There's a 3 lane (each way) street with traffic lights in my suburban city that I drive every day. I refuse to go above the speed limit (40mph) while driving in general but the generally accepted speed is 55mph and there's no enforcement.
Either they need to raise the limit or enforce it. I'm sick of being the asshole going too slow.
Also my speed is generally more a function of gas mileage than anything else. With stop lights littering the route I don't feel that driving 55 is any faster than 40. It just wastes more gas. So maybe it wouldn't even make sense to raise it and instead it just needs to be enforced.
The problem is, at least in more populated areas, there are so many exits that traveling in right-most lane can be dangerous with all of the merging traffic. Large trucks in particular will just cut off cars forcing you to slam on the breaks at least once every mile or two.
All 50 US states have some type of keep-right law. Whether it's an absolute "keep right unless actively passing" or a looser "keep right when slower than other traffic" varies, but all of them have some kind of enforceable keep-right rule.
All US traffic laws come from the Uniform Vehicle Code. Keep right rules are meant for absolutely slow traffic and not for driving the speed limit. The UVC has keep right exceptions for divided highways with multiple lanes going in one direction.
Passing left laws were intended for two way streets with one lane in each direction when the only way to pass is by driving on the lane going the opposite direction.
> Keep right rules are meant for absolutely slow traffic and not for driving the speed limit.
Do you have a citation for that? Many state laws use the speed of traffic as a reference to define slower as opposed to using the posted speed limit as the reference. If they meant to say only slower than the speed limit, then the text of the law would be explicit on that point.
It's really better and safer to drive at a speed similar to the speed of the rest of traffic. If the speed limit is 55 mph and the pace speed lies between 65 to 75 mph, then the minimum speed you should be driving is 65 mph.
Having less speed variance leads to smoother flow and traffic that's more spread out. That increases safety overall.
So I can ruin my gas mileage slowing and stopping every time someone in front of me turns onto a side street or pulls out in front of me?
No thanks!
Generally its the middle lane I use, but sometimes it's even the left if some landscaping truck or cement mixed is in front of me dropping who knows what into the road.
In the city, you are correct. The far right in a 3 lane is often just for turning and merging, making the middle the travel lane. The point is not to travel in the passing lane.
I don't think that passing makes any sense on this kind of road. It's just bad for your wallet in both gas and maintenance on your vehicle and also it's bad for the environment.
The chief component in getting to one's destination is the traffic and the second one is number of lights you get stopped out. Since all the lights are timed to 40mph it doesn't make sense to go faster unless they re-engineer the road.
Generally any car that passes me will be stuck at the light ahead and if there is light traffic I will pass them because I have a rolling start and if there is heavy traffic it's all the same.
Staying to the right in this situation only makes sense if you're unable to accelerate at a reasonable speed or unable to go the speed limit at all.
There is no passing lane. Passing left laws were meant for passing on the opposite side of the street. Traveling the speed limit in the left lane is the original intention. See the Uniform Vehicle Code, the standard that state traffic laws are derived from.
There's a two-lane (each way) street near me with no houses along it, split carriageways and great visibility. It's a 30 zone with speed cameras. After 5 years of living in this city I finally fouled up and it got me.
That "psychopath" was the major force in bringing to light the effects of Thalidomide in the early 1960s. He stood up to drug companies.
> A plot was hatched, fueled by indignation: "By God, I've paid taxes for a long time -- and more than a lot of those trucks." First he consulted with the commonwealth attorney's office and other traffic authorities to ensure that his plan was legal, that passing on the right was acceptable on multilane highways and that traveling over 55, even to pass, was against the law.
It's definitely true in my experience, or rather that those people drive at 5-10mph slower. This problem is exasperated in those small towns where overzealous officers strictly enforce a ridiculously limit, simply to fill their ticket quotas.
Agreed - 21 is absurd. I'd be curious to see the effects of lowering the drinking age (in the US) to 18 for those who graduate from high school (or equivalent). I honestly doubt we'd see a more-than-negligible increase in underage drinking.
In my experience, the 85th percentile is at the speedlimit + 10-15 mph. It's as if people have decided they're unlikely to be ticketed by going "only" 10 mph over the limit. I rarely see anyone driving at or below the speed limit.
In Europe I've gotten tickets driving only 5mph over the limit (58 km/h on a 50 road), which would explain why the 85th percentile is closer
to the actual speedlimit there.
In the US you usually wont be pulled over unless you are blatantly (10 mph+ depending on the road) speeding. Going 5 over will pretty much never get you pulled over unless you have a tail light out, or a warrant for your arrest or something
I think ticketing for 5 over would open up the floodgates to a debatably valid reason/excuse: a speedometer only reports accurate numbers when tuned to the wheel configuration. It's common enough for tire sizes to be changed on a vehicle, especially in regions where larger summer tires are swapped out for smaller winter tires, without the speedometer readings being adjusted for the new tire size.
It could be argued that the vehicle owner is responsible for ensuring this adjustment is made every time tires are changed, but with no real way for the average consumer to verify or measure the difference, the fact is we depend on the business providing the service to do it for us.
While there is a standard for claims of speedo deviation, it usually is not claimed due to the 10mph or larger discrepancy commpn for tickets. You are right on about snow tires, but mine are larger, and my summer tires low profile. But those who swap wheels also tend to mentally recalibrate while passing those speed signs. I have to on all my motorcycles, as manufacuturers all seem to want me to think I am going 15% faster.
People have decided they are unlikely to get punished for going slightly over the speed limit because they are. I regularly pass speed traps on my daily commute going (precisely) 15 over. Would be nice if speed limit was actually the limit instead of the selectively enforceable suggestion that it is.
The heuristic I tend to follow is "9 you're fine, 10 you're mine". It has not failed me yet. Traffic cops are reasonable unless they're running behind quota.
> Traffic cops are reasonable unless they're running behind quota
It's kind of funny to watch on the last two or three days of the month how many of the state troopers are out on the interstate, doing speed traps all day long. The rest of the month, you'll almost never see them, unless they are escorting an oversize load.
IF a department was going to set up quotas for speeding tickets but also wanted to slow drivers down as much as possible, why not have the quota deadline be rolling? Officer Jones has to meet his quota by the 3rd of the month. Officer Smith must meet hers by the 5th and so on. Quotas without the end of month blitz and more reliable enforcement.
My wife was born and raised in the Southern US, and whenever we travel on the interstate system here she assures me that so long as I remain within 15mph of the posted speed limit I'll never be ticketed. When she first told me her theory it's fair to say I was a deep sceptic (as a foreign-born LPR), but nearly a decade on and she hasn't been wrong yet.
I will admit though, she counsels me against following the rule in Virginia because the cops there don't mess around.
EDIT: I should add that 15mph over the limit is usually "going with the flow". If the other cars are traveling at 70 then 85 really stands out.
Yeah, absolutely do not follow that rule in Virginia. We have roads where the speed limit is 70MPH. If you're driving 80MPH or over, it's automatically a reckless driving charge, which is an actual crime, not just a moving violation. And if your attention drifts a bit and you accidentally break 90MPH, you'll probably end up in jail.
My usual rule is 5MPH over. I sometimes increase it to 10MPH, but it works almost everywhere.
5 over is safe everywhere in the USA except school zones.
10 is generally safe in suburban and rural areas.
14 over on highways, unless mitigating situations exist (bridge, visibility, twisties)
Beware, almost every area has some county or township that abuses their little patch of highway, and they tend to be well known to locals, but prey on passers by.
This is not bulletproof, but has been my experince.
This is true but personally I would rather see this shift to something closer to +10%. Going 35 in a 25 mph residential zone puts anyone not in a car in significant danger. Going 27 or 28 doesn't change the risk nearly as much.
This rule of thumb still allows for 61 mph on urban freeways and 77 to 83 on rural interstates.
Federal standards for car spedometers allow 10% error. Because of liability, cars are not sold with spedometers that read low.
If you are less than 10% over, the cops would need to prove that you knew it. This would involve testing your car. Nobody wants to bother with that, so you normally get an extra 10%.
Source of said standard? Older cars (pre-1990) had pretty inaccurate speedometers, 5-10% off. Modern cars are very accurate.
There is no such need for cop to "prove" you "knew" you were speeding. Ignorance of the law (or the condition of your vehicle, or whatever) is no excuse, as the saying goes. When you sign up for a driver's license (in the US) you agree that you will abide by all traffic laws.
It also helps that every speedometer installed in cars is 1-3 MPH slow on purpose (estimating above true velocity is obviously a real problem, and I believe results in fines to the manufacturer).
Plug an OBDII reader + app into your car to see the true velocity.
Well, true velocity as reported by the car. Slop in the drivetrain, tire inflation differences, temperature differences... these can add up to up to 10% differences between your speed as reported by radar/gps and what your car measures from the drivetrain.
I often drive a section of about 2 miles of highway where I need to average 33 mph to arrive at a traffic light just turning green. Although the speed limit there was recently lowered from 55mph to 45mph, every other car drives well over 50mph, and it takes a lot of will power to maintain my much lower speed. You're right that speed limits often feel more like minima than maxima.
Yes, this is a problem. I would often drive slower, if there wasn't a speed limit.
Personally I think a recommend and speed limit should exist, (on the same road/sign).
Virtually eliminating road fatalities is quite possible, Sweden has done it. The low speed limits and infrastructure spending on separated pedestrian & cyclist paths would never fly in the United States.
Which is really sad, because (and I say that as a hard core auto driver) riding a bike through the city significantly lowers your death risk (also by health benefits) as long as there are bike lanes.
Bike riders also solve traffic jams (by NOT going bar car), make cities more silent and more liveable, bring more business to local stores and restaurants etc.
I was hoping there would be a novel reason to stop comparing Nordic countries to the rest of the world. Sadly the main points the article makes are: (1) they are welfare states and that would never be welcome anywhere else and (2) they have small populations.
So... (1) maybe a welfare state isn't that bad? and (2) that's akin to not believing in small-scale trials/pilots because they're small.
Also that they're incredibly homogenous and that they may be just as racist and unequal as the rest of us, but nobody notices because everybody in their country is the same race.
Sweden has its share of problems. It's not a fantasy state where everything is hunky-dory. The south of Sweden is a European hotspot for anti-semitic violence, for example. It also currently has a spate of hand-grenade attacks by organised crime, the only area of its kind in the West[1].
As for 'incredibly homogenous', they have a larger foreign-born population (15%) than the US (14%) or the UK (12%). While that number doesn't tell the full story, sure, it does show that Sweden isn't some hermit-state. And it's neighbour Norway has the highest immigration rate of any western democracy that isn't a city-state.
Trying to find reasons to exclude Sweden as a comparator is basically condoning bad behaviour. It's not a perfect fantasy state; they're just doing really well in the quality-of-life stakes.
I think #2 is the most valid and compelling reason for a host of reasons. The other thing that is in the article that shouldn't be dismissed the homogeneity of the population. That goes a long way toward making #1 possible as it's easier to empathize across a smaller population.
Sure, so those comparisons are actually more apt! You rarely if ever see them made however.
Georgia, Michigan, NC and NJ are the closest in size but that's about where it ends. Michigan probably has the closest demographic homogeneity. However the existence of the federal government as well as natural resources as a economic base throws a wrench into any further comparisons.
I don't understand how having a small population means anything when it comes to the most local of things: the speed limit on a bit of road.
I can understand saying "well they have a bunch of Oil money and not much ground to cover" but most things in the universe can be solved at scale in the same way they're tackled in these countries.
It'd be like if Sweden was the only place that invented spark plugs and you're like "Well they're a really small country so they have less people to give spark plugs to so it's feasible".
Geographically, Sweden and the US are immensely different. Sweden, as well as most of Europe, is densely populated and has good public transportation infrastructure. The US on the other hand is a very large area with low density and poor public transport.
Sweden and the US have almost exactly the same population density (22/km2 vs 24/km2) and GDP (50K vs 56K). The only reason that Sweden has substantially better public transportation infrastructure than the US is because it chooses to.
It's also much easier to build infrastructure in regions of 447,435 km² than it is for 9.834 million km². Sweden is a little larger than California (423,970 km²)
"The United States has terrible public transport" doesn't hold true for pocket regions which have very reliable public transport. You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries. Not to mention geographical differences. Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
> You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries.
This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder?
> Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
> This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder?
I think this has to do with the frequency of rest-stops/ tourist destinations.
There are many places to stop and see if you were to have a track going through all of the EU, but if you do that with the U.S, you're just going through "nothing" for hours on end. There's no site-seeing, sparse and isolated rest-stops, etc.
This is if we assume coast-to-coast travel, not just state-to-state. If we do, it's just not worth it to spend that much money.
How long does it take for a train to get from London to Paris? A few hours? We have something like that: the Amtrak northeast corridor line between DC and Boston (with stops in Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and others along the way). Going from DC to NYC is probably somewhat comparable, and I think that takes 3.5 hours. However, going from the east coast to the west coast on a train means several days of travel. We do have that too, with Amtrak. It's horribly slow and no one uses it except people who really want the "see the nation on a train" experience. It's also really expensive, because you'll surely want a sleeper cabin for such a long trip.
The rail network in Switzerland runs primarily through the easiest to deal with terrain. There are a few lines that go through mountainous terrain. IIRC, none of them are any worse than some of the easiest traversals of the Rockies.
Your examples are all within a pretty close range of each other. Not to mention all being popular tourist destinations. Throw a trip to Italy in there and it doesn't change much. You've traveled to four different countries: roughly the size of a few states and only a fraction of the size of the US.
A train from New York to Miami, Florida is around 2057 km leaving from Penn Station. From Paris to Zurich and Zurich to Berlin is 1622~ km. Although a tad larger going back to Paris from Berlin, a total of 2676 km.
So for comparable distances and from [Tourist Attraction] --> [Tourist Attraction] things are comparable.
Take a train around all of Germany, Switzerland, and France. The entire countries - and not just the capitals! You've still only covered a small portion of the US [0].
Things don't work when there is large amounts of nothing between areas that need to be connected. This is also why the US has laughably bad internet connections in most of the nation. It isn't worth laying down fiber in towns with populations <5,000 nor is it worth laying down rail.
Size isn't the only issue but it is, in my opinion, the largest issue. Pun not intended.
>Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
My understanding of it is as coredog64 said in their reply, but also Switzerland is yet-another-tiny-country. It'd be more fair to compare it with a 3rd of New York. Does a third of New York have an extensive, heavily used train system? Yes. It so happens to have one of the most extensive rail systems out of any state in the US even! Why? My guess is the size: it's a smaller state with more concentrated populations.
New York (State): 141,300 km²
Switzerland: 41,285 km²
Does anyone have information on how extensive and heavily used public transport is in, say... Russia? Then we'd at least be closer to any size comparisons. I'm only familiar with Moskva and Sankt-Peterburg (Moscow and Saint Petersburg) which is the capital and the second largest city, so I'd expect them to be well connected - so that isn't exactly saying much. Looking at the rail map on Wiki [1] doesn't tell you which are public transport lines and which are freight lines. So it's hard to get a good idea.
The problem with US public transit is not its interregional distances, but the low density of its regions. Diffuse populations defeat transit. People in those diffuse regions are more likely to utilize cars for midrange travel because the time to reach transit is high. In many regions, this means that transit is only for people too poor to have reliable cars, introducing another problem.
That we have any American cities with decent transit seems to be largely thanks to the restrictive geography of those cities, as well as some excellent activists (Jane Jacobs being the easiest example.)
So... it's the interregional distances between populated regions? Same difference honestly. The argument boils down either way to "US is too big".
Smaller countries or countries where half the country isn't populated (due to geography such as frozen tundra or large mountains), focusing population in a smaller region of that country don't have to deal with as many pockets of low density populations.
Thanks for responding. I'm afraid I haven't made myself clear; let me see if I can do better.
The issue is not the spacing of our metro areas in relation to one another (interregional distances). Rather, we have bad geometry withinour metros (intra-regional distances.) To me, this seems to stem largely from the many ways we've subsidized automotive transit and low density, single family residences since WWII.
The difficulty created by our development pattern is that you can almost never gather enough people into one place to justify building a train station, subway station, or even a bus stop. When you can gather them, it's normally by those people driving to the stop, and the disappointing crowd that shows up often doesn't pull enough weight to get reliable, frequent service to those stops. And as long as those people are going to get in the car anyway, and then have to wait a long time to catch the next bus/train, a lot of them are just going to say "the hell with it" and drive to their destination instead.
Alternatively, maybe you live in a downtown area where there actually are enough people in close proximity to justify transit stops with a high level of service. If you're in a typical American city, you'll run into the problem at the other end of your journey. Sure, you easily walked to your stop, but maybe when you get off at your other stop, several miles from the center of town, you're still several miles from the store, or the restaurant, or your friend's house. And it's typically not on streets that are pleasant to walk, because they're not very interesting and the cars may be quite fast. So you'll have to make your friend pick you up, or pay for Ubers both ways, or walk anyway in an act of defiance against the place you've ended up. None of that sounds great, and if you even did it once, you're probably thinking seriously about driving your car next time.
And so it turns out that what you really need are at least two places, neither of which really require cars, for transit to be all that helpful. And in the US, we seldom have that, because we have a single center of intensity, with the density decreasing radially in all directions.
These places don't have to be huge, either. A compact outlying town of 30,000 or so could reasonably have hourly bus service to the major city an hour away. The key is that the town needs to be walkable enough that people can easily get to the bus, and the big city also needs to be navigable without a car.
As to intercity: I'm not saying NYC and LA should have a dedicated rail line between them, but it would certainly be reasonable to have SF, LA, and SD all connected by rail, perhaps high-speed. But at the same time, given the spread out development of those three cities, it doesn't surprise me at all that that's not feasible.
You can't compare population densities that way. They vary far too much from place to place. In the US, for instance, 2/3 of the population lives east of the Mississippi River. Most of that other 1/3 lives on the west coast (largely California), while states like Wyoming are almost completely empty (~500k people total). Also, if your number includes Alaska, that skews it horribly because Alaska has an enormous amount of land and very little population.
Similarly, the Nordic countries are not homogeneous: most of the population lives near their southern borders (on the Baltic Sea), while their northern areas are barely populated at all. It's very similar to Canada: most of the population there lives within 100 miles of the southern (US) border.
So you can't compare population densities like that: you have to focus on specific areas. What's the population density of Malmo versus Philly? Stockholm vs. DC? And even here it's hard to compare, because for instance "DC" could mean just the District itself, or it could mean the much larger metro area around it, and all parts that are reasonably commutable. Most of the "DC" population lives outside of DC.
Offhand, I'd say Sweden has substantially better public transportation because most of the population lives in a few large cities, and also because it's a better-managed country that invests more in infrastructure for the common good.
I'd say the US invests in infrastructure, specifically, roads, the interstate system is an amazing way to get around and much more flexible than trains. For numerous reasons other forms of public infrastructure not centered around cars get much less investment.
Population density varies a lot in Sweden, too. A vast majority of Swedes live south of a line that is slightly north of Stockholm, and the northernmost Norbottens län has 21 % of land area and 2.5 % of population.
This only works since Sweden is so sparsely populated. People here routinely drive 40 -60 kmph above the speed limit, especially where the new limits are ridiculously low considering road conditions.
This is a good article with sensible rationale for raising the speed limit on freeways. It starts to touch on why local safety advocacy groups push for lower speed limits, but it only really addresses speed in the context of other motorized traffic.
It's not just the ticket. It's the whole legal machine spinning up and siphoning a pile of money off of you:court costs, lawyer/legal fees, auto insurance increases for the next x years. And as you've mentioned, time away from productive work.
The ticket is only a small part of the actual costs.
And even worse, while this combination-punch can be irritating to middle- and upper-class folks, it can be financially devastating to someone living on the edge of sustainability.
But then, somebody has to pay for all those shiny new Police Intercept cruisers, SUVs, tactical body armor, new weapons & training, drones, robots, etc. etc. etc.
Have you heard the steve jobs approach? Ethically dubious, but very effective. He just got a new car long enough he could avoid having a real plate so he could park illegally.
I don't think it was that deep -- I think Jobs was simply being a self-absorbed asshole in this case.
I've not read of him routinely buying new cars - quite the contrary. In this case I believe it was a simple disregard for the laws that only applied to "little people." He couldn't be bothered and didn't care.
Related: He routinely parked his Mercedes (the one without a license plate) in a reserved Handicapped parking space.
source: Walter Isaacson's Jobs biography, Sculley's book, and Amelio's book on his time at Apple.
I've always considered speeding tickets to be the small fee I pay for the privilege of driving faster. Last year I got about $250 in tickets in 40,000+ miles of driving. Totally worth it.
FTA: "Fortunately, American roadways are safer than ever, with highway fatalities at historic lows. Roads can be dangerous, but the perception of roads getting increasingly dangerous is a false one."
...
"Published Jul 23, 2014"
Per capita, or per miles driven? My limited experience is that people in the U.S. drive a lot more in general, so per mile driven would be a more meaningful measure of road safety.
Some of this may be due to the skillset to obtain a license in most states in the US is a quick written test and a 15 minute driving test in a parking lot, whereas other countries require actual studies, hand-on road instruction, and about 30x more cost ($32 for Georgia vs ~$1000 for many European countries).
To be fair, distracted driving is a larger problem for fatalities than speeding. Also, I think we probably have far more than 3-4 times the people who drive and the corresponding roadways than most other western countries.
It would be interesting to know what the ratio of deaths per driving regularly capita is for all western countries.
You jest, but given that the average lifespan is about 622k hours, I think you can have a serious moral argument about whether it's better to kill one person or make a million people late by an hour.
In my experience, all this does is create a dangerous speed differential between the people who go 80 regardless of the posted speed limits, and the people who follow the speed limits with room to spare.
And it's the large differentials in speed which create the most dangerous conditions and accidents.
Even rigorous enforcement can't catch everyone, and the high speeds quickly become the norm; with people going 65 the dangerous exceptions.
Rates would be lower if we all drove at the same speed, no matter what that speed is. Setting the speed limit at 55/65 doesn't make everyone drive at 55/65.
That may be true, but doesn't change the fact that we've done this experiment nationally, and adjusted for other factors that are known to affect speed, there were fewer fatalities when the limit was lower.
Setting the limit at 80 doesn't make everyone drive 80, either.
That's why you set it to the 85th percentile speed, as the article explains, rather than picking some arbitrary speed and expecting everyone to go at that speed.
> And even at the historic lows, numerous studies suggest fatality rates would be even lower if we'd stuck to the national 55/65 speed limits.
Evidence, please.
We did this experiment and the evidence is against you.
Fatalities did not significantly increase for any of the states that increased their limits after the 55mph thing ended and there was some weak evidence that they went down.
Did you even read the report, or did you simply pull a summary? The numbers are all over the map and the P values look hacked to generate a paper.
In addition, if you look at the fatality and injury numbers for urban interstate they went down for 65MPH and up for 55mph and 75mph. That makes no sense.
Basically, the statistics are sufficiently close to a wash that the confounding factors (like texting or rerouting due to more convenience) matter more than the speed limit.
Not only that, but there is a study [1] that shows that traffic speeds do not change significantly even if the speed limit dies have a significant change.
> Almost half of passenger vehicle occupants killed were not wearing seat belts. Research shows almost one in three fatalities involved drunk drivers or speeding. One in 10 fatalities involved distraction.
Someone has a pretty big axe to grind when they have to lump speeders in with drunk drivers in order to get the statistics they need... I suspect that the number is almost the same even if you remove the non-drunk speeders from it. (I'm being a little snotty and disingenuous--I suspect that the issue is that the number of non-drunk, speeding fatalities is almost nil and that drunk and fatality almost always implies speeding as well).
And I still can't believe how many people die because they won't put on a bloody seat belt. Sheesh.
So, what we know is that using electronic devices in cars is more dangerous than speeding. So, we clearly need to remove the cellular towers near highways, right?
Indeed. Looking at the local accident statistics and investigation reports where I live (Finland), it is easy to see that small breach of speed limit is fairly negligible as a cause for accidents. In some part of accidents it is one contributing factor, but there are quite large groups where speed limits are not relevant at all:
- suicides (somewhere between 10 % and 20 %)
- spontaneous deaths (around 10 % of traffic deaths, driver dies of old age or similar; they are included in statistics even though the accident was not actually cause of death)
- gross negligence (at least 30 %: the driver is severely drunk, does not have a license, the vehicle has not passed inspection and the driver is trying to escape the police at 160 km/h on a 50 km/h zone; sometimes you have all these at the same time!)
- freak observation errors (at a rail crossing, just drive under the train)
Near where I live, there is a split 3-lane-each-way toll road. The speed limit is 85mph.
Directly on either side of the toll road are the free roads. The only difference is one fewer lane each way. The speed limit is 60mph.
I do not believe there is enough difference between the two roads to justify a 25mph speed limit difference, except to create an artificial police-enforced incentive to fork over if you want to be able to drive as fast as you should.
I suspect many speed limits are designed in this way: either mostly arbitrary or calculated to maximize revenue (for police, toll road operators, etc.). They are not designed with optimizing driver utility in mind.
There are few things better than when you end up driving in a swarm of experienced drivers who are willing to safely exceed the speed limit. Safety (and efficiency!) in numbers.
This is essentially what the DC region has with Virginia's Express lanes, though the difference here is only 10 MPH.
The waste of space and resources that was required to put those extra lanes in, and all of the traffic control measures could have EASILY doubled the number of lanes on the beltway - alleviating traffic for many many years to come.
Instead, they've just created a false economy around the pricing of convenience. It's essentially rent seeking by the government.
> The waste of space and resources that was required to put those extra lanes in, and all of the traffic control measures could have EASILY doubled the number of lanes on the beltway - alleviating traffic for many many years to come.
Adding traffic lanes increases traffic. (Amusingly, I originally learned this reading about the research that went into SimCity, though I've done a lot more reading on urban and traffic planning since.)
Dallas, Austin or San Anton? 131 is(was?) the highest speed limit in the country. And had it's first fatality within 24 hours of raising to 85 MPH. I will take this over the previous 65 day / 55 night option. Nothing quite as infuriating as getting a ticket for driving 65 in Nowhere, West Texas.
Over here in Germany a speed limit typically means there's a good reason to follow it. On the Autobahn we've got places where there is no speed limit at all (yep, there's places where I can legally go 250 km/h) and on other places the speed may be set as low as 80 km/h (around 50mph).
A low speed limit typically is enforced with a traffic camera. Additionally we've go a lot of dynamic speed signs which show a speed limit which fits the current traffic conditions. (empty road at night - it's turned off. Rush hour - 80 km/h. Fog - 60 km/h And several steps in between)
Not having a "fixed" all the time limit makes drives accept the speed limit more easily.
Oh yes, and 85'th percentile. I frequently drive "+15km/h", so I go 95 when there's 80 allowed because the fine when I get caught that is not too expensive. (Fines for speeding are lower when you get caught outside city limits, speeding in a residential zone or in front of a school for example is one thing I have no tolerance for as well.)
One interesting reason for imposing speed limits on some sections of German highway is to reduce road noise. It's not always a traffic engineering reason.
The article talks about differential speed and lane discipline. In Germany, it's not rare to see people driving 250 km/h (155 mph), but some heavy trucks are restricted to 80 km/h (50 mph) regardless of the speed limit. Germans are very strict about lane discipline though. It's generally illegal to pass on the right or be in the left lane when not passing, and someone who puts their turn signal on to move left will usually respond to a flash of the headlights from an approaching car and wait for it to go by.
As an American who has spent a lot of time in Germany, and driven across Texas a few times, I sometimes wish for German style speed unlimited-speed highways in the US, but I think it would be hard to get American drivers to adopt German attentiveness and discipline.
Germany is also the most stressful country to drive in I think. You usually have three or four lanes - 80 kmph truck lane, 140 kmph standard lane, 200 kmph I'm slightly crazy lane and 250 kmph I'm a loonie lane.
When you accelerate from the 80kmph to the 140kmph you better have a good engine or you feel stressed like hell slowing everybody else down.
And keeping right all the times just creates a lot of unnecessary dynamics in traffic flow.
Don't even get me started on congestions when everybody slams their breaks and hit the warning blinkers.
German traffic is for macho wannabe race drivers.
I rather have US traffic or the traffic in the Netherlands where everybody just set their cruise control and drive casually.
In the Netherlands they also have trajectory speed checks, so you cannot speed anywhere from point A to B, since they clock your total time. Works wonders for getting a nice steady flow on the highway.
