The speed limit is America’s most broken law. Why can’t we fix it? | Hacker News Reader

The speed limit is America’s most broken law. Why can’t we fix it?

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27 pointsAmorymeltzer62 comments

Speeding is basically a function of road design.

Until this year, I lived on a street that was just wide enough for 3 cars. It had street parking on both sides of the road, and allows traffic both ways. Believe me, nobody is speeding on that street.

Road design and car design. Few people were doing 80mph back when the road noise was deafening and your steering wheel would shimmy. In today's cars you can't tell the difference between 60mph and 80mph.

Bingo.

This is why we have things like the 85th percentile rule. There is no such thing as a road with a speeding problem, just a road that is designed for and thus encourages higher speeds than the posted limit.

When that happens, you have to change one of those two things. Either fix the road to match the desired speed, or raise the posted limit to be appropriate for the road as it exists.

Anyone who simply advocates for stricter enforcement of the limits as they stand without changing anything does not understand the problem.

I'm not convinced. I'm from a rural area with very wide roads, virtually no pedestrians, great visibility. Basically everyone went the speed limit or under. At most 5 over. Where I am now the roads are much narrower, less visibility, overall just not as good for going fast. Despite this, the speed limits seem to be higher and more people speed. Almost everyone does. Go to most small towns in the US and people drive slower (despite the fact there's less traffic). This makes me think speeding is a culture thing, and with the right enforcement the culture could be changed.

Anecdotally, speed limit enforcement is much more vigilant in small towns.

True. Anecdotal but I was pulled over 10x as much in a small town versus a city with 1M pop.

Smalltown cops are bored.

I’ve only lived in Mid sized or larger cities so I have no experience with small towns, but I think it’s fair to say they may work differently than urban regions for cultural reasons or otherwise

Regardless, “the right enforcement” thing is clearly true, but the right enforcement isn’t necessarily practical. Some of the worst offenders I’ve seen wrt speed limit aren’t (imo) highways where people go 15 over, but really wide locals in suburban residential areas where people come off the highway and keep driving 40+, putting bicyclists or pedestrians in danger. These roads are rarely enforced by traffic cops probably due to how little traffic they see in the first place

I am also from a rural area, I've spent the better part of the last two decades driving through farmland on roads with no posted limit to get to anywhere. The legal speed limit on such roads is 45 MPH but for the most part on the flat, straight segments traffic goes 55ish. County Sheriff doesn't care until somewhere in the 60s unless they're looking to pull you over.

If you're on a road that goes through a town just barely large enough to have a police department, you can guarantee that the road suddenly gains a posted limit of 35 MPH without changing in any significant way and that there will be strict enforcement which may or may not be biased towards those with non-local tags.

The exception is the state of Indiana. I don't know what they put in the water there, but no one in Indiana seems to have noticed that interstate highways are no longer stuck with the double nickel. Of course they also have the most bare minimum 2+2 interstate where one dawdler refusing to pass a semi can tie up traffic for miles on end.

At least in my area, it feels unsafe to drive the speed limit on the interstate because you will be run off the road by impatient truck drivers.

It’s similar in my area, but not just limited to truck drivers. It’s amazing to me how angry people appear to be when I drive exactly at the speed limit and refuse to tailgate the car in front of me.

They seem to think that I’m the one in the wrong for treating speeding hunks of metal that weigh thousands of pounds as dangerous things that can and do kill people.

If you aren't in the right-most lane, then yes, you are wrong. See, e.g., Ind. Code § 35-44.1-2-13; Virg. Code § 46.2-842.1.

Typically I am in the right-most lane. I was taught during drivers education that the left lane is for passing and that you should move back over to the right-most lane whenever possible, especially if you’re a “slow moving” vehicle.

But there are drivers who weave through traffic whenever they see an opening and those are the ones who appear to be angriest when they’re behind me in the right-most lane because they were impatient in the other lanes.

I am an impatient driver, but I think you're in the right and the other driver is in the wrong. Right lane is slow traffic/merge. Middle lane is travel. Left lane is fast/passing lane.

I don't think every state has this law.

Unless you’re in the right lane, you are the one in the wrong. You can be pulled over in most US states for driving slower than surrounding traffic.

Usually I am in the right lane. My area has laws where “slow moving” traffic should stay to the right, so I use the left lane for passing and move back over whenever possible.

Respectfully, I don't think this is the right mentality. These laws give the idiots cause to be jerks. The guys speeding 80+ bullying people over to the right lane do not make our roads a better place.

the person hogging the left lane does not make our roads better, instead they make them slower and less enjoyable. If you're in the left lane and somebody's behind you, just be decent and go to the right once it's clear to do so. Then you can go back into the left lane

I am not much for speeding but I try to keep in the appropriate lane. I understand Someone going at speed limit in the left lane if there are just two and the right is full of trucks. I see people doing it on sparsely used 4 lane highways too and I think that is just stupid. Why would you make traffic more dangerous for yourself?

if you're in the left lane and people are behind you, that means you need to go faster, period. It doesn't make traffic any less safe if you go faster. Going slow pisses people off and makes them do risky moves.

