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Comment by rand77763 | Hacker News Reader

You must learn to differentiate legality from morality.

Right. It's illegal to exceed the traffic limit. It's immoral to speed excessively in way that causes needless risk of physical harm to other people.

It's immoral to drive at any speed which causes needless risk of physical harm to other people, speeding or otherwise. There are times when speeding does not cause this risk though.

The phrase "speed excessively" in your second sentence directly implies that "speeding" leads to the immorality rather than just speed. Additionally, "excessive" is approaching a tautology. In your first comment though you just talk about "speeding" without the excess and then say that's flatly immoral.

Sure, but in my experience people who are speeding at 10-20 mph on 35-mph-limited mixed-user surface streets are doing both. That's true as well on rural highways with hidden curves and possibly animals or tractors, or complex urban interstates with lots of traffic merging. These account for a majority of the driving people do. The case of a rural interstate with few interchanges is what people mostly think of with speed limits, but many of these have already been raised to a limit of 70–80 mph.

People are bad at assessing risk and bad at awareness of road conditions. And I think learning to disregard posted speed limits corrodes regard for other rules of the road, like stopping at traffic lights.

>It's immoral to speed excessively in way that causes needless risk of physical harm to other people.

Even in jurisdictions that didn't have speeding laws (before we had a national standard) those people were still prosecuted for reckless driving. The standard speeding law is whatever is reasonable and prudent given the traffic, weather, and road conditions. It's a subjective standard that offers police a lot of leeway, but so it goes.

Normal traffic is driving up to the legal speed limit.

> On the other hand, a New York judge announced that he would not convict drivers for blocking speeding traffic, People v. Ilieveski, 175 Misc. 2d 943; 670 N.Y.S.2d 1004 (Monroe County N.Y. 1998).

Failing to keep pace with the flow of traffic is just as much of a safety hazard. I see near misses all the time on the highway due to people make desperate lane changes to avoid getting stuck behind a slower car.

Mostly I'm talking about surface roads, especially where people go at ~50 mph in a 35 mph zone, without regard for road conditions or other road users.

But drivers have developed a sense of entitlement to speed at least 10 mph, and regard the posted speed limit as a speed minimum. But if a car is traveling 65 mph in a 65 mph zone in a center or right lane, and a car behind him traveling at 75 mph swerves recklessly into another lane in order to avoid having to slow down to the posted speed limint, then the responsibility for the risk of that unsafe lane change is the responsibility of the driver who did it, not the car driving at the posted speed limit in the right lane.

> drivers have developed a sense of entitlement to speed at least 10 mph, and regard the posted speed limit as a speed minimum.

This is the result of underposting highway speed limits for decades. Had that not happened, then dotted limits would have a lot more respect today.

The National Maximum Speed Limit law was passed in 1974 and repealed in 1995. It's been repealed for longer than it was in effect. Virtually all of the lower 48 US states have an interstate speed limit on the order of 70-80 mph.

Yes, though a lot of them have 85th percentile speeds more than 5 mph above the speed limit. And they still have a tendency to randomly reduce the speed limit to 55 mph without any obvious difference in road design (Pennsylvania and Maryland for example). Also, a lot of those states only recently allowed speed limits above 65 mph (far more recently than 1995).

So you basically have a generation of motorists who grew up and spent a substantial portion of their driving years with highway speed limits that virtually no one complies with, and that it was okay to drive 5 to 10 mph above the speed limit. This attitude spread to other road types as well meaning that even appropriately posted speed limits (e.g., 25 mph residential streets) have a high degree of noncompliance.

It's going to take a while to undo the damage, but that's what happens when traffic control devices are effectively used to "cry wolf".

Edit: s/compliance)/noncompliance/

The flow of traffic is the speed limit when police are around.

The key word there is "excessively". Going faster than the posted speed limit doesn't mean you're endangering others. And, heck, driving at or lower than the posted speed limit also doesn't mean that you aren't endangering others (e.g. under poor weather conditions).

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