My experience driving in Germany is that it's very rare to see four lanes. Three is common enough, but usually around major cities where there's a speed limit. More typical is two.
The highways are also regularly torn up and rebuilt to maintain a glass-smooth surface on which one could safely drive 300 km/h, but it's only possible to maintain that for a minute because then you hit another construction zone or traffic jam caused by inadequate capacity. Despite all the construction, the highways rarely get widened, just resurfaced.
I don't think the main problem is that speed differentials are causing poor dynamics, but that the roads don't have enough lanes.
> I don't think the main problem is that speed differentials are causing poor dynamics, but that the roads don't have enough lanes.
I don't know.
I drove throughout Germany a few times last year, and I didn't really understand why there were so many jams and general slowdowns. I usually drive in France where the highways are almost exactly the same as Germany (most often two lanes, frequently three, rarely more, usually in very good state) and traffic is rarely as bad. I got stranded a few times in completely still traffic, for tens of minutes, during a normal working day, while this only ever happens at the worst time of holiday traffic in France.
Maybe it's because French highways are paying which probably discourages some drivers, but I also noticed a lot of roadworks in Germany (almost as bad as Belgium during the height of roadworks there last year). Enough, as you said, to never be able to maintain a high speed for long, while you barely ever notice those in France. I don't know how French companies do it, but I'm pretty sure it helps with the traffic.
Other than the traffic though, driving in Germany was a pleasure. People are aware of their surroundings and don't drive like the road was theirs.
Having driven in both countries, I think that has a lot to do with the extremely steep tolls on French highways, and the much higher gas tax. I believe Germany also has a higher rate of car ownership and the average population density is higher.
Germany Autobahn see more use and needs more maintance. Besides more Germans on the road, a lot of trafic pass through German, a lot more than in France.
And the fact that the French highways require payment reduce trafic even more. But they are a joy to drive on. Set the CC and just go.
And the fact that SNCF has dedicated high speed infrastructure for the TGV, whereas DB runs the ICE mostly on mixed use tracks which makes it more challenging to provide fast, predictable service, all while having to compete with faster best-case speeds on the road.
The difference really is that many French motorways are toll roads (that péage sign) and have far fewer cars and lorries than the German autobahns.
In Germany, the logistics clearly utilizes the autobahns a lot. You see constant lines of heavy vehicles on the rightmost lane, and sometimes your overtaking them is interrupted by one truck passing another one, very very slowly as they both have a speed limiter, just adjusted slightly differently.
> on which one could safely drive 300 km/h, but it's only possible to maintain that for a minute because then you hit another construction zone or traffic jam caused by inadequate capacity
Anecdote: recently went from Offenburg to Stuttgart and back and could drive a pretty much constant 190~240kph all the way (~1h30) except for a couple sections which were not unlimited. Having to slow down to 190kph isn't quite what I'd call a traffic jam. 300kph is just harder because there's not that many vehicles able to go that fast, so you end up catching up with the "slower" (so to speak) ones, and since vehicles are (supposed to) be electronically limited to 250kph, you're bound to meet some anyway.
vehicles are (supposed to) be electronically limited to 250kph
It was my impression that vehicles aren't supposed to be able to go faster than the speed rating of their tires. Since 250 km/h is a common speed rating for tires, and higher ratings tend to get expensive fast, German cars are often limited to 250 km/h.
No current Porsches (real ones, not the SUVs) are that slow, and the Porsche tire recommendation guide calls for tires rated for 300 km/h, or "over 300 km/h" (the standardized ratings don't go higher) for all models except the Macan SUV with 18" wheels, for which it recommends 270 km/h.
The index rating on a tire basically reflects the speed limit that a tire can sustain for at least (IIRC) 10 mins before giving up and being destroyed, minus one. So a tire that sustained 10 min of U rating (200kph) speed and suffered drastic damage (typically, tire blows and tread band goes off) right after that mark gets a T rating (190kph). This is oversimplified but that's the gist of it.
You can thus see why the index of stock tires always vastly overshoot the top speed of a car, e.g my car gets a Y tyre stock even though its top speed is 245kph, and my ex car has a W rating when the top speed is 210kph.
It's not a good idea to go anywhere near the limit of your tire speed index, nor to go cheap and skimp on the index when buying a replacement tire.
I bet the Macan that gets 18" and the W index is the one with low enough top speeds (below 230kph, that'd be 2.0L four-pot petrol and 3.0L V6 Diesel ones)
EDIT: found a reference again WRT index tests
> Speed ratings are based on laboratory tests where the tire is pressed against a large diameter metal drum to reflect its appropriate load, and run at ever increasing speeds (in 6.2 mph steps in 10 minute increments) until the tire's required speed has been met.
> I don't think the main problem is that speed differentials are causing poor dynamics, but that the roads don't have enough lanes.
Actually the limited number of lanes is what enables us to survive the speed differentials. Fast/[middle/]slow lanes can easily be enumerated without counting, which makes situational awareness so much easier. And you certainly do need a lot of situational awareness. It's a bit like CPU registers vs. an unconstrained stack.
I have only ever seen more than three regular lanes in large metropolitan areas where there is hardly any open road between interchanges and where speed limits are a certainty. I don't know if a single piece of four lane unrestricted driving exists in all of Germany, I would not even be entirely surprised if you could not legally build one.
>Germany is also the most stressful country to drive in I think.
I'm guessing you've never been to any developing country. India doesn't even respect traffic lights or the concept of "lanes." You have modern cars sharing the roads with literal ox-drawn carriages and they're all splitting lanes with hundreds of little scooters.
Hell, even Italy is a complete clusterfuck. If Germany is stressful to drive in for someone I would question if that person is comfortable behind the wheel of a car at all.
In fact, I'll say this is one of the big problems with how lax driving standards are in America. There are lots of people who drive everywhere here who do NOT have the skill, attention span, or reflexes to be behind the wheel of a car. It's too economically essential to be a functioning member of society to make the standards any stricter, but they're so lax that we have a glut of terrible drivers. Terrible drivers lead to overly permissive road design (that winds up being unsafe for anyone not in a car like bikers, cyclists or pedestrians) and that just leads to a bad quality of life overall for everyone.
Last time I was there, Indians referred to western traffic as "Streamlined." I remember Delhi had the words "Relax" printed on all the stop lights, in English. I'm not sure it really helped.
They won't. Firstly because the traffic is insane. Secondly because labor rates are so low that rickshaw and taxi drivers are dirt cheap. The productivity function is way skewed towards labor in India to where expensive robots to drive the cars don't make economic sense.
Won't in the short run, perhaps. Sure, in the long run we're all dead, but somewhere in the middle there will be robots and automobiles in the more complete sense of the word.
Won't in the short run, perhaps. Sure, in the long run we're all dead, but somewhere in the middle there will be robots and auto-mobiles in the more Latin sense of the word.
Highly doubtful. There are way too many variables. If they worked at all, they'd be unable to move or only at a speed of <5kph. It's simply too chaotic and way too many variables.
I see what you are saying, but I still think a computer would do better in an environment like that with less rules than say the US. At least with the goal being not causing accidents. A computer with 360 vision is undoubtedly better at avoiding accidents probably in any condition. It may result in as you say too slow speeds or paralyzation, but many "rules" in the US either arent written down, or often arent followed making that situation more likely than with less rules imo.
If it follows other tech trends(eg: cell phones bypassing land lines), India and other developing countries will see self-driving cars before freeways and owned cars. Well, I'm an optimist.
Maybe. But I'm not sure it's as easy as putting things in a scale from more modern to less modern. The places where India has leapfrogged has been on stuff that needs new infrastructure development since there was never any good old infrastructure to take up resources or incumbent players to choke out new players.
Self driving cars don't need new infrastructure, its functionally an application that runs on existing infrastructure. If you have decent roads it'll work the same way whether you're in India or anywhere else.
Although I guess you could argue that Indians are less prissy about what they're willing to tolerate. A self-driving auto-rickshaw wouldn't fly in America, but it would be just fine for just about any Indian, and it's a much more useful application of self-driving tech than expecting everyone to have their own robo-chauffeured luxury cars.
Cell phones bypassing land lines makes sense because you can cover more customers with less cost. Self-driving cars may eventually be less costly than human driven cars, but for the near future, the costs you add (sensors, software, actuators, etc) are way more expensive than the costs you save (driver's attention, optimistically damage to persons and property reduced through collision avoidance), particularly in developing countries where a person's attention has less monetary value, but the raw materials for the car have similar costs. It's unlikely that you'd get much of the ancillary benefits of usability by unlicensed drivers either -- few people will be able to afford a driverless car to cart their kid around to school or wherever, anyway those people could just hire a driver and a normal car.
> In fact, I'll say this is one of the big problems with how lax driving standards are in America. There are lots of people who drive everywhere here who do NOT have the skill, attention span, or reflexes to be behind the wheel of a car.
So should we only allow some of the population to utilize cars? Considering how vital they are to the American lifestyle (the US covers so much land), that seems unreasonable.
I have as my girlfriend and I have lived for over a year without a car. We walk/lyft/occasionally use the Seattle lite rail to get to 90% of the places we want to go.
However, despite the amazing hiking/backpacking places we can go here, we have only done that a few times (relying on other people driving).
Should we always rely on other people to go to non-public transportation routes (This has also hampered us from doing lots of other things hence why we got a zipcar membership recently)?
I'm not from the US, but the hearsay is that getting a driver's license is a lot easier than in e.g. in Germany. Here in Germany getting a license costs ~1500 Euro and it's not uncommon for people to flunk their first attempt.
I took a semester long drivers education class and then had to have a 50 hours of driving with my parents (Although I heard of other parents just signing the forms for driving with parents (my parents did not)).
> had to have a 50 hours of driving with my parents
The assumption with this requirement is that the parents are good drivers. That may or may not be the case. It would be better to require that the 50 hours be completed with a certified driving instructor.
Well, at least drivers should be prepared and trained thoroughly. I'm not sure if this is still true but it is my understanding that getting a drivers license is a very casual affair in the US - a quick theoretical and a practical test and you're done. In Germany you have to finish about two dozen practice sessions, in class and on the road, before you can apply for a theory or road test.
And it will cost you - over the whole course it will almost certainly be above € 1000 and generally depend on how well you do, how many sessions/tests you need. With these kind of costs people take this very serious and still fail all the time.
Naturally I'm not a fan of the costs, but I think thorough preparation and training is essential. Operating a car is a huge responsibility that affects not only your safety but that of other drivers, pedestrians, passengers, etc. Getting the license to do so should not be a cakewalk.
On a sidenote: Of course this approach requires valid alternatives to a car, like efficient public transport options, but that's another discussion.
The US covers a lot of land, but the American population does not. And there is no real reason it even needs to occupy as much land as it presently does. It's bad urban planning and dubious tax incentives that makes us sprawl. Most people in or near major metros shouldn't need a car to be a functioning member of society. It's a major policy failure that it is presently so.
I don't know how you just pulled "25%" out of the air. Most people could be trained to drive better, they just never bother learning because the standards for licensing are so lax that there is no downside to doing so. There are lots of areas where you can get a drivers' license without even knowing how to parallel park.
Yep, not trying to be disrespectful to fellow South American or African HNers, anyone that thinks driving in Germany is stressful won't ever manage to drive in those countries as well.
Yet people do manage to have some kind of order within chaos, that makes the whole traffic flow.
I'm the original poster and I've driven in central and south america and found it completely fine. I guess I prefer common sense to idiotic speeds and strict rules ;)
Yes, but only until you understand the trick: do NOT expect perfect adherence to driving code from others. That's it!
For example, when approaching an intersection where you have right of way, expect someone to try and pass anyway: it basically means slowing a bit down and paying attention on the incoming roads. Applying this grain of salt would prevent a good part of the car crashes I see on youtube (namely "driving in Russia", but not only).
And, by the way, expecting bad behaviour from others is not a justification for when I'll be the other.
It's very subjective. I find driving in Germany to be not very stressful, despite the relatively narrow lanes and high speeds.
Now, one has to compare similar situations, not a German Autobahn in a Metropolitan region with a empty desert highway... But comparing a busy Autobahn with a busy freeway (say the interstate into Chicago), I found the freeway to be much more stressful. People are passing on both sides! And there is not much speed differential. I can't just fall back to the right if I want to take it slow. There is often no emergency lane. I feel like I'm being pushed along, and if I can't keep up, I will be ran over.
In Germany, people can go faster, but it feels very predictable, clockwork-like. Yes, you have occasional idiots speeding with 250 km/h on the left lane that don't slow down and assume you will move out of the way out of self-preservation. But those are outliers, other than that I rarely have complaints. Maybe it is a cliche, but it seems the drivers' education, and the condition of cars and streets, is really good in Germany.
>Maybe it is a cliche, but it seems the drivers' education, and the condition of cars and streets, is really good in Germany.
It is not a cliche. I have lived in the US for the past 5 years and lived for 20 years in Germany before that. Germans roads are like 5000x better than US roads (at least here in California).
Road paintings here are a joke, especially at night or when it is raining. The only exception is when a road gets painted freshly. Then it is good for like 2 months.
However, you hardly see any grit/sand on the roads. There's a lot of salt.
Where I live (Finland) we have lots of sand but much less salt. The salt use is diminished to protect the environment, but the sand eats the road, as well as the studs most people use in winter tires.
(Yes, we change to winter tires in the autumn and summer tires in the spring; this seems to be an unknown thing in Britain or France and even a bit of snow produces a mess there. Germans have non-studded winter tires which work fine with the amount of salt.)
Do drivers in Finland ever use studless snow tires like Bridgestone Blizzaks, or do they always rely on studded tires.
I live in the US and switch to those tires in the winter and find that they have much better traction compared to the all season tires I have on my other car. Other than icy conditions, does having studs have much advantage over studless. I suspect that the damage to roadways caused by studs could be substantially reduced if more people used studless snow tires in the winter.
In Finland, about 85 % use studded winter tyres, 15 % use tyres without studs. Sweden is similar but somewhat less studs.
Studded tyres are more noisy, and they do eat the road more. They are more consistent - in snow, there's no difference; when the road is clean, studs do slightly worse; when the road is particularly slippery and icy, the studded tyres are much better. However, I can deal with that, so I prefer studless tyres. Last winter I had studded ones because they came with the used car I bought. I'm switching to studless for next winter.
