffic.
- quantified 2y agoI know quite a few people, and I was once one myself, who simply keep to the limit. You can assert your right to drive only the speed limit, you have that.
- Cheer2171 2y agoThat is what I do, because politicians in my jurisdiction constantly talk about "law and order" and being a "nation of laws", in addition to much anti-immigration rhetoric. I still get tailgated, honked at, and road raged. Often by a large pickup truck.
- quantified 2y agoYes, it takes a bit of fortitude to stand against something similar to peer pressure. Modeling behavior, like fully stopping at stop signs, always using blinkers, getting your passengers to use their belts, etc. can take a bit of a mindset. Ultimately, lawbreakers will break laws. Just like the trope of getting a gun illegally.
- archagon 2y agoPeer pressure is one thing. But tailgaters and road ragers could put your life in danger.
- workingdog 2y agoGeneral advice: Stay in the second to right lane. Never go more than 7 miles over. After 10 miles over, the tickets get expensive, and the police have more of a reason to pull you over. 7 mph accounts for speedometer errors and makes you part of the pack but not the speediest. Make your car look respectable; Like it's driven by a person who could contest a ticket. If pulled over: Be polite but not obsequious. When asked, immediately admit to going 7 miles over as a matter of fact so you don't get tailgaters. You'll most likely get a warning.
- CalRobert 2y agoIndeed, we build roads that feel like you should go 45mph on them and then slap a sign that says 25 down and wonder why pedestrians die. US road design is trash.
- rainsford 2y agoUS road design undoubtedly is hot garbage, but US drivers are trash too. Nobody's forcing anyone to speed through a neighborhood regardless of street design, following the posted limit so you don't mow down pedestrians isn't that hard.
- CalRobert 2y agoTrue, though I live in the Netherlands now and the drivers here (mostly) obey because speed limits are actually enforced and the street design is better. They’re not somehow more virtuous I think.
- rainsford 2y agoHaving to break the law to keep up with the flow of traffic has been weirdly normalized in the US. I don't disagree that speed limits are artificially low in many cases, but the expectation that everyone should respond to this by exceeding the limit (instead of maybe lobbying to get the limit changed) seems goofy. And it moves from goofy to dangerous when the response of many drivers to people who don't respond that way is to behave super aggressively towards anyone going the speed limit, even if they're in the right-hand lane.
- fargle 2y agowhat you're seeing is a different kind of breakdown of law-and-order. instead of not enough regulation to the point of anarchy, at a certain point a highly bureaucratic highly regulated system gets to the point of over-regulation. instead of reducing "crime" it perversely increases. this isn't "goofy", it's very predictable and certainly can be dangerous. take california where this kind of speeding is rampant. - it has very regressive speed laws compared to other western states with similar roads. it has 55mph maximum for trucks (and cars) pulling trailers and on two-lane. 65mph anywhere else maximum. most neighboring states have eliminated split speed limits and have 75 or 80 max. - it has a comparatively large, very professional highway patrol (CHP). it certainly isn't for lack of enforcement capability. - a very large population (39M) means state politics is a combination of huge bureaucracy and big money. there's a proposition system, but even that is essentially inaccessible without lots of money. even if something good did start organically, by the time it was mangled by the self-serving politicians it'd end up worse than where it started. - california has roads and drivers. lots and lots of both. and lots of urban sprawl too. nearly everyone has to contend with it, like it or not. so the reason "everyone" responds to this by exceeding the limit, is that it's easier than the alternatives. a majority of the drivers "realize" (to some extent) that they have approximately three options: a) drive the speed limit and get punished by other drivers and sometimes law enforcement [1], b) same as a, but make it one's life mission to change the laws effectively, or c) put your foot in it and go with the flow of the herd. even if there were 10x the CHP presence, they can't stop everyone. there are so many people who vote this way with their accelerator pedal, that if you go with the flow of traffic even if it's 20mph over the posted limit for 10 years you might not get a ticket. if you ever do, no harm, no foul: you were simply randomly selected for the "extra road tax". this is a different kind of democracy. it's very "direct" and very real time. the rules aren't written down, but they aren't imaginary either. in short, it's the polar opposite of the dejure government system. it's actually extremely democratic: one car, one vote for the "correct" speed. of course there are outliers and "criminals" in this society: the guy in the black mercedes who "doesn't give a shit" and wants to go as fast as he can. his concern for the other drivers is as slalom obstacles. AND ALSO the guy who sets his speed control to whatever the sign says and becomes an obstruction. they are both ignoring the other drivers and thumbing their nose at the rules of that society. it's a lot worse than "goofy". when you've conditioned people that the "right" way to effect change in government, whether democracy or not, is defacto closed-off and inaccessible. and then there's a problem, people will organically find a way to fix the problem. if the cheapest easiest way is simply to ignore the dejure government rules en-mass, that's what will happen. it's hard to imagine how to "get back" from it, if that's what you want. it's a testament to the unprofessionalism, selfishness, and pure stupidity of our elected officials that they've ignored this possibility allowed it to cross that line. as for speeding, if california would post really reasonable speed limits, a larger group of people might find it "not worth it" to go faster than posted. perhaps they didn't really want to go faster in the first place. you'd have to make this a solid majority in order to cause the pirate society to fail. it doesn't seem that likely. it's pretty cheap to just ignore something. [1] if you drive substantially slower than the "herd", perversely you will draw more CHP attention and be more likely to be pulled over. are you drunk? is your car unsafe? are you on the phone? violating CVC 24000? are you unlicensed or uninsured? are you simply the first/slowest car the motor-officer catches up to, and therefore a safer/faster option to get to the next doughnut?
