I have a friend who got an entirely fabricated ticket claiming he was doing 80+ going uphill on an on-ramp in an early 90s toyota corolla with four people and four desktops + a couple of CRTs. We weren't going faster than ~35. Ticket said it was radar verified but he was sitting on his hood eating a sandwich.
Other times going the speed limit when traffic is going significantly faster is reckless (I'm looking at you, Atlanta). Cops in places like that love to ticket out of town/state plates.
While I'd accept that there are tight situations on remote highways similar to the one you described with the semi and tailgater, I also relish in those moments where I do just slow down and let the tailgater be pissed, sometimes they do get the ticket, and my conservative speeding gets vindicated.
Worth noting in this case that this bill does not redefine reckless driving, and is in fact dependent on a reckless driving charge and having been going over 100mph.
Having driven extensively in nearly every city in this country, the drivers in Atlanta are absolutely the most dangerous. It is the only city I refuse to drive in, and I try to limit my physical presence in the Atlanta Metro (aside from transiting the airport) to reduce the risk of being in an accident.
I have seen a mid-90s Nissan pickup truck literally on two wheels it was weaving through traffic so recklessly on I-85.
LA, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, Bay Area, Houston, Dallas, etc. They all have their bad drivers, but none of them seem to have this deeply ingrained culture of reckless driving quite like Atlanta.
Because you can always count on people to have sufficient self awareness to rationally evaluate the pros and cons of their decisions before the fact, especially those who have demonstrated a repeated willingness to drive recklessly.
How is this different from actual criminals that we lock up behind bars? Sometimes till the remainder of their lives. These aren't children, and the quicker we start treating them as adults, the quicker they'll learn to obey the laws before the real and life-changing consequences kick in.
Speed limits in the US have a particular problem. The speed limits are set too close to the speed people are expected to drive.
If the typical traffic speed on some highway is 65 MPH and someone is driving 76 MPH, that... isn't much different. It's not some night and day distinction where you can objectively say that 65 is perfectly safe and 76 is recklessly dangerous. The variation in stopping distance between those speeds is less than it is between one car and another from the same speed.
The normal way you resolve this sort of thing in the law is by setting a legal limit which is objectively reckless, e.g. by setting the speed limit to 125 MPH. Then you aren't actually expected to drive 124 MPH, you're still expected to drive around 65 MPH, but we can reasonably say that if you're caught doing 130 there you're deserving of some penalties.
However, that doesn't generate fine revenue because then hardly anyone actually drives that fast. What generates fine revenue is setting the speed limit there to 55 MPH even while the median traffic speed is still 65 MPH, and then doing only enough enforcement to make sure people don't follow the law. You maximize revenue when everyone is "speeding" all the time and all you have to do is post a patrol car there once in a while and rake in the dough. But that also makes it unjust to impose harsh penalties for it because then receiving a citation is a matter of bad luck rather than doing something outside the bounds of reasonable and expected behavior.
> You maximize revenue when everyone is "speeding" all the time and all you have to do is post a patrol car there once in a while and rake in the dough.
This is the major problem with speed limits in the USA. The speed limits are set to ensure easy revenue collection, not for safety. Nearly every single person on a given road is speeding, so they just send out officers and collect fines, regardless of whether or not the people fined are actually driving dangerously.
> The normal way you resolve this sort of thing in the law is by setting a legal limit which is objectively reckless, e.g. by setting the speed limit to 125 MPH. Then you aren't actually expected to drive 124 MPH, you're still expected to drive around 65 MPH, but we can reasonably say that if you're caught doing 130 there you're deserving of some penalties.
I can't think of any teenage boy I've ever known who would have driven anywhere near 65 mph if the speed limit were 125 mph, no matter how much they were told that people were "expected" to drive around 65 mph.
I don't doubt that you could further reduce the problem with stricter laws.
The question is, how much more are we willing to pay to do that? The US already incarcerates its population at a greater rate than most of the rest of the world (5th highest as of 2022).
If incarceration was really that effective, shouldn't we also have some of the lowest crime rates in the world? If that's not the case, then why should we think that doubling down on that strategy is likely to be effective?
Ah yes, the person that makes the mistake of conflating random laws and arbitrary numbers for political reasons with some sort of lack of risk awareness / mitigation.
Yet we’d be better off if we at least adhered to the 85th percentile speed limit process rather than having the 85th percentile speed be 75mph and the posted limit be 55mph.
Speeding is widely accepted, because it seems such a low level offense. 50km/h instead of 30, it’s only 20 more. But the physics are against you - the energy of the vehicle grows quadratic with the speed. At 30, you need about 18 meters to come to a stop. So you can prevent an accident if a person appears about 20 meters from your hood. At 50, you’ll run them over with a remaining speed of more than 30km/h. Speeding kills.