It would be good to reduce the number of studded tyres, but people like them for the consistency. However, it wouldn't be good if all switched to studless tyres, because then the roads would sometimes become extremely slippery and polished. The studs remove the ice so that main roads become safer also for studless tyres. I think that a ratio of 30 % of studded tyres would be good for the whole.
If everyone had studless tyres, there would need to be substantially more salt and grit on the roads, and then there would again be more dust and damage to waterways.
(Currently we can see the polishing impact on bus stops: buses are heavy vehicles which do not have studs, and they sometimes get stuck on bus stops at a slight uphill, as the area is polished ice, while everyone else drives by normally.)
Wow. I live within the USA snowbelt, but studded tires are pretty uncommon outside remote undeveloped areas and mountainous areas. Studless (or unstudded, studdable) winter tires are very common in the winter. Poor or clueless people or those who don't drive much will use all-season year-round. Studded (and obviously even winter) tires are very much a regional thing, but studded tires do very much eat the roads and are regulated or banned on many roads.
We do use a lot of salt. I don't think rock salt is much of an environmental concern. It can kill plants by the roadside until it's flushed out of the soil, but the roadside is already a degraded environment for flora. Normal rock salt is a natural material.
What's worse is that some towns will use raw "frack juice" as we call it for deicing roads. This is a mixture of water, salt, and chemicals that spits out of gas wells in the hydrofracking process. Often they'll just remove some of the water to concentrate a brine and apply it to roads as well. There is unbelievably little oversight, it's done on a local level, the chemicals are considered an industry trade secret and god knows what they're spreading around in those communities that allow this to happen.
I'm gonna guess some combo of "pay for materials that last more than 2 months" and "paint every two months". Which is doable when you have 200% less roads / vehicles and politicians unwilling to let the infrastructure of your country fall to shit.
Driving in Italy, and Spain for that matter, is....exciting. Especially the intersection rules in Spain takes some getting used to. Oh there is green, I can go - but why are trafic still going from the other direction? Oh, the light closest to me is red, so I may not drive...
Good thing is you never really have to drive if you don't want to. Most small towns are connected by commuter rails, ICE and PostBus (5 euro rides if you book early). Small towns like Jena of only 100k people have full tram and bus networks.
I just returned from a 2 week driving trip through Germany and vastly preferred driving there to driving in the U.S. The "always pass on the left and never on the right" seemed like it led to more systematic and predictable behaviors, and also tremendously reduced the competitiveness of the driving experience as compared to the U.S.
It might all be cultural differences though. I noticed drivers seemed more attentive and never used their phones (unless completely stopped in traffic jams), whereas here in the U.S. it is extremely common to have drivers piddling in the left lane and absolutely oblivious to the goings on around them.
The only stressor I could see from driving on the autobahn was easily overcome - before passing someone on the left, just be sure to check really, really far back towards the horizon to make sure one one is coming.
That's because too many people drive in the left lane all the time. In my commute, traffic gets inverted where the left lane becomes clogged with people not going fast enough and to get anywhere requires passing on the right.
I can appreciate not wanting to go back and forth between say the middle lane and left lane all the time. I just wish people could figure out they are holding up traffic and get out of the way for a minute or two every now and then.
If I do a steady 140 km/h in the middle lane, as mostly everybody else (here in germany), then why am I endangering anybody, if I just stay there?
There is still the left lane for the faster ones and the right for the slower. (in the 3 lane scenario)
Sitting in the middle lane with adequate speed is fine when there is heavy and/or slower trafic in the right lane. The grandparent talks about sitting in the leftmost lane because it's more convient, rather than sitting in the middle lane and using the left lane when passing.
Eh, I'd have to agree that staying in the middle lane and going the speed limit is the smarter thing to do. There are too many badly-designed on-ramps and people that don't understand how merging works for staying in the right lane to be practical, in most cases.
Lane changes are dangerous too. I have no real statistics to back me up, but most of the signs of accidents that I see appear to stem from lane change collision.
I base that on sideways skid marks and wall impact.
In the 3 US states I've lived in, always pass on the left has been a "rule of thumb" but has never been illegal. So long as the right lane is a legal travel lane.
I have noticed a tendency for many slow, timid appearing drivers to prefer to campout in the left lane because it gives them the least amount of interaction with other highway traffic.
On a typical 3-lane highway, the right lane will have many big trucks, plus merging traffic entering and exiting constantly. The center lane puts them right in the middle of all the chaos, getting passed by other traffic regularly on both sides. In the left lane they can set their cruise control to 5mph below the limit and squat.
Even when there are lulls in the amount of traffic, many times I have approached this type of driver from behind in the left lane, paused to see if they would move over for me to pass, and they almost never do.
Disclaimer: I like to drive 5-10mph over the speed limit :)
Horrifying! :) But yes, the left lane is much nicer to camp out in on, say, a long commute - as long as you can handle maintaining the speed.
I live in the Dallas area and the lanes usually seem to be, from right to left: "the limit", "+5-10” and "+10-15". 15mph over is my cutoff, more or less, so I keep an eye on the mirror and try to shift over if someone is clearly coming up fast. Besides, don't want anyone tailgating me at those speeds tbh.
Does get a bit aggravating when what I consider "safe following distance at speed" is considered by the driver behind me as "this dumb econo-box being slow" and they whip around me. Doubly so when all it achieves is the two of us swapping places because there are no open avenues forward, lol. I'd have given it to him if there was one.
But "everyone else is a bad driver" will always be with us (myself no exception) so what can you do but grin and turn the music up.
> The "always pass on the left and never on the right" seemed like it led to more systematic and predictable behaviors, and also tremendously reduced the competitiveness of the driving experience as compared to the U.S.
Isn't that a thing in the U.S. as well? At least where I'm from (the northeast), passing someone on the right generally gets you a loud honk on the horn and occasionally a flip-off.
It depends on the state. In many states passing on the right is illegal and considered rude, but California is a notable exception. Also, while there is a law here in CA that slower traffic should stay out of the left lane, I think it is more of a recommendation -- I can't recall ever seeing it enforced. I think most drivers make some effort to follow it, but not to the extent that people do on the east coast.
In Massachusetts, passing on the right on a divided highway is legal. I'd argue that in a lot of cases, it's the fault of drivers on the left not moving out of their lane. But you also have situations where, with lanes of steady traffic, the right lane just gets moving faster.
Now, yes, you get situations where people veer from lane to lane because the overall flow of traffic isn't fast enough for their tastes. But, especially on three lane each direction roads, you get cars and trucks that don't want to deal with merging traffic at exits just sitting in the middle.
The problem with "pass on the left" is that it requires to drivers to consciously treat the left lane as a passing-only lane. That doesn't happen in California. The left lane in California is the "let me zone out and ignore all these cars passing me" lane.
I disagree with strictfp that "staying to the right" creates unnecessary traffic dynamics. What happens in California is worse. Someone holds up the left lane, so all the faster cars will pile up on the right lane and try to sneak in front of the slow car, but inevitably they'll cut someone off and set off a chain reaction of braking for everyone that was patiently queued up in the left lane.
(Granted on two-lane I-5 there are some legitimate a reason for this: the right lane is used heavily by trucks, so the road wears down quicker and becomes rougher in the right lane than the left. Naturally people gravitate towards smoother asphalt. And if you just passed a truck a few minutes back and are gonna pass another one again, why not just stay in this lane?)
This only happens on poorly designed roads that cannot handle their traffic flow. Most people in most places will obey the left passing rule only so long as there are enough lanes that the traffic fits in lanes - 1 so one can always be open.
Since the US infrastructure system is a colossal piece of shit, highways built 40 years ago still stand exactly as they were then today having to accommodate multiple times more traffic than they were ever meant to. This breaks down the road rules when its bumper to bumper and every lane is backed up.
The scenario illustrated in the GP happens because the the rightmost lane is subject to merging traffic from onramps and offramps, and also tends to be the lane where trucks and vehicles obeying the speed limit (or both) congregate.
Meanwhile, the leftmost lane attracts people wanting to drive faster than traffic, the people who just want to get one car ahead, as well as the people who just want to drive without having to let cars in all the time.
If there's only two lanes -- like on most rural interstates -- and sufficient volume exists to prevent the left lane from actually clearing out cars, this creates a tragedy-of-commons situation in the left lane where there's more empty space in the right lane than in the left. A subset of people will then use the empty slots in the right lane to try to get ahead, making the situation even riskier.
But this poster's right; the root cause is not enough lanes to ensure a high level-of-service.
It would be much more informational to take into account things like average number of cars traveling between various locations, number of lanes between said locations, residential density...
Another issue is mobility in America. It's not uncommon for people to move across the country for work. So cities like Portland or Austin don't expect the sudden boom in population and increased traffic that entails.
> Most people in most places will obey the left passing rule only so long as there are enough lanes that the traffic fits in lanes - 1 so one can always be open.
By that logic, that would mean at 11pm at night on US-101 between SF and San Jose, I shouldn't need to pass anyone on the right, but I guarantee you there's always drivers lingering in the left-most lane.
If the road is usually congested, frequent traversers of that road will just get in the habit of staying left until they are near their destination. I do it on PA-22 all the time (albeit not in a condition where people need to pass me on the right), even when the traffic is light, because its what people expect behavior wise on that road.
highway 5 between sf and la is notorious for this. it's a 2-lane highway and the right lane is filled with trucks, so all cars go in the left lane. passing is some crazy game where you try to get around slow cars in the left lane while trying not to get stuck behind a truck. it's just awful. rush hour makes it even worse.
Yes, but not normally observed in more densely populated areas. In Los Angeles, for example, it's use any lane you can to pass. I've personally witnessed people, who were driving slower than the flow of traffic, move all the way to the left to "get out of the way" of other drivers. It's well-intentioned, though poor understanding.
Licensing needs to be more rigorous, but many cities rely very heavily on commuting without a proper public transportation infrastructure in place.
I believe that there it's ruled so that you have to use the rightmost lane that's free - so if it's possible to pass someone on the right, then it means that they're not in a position to honk and flip off because they're driving wrong themselves.
The left lane is also, almost universally, a "I expect to speed" lane. When I need to use the left lane to pass and I'm driving the speed limit, I'm almost always tailgated.
I agree with all of this. Driving in the US is very unpredictable-- from the road surface to the drivers. In Germany, the road surface is great, and the flow of traffic is easy to understand. Sure, sometimes someone will flash their lights at you because you're only doing 130 in the passing lane, but you just pull over and they go by and everything's fine.
That said, if you do have an accident at those speeds... The one wreck I saw looked like a tin can had met a hydraulic press.
Much better than the average concrete US interstate. ;-)
Also, speed limits on the Autobahn are lower in construction zones, urban areas with more traffic, and anywhere the roads are not that great (still good by Jersey Turnpike standards).
The stretches with no speed limit are really well maintained.
Huh. Fascinating how different experiences can be: I found the roadtrip through northeast US I made a few years ago one of the most relaxing freeway driving experiences ever.
Sure, as an Austrian I prefer driving on German autobahns as well (due to better perceived discipline), but the US trip was something else entirely - and I've come to think that it's maybe because almost every car has cruise control.
It's not even the speed differences between different lanes, but staying in lane, setting CC and not having to correct it for a really long time is not something I was used to, and going 600km or more a day left me far less tired than over here.
EDIT: Maybe there are intra-US differences as well? Since most here seem to talk about California...
Depends where in the US. You're unlikely to set your cruise control and leave it in a big city, unless it's late night/early morning.
Outside of the big cities, it can be much more relaxing. I drove across the mid-west and did the same as you. Drive at 70-80 mph and not take the cruise control off for hours.
Anyone who hasn't driven in congested roadways like 880 or new jersey turnpike cannot understand that left lane as passing completely breaks down when you have too many cars and too many exits. We just have too many goddamn cars.
I think "Slower traffic keep right" is part of the problem, nobody wants to think of themselves as "slower". The signs should read "Left lane for passing only" or similar.
Also, I pass people on the right all the time, but I blame them for it. :-) If people don't want to be passed on the right, they shouldn't drive on the left. Simple enough.
At least here, the signs say "State law: Left lane for passing only." Slower drivers never enter the left lane, and the right lane is consistently fast and accessible if you're willing to meet the speed requirements of going above the limit a bit.
I agree that driving on a German highway is a stressful experience. Especially since there is not so many highways with more than 2 lanes, occasionally changing to 3 lanes.
On a highway with no speed limit and only 2 lanes, the difference between the right lane and the left lane is just so freaking huge, you are stressed out every time you need to pass a truck or slower car, and almost always see your random Ferrari / Maseratti / Porsche approaching at a fraction of second of the time you spend on the left lane.
I would advocate for no speed limit on highways with >= 3 lanes, but would put a limit of 140-150 on those with only 2.
I find the US much more stressful to drive in, because you have to constantly assume that people don't use their turn signals when changing lanes randomly. You obviously also have to do these dangerous lange changes because people drive slowly for no reason whatsoever wherever they want (e.g. most left lane).
I have noticed that a lot of people change into the middle lane for no reason at all. This results in you having to pass on the right, especially if there is a slow driver on the left lane. So now you have to change 2 lanes to pass 2 cars....
Fact is, if you learn how to drive well and everyone else does as well, then driving is not at all stressful. You can still use your cruise control in Germany, just not on the left lane (if you are going 80 or whatever).
Having grown up in Germany and living in the US, I feel the opposite. The US traffic is far less predictable. In the US, you have to look, left, right, back and ahead when trying to switch lane, as anyone could appear from anywhere. You never know which lane you should stay on to drive "a little faster". Generally, people just don't pay attention.
In Germany it is in one direction only. Left to overtake, right to pull back over. In addition you do have to monitor your back mirror more carefully, which people in the US do not seem to do (though they should). In Germany, virtually no one plays with their phones on highways.
Also, traffic deaths are more than half in Germany than in the US, despite higher speeds [0].
I feel like traffic rage in the US is much more prevailent, particularly in the east coast. Having said that, Dutch or Danish traffic is far more relaxing. But also much much slower...
US resident here. On the local freeway, when I signal I wish to make a lane change, other drivers often speed up. I really don't get it. What did I do to their family?
The trick is to follow the mirror, signal, maneuver method. In other words, you don't signal until you know you have a gap to change lanes into. If you signal first without checking for a gap first, then you're treating the signal as a way to ask for permission to change lanes. Other drivers may or may not allow you to do so.
