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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

This can also be adjusted to by reducing speed.

You have to go so slow that you double the length of the trip, which is a big deal when a 2 hour trip turns into a 4 hour ordeal.

Sure but you should be able to safely drive the speed limit under normal (Ie not pouring rain, snow, etc) conditions. Night is a normal condition.

Bear in mind that the UK has a “national speed limit” of 60mph for much of the countryside. This is very much a limit, a maximum, and you’re expected to drive to the conditions of the road. If it’s perfect weather conditions and twisting roads not wide enough for 2 cars, you shouldn’t be driving at the speed limit.

Absolutely. The legal speed limit is 60 in the country - on any road not marked with a lower speed limit. This means that legally, you can drive at 60mph down a twisty single track road with 1.5m earth and rock banks topped with hedges.

You would be an irresponsible nutter with a death wish to try through! And if you crashed, "I was driving at / under the speed limit" wouldn't wash - you would be charged with Driving without Due Care and Attention, or Dangerous Driving depending on the consequences of the crash.

Driving too fast for the conditions (but within the limit) would usually be considered Driving without Due Care and Attention even if you don't crash (although the likelihood of anyone being around to enforce it on a deserted country road is pretty low).

That's not the purpose of that law. That's just the pretext they use to get the useful idiots to endorse it. The purpose of that laws is if you do something stupid but below the speed limit and not violating any other specific laws they've got something to nab you for.

Having driven in the US and UK, this is a significant difference between the two. In the UK, you might sometimes drive 30 under on a road that is nominally 60 mph. In the US, that road would have a specific posted speed limit that is safe to drive. US roads are also more consistently designed for constant speed or have additional advisory speed limits for curves. You can nearly always drive as fast as the number on the sign unless there is some additional hazard.

I have not yet found a road in the UK where i couldnt safely drive the maxiumum speed limit.

No. The speed limit is the maximum for a dry road, in the summer during the day.

Its literally not in the US

Care to educate us, what it is in the US instead?

Where I live there are speed limits but rarely minimum speeds, only on divided highways as far as I know. Everyone is different, some people just aren't comfortable driving the speed limit at a given moment. We should literally back off those folks, they're not what's making traffic horrible in my experience.

I have seen people with the same expectation drive off roads in hilly areas in europe because some turns were impossible to do at speed limit. Not sure if what you say is a legal requirement

In the US it mostly is. Depends on whether it is federal or state road but it's true in the vast majority of cases

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