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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

And what do you expect would happen if 90+% of the people driving on that freeway got a ticket?

French drivers used to be insane. As little as five or six years ago, you'd regularly see people pulling moves that would make a rally car driver blush. Then, they installed speed cameras EVERYWHERE, and sent out mass amounts of tickets, even for going a couple kilometers/hour over the limit. Since that time, people actually stay under the speed limit. Amazing, the difference an oppressive regime of automated enforcement can make on people's behavior.

The local government (or whoever collects fines) would make a lot of money, behaviour would change, and possibly, just possibly, speed limits would rise.

But the increase in revenue raised would make it too tempting not to use, IMO.

The speed of drivers would go down and normalize at maximum 65mph. This falls in line with the idea of a speed limit (not a speed suggestion).

I fail to see how this is a bad thing.

You have a failure of imagination, then. Many times an ill-advised overtake started out below the speed limit but needs to go a bit over to be made safe, and that's not just my opinion, but that of many traffic police officers over here in the UK.

And think about what a low speed limit like 65mph would do to the economy.

Then businesses would clamor to have the speed limit raised, huh? Here in Michigan, we were taught in drivers training that passing another car can only be done legally at a speed differential greater than 5mph and only if you stay within the speed limit. Such as, if the car in front of you was driving 50 and the speed limit was 55. You could pass at 55.

A lot of the discussions I hear on this fall down to "it's inconvenient to drive the speed limit". Man that sucks, but the speed limit is kind of a legal limit.

Possibly a brief spike in civic participation in the local government process, lasting for exactly as long as required to yank automated enforcement tools back out of local cops' hands.

The courts would be clogged with people challenging the tickets.

California would have some money to spend on their lousy roads?

More likely state troopers would be making $300K a year.

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