Driving on the German Autobahn is not stressful. 3-4 lanes highway are usually around the bigger cities and they have a speedlimit anyway.
Because people know cars can fly past them with more than 200 kmh, they also actually stay to the right and use the left lane to pass and not to cruise. All in all it's a pleasant experience and all a driver really needs to wrap his head around is to keep as much track of the traffic behind and as in the front.
Germany is the best country in the world in which to drive.
Drivers are trained well. They look before they turn. THEY DON'T USE THE LEFT LANE AS A CRUISING LANE - they move over, pass, and return to the right lane. They use their turn signal.
You can go very, very fast in situations where it's warranted. In situations where it's not, people slow down. As someone who walks, rides a bike, and enjoys not being deafened by road noise in towns, this is good.
My experience driving has primarily been California, Ireland, and Germany, and Germany has been _far_ superior to the other two.
Personally after living in the Dutch half of Belgium for 7 years, I find Belgian and Dutch (it's possibly Belgian drivers in Dutch cars) drivers to be the worst drivers I have come across, certainly compared to German and British drivers.
I've always wanted to take a dash cam and compare the driving styles when driving to the Eurotunnel in the UK and then driving across Belgium. The ring around Antwerp is an absolute mess of people driving in a dangerous manner.
Belgian drivers typically will leave no more than a 1 second gap. In the UK this is repeatedly drummed into you that it should be 3 seconds.
Also I find Belgian and Dutch drivers react erractically, they will switch lanes erratically and move very close to the car in front before switching lanes often without indicating. Germans and British seem to leave much more room and perform maneouvres in a much more deliberate manner.
Certainly with Belgian drivers, this is back up with statistics, their death rates per 100k population are 2x that in the UK and 1.5x Germany [0]
Wouldn't even go near India ;) It's read on every death cause map I've ever seen, from traffic incidents to presence of diseases to antibiotic resistance.
When driving in Germany I noticed that I hardly ever used cruise control - you need to change speeds quite often since areas with reduced speed and unlimited speed change all the time. In US I use cruise control all the time since speed limits are constant over very long stretches. This makes driving in Germany fun, but driving in US less stressful and tiresome.
It's a maximum speed limit, not a minimum speed. Rush hour means jams in Germany too - that is the reason for the speed limit, so you don't drive into the back of a traffic jam going 80 miles an hour.
I live near the Germany border and the speed limits here in France just consistently produce some of the most dangerous behaviors I've witnessed, while crossing the border and it's just fine, even if people sometimes pass you on the right, and even if, like anywhere, shitty dicks do exist. Also, it's far from a stress free experience in France when there are speed checks at every corner and you spend your time looking at your speedometer and on the lookout for controls even if you respect the speed limit instead of the road and other drivers, because it's so easy to ever so slightly drive above the limit as it's set to such an unnatural value. You just feel coerced, constantly watched and judged as guilty by default and it's terrible. Worse, there is a whole category of people that feel safe as long as they dutifully respect the limit and since it's so low they get bored and text or phone or play with the kids or fiddle with their GPS, not feeling responsible the least about hurling more than a metric ton of metal at speeds that are anyway entirely unnatural. In Germany you just drive and since there is quite the gradient of speed alongside the perpendicular axis of the road, it's just fine and you feel safe at whatever speed you drive: people just don't close-call zoom past you at 200+kph when you cruise at 120kph. It's just surprising at first because you got that message shoehorned at every moment that speed kills and speeders are the worst scumbags on earth, but as soon as you learn to drive socially so to speak and not like an individualist prick isolated in your cage of metal, things get really better. The road is best lived together, pay respect to the flow which you're part of and you'll be damn fine.
> when there are speed checks at every corner and you spend your time looking at your speedometer and on the lookout for controls even if you respect the speed limit instead of the road and other drivers
If you cannot check your speedometer, and safely navigate in the trafic at the same time, you should stop and look inwards. It is not hard.
There's a difference between looking at the speedo because you're rechecking your speed and feeling pressed into doing it out of fear of being caught speeding 2kph above the limit simply because there's variability. I'm not saying it's hard, I'm saying it's distracting and stressful having to constantly poll and check for an arbitrary number that bears no actual relation to safety (which is the factor that drives anyone's natural speed limit feedback loop). IOW here I'm talking about the psychological effect that induces fear, stress and guilt in the driver, not the technical ability to do it. I believe coercion is not the proper way to educate people into living respectfully together.
I love driving in Germany. The only things I wish they'd explained to me before picking up a rental car:
1) The "priority road" system, indicated with diamond signs, for right of way on secondary roads. This isn't quite as weird for outsiders as the weird British Columbia flashing green lights thing (wtf), but still, almost caused an accident the first time I encountered it at night.
2) When traffic is stopped and you want to allow emergency vehicles, you make a gap between (California) lanes 1 and 2, i.e. where Californian motorcycles go; in the US (and everywhere else I've seen), emergency vehicle drive on the shoulder. Either makes sense, but knowing what's going to happen is good. I naturally pulled toward the right in the leftmost lane until I looked behind me and saw flashing lights coming up fast.
Other cities might be different, but small (and some no-so-small) streets in Munich streets have a 30km/h limit (note to Americans, that's less that 20 mile/h). I never saw many cars obeying those limits.
As far as I can see those limits exist to make the politicians responsible for them look concerned about safety.
Drivers don't obey those limits to the letter, but they certainly do recognize them in so far as that they go considerably slower than the speed they would drive if the limit wasn't there.
> a speed limit typically means there's a good reason to follow it
I'd say in the UK it's pretty similar as well. The standard limit on single-carriageway roads, unless indicated, is 60mph/97kmh. This could be anything from a bypass around a town, to a small country road with tight bends and steep drops at the side.
The limit is usually only lowered if going through a town/village (typically 30mph or 40mph) or if there is a some sort of danger that you wouldn't expect, like a hidden junction on a bend.
The officer in the article is absolutely right: if communities want to reduce speeds then they need to do more the number on the sign. I notice the wider and more open the roadway is, the faster I'll drive. Even if a large bike lane replaces my lane, that space is still available to take up the slack for mistakes. Whereas a narrow county road or narrow residential street lined with cars will certainly slow me down, especially with oncoming traffic.
Agree. One thing I've never understood is why people ever thought it was a good idea to combine vehicle, foot, and bicycle traffic on essentially the same roads. Side walks are just another lane.
Communities need to enforce zoning that makes certain areas (malls, downtown, etc.) pedestrian areas only. Additionally, separate bicycle traffic onto different paths.
Because in the early days cars were not traveling at lethal speeds. Collisions are very rarely fatal to people being hit at speeds below 20mph, and somewhat easier to prevent at those speeds as well. In a real mixed use street, any driver can instinctually feel that 20 mph is recklessly fast. The problem was surrendering primacy to the cars.
Maybe police should try enforcing the traffic laws?
I refuse to speed; I think it is immoral. This is because I ride a bicycle everywhere, and the extent to which people speed on surface streets has an obvious and tangible effect on my safety. My town has a narrow bridge that used to be the only way for cyclists to get across the river, where drivers routinely exceed the 35 mph speed limit by 20 mph or more. It is terrifying, and people have gotten killed. I wish they would put a speed camera on that bridge.
The argument that "the speed limit doesn't matter because people will travel the same speed" only makes sense under the assumption that the only people who will use the public roads are drivers who feel like they can do whatever they want. Plenty of drivers feel entitled to run red lights, too, and that causes more collisions.
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).
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).
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.
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".
For drivers, I'm sure. Not for cyclists or pedestrians. Depends on the street of course.
In general, I think speed limits can be higher on highways, but should be much lower and actually enforced in town. Fast cars are absolutely terrible for the safety and comfort of walkers and bikers.
I think the article was about highways specifically (the arguments do not really hold up in an urban environment), but I don't think it said so specifically.
The paragraphs under the "Slowing Down" heading kind of imply that they think the argument also applies in an urban environment. It's incredibly frustrating and infuriating to read such an utterly anti-bike anti-walker policy get advocated like this.
Probably, but the title of the article is "Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?"
People seem have a bias towards thinking about speed limits in terms of interstate travel speeds, which frequently have been raised to 70–80 mph anyway.
Perhaps this is because most speeding enforcement is on interstates and there is relatively little enforcement of speed limits on surface streets unless they are very egregious.
Mixed-use streets and a mis-guided desire to build urban and suburban areas on grids of wide straight roads are the root cause of the problem. Fast cars are just a symptom.
In my area the state and/or county went to great lengths to create a bidirectional bicycle highway alongside (but physically separated from) some of the freeways, but the city can't be bothered to provide bicycle lanes and street lights along the full length of any of the major roads through town. During most of the year I prefer to stick to the major roads in the early morning hours because the vehicle traffic usually keeps the coyotes away. The only thing more likely to cause a driver to hit me than swerving to avoid an animal (assuming I'm complying with the laws while riding my bicycle in the street) would be if the driver is impaired or passes too close, either of which is a law I would be much happier to see an officer enforce than the speed limit.
Every time a car, train, boat, or plane crosses paths with one of the other modes of transportation on that list we make sure that someone has to have a lapse of attention, poor judgment, or some form of vehicular malfunction to violate the right of way. When it comes to a car, bicycle, or pedestrian, though, we tell them it's ok to share the same road and pretend that there's nothing wrong with that assumption, even when more people every year seem to be completely unaware that they're supposed to share the road with bicycles (and more cyclists seem to be unaware of which side of the road they're supposed to be on or that any laws regulate them).
The point of this article is not that speeding is safer, but that wide variance in speed create their own risks, and some drivers will obey a posted speed limit that is lower than the road mean. OTOH, many surface streets necessarily have wide variances in vehicle speeds because they serve varied vehicle users or other reasons, and wide variances in speed are more likely to be cause by speeding cars.
If you want people to drive slower, there are effective ways of doing that. Changing the speed limit is not one of them. Try removing the lines, removing the curbs, sporadically insetting curbs, adding trees, etc.
Changing the speed limit isn't the question, since the speed limit is low enough but simply not enforced. Enforcing the existing speed limit is a strategy that can be tried. but yes, most streets are built to encourage fast auto traffic, and need physical changes to calm the street down. Some cannot.
Your argument just tells me you need a ped bridge, not slower speed limits. Even as it is, bikes are traffic, and drivers can wait. The differential is not the root issue in your case.
The problem isn't that the posted speed limit was too high, it's that the road mean is 55 mph in a 35 mph zone with little room to pass.
Then they built a ped bridge, and threatened to kick off cyclists because cyclists are vehicles that travel 10-20 mph faster than pedestrians (and don't integrate well with pedestrian traffic generally).
Your counter argument only makes sense under the assumption that there is no other way to change travel speeds. As others have mentioned, narrow lanes do wonders, as do trees near the roadway and shorter sight lines. The trees are even more effective if they become mature enough to form a canopy across the top of the roadway. You can also achieve these changes with more temporary measures, such as paint and cones.
Your situation sounds ripe for change. Look into street calming demonstrations, and seek neighborhood support to do one as well as possibly painting lines to narrow the lanes for drivers.
Just don't be surprised that drivers try to drive highways like highways, even when you try with signs to tell them that it's a low speed road.
Our community is a short cut. Its 25Mph even outside school hours. Its at the bottom of a hill. Someone blew by me this morning doing easily 50Mph. We've had someone roll their SUV onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing my wife and kids - and that driver was going uphill! So totally get it. I've usually got the fastest car in sight, and I'm doing the speed limit through town. On the freeway I go the same speed as everyone else. Sometimes a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower. Data shows that driving at the speed of traffic, or slightly faster, is less dangerous than driving 5mph slower. Where I live, the freeway is regularly 75mph, even though the limit is 65mph. With the obvious exception of rush hour, when I encounter a traffic knot, its because two people are driving slower than the rest of traffic wants to, and everyone has to negotiate around them. One could view the 50 people wanting to pass the two as the problem, or we could criticize the two traveling the speed limit. In the absence of those two people, the safety of the other 50 would increase. Conversely, in the absence of those other 50 people, the safety of those two would increase. Seems an obvious choice to me. Its easy to point out yahoos who run red lights or speed through town, but these are not representative, and doing 10 mph over the limit through a school zone is not remotely like doing 10mph over the limit on a freeway.
Where I live, running red lights, easing through right-on-red turns without stopping or looking, and speeding in school zones are very common. In my view, these are related problems: people develop an entitlement to speed 10-15 mph on the interstate, broaden that to speeding 10-15 mph everywhere, and start disregarding traffic laws more generally.
If one views the problem as one of lawlessness, then it certainly looks that way, and certainly there are people like that. I view the problem as one of safety: drive 25mph through school zone because kids, drive 80mph on freeway because safe. Regardless, if you continue to drive at 65mph when everyone else is doing 75mph, then you are making accidents more likely. This is no longer the moral choice. This is just righteousness.
I ride as well (about 1000 miles a year) and normally will not exceed speed limits on surface streets while diving. In some cases, I'll actually ride faster than I drive on some roads. I practice vehicular cycling when riding.
But when driving on a limited access highway,I will speed most of the time because the speed limit is based on a now defunct national motor vehicle maximum speed law that was repealed over 20 years ago instead of an actual traffic and engineering study.
Fucking obviously they are too low. Everyone knows this. Absolutely no one drives exactly the speed limit. Speed limits are low to increase revenues from speeding tickets.
If reducing speed is really desired, there are other ways:
- make roads narrower (either by optical illusion with narrower painted lanes or physically)
- reduce stretches of straight road: traffic circles are great at breaking up a straight line
- remove all straight lines from highways, making them perpetually in a slight curve. This is something that has been done in many place in Europe for newer highways. This breaks up the monotony of being on a straight stretch of highway and therefore feeling the need to drive faster. As an example, notice the slight curves in the limited access highway (A5) and compare to the 2-lane road that runs parallel to it (D605) in segments of straight lines:
The bottom line of the article gets it totally backwards: "Raise speed limits, make roads safer." It should really be "design roads for lower speeds, make roads safer".
They aren't mutually exclusive. Existing roads are wide and straight and have too-low speed limits. Revamping them to be lower speed roads takes more money than just fixing the sign.
Reducing accidents, injuries, and fatalities are is what really desired -- not reducing speed. This seems to be an argument for making roads more dangerous because people slow down when things are dangerous.