- bluejekyll 2y agoOne of the issues is that posted speeds often don’t match the speed the road allows people to comfortably do. To bring speeds down, the things that are generally most effective are street narrowing, speed tables and humps (to bring to speeds safe in neighborhoods), and then obstacles like protected bike lanes or pedestrian refuge islands. When a street is designed to allow someone to comfortably do 45 because it’s maybe 2 lanes in one direction instead of 1, but posted as a 25, people will speed on it.
- TulliusCicero 2y agoAlso useful to do stuff like make roads curved and add trees to the side. A YouTube short I saw the other day about this concept: https://youtube.com/shorts/MyT7F5zuOU4 https://youtube.com/shorts/MyT7F5zuOU4
- rainsford 2y agoI'm sort of sympathetic to that argument, but my observation has also been that most drivers are terrible at judging safe speeds for a given road. They go way too slow when they don't need to (a gentle curve on a highway) and drive way too fast for conditions at other times (a narrow twisty two lane road with blocked sight lines and blind driveways).
- austin-cheney 2y agoYour opinion demonstrates some combination of appeal to authority and weak empathy. People drive fast because for any number of reasons: they enjoy driving fast, want to get to their destination earlier, have competing priorities, are not paying attention, and so forth. There are many laws on the books that are rarely enforced and its not a recipe for disaster. Some laws are just old and achieve functional obsolescence. Some laws exist only so that they can be enforced as helpful to prevent or investigate other unrelated criminal behavior. The only disaster here is irrationally limiting the discretion of judicial and law enforcement agents to appease some blind appeal to authority.
- Cheer2171 2y agoIn what other domain of law are people allowed to violate the posted law because of their feelings? The "flow of traffic" is just the sum aggregate of what all the drivers are feeling like doing given the current conditions, like the price of a stock is just the sum aggregate of what all the investors are feeling like doing given the current conditions. If that's how the US wants to govern speeding, then that should be the law. Why is an appeal to authority wrong, when we are literally talking about the speed limit, which is a law posted by an authority? Obviously what is legal is not what is moral/ethical, but if the speed limits should be changed, that is a different conversation than if the law should be enforced. What is the point of a law that is not enforced? I guess Americans are used to seeing a posted number and then having to do mental math to calculate what the real number is (prices). That feels literally insane to me. I feel like I am living in Crazytown, USA.
- austin-cheney 2y agoI will not invent some conclusion to answer for the emotional state of all other people. I wouldn't know what any other person is feeling unless I talk to them. Appeals to authority are logical fallacies because they are blanket excuses to ignore evidence in order to satisfy an opinion out of convenience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#In_the_deductive_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#In_the...
- Svip 2y ago> It needs to physically restrict the speed of the car. There are situations, where it would be dangerous if you cannot exceed the speed limit. All cars in Japan are limited to 160 km/h, even though the fastest speed limit is 120 km/h, this to allow for situations where exceeding that limit is necessary.
- bluejekyll 2y agoWhat situations is it necessary to exceed the speed limit?
- photonthug 2y agoWhen other cars do. This is why, regardless of any other rationale, we can’t automatically limit speed limits anywhere unless we can do it everywhere all at once.
- Scubabear68 2y agoSometimes in passing a driver acting dangerously it pays to get passed them as quickly as possible. Or perhaps getting away from a natural disaster.
- bluejekyll 2y agoYou mean like a tornado? Most natural disasters will end up with many people clogging the roads, generally won't see a lot of speeding as an option.
- beej71 2y agoAn unintended consequence of this will be massive lines of cars going down the highway because no one will be able to get up the speed to pass safely.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoGoing well below speed limit for no reason is also illegal in _some_ places.
- mdp2021 2y ago> just informs ... Not good. It needs to physically restrict Would you trust the system to be reliable? (Among the many issues in topic.) I have met many that call car systems trying to keep people inside lanes "plain dangerous after experience".
- photonthug 2y ago> Not good. It needs to physically restrict the speed of the car. What I’m hearing is that you either want to have a mixed bag of automatic enforcement on some cars and none on other cars, or, you want everyone with a noncompliant car to be forced into an upgrade. If you think about it for more than a few seconds, either approach is bad. In the first case you have added new safety issues while you try to remove them. In the 2nd case, it only sounds like a good plan if you want to redistribute wealth from the middle and lower classes to car manufacturers.
- mckn1ght 2y agoI think just adding it to new cars would be enough. Eventually all unregulated cars would age out. For the upgrade path, it could be treated like building codes, which change every so often without requiring immediate retrofit of all homes/buildings: require it as a part of resale.
- photonthug 2y agoWhen new cars are forced to go 55 on that one long curvy downhill where the big trucks are all going 80, you just increased fatalities on that corridor by a LOT. And probably for like 15+ years without forcing regulation that requires updates. The body count will be very substantial when you multiply it across all of the roads, or even just California roads. Not trying to be contrary or throw up imaginary hypotheticals, I drive a car that sometimes has trouble keeping up with traffic on such downhills because I’m very top heavy. People that talk about stuff like this seriously have no appreciation for the variety of car and road types that are already present in the real world. Robot assistance being offered is fine. But robot enforced compliance killing people in the name of safety is absurd.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aagha 2y agoShow me you've never been to Germany without showing me.
- CottonMcKnight 2y agoI have a bumper sticker that says "Vehicle speed monitored by GPS / Speed limiter in use", like some commercial trucks have. It dramatically cuts down on the road rage.