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Why does everyone drive 10-15 miles above the speed limit?
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Why don’t we raise the speed limit if that’s how fast everyone wants to go?
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Why is traffic enforcement given to very expensive and ineffective police instead of cheaper and more automated traffic cameras?
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Why do we refuse to ever use ANY traffic calming measures? Yes, than you flashing digital sign for telling me I’m going 10 miles above the limit on this incredibly wide and straight and flat road with high curbs and perfect visibility.
It’s a serious confusion I have about how society is supposed to operate because it seems like a complete and total breakdown of logic and sense.
And, yes, I know there’s some thing people did long ago to set the speed limit at some percentile of what people were already traveling at, but that’s obviously a stupid way to do it and we did it anyway. So why?
It’s one of those areas where we want to regulate something we don’t really want to, so we’re stuck at a compromise that nobody says they are happy with but also nobody wants to change.
We set speed limits (so we did something about traffic deaths), but we don’t enforce them, because drivers would hate that. The upside of the existence of speed limits is that reckless drivers can be charged with speeding if they cause an accident. The downside is that police departments make a revenue stream of ticketing citizens driving at completely safe and reasonable speeds.
Some parts of Europe have automated average speed cameras. That’s way more draconian than a speed camera: they take a pic at each checkpoint, they know the distances between them, if your time is better than what you could do by driving at speed limit, you get a ticket. I would go nuts if I had to drive like that. It would work for autonomous vehicles, so I expect that systematic speed limit enforcement will coincide with the rollout of autonomous cars, which will be the time to stop driving on public roads anyway.
Another similar area is immigration, sorry for the off topic tangent, but I think it’s a similar dynamic. Anti immigration politicians say they want to make tough laws that keep immigrants out, but the laws are not enforced, because without immigrants entire sectors of the economy would stop working. Progressive politicians say they want lax laws so everyone is welcome to enter, but that would be a shitty law because you can’t run a country without borders. So the likelihood that we end up with regulations that allow the right amount of migrant workers and respect refugee rights, and then are actually enforced, is about zero.
In Australia we have automated ticket cameras and it’s really not as bad as you seem to think. You literally just do the speed limit and then you have no problems. And doing the speed limit is as simple as looking at your speedometer and doing what it says. You’d be doing that anyway to make sure you weren’t more than 10-15mph over, right?
Most cars have slightly different speedometers so the cameras aren’t so sensitive, you can go a couple of km over with no issues.
Sure, but I would like more agency than that. That’s the crux of OP’s question: is the speed limit treated as a hard rule, or a soft rule. I am on the opinion that it should be treated as a soft rule; and drivers should be able to judge the safe speed for driving that is appropriate for the road conditions, traffic, vehicle characteristics, tires, weather, driver’s experience, and so on. I don’t think that on a given road with a 65 sign, the ideal speed is 65 mph for everyone in all weather situations, in a 4wd with performance tires or a fwd with worn chinese 4 seasons tires, for a teenager who just got a permit or a commercial driver who’s been on the road at least 40 hours a week for 20 years, day or night. Maybe someone should slow down to 55 in the rain in curves, and the other guy is safe to do 70.
Why is that that folks aren’t routinely getting tickets for tailgating, for holding a phone while driving, or for drifting in and out of the lane. While you can always expect to get a ticket for speeding. It is used as a proxy of safe driving because it is easy to determine whether speed was greater than limit. But it is nowhere near being the most relevant measurement.
And the fucked up thing is: society does treat it as a soft rule in the places where I lived (many, if not most drivers go over the limit), but police occasionally set up shop and pretend we treat it as a hard rule. If you ever see that everyone is slowing down from the normal cruising speed when there’s a police car in sight, that’s a sure sign of this. The speed limit is only a hard rule when it comes to writing tickets, not when it’s about choosing the speed.