The government recently increased the speed limit on a long highway I take a few times a year. Honestly a lot of people were driving at or below the limit and I felt no reason to speed. The highway also seemed to move better and felt a lot safer with fewer lane changes needed.
+1 for narrow roads. By my house there are suuuper wide roads with no houses on them, but 3-4 turn-offs into subdivisions. The roads have 20ft on either side of them that is mowed grass and huge shoulders. The subdivisions usually have turn lanes into them. Everyone goes 55-60 because the road is designed that way. The actual speed limit: 40. Lesson: Design the road for the speed limit that is intended.
This is what made the article a maddening experience to read, for me. Thankfully the article called out to these practices just a smidge at the very end.
But it seems wrongheaded to focus on 85/15 out of safety, in areas where the safety concerns are for surrounding property, bikers, and pedestrians. I'd love to see more emphasis on designing roads for intended speed limits.
I stumbled upon this presentation to local city leadership by the police department (https://youtu.be/BJNCCAJUEgM?t=9m36s). The commentary by the police contradicts some of these facts from this article but I would have to assume there is a vested interest in saying "pulling people over more saves lives." There are likely many variables at play so its hard to say what truly helps prevent accidents...
"If every car sets its cruise control at the same speed" I wish cruise control use was more common on the highway than it appears to me, at least in eastern Massachusetts. I don't want to play passing games; I just want to leave my cruise control set at the speed limit.
Instead, many people seem content to do a bad job modulating their speed with the pedal on hills, and average just under the speed limit instead; or swerve like a maniac across as many lanes as it takes to get ahead a few car lengths. It's really frustrating.
> many people seem content to do a bad job modulating their speed with the pedal on hills,
That's the behavior of my wife's cruise control on her truck; we have to set it to account for 8-10mph slop on either side of the set point, depending on the slope of the hill. It's not even an old truck...
Adaptive cruise makes highway driving so much less stressful. You don't even notice the small changes in speed. It's becoming pretty popular and will soon be standard on even lower end cars.
My wife's car has ACC. I typically set it for about 6-7 over the limit on the freeway (about 85% speed here). Every now and then I will suddenly realize that I'm now going 50. Usually about the time some car flies past my in the left lane and I'm wishing for some traffic enforcement. Then I see that he was really only going the speed I planned to go and I've settled in behind a slow poke.
If every car set its cruise control to the same speed, nobody would ever be able to change lanes; merging and exiting would become an impossibility.
That's why it's so bloody dangerous that clueless folks plod along in the left lane obstructing traffic. It's extremely common to see 1/4mi or more of open roadway ahead of knotted up traffic driving the same speed.
beyond agreeing with just about everything in the article, a few points to add/emphasize:
* speed limits are set at the 85th percentile of speeds to minimize speed variance, giving slow drivers a target speed and thereby making them go faster than they might otherwise go (but still at a safe speed).
* larger variances in speeds correlate with both greater traffic and frustration. if highway patrol could enforce just one law, it should be that drivers should move to the right if they are not passing cars on the right. this allows faster cars to clear out of congestion, increasing the overall average speed and throughput for a given section of road. it also reduces overall frustration.
* traffic enforcement as a revenue generator creates a perverse incentive and adversarial relationship largely exacerbated by artificially low speed limits. let's abolish those limits and bad incentives and give the police more time to develop relationships within their community.
* change the term "speed limit" to "safe speed" on signs (along with commensurate fines/laws), because that would have the same normalizing effect on speed variance, while also removing the revenue incentives for police.
* distracted driving is the real killer on the roads, not speed. changing roads to make them more hazardous (like narrower lanes, obstructing sightlines) probably reduces distracted driving more than it reduces speeding (just my conjecture), and thereby lowering accidents. i don't mind narrower lanes and such, but i'd advocate separating cars from bikes and pedestrians as much as possible so that cars can still move at a good clip while providing greater safety for pedestrian and bike traffic.
On highways, the 85th-percentile rule makes some sense. The evidence seems to suggest that raising speed limits slightly increases fatality rates, but not accident rates, and doesn't have much influence on driver speed.
At the other extreme, on neighborhood streets in residential areas, the rationale for the 85th percentile rule (reducing the speed differential between cars traveling in the same direction) is absurd: these speed differentials are much lower and much less important than other speed differentials. If a car driving down my street at 30mph has trouble dealing with a car going the same direction at 20mph, it will also have trouble with the kids playing basketball in the street, or the car headed the opposite direction without room to pass, or the car backing out of a driveway, or the bike going 15mph. Conflicts between drivers headed the same direction are a non-issue on these types of streets.
And there are streets in the middle. A major commercial street in my town is four very narrow lanes (the right lane is actually less wide than a city bus, so when a bus is traveling the same direction you must enter the oncoming lane if you try to pass), with very small blocks, crosswalks at every intersection, tons of pedestrians and cyclists, tons of cars turning left across traffic, etc. Should this be set at the 85th percentile speed? Although it's more debatable, again, I don't think that the speed differential between cars traveling the same direction is likely to be a major contributor to fatal accidents here--on a busy urban street like this the danger is much more likely to arise from the speed differential between pedestrians and cars, a car turning left and an oncoming car, cyclists and cars, etc.
Not to mention that one of the main reasons for speed limits typically being 30mph or lower in urban areas even where the roads are fairly easy to drive on is those kids playing basketball in the street or cyclist are much more likely to survive an impact even if the driver isn't able to anticipate and avoid it than at 40mph, when they have a 95% chance of being killed (it's 95% chance of survival at 20mph)
Obviously this applies less to country roads where pedestrians are rarely encountered, speed limits are well over 40mph and drivers often should be paying more attention to the bends ahead of them than the notional speed limit when judging how fast to go anyway.
As the article says, people won't slow down just because you posted a lower limit. A better way to protect these children would be to change the design of the road (this report seems to be a good overview of ways to do this: https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/216727/mu...).
In the last 20 years Denmark have had focus on doing this in villages along main roads. Before it was normal to see cars on through the village with 100kmh, now they'll crash if they try to do that, because on entry and exit in the village there is a chicane.
The road to my son's high school has a 5 MPH speed limit. Have you ever tried to drive 5 MPH? My speedometer doesn't register that low. My car goes faster than that at idle.
My favorite are the 7.5mph, 14mph, and other odd increments ment to convey percision, while we just ballpark most slow speed limits. Reminds me of the guy who set all his meetings at exactly 7 minutes after the hour to convey promptness.
I read somewhere that the original goal of those oddball speed limits was to get drivers to notice them and therefore, hopefully, obey them. It's easy to tune out yet another 25 mph sign, but 23 mph stands out.
i think that's the point, so you pay close attention to speed limits instead of overlooking them if they are everywhere same, of course you can drive at common lowest denominator and don't be distracted
anyway your speedometer always show more than it's real speed, so maybe real reason is to follow speed from speedometer since 23mph means roughly 25mph displayed on speedometer instead of doing opposite, setting speed limit 25 but people trying to match it with speedometer displaying 27
5mph is just about the lowest I can drive on a motorcycle, and it's real hard to maintain balance. Have to focus so much on that there is less attention for, say, looking out for kids running across road.
As usual, the answer to the headline is "no." Probably most freeway speed limits are too low, and many others, but lots of smaller streets have appropriate limits, or even ones which are too high.
It's a fun (and annoying) game to observe how people's speed varies compared to the limit. I almost always go at the limit plus 5MPH unless that would make me dangerously slow. Sometimes this makes me the fastest car on the road, and other times the slowest.
There's a road I drive about twice a day where the first half has a 25MPH limit and the second half is 35MPH. I'm usually a slowpoke on the first half, building up a queue of cars behind me, and then end up the fastest car around on the second half. (And to preempt any haters, the 25MPH segment is less than a mile long, so I'm not severely inconveniencing people.)
Rural interstates here have a 70MPH limit, so I go 75MPH. Most people go 65-70MPH. As you get into the city where I live, the limit drops progressively to 55MPH, and most people go... 65-70MPH.
My opinion is that most are not too high. Though there are many that may /technically/ be that way due to the driveways of older houses which are a legacy from before the rest of the city moved out to the area. Society should do a better job of encouraging the increase of density and arterial conversion.
Genuine question...if we really cared about speeding, couldn't we just put speed cameras everywhere and issue tickets automatically for people who are driving too fast?
The randomness of having a human officer grab me (not the other 1,000 people) off the road for going too fast feels unfair and ineffective.
how do they deal with stopovers? average speed measuring is useful only for continuous trip and very short distances between measuring points so they can't be cheated by stops, but I can see how delivery driver with many stops could easily break speed limits even with average measuring
They're only done on motorways (~freeway) in general, and there tend to be at the very least cameras before/after each junction. Any directly on-carriageway parking places tend to be closed off, hard shoulders are for emergency use only, and service areas are considered junctions for this.
I don't think I've ever seen anywhere with them with less than, say, half a mile separation between junctions. At that point, you just get normal speed cameras.
In 2013, there were 4,071,000 miles of roads [1]. How many cameras are we going to need? I think the idea of randomness is supposed to make people think "there could be a cop anywhere, so I'd better not speed", but I think a basic psychology education (and driving on a US highway for three minutes) proves that that's not actually how people behave.
That's solving the wrong problem. We want to keep the roads safe and fine drivers that drive at an unsafe speed. Since speed limits are not tied to the safe speed in most cases then you are just fining people in a way that does nothing to help society.
You need to fix the core speed limit problem before fully enforcing the limits.
this is already taken care of, in EU within few years so roads must have toll gate system monitoring passing cars with unit built in car, so you can easily measure average speed, though it's not perfect solution if there is longer distance between gates
> If someone could wave a wand and get every American to drive below 60 mph, roads would be safer.
That wand exists - it's called "enforce the law". Increase penalties, or decrease them if you need a revenue-neutral plan, but enforce that 60MPH is a limit, not a suggestion.
This article parrots the same concept as most speeding solutions: speed doesn't kill, only variance in speed is dangerous. That makes perfect sense. So why increase the possible variance from zero, and why let people complain about driving at the limit being too slow? If you're above the limit, _you_ are increasing the variance, and _you_ need to slow down.
> Enforcing the limits when they are artificially low helps no one except for the police.
Sufficient enforcement will, over time, reduce speed variance, which is the behavioral problem which leads to the conclusion that speed limits are "too low". So, no, increasing enforcement of limits that are "too low" based on the variance of speeds produced on those roads given present enforcement patterns helps safety in the same way as raising speed limits does, by reducing speed variance. And it does so without increasing the number of people who are driving faster than is safe for their own abilities because of traffic pressure.
Now, you might argue that the cost of enforcement or the travel time make it undesirable.
Did you even read the article? Many speed limits are not based on safety, which is the entire point of a speed limit. That's where "artificially low" comes from. 85% of people drive at a safe speed regardless of what the speed limit is. The speed limit should more closely match that safe speed.
Forcing everyone to drive at a slower speed than what's safe by force does not actually make the road safer. 100% enforcement of current speed limits would not actually make things better.
Yes, and I directly addressed it's points. Did you read my post? Because you don't seem to address what I've said, and you ignore that I've more directly dealt with the points made in the article than you do in yours.
> 85% of people drive at a safe speed regardless of what the speed limit is.
No, traffic engineers have come to the conclusion that, because speed variance is a significant source of risk, the safest speed limit (considering auto vs. auto issues only) is the 85th percentile speed of traffic on the road, which (at least with patterns of enforcement over the time the rule was found and since) seems not to vary much based on posted limits, in any case.
That's the 85th percentile rule, and it's the single most common rule for setting speed limits in the US. Its incorporated in federal guidance, its incorporated in most state laws (though with some exceptions—e.g., school zones, upper highway speed limits—in virtually all of them).
Given that the 85th percentile speed will rarely fall on exactly a convenient numbee, you'd expect nearly half of limits to be below that because of rounding, and add in some conditions which create downward departures in limited cases, and, sure, as the article body says, most (>50%) are below. But that's not the headline's "every speed limit".
Not is it clear, as I stated previously, that the 85th percentile rule is ideal for safety for mixed use. There's considerable global evidence that lower speed limits are better for that.
Suppose I am driving down a street. The sign says the limit is 60kmph. However the condition of the road is good. It's well maintained, it's nice and wide. I can clearly go faster. Say 70kmph. Most people realise this so they go faster too. Say between 65-70kmph.
But the sign clearly said 60. Further more, you know you can get ticketed. Even if the limit is artificially low and the police are doing it for revenue raising reasons, why not just slow down regardless of the conditions?
It seems irrational to me that you would go faster on a street where they enforce the limit just because the conditions are good. Why even bother risking the ticket and losing points on your license.
I drive in Sydney. There are signs well in advance of red light cameras and speed cameras. And people still speed through them. There are certain roads where I see the camera go off quite regularly. Hell, a couple of times I've seen signs, slowed to match the limit and people behind me will change lanes and speed to over take me, triggering the cameras. Sometimes I am already over the limit, and the person behind me will decide I am not over enough, change lanes and speed to overtake.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadEither they need to raise the limit or enforce it. I'm sick of being the asshole going too slow.
Also my speed is generally more a function of gas mileage than anything else. With stop lights littering the route I don't feel that driving 55 is any faster than 40. It just wastes more gas. So maybe it wouldn't even make sense to raise it and instead it just needs to be enforced.
In fact, I think it needs to go a step further - ALWAYS stay to the right. Only move to the other lane to pass or turn left.
Passing left laws were intended for two way streets with one lane in each direction when the only way to pass is by driving on the lane going the opposite direction.
Do you have a citation for that? Many state laws use the speed of traffic as a reference to define slower as opposed to using the posted speed limit as the reference. If they meant to say only slower than the speed limit, then the text of the law would be explicit on that point.
Having less speed variance leads to smoother flow and traffic that's more spread out. That increases safety overall.
No thanks!
Generally its the middle lane I use, but sometimes it's even the left if some landscaping truck or cement mixed is in front of me dropping who knows what into the road.
The chief component in getting to one's destination is the traffic and the second one is number of lights you get stopped out. Since all the lights are timed to 40mph it doesn't make sense to go faster unless they re-engineer the road.
Generally any car that passes me will be stuck at the light ahead and if there is light traffic I will pass them because I have a rolling start and if there is heavy traffic it's all the same.