Road conditions change. Sometimes it’s the middle of the night and nobody is on the county road, so you can run your brights. Sometimes a particular section of road has high visibility that makes a higher speed safer, while other sections are best taken under the limit. Some vehicles have better headlights than others, different stopping distances. Your logic only says “lower is safer,” it provides no means by which to draw the line on what level of risk is acceptable and, make no mistake, any amount of driving always implies risk. We balance the risk against its reward, that’s the function of traffic law.
For speed limits, the conditions are so variable that we compromise and set a number that’s reasonable-ish, most likely calibrated to the least safe conditions the road regularly experiences, and leave it at that. It’s still entirely possible, however, that a particular driver can have a much greater understanding of the risks implicit in going 10 over given their conditions, and thus increase the risk only a slight bit to save a large amount of time. This isn’t intrinsically some horrific moral crime; if you think it is then it sounds like law for the law’s sake type shit.
You’re trying to apply the “I am a good driver and my judgment is better than other people’s” argument - but the majority of people believe they’re an above average driver. That’s a dangerous fallacy. Now, you might truly be, but your argument paves the way for everyone else to say the same. After all, nothing happened so far. And that other driver might be the one that misjudges and crashes into you.
On country roads and highways, physics work even worse against you. Most People have good feeling for how long stopping distances are and how fast they increase at higher speeds. Increasing you speed from 100km/h to 110 increases your stopping distance by about 25 meters from 130 to 155. That puts it well above the outer limits for your brights - meaning by the time you could see any potential obstacle, you can’t stop any more. At highway speeds, in daylight conditions, high speeds can put an obstacle beyond the arc of a bend. At the same time, time savings are diminishing. Running 110 saves you 5.5 minutes on the hour compared to 100 with diminishing returns the faster you go.
Yet the German autobahn suggests that the fallacy is the reasoning that highways even need speed limits. The autobahn is safer without speed limits than every single innovation we have had in setting speed limits. Perhaps it is time to stop blaming drivers and blame highway speed limits for causing safety issues.
The german autobahn demonstrates exactly the opposite. Everywhere that speed limits are introduced, the number of accidents drop. Less injured people, less fatalities. One example is the A24 https://www.geo.de/wissen/vergleich-auf-a24-weniger-verletzt... where the number of fatal accidents dropped by 50%.
This is a relative matter. The autobahn, without speed limits, is safer than US high ways with speed limits. The speed limit being suggested there is also a higher speed than the speeds reached on most US highways, which were a clone of the autobahn. Research into this matter has long suggested that there is an optimal limit at the 85th percentile and setting a speed limit above or below it harms safety. The autobahn demonstrates the optimal limit is well above the limits that are used in the U.S., which coincidentally are well below the 85th percentile.
The autobahn with speed limits is demonstated to be safer than the autobahn without - there's no need to compare to US highways. You could compare the autobahn with germanies european neighbors, but the better comparison is the article that I posted in my previous comment. The same 62km long segment of autobahn, no infrastructure changes, compared with and without speed limit. The posted speed limit of 130km/h is also largely in line with US speed limits.
This all seems like a moot point to me until there is actual consequences for people who ACTUALLY cause accidents. We all know someone (maybe ourselves) who had their car totaled, seriously damaged, or been harmed by people that hit and run, had no financially responsibility for their damage, intoxicated, etc. And jack shit happened to them.
When an illegal hit my car and totalled my car (and then ran off), the police told me to fuck off and would not even write a report.
I don't give a single shit about speeding limit enforcement because the yield seems just so incredibly low compared to the yield of the same effort actually going after people who generate real victims rather than hypothetical ones.
My car was damaged by a guy who drove into my rear quarter panel in bumper to bumper traffic and convinced the officer and insurance that it was my fault by fabricating a story that I cut him off. He was trying to merge into my lane after I had been fully merged. He had stopped inches from the center of my car, and the moment he saw me move forward, he pressed the accelerator, going into my car. I suggested we move to the side of the road so that we would not block two lanes of traffic, which had worked against me because it made things look consistent with his story versus having stayed in place and blocking traffic. When I called 911 to have an officer come, the guy started yelling in my ear so much that I was deeply shaken and could not even speak to the officer well to describe what had happened.
Getting consequences for people who cause accidents sounds great, but we need actual ways of achieving it. In my case, I believe retrofitting my car with a traffic camera would achieve this. I also am not going to ever move my car following an accident in such conditions until police arrive either again.
No, he's not. But that's never stopped anyone from lobbing a strawman. He's saying that limits are set based on a low-ish common denominator and wind up being way below the typical common denominator and then they get ignored a bunch of the time hence why nobody takes ignoring them as a serious violation.
You strawmanned the shit out of the headlight example because it was a foot in the door (he should have known better). The point was that vehicles and equipment vary so safe speeds vary. 90s headlights vs the best you can get today. Work van handling vs sports car handling. Etc. etc.
If a person appears 20 meters from my hood while I'm on the interstate, they're toast, whether I'm going 100 km/h or 150. Surely the unpredictable can happen at any moment with other cars, but I find follow distance more important than speed. If you're bumper to bumper at 100 km/h, you're going to have a worse time than if you give 10 cars space at 150 km/h.