In MA area I almost never see cars going at speed limit (65) in Mass Turnpike. Most cars average 75, leftmost lane goes at 80.

Was once pulled over for doing 65mph in the left lane of a two lane stretch of the Mass Pike, creating a minor traffic bottleneck in the process. (I was 17 and didn't know any better.)

I received my first ever ticket last year because everyone on the freeway was driving 80+ during Covid lockdown and I had to accelerate past that to be able to safely change lanes for an upcoming exit.

Completely clean record. Cop didn’t care. Quotas are gonna quota.

Certainly not just the USA. Also, unless you are travelling large distances or travelling at criminal speeds, you aren't really saving that much time by speeding.

A developer once asked me if I optimized my short/frequent inner loops or my long/infrequenly run code paths.

But I agree. Watching someone weave past me to sit at the same red light or passing them when they pick the wrong lane in traffic always makes me laugh.

Yeah if people really want road trips to be over quickly they should just drive below ticketable speed and keep moving. Going 10% faster on the highway for an hour is easily canceled out by a single stop.

Within cities, driving even 20% faster routinely results in literally no improvement in transit time because you still catch the same red lights at the same times, but burn more fuel between them.

When I was a kid, there was this smaller town we went through somewhere in the midwest. It had signs that said "traffic lights are synchronized for 25 MPH". Once you figured out that they were telling the truth, you drove 25[1]. If you didn't, you hit every light red.

[1] Or at least most people did. We still saw at least one vehicle jackrabbit out of a stop, get up to 35, and then hit the next red light. Over and over. Sigh...

So you drive 50, then ;)

I typically go 5-10 miles above the speed limit, have been driving for 30 years, drive more slowly than probably 60% of drivers, and have never gotten a speeding ticket.

Same. But I usually do 15 to 20% over max instead of 5-10. 10 over in a neighborhood is way different than 10 over on the xway.

Why is the speed limit what it is? Why not focus on driver education? Why not focus on feedback? This topic, where a driver is holding back 40 cars trying to get to work on time while he/she drives in a way to prevent anyone from getting past... People get fed up, occasionally doing stupid stuff like passing on the shoulder. How many accidents are caused by roadrage? Traffic on your bumper - move right. I'd much rather have that guy on down the road instead of in my mirror. I once had a car block me on a near empty road for almost 10 miles. We were trying to make a flight, but this guy was bothered that we were doing 10mph over on an empty road. I read a few years ago about a guy blocking a driver who had an accident... while trying to get to the hospital with his pregnant wife.

We can all coexist on the road. Rule one - use common sense, be polite. Rule two - don't be a dick. Rule three - let the cops do the policing.

It's broken because it's wrongheaded and unsafe. e.g. people blocking the left lane are demonstrably causing accidents and unsafe driving. Instead of taking an engineering approach, we let emotions and revenue generation dictate the limits.

And that's why I'm a proud Cannonballer: it's a protest against arbitrary speed limits. Nothing like beating the Google estimate by 10 or 11 hours going cross country.

And with something like 1 million miles driven, there has been 1 injury, which happened in the 70s. No multiple car crashes. And I can say that people were traveling way above the speed limit the entire time.

If you want to tell me that going 100+ west of Tulsa isn't safe in a relatively modern car, I just can't even with you. Arizona? New Mexico? The speed limits there are a joke. They should be unlimited.

I wonder what would happen if we set up a micro-transition traffic management future: eg. if you are in the left lane and not actively passing, 1.00$/min (or some percentage of income).

If you are switching lanes above some safety/rate threshold, $40.00 per pass, etc.

I wonder if you could gamify a safer road.

Insurance. There are insurance companies that will have you download an app from which they monitor your driving and adjust your premiums accordingly.

Man, that's pretty creepy.

You have no idea how much I'd be willing to pay for access to the bonus lanes and higher speeds.

> More than 1 in 4 fatal crashes in the United States involve at least one speeding driver, making speeding a factor in nearly 10,000 deaths each year, in addition to an unknowable number of injuries.

We hear this statistic all the time from law enforcement and I smell BS. Is there some quantitative method being used to determine if speed was a factor? More likely, this is some checkbox on a form an officer checks almost by default when filing a report.

The article goes on to later discuss the difficulty in correlating speed limit and deaths. Perhaps this is difficult to determine because the correlation is low or non existent at the speeds most drivers drive (5-10 mph over limit.)