Staying to the right in this situation only makes sense if you're unable to accelerate at a reasonable speed or unable to go the speed limit at all.
I really hope this is not the case
Some cops claim that aggressive traffic enforcement leads to knock-on effects in reducing gun crime:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/809689.pdf
> Gun seizures by police in the target area increased by more than 65 percent, while gun crimes declined in the target area by 49 percent
It probably makes sense -- any kind of warrantless search has the potential to decrease crime.
> A plot was hatched, fueled by indignation: "By God, I've paid taxes for a long time -- and more than a lot of those trucks." First he consulted with the commonwealth attorney's office and other traffic authorities to ensure that his plan was legal, that passing on the right was acceptable on multilane highways and that traveling over 55, even to pass, was against the law.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1984/11/21/...
Do any/many states have lower ages?
In Europe I've gotten tickets driving only 5mph over the limit (58 km/h on a 50 road), which would explain why the 85th percentile is closer to the actual speedlimit there.
It could be argued that the vehicle owner is responsible for ensuring this adjustment is made every time tires are changed, but with no real way for the average consumer to verify or measure the difference, the fact is we depend on the business providing the service to do it for us.
Why? It would add time to your (and everyone else's) commute, while simultaneously being unlikely to substantially improve traffic safety.
It's kind of funny to watch on the last two or three days of the month how many of the state troopers are out on the interstate, doing speed traps all day long. The rest of the month, you'll almost never see them, unless they are escorting an oversize load.
I will admit though, she counsels me against following the rule in Virginia because the cops there don't mess around.
EDIT: I should add that 15mph over the limit is usually "going with the flow". If the other cars are traveling at 70 then 85 really stands out.
My usual rule is 5MPH over. I sometimes increase it to 10MPH, but it works almost everywhere.
5 over is safe everywhere in the USA except school zones. 10 is generally safe in suburban and rural areas. 14 over on highways, unless mitigating situations exist (bridge, visibility, twisties)
Beware, almost every area has some county or township that abuses their little patch of highway, and they tend to be well known to locals, but prey on passers by.
This is not bulletproof, but has been my experince.
This rule of thumb still allows for 61 mph on urban freeways and 77 to 83 on rural interstates.
If you are less than 10% over, the cops would need to prove that you knew it. This would involve testing your car. Nobody wants to bother with that, so you normally get an extra 10%.
There is no such need for cop to "prove" you "knew" you were speeding. Ignorance of the law (or the condition of your vehicle, or whatever) is no excuse, as the saying goes. When you sign up for a driver's license (in the US) you agree that you will abide by all traffic laws.
Plug an OBDII reader + app into your car to see the true velocity.
http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/
Bike riders also solve traffic jams (by NOT going bar car), make cities more silent and more liveable, bring more business to local stores and restaurants etc.
Obligatory Reference to wit: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/08/29/will_everyo...
So... (1) maybe a welfare state isn't that bad? and (2) that's akin to not believing in small-scale trials/pilots because they're small.
As for 'incredibly homogenous', they have a larger foreign-born population (15%) than the US (14%) or the UK (12%). While that number doesn't tell the full story, sure, it does show that Sweden isn't some hermit-state. And it's neighbour Norway has the highest immigration rate of any western democracy that isn't a city-state.
Trying to find reasons to exclude Sweden as a comparator is basically condoning bad behaviour. It's not a perfect fantasy state; they're just doing really well in the quality-of-life stakes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
Georgia, Michigan, NC and NJ are the closest in size but that's about where it ends. Michigan probably has the closest demographic homogeneity. However the existence of the federal government as well as natural resources as a economic base throws a wrench into any further comparisons.
True for Norway, but not any other country in the neighborhood (fine, Scotland I guess)
Also, as some other commenters point out, their homogeneity isn't on a different scale from places that aren't topping the charts.
I can understand saying "well they have a bunch of Oil money and not much ground to cover" but most things in the universe can be solved at scale in the same way they're tackled in these countries.
It'd be like if Sweden was the only place that invented spark plugs and you're like "Well they're a really small country so they have less people to give spark plugs to so it's feasible".
"The United States has terrible public transport" doesn't hold true for pocket regions which have very reliable public transport. You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries. Not to mention geographical differences. Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder?
> Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
The US is 3.797 million mi². Europe is 3.931 million mi².
I think this has to do with the frequency of rest-stops/ tourist destinations.
There are many places to stop and see if you were to have a track going through all of the EU, but if you do that with the U.S, you're just going through "nothing" for hours on end. There's no site-seeing, sparse and isolated rest-stops, etc.
This is if we assume coast-to-coast travel, not just state-to-state. If we do, it's just not worth it to spend that much money.
2 hours 16 minutes.
Of course, as always, this is from station to station, not your real total journey because you don't live at the station.
A train from New York to Miami, Florida is around 2057 km leaving from Penn Station. From Paris to Zurich and Zurich to Berlin is 1622~ km. Although a tad larger going back to Paris from Berlin, a total of 2676 km.
So for comparable distances and from [Tourist Attraction] --> [Tourist Attraction] things are comparable.
Take a train around all of Germany, Switzerland, and France. The entire countries - and not just the capitals! You've still only covered a small portion of the US [0].
Things don't work when there is large amounts of nothing between areas that need to be connected. This is also why the US has laughably bad internet connections in most of the nation. It isn't worth laying down fiber in towns with populations <5,000 nor is it worth laying down rail.
Size isn't the only issue but it is, in my opinion, the largest issue. Pun not intended.
>Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
My understanding of it is as coredog64 said in their reply, but also Switzerland is yet-another-tiny-country. It'd be more fair to compare it with a 3rd of New York. Does a third of New York have an extensive, heavily used train system? Yes. It so happens to have one of the most extensive rail systems out of any state in the US even! Why? My guess is the size: it's a smaller state with more concentrated populations.
New York (State): 141,300 km² Switzerland: 41,285 km²
Does anyone have information on how extensive and heavily used public transport is in, say... Russia? Then we'd at least be closer to any size comparisons. I'm only familiar with Moskva and Sankt-Peterburg (Moscow and Saint Petersburg) which is the capital and the second largest city, so I'd expect them to be well connected - so that isn't exactly saying much. Looking at the rail map on Wiki [1] doesn't tell you which are public transport lines and which are freight lines. So it's hard to get a good idea.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/uwOnbWY.png
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Russia_R...
That we have any American cities with decent transit seems to be largely thanks to the restrictive geography of those cities, as well as some excellent activists (Jane Jacobs being the easiest example.)
Smaller countries or countries where half the country isn't populated (due to geography such as frozen tundra or large mountains), focusing population in a smaller region of that country don't have to deal with as many pockets of low density populations.
Because they're small.
No. It's a lack of "populated" regions at all. The problem being described is that the population density is too even.
The issue is not the spacing of our metro areas in relation to one another (interregional distances). Rather, we have bad geometry withinour metros (intra-regional distances.) To me, this seems to stem largely from the many ways we've subsidized automotive transit and low density, single family residences since WWII.
The difficulty created by our development pattern is that you can almost never gather enough people into one place to justify building a train station, subway station, or even a bus stop. When you can gather them, it's normally by those people driving to the stop, and the disappointing crowd that shows up often doesn't pull enough weight to get reliable, frequent service to those stops. And as long as those people are going to get in the car anyway, and then have to wait a long time to catch the next bus/train, a lot of them are just going to say "the hell with it" and drive to their destination instead.
Alternatively, maybe you live in a downtown area where there actually are enough people in close proximity to justify transit stops with a high level of service. If you're in a typical American city, you'll run into the problem at the other end of your journey. Sure, you easily walked to your stop, but maybe when you get off at your other stop, several miles from the center of town, you're still several miles from the store, or the restaurant, or your friend's house. And it's typically not on streets that are pleasant to walk, because they're not very interesting and the cars may be quite fast. So you'll have to make your friend pick you up, or pay for Ubers both ways, or walk anyway in an act of defiance against the place you've ended up. None of that sounds great, and if you even did it once, you're probably thinking seriously about driving your car next time.
And so it turns out that what you really need are at least two places, neither of which really require cars, for transit to be all that helpful. And in the US, we seldom have that, because we have a single center of intensity, with the density decreasing radially in all directions.
These places don't have to be huge, either. A compact outlying town of 30,000 or so could reasonably have hourly bus service to the major city an hour away. The key is that the town needs to be walkable enough that people can easily get to the bus, and the big city also needs to be navigable without a car.
As to intercity: I'm not saying NYC and LA should have a dedicated rail line between them, but it would certainly be reasonable to have SF, LA, and SD all connected by rail, perhaps high-speed. But at the same time, given the spread out development of those three cities, it doesn't surprise me at all that that's not feasible.
If that's true, so what?
Split it into 20 separate jobs, each equivalent to Sweden in terms of landmass, population, and budget.
Or maybe 48 separate jobs.
Similarly, the Nordic countries are not homogeneous: most of the population lives near their southern borders (on the Baltic Sea), while their northern areas are barely populated at all. It's very similar to Canada: most of the population there lives within 100 miles of the southern (US) border.
So you can't compare population densities like that: you have to focus on specific areas. What's the population density of Malmo versus Philly? Stockholm vs. DC? And even here it's hard to compare, because for instance "DC" could mean just the District itself, or it could mean the much larger metro area around it, and all parts that are reasonably commutable. Most of the "DC" population lives outside of DC.
Offhand, I'd say Sweden has substantially better public transportation because most of the population lives in a few large cities, and also because it's a better-managed country that invests more in infrastructure for the common good.
The ticket is only a small part of the actual costs.
And even worse, while this combination-punch can be irritating to middle- and upper-class folks, it can be financially devastating to someone living on the edge of sustainability.
But then, somebody has to pay for all those shiny new Police Intercept cruisers, SUVs, tactical body armor, new weapons & training, drones, robots, etc. etc. etc.
I've not read of him routinely buying new cars - quite the contrary. In this case I believe it was a simple disregard for the laws that only applied to "little people." He couldn't be bothered and didn't care.
Related: He routinely parked his Mercedes (the one without a license plate) in a reserved Handicapped parking space.
source: Walter Isaacson's Jobs biography, Sculley's book, and Amelio's book on his time at Apple.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1033_program
And then: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-fatalities-shar...
Well, even then, the US still has somewhere around 3-4 times more deaths on the roads per capita than other western countries.
It would be interesting to know what the ratio of deaths per driving regularly capita is for all western countries.
If the break-even point isn't 1 million people, where is it? 622k? 100 billion? 3^^^3?
This is Eliezer Yudkowski's dust speck argument all over again. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/
And it's the large differentials in speed which create the most dangerous conditions and accidents.
Even rigorous enforcement can't catch everyone, and the high speeds quickly become the norm; with people going 65 the dangerous exceptions.
Setting the limit at 80 doesn't make everyone drive 80, either.
Evidence, please.
We did this experiment and the evidence is against you.
Fatalities did not significantly increase for any of the states that increased their limits after the 55mph thing ended and there was some weak evidence that they went down.
In addition, if you look at the fatality and injury numbers for urban interstate they went down for 65MPH and up for 55mph and 75mph. That makes no sense.
Basically, the statistics are sufficiently close to a wash that the confounding factors (like texting or rerouting due to more convenience) matter more than the speed limit.
[1] http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel/
Someone has a pretty big axe to grind when they have to lump speeders in with drunk drivers in order to get the statistics they need... I suspect that the number is almost the same even if you remove the non-drunk speeders from it. (I'm being a little snotty and disingenuous--I suspect that the issue is that the number of non-drunk, speeding fatalities is almost nil and that drunk and fatality almost always implies speeding as well).
And I still can't believe how many people die because they won't put on a bloody seat belt. Sheesh.
So, what we know is that using electronic devices in cars is more dangerous than speeding. So, we clearly need to remove the cellular towers near highways, right?
- suicides (somewhere between 10 % and 20 %) - spontaneous deaths (around 10 % of traffic deaths, driver dies of old age or similar; they are included in statistics even though the accident was not actually cause of death) - gross negligence (at least 30 %: the driver is severely drunk, does not have a license, the vehicle has not passed inspection and the driver is trying to escape the police at 160 km/h on a 50 km/h zone; sometimes you have all these at the same time!) - freak observation errors (at a rail crossing, just drive under the train)
Directly on either side of the toll road are the free roads. The only difference is one fewer lane each way. The speed limit is 60mph.
I do not believe there is enough difference between the two roads to justify a 25mph speed limit difference, except to create an artificial police-enforced incentive to fork over if you want to be able to drive as fast as you should.
I suspect many speed limits are designed in this way: either mostly arbitrary or calculated to maximize revenue (for police, toll road operators, etc.). They are not designed with optimizing driver utility in mind.
There are few things better than when you end up driving in a swarm of experienced drivers who are willing to safely exceed the speed limit. Safety (and efficiency!) in numbers.
The waste of space and resources that was required to put those extra lanes in, and all of the traffic control measures could have EASILY doubled the number of lanes on the beltway - alleviating traffic for many many years to come.
Instead, they've just created a false economy around the pricing of convenience. It's essentially rent seeking by the government.
This never seems to happen in practice tho, from what I understand. Traffic always seems to 'magically' expand to match capacity.
Adding traffic lanes increases traffic. (Amusingly, I originally learned this reading about the research that went into SimCity, though I've done a lot more reading on urban and traffic planning since.)
A low speed limit typically is enforced with a traffic camera. Additionally we've go a lot of dynamic speed signs which show a speed limit which fits the current traffic conditions. (empty road at night - it's turned off. Rush hour - 80 km/h. Fog - 60 km/h And several steps in between)
Not having a "fixed" all the time limit makes drives accept the speed limit more easily.
Oh yes, and 85'th percentile. I frequently drive "+15km/h", so I go 95 when there's 80 allowed because the fine when I get caught that is not too expensive. (Fines for speeding are lower when you get caught outside city limits, speeding in a residential zone or in front of a school for example is one thing I have no tolerance for as well.)
The article talks about differential speed and lane discipline. In Germany, it's not rare to see people driving 250 km/h (155 mph), but some heavy trucks are restricted to 80 km/h (50 mph) regardless of the speed limit. Germans are very strict about lane discipline though. It's generally illegal to pass on the right or be in the left lane when not passing, and someone who puts their turn signal on to move left will usually respond to a flash of the headlights from an approaching car and wait for it to go by.