I would guess that at least one out of four drivers is exceeding the speed limit at all times, so the fact that one out of four fatal crashes involves speeding doesn't say much. it's odd to start off the article with such a weak statistic and say nothing about how tenuous the causal link is, but the the rest of the article does a pretty good job exploring the absurdity of US speed limits.

96% of all deaths in America, the person ate potatoes within the last 4 days.

Because we eat lots of potatoes. Correlation only.

Isn't this just wrong? Speeding is 1 in 4 fatal crashes. Something like 1 in 2 is 'running over a pedestrian'. Why can't we fix that? Why don't we talk about that, instead of some marginal issue like speeding?

Do you think these things aren't all intertwined?

I'll note that the article specifically claims that speeds are too high on local roads, which I'd think you'd appreciate.

I see the garbage speed limits (set haphazardly, frequently to generate revenue, etc), as producing a generalized contempt for traffic law, which isn't good for pedestrians.

If 'local roads' mean rural, then no, there aren't many pedestrians there. I'd imagine most pedestrian fatalities are simply crosswalks in town.

no, that isn't what that means.

perhaps commenting on the subject will be more fruitful for you if you familiarize yourself with it.

Yes I read it. Rereading, I see they use the the term to mean neighborhood streets. Then yes, it's entirely possible the pedestrian carnage has little to do with speed limits, and mostly to do with inadequate crossings. In fact, we know that to be true because only 1/4 of fatal accidents have speed as a factor.

I suggest boning up on basic statistics!

> Despite the high speeds, the Interstate Highway System is more than twice as safe per mile as almost any other type of road.

I wonder how that compares to be speeding ticket issued per hour of driving. I always think of the classic pull over scene being on the interstate.

A simple if speed >= speed limit, then slowly apply brakes, would be so controversial, even if we exempted cop cars and ambulances. Because "freedom." Same with guns and if location == school zone, then don't fire.

Of course, it's automatically about "muh freedom" and implicitly insulting a whole culture. No reason to think that maybe, just maybe, speed limits as they stand in many places are arbitrary, overly low and specifically designed as revenue machines for vaguely corrupt municipal, state and other regional governments. The majority of people who moderately speed (a majority of people in general) have perfectly reasonable use of their faculties and judgement. They're not going over the speed limit because they're just freedom-obsessed assholes. They're doing it because their slightly elevated speed is more reasonable and relatively safe.

Okay, so if I changed my software to allow you to speed everywhere except school zones, are you okay with that, or does is it still seem like a revenue machine or a thwart on your reasonable speeding?

If by 'freedom' you're referring to the freedom to overtake a vehicle, the freedom to escape a dangerous situation, or the freedom to rush to the hospital, I'd agree.

Okay, so if I changed the software to prevent speeding only if you are in a school zone, would you be okay to lose your freedom to speed in the school zone, or do you still contend that you need to speed to escape your dangerous situation or rush to the hospital?

That's a great illustration of why limited regulation can be desirable: if the law says you must apply brakes, it bans downshifting for engine braking (a better means to slow, arguably)! Regulation ossifies a "state" of the world and it may be inaccurate, or it may become outdated compared to the needs of the future.

Corruption. The police and courts stand to profit handsomely from the existing system. The legislatures cooperate because those groups will make their lives difficult in other ways. Quid pro quo, Clarice.

I sometimes wonder why road fatalities are not measured per-hour of driving instead of per-mile?

why? miles seem like the natural denominator to me. I don't hop in my car to drive 20 minutes and see where I end up. my goal is to drive to a specific location n miles away.

I believe they would mostly correlate with each other, but doing it per hour driven would better surface things like tiredness playing a part (eg. that 5 mile commute back from work can take either 5 minutes in no traffic at 60mph, or an hour or more in heavy traffic — one has a different risk profile from the other).

Still I don't think it'd make for a practical difference as long as all the studies are including enough of both types of driving.

But breaking it down, perhaps there should be stricter speed limit controls in suburbs and cities, and relaxed on inter-city highways?

We've got that in Serbia, so I imagine it's not that unusual elsewhere either (our lawmakers are not the smartest ones and they usually just copy stuff over :)).

Basically, speeding up to 10km/h in the urban area is equivalent to speeding up to 20km/h outside cities as far as fines go (and up to 20km/h in the urban area is an equivalent penalty as for up to 40km/h outside urban areas, and so forth...).

Specifically for long trips: if I drive on a long trip (say, 10 hours at the speed limit, on high quality highways), given the fixed distance, how does my risk of a fatality change if I drive 20% faster and thus spend 2 hours less in the car?

I'd say the section of the Constitution defining the structure of the Senate is pretty high up there. Or perhaps the laws that define most Congressional elections as First-past-the-post method instead of something failing fewer voting system criteria.

But, headlines have to catch attention, even if it's a boldly foolish and false claim on its face.

I presume the writers meant "most frequently violated."

America's most broken law... Does the author understand the role of states?

And municipalities.

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