As an American who has spent a lot of time in Germany, and driven across Texas a few times, I sometimes wish for German style speed unlimited-speed highways in the US, but I think it would be hard to get American drivers to adopt German attentiveness and discipline.
When you accelerate from the 80kmph to the 140kmph you better have a good engine or you feel stressed like hell slowing everybody else down.
And keeping right all the times just creates a lot of unnecessary dynamics in traffic flow.
Don't even get me started on congestions when everybody slams their breaks and hit the warning blinkers.
German traffic is for macho wannabe race drivers.
I rather have US traffic or the traffic in the Netherlands where everybody just set their cruise control and drive casually.
In the Netherlands they also have trajectory speed checks, so you cannot speed anywhere from point A to B, since they clock your total time. Works wonders for getting a nice steady flow on the highway.
My 5 cents anyway.
The highways are also regularly torn up and rebuilt to maintain a glass-smooth surface on which one could safely drive 300 km/h, but it's only possible to maintain that for a minute because then you hit another construction zone or traffic jam caused by inadequate capacity. Despite all the construction, the highways rarely get widened, just resurfaced.
I don't think the main problem is that speed differentials are causing poor dynamics, but that the roads don't have enough lanes.
I don't know.
I drove throughout Germany a few times last year, and I didn't really understand why there were so many jams and general slowdowns. I usually drive in France where the highways are almost exactly the same as Germany (most often two lanes, frequently three, rarely more, usually in very good state) and traffic is rarely as bad. I got stranded a few times in completely still traffic, for tens of minutes, during a normal working day, while this only ever happens at the worst time of holiday traffic in France.
Maybe it's because French highways are paying which probably discourages some drivers, but I also noticed a lot of roadworks in Germany (almost as bad as Belgium during the height of roadworks there last year). Enough, as you said, to never be able to maintain a high speed for long, while you barely ever notice those in France. I don't know how French companies do it, but I'm pretty sure it helps with the traffic.
Other than the traffic though, driving in Germany was a pleasure. People are aware of their surroundings and don't drive like the road was theirs.
I'm pretty sure Germany is trying to use less road for a lot more cars and everything else is secondary with regard to traffic jams.
And the fact that the French highways require payment reduce trafic even more. But they are a joy to drive on. Set the CC and just go.
In Germany, the logistics clearly utilizes the autobahns a lot. You see constant lines of heavy vehicles on the rightmost lane, and sometimes your overtaking them is interrupted by one truck passing another one, very very slowly as they both have a speed limiter, just adjusted slightly differently.
Almost every freeway around major American cities is 4 lanes and yet traffic persists. Some freeways in LA are 6 lane parking lots.
Anecdote: recently went from Offenburg to Stuttgart and back and could drive a pretty much constant 190~240kph all the way (~1h30) except for a couple sections which were not unlimited. Having to slow down to 190kph isn't quite what I'd call a traffic jam. 300kph is just harder because there's not that many vehicles able to go that fast, so you end up catching up with the "slower" (so to speak) ones, and since vehicles are (supposed to) be electronically limited to 250kph, you're bound to meet some anyway.
It was my impression that vehicles aren't supposed to be able to go faster than the speed rating of their tires. Since 250 km/h is a common speed rating for tires, and higher ratings tend to get expensive fast, German cars are often limited to 250 km/h.
No current Porsches (real ones, not the SUVs) are that slow, and the Porsche tire recommendation guide calls for tires rated for 300 km/h, or "over 300 km/h" (the standardized ratings don't go higher) for all models except the Macan SUV with 18" wheels, for which it recommends 270 km/h.
http://files2.porsche.com/filestore/download/usa/none/porsch...
You can thus see why the index of stock tires always vastly overshoot the top speed of a car, e.g my car gets a Y tyre stock even though its top speed is 245kph, and my ex car has a W rating when the top speed is 210kph.
It's not a good idea to go anywhere near the limit of your tire speed index, nor to go cheap and skimp on the index when buying a replacement tire.
I bet the Macan that gets 18" and the W index is the one with low enough top speeds (below 230kph, that'd be 2.0L four-pot petrol and 3.0L V6 Diesel ones)
EDIT: found a reference again WRT index tests
> Speed ratings are based on laboratory tests where the tire is pressed against a large diameter metal drum to reflect its appropriate load, and run at ever increasing speeds (in 6.2 mph steps in 10 minute increments) until the tire's required speed has been met.
https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=...
Actually the limited number of lanes is what enables us to survive the speed differentials. Fast/[middle/]slow lanes can easily be enumerated without counting, which makes situational awareness so much easier. And you certainly do need a lot of situational awareness. It's a bit like CPU registers vs. an unconstrained stack.
I have only ever seen more than three regular lanes in large metropolitan areas where there is hardly any open road between interchanges and where speed limits are a certainty. I don't know if a single piece of four lane unrestricted driving exists in all of Germany, I would not even be entirely surprised if you could not legally build one.
I'm guessing you've never been to any developing country. India doesn't even respect traffic lights or the concept of "lanes." You have modern cars sharing the roads with literal ox-drawn carriages and they're all splitting lanes with hundreds of little scooters.
Hell, even Italy is a complete clusterfuck. If Germany is stressful to drive in for someone I would question if that person is comfortable behind the wheel of a car at all.
In fact, I'll say this is one of the big problems with how lax driving standards are in America. There are lots of people who drive everywhere here who do NOT have the skill, attention span, or reflexes to be behind the wheel of a car. It's too economically essential to be a functioning member of society to make the standards any stricter, but they're so lax that we have a glut of terrible drivers. Terrible drivers lead to overly permissive road design (that winds up being unsafe for anyone not in a car like bikers, cyclists or pedestrians) and that just leads to a bad quality of life overall for everyone.
Self driving cars don't need new infrastructure, its functionally an application that runs on existing infrastructure. If you have decent roads it'll work the same way whether you're in India or anywhere else.
Although I guess you could argue that Indians are less prissy about what they're willing to tolerate. A self-driving auto-rickshaw wouldn't fly in America, but it would be just fine for just about any Indian, and it's a much more useful application of self-driving tech than expecting everyone to have their own robo-chauffeured luxury cars.
So should we only allow some of the population to utilize cars? Considering how vital they are to the American lifestyle (the US covers so much land), that seems unreasonable.
How is the rest of the population supposed to get around?
However, despite the amazing hiking/backpacking places we can go here, we have only done that a few times (relying on other people driving).
Should we always rely on other people to go to non-public transportation routes (This has also hampered us from doing lots of other things hence why we got a zipcar membership recently)?
The assumption with this requirement is that the parents are good drivers. That may or may not be the case. It would be better to require that the 50 hours be completed with a certified driving instructor.
And it will cost you - over the whole course it will almost certainly be above € 1000 and generally depend on how well you do, how many sessions/tests you need. With these kind of costs people take this very serious and still fail all the time.
Naturally I'm not a fan of the costs, but I think thorough preparation and training is essential. Operating a car is a huge responsibility that affects not only your safety but that of other drivers, pedestrians, passengers, etc. Getting the license to do so should not be a cakewalk.
On a sidenote: Of course this approach requires valid alternatives to a car, like efficient public transport options, but that's another discussion.
I don't know how you just pulled "25%" out of the air. Most people could be trained to drive better, they just never bother learning because the standards for licensing are so lax that there is no downside to doing so. There are lots of areas where you can get a drivers' license without even knowing how to parallel park.
Yet people do manage to have some kind of order within chaos, that makes the whole traffic flow.
Yes, but only until you understand the trick: do NOT expect perfect adherence to driving code from others. That's it!
For example, when approaching an intersection where you have right of way, expect someone to try and pass anyway: it basically means slowing a bit down and paying attention on the incoming roads. Applying this grain of salt would prevent a good part of the car crashes I see on youtube (namely "driving in Russia", but not only).
And, by the way, expecting bad behaviour from others is not a justification for when I'll be the other.
Now, one has to compare similar situations, not a German Autobahn in a Metropolitan region with a empty desert highway... But comparing a busy Autobahn with a busy freeway (say the interstate into Chicago), I found the freeway to be much more stressful. People are passing on both sides! And there is not much speed differential. I can't just fall back to the right if I want to take it slow. There is often no emergency lane. I feel like I'm being pushed along, and if I can't keep up, I will be ran over.
In Germany, people can go faster, but it feels very predictable, clockwork-like. Yes, you have occasional idiots speeding with 250 km/h on the left lane that don't slow down and assume you will move out of the way out of self-preservation. But those are outliers, other than that I rarely have complaints. Maybe it is a cliche, but it seems the drivers' education, and the condition of cars and streets, is really good in Germany.
It is not a cliche. I have lived in the US for the past 5 years and lived for 20 years in Germany before that. Germans roads are like 5000x better than US roads (at least here in California).
Road paintings here are a joke, especially at night or when it is raining. The only exception is when a road gets painted freshly. Then it is good for like 2 months.
Where I live (Finland) we have lots of sand but much less salt. The salt use is diminished to protect the environment, but the sand eats the road, as well as the studs most people use in winter tires.
(Yes, we change to winter tires in the autumn and summer tires in the spring; this seems to be an unknown thing in Britain or France and even a bit of snow produces a mess there. Germans have non-studded winter tires which work fine with the amount of salt.)
I live in the US and switch to those tires in the winter and find that they have much better traction compared to the all season tires I have on my other car. Other than icy conditions, does having studs have much advantage over studless. I suspect that the damage to roadways caused by studs could be substantially reduced if more people used studless snow tires in the winter.
Studded tyres are more noisy, and they do eat the road more. They are more consistent - in snow, there's no difference; when the road is clean, studs do slightly worse; when the road is particularly slippery and icy, the studded tyres are much better. However, I can deal with that, so I prefer studless tyres. Last winter I had studded ones because they came with the used car I bought. I'm switching to studless for next winter.
It would be good to reduce the number of studded tyres, but people like them for the consistency. However, it wouldn't be good if all switched to studless tyres, because then the roads would sometimes become extremely slippery and polished. The studs remove the ice so that main roads become safer also for studless tyres. I think that a ratio of 30 % of studded tyres would be good for the whole.
If everyone had studless tyres, there would need to be substantially more salt and grit on the roads, and then there would again be more dust and damage to waterways.
(Currently we can see the polishing impact on bus stops: buses are heavy vehicles which do not have studs, and they sometimes get stuck on bus stops at a slight uphill, as the area is polished ice, while everyone else drives by normally.)
We do use a lot of salt. I don't think rock salt is much of an environmental concern. It can kill plants by the roadside until it's flushed out of the soil, but the roadside is already a degraded environment for flora. Normal rock salt is a natural material.
What's worse is that some towns will use raw "frack juice" as we call it for deicing roads. This is a mixture of water, salt, and chemicals that spits out of gas wells in the hydrofracking process. Often they'll just remove some of the water to concentrate a brine and apply it to roads as well. There is unbelievably little oversight, it's done on a local level, the chemicals are considered an industry trade secret and god knows what they're spreading around in those communities that allow this to happen.
Driving in Italy, Rome esp, is fine too. There is a reason the red light is so big and so much larger than the green light though :)
It might all be cultural differences though. I noticed drivers seemed more attentive and never used their phones (unless completely stopped in traffic jams), whereas here in the U.S. it is extremely common to have drivers piddling in the left lane and absolutely oblivious to the goings on around them.
The only stressor I could see from driving on the autobahn was easily overcome - before passing someone on the left, just be sure to check really, really far back towards the horizon to make sure one one is coming.
I can appreciate not wanting to go back and forth between say the middle lane and left lane all the time. I just wish people could figure out they are holding up traffic and get out of the way for a minute or two every now and then.
That is about as self centered one can be in trafic. In reality, they are endangering themself and everybody else near them.
If I do a steady 140 km/h in the middle lane, as mostly everybody else (here in germany), then why am I endangering anybody, if I just stay there? There is still the left lane for the faster ones and the right for the slower. (in the 3 lane scenario)
I base that on sideways skid marks and wall impact.
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIV/Ch...
I lived in Massachusetts for 3 years and routinely passed people on the right, sometimes even in the breakdown lane if it was open for traffic.
On a typical 3-lane highway, the right lane will have many big trucks, plus merging traffic entering and exiting constantly. The center lane puts them right in the middle of all the chaos, getting passed by other traffic regularly on both sides. In the left lane they can set their cruise control to 5mph below the limit and squat.
Even when there are lulls in the amount of traffic, many times I have approached this type of driver from behind in the left lane, paused to see if they would move over for me to pass, and they almost never do.
Disclaimer: I like to drive 5-10mph over the speed limit :)
Horrifying! :) But yes, the left lane is much nicer to camp out in on, say, a long commute - as long as you can handle maintaining the speed.
I live in the Dallas area and the lanes usually seem to be, from right to left: "the limit", "+5-10” and "+10-15". 15mph over is my cutoff, more or less, so I keep an eye on the mirror and try to shift over if someone is clearly coming up fast. Besides, don't want anyone tailgating me at those speeds tbh.
Does get a bit aggravating when what I consider "safe following distance at speed" is considered by the driver behind me as "this dumb econo-box being slow" and they whip around me. Doubly so when all it achieves is the two of us swapping places because there are no open avenues forward, lol. I'd have given it to him if there was one.
But "everyone else is a bad driver" will always be with us (myself no exception) so what can you do but grin and turn the music up.
Isn't that a thing in the U.S. as well? At least where I'm from (the northeast), passing someone on the right generally gets you a loud honk on the horn and occasionally a flip-off.
It refers to passing people while in an exit-only lane, turn-only lane, shoulder, etc.
Now, yes, you get situations where people veer from lane to lane because the overall flow of traffic isn't fast enough for their tastes. But, especially on three lane each direction roads, you get cars and trucks that don't want to deal with merging traffic at exits just sitting in the middle.
I disagree with strictfp that "staying to the right" creates unnecessary traffic dynamics. What happens in California is worse. Someone holds up the left lane, so all the faster cars will pile up on the right lane and try to sneak in front of the slow car, but inevitably they'll cut someone off and set off a chain reaction of braking for everyone that was patiently queued up in the left lane.
(Granted on two-lane I-5 there are some legitimate a reason for this: the right lane is used heavily by trucks, so the road wears down quicker and becomes rougher in the right lane than the left. Naturally people gravitate towards smoother asphalt. And if you just passed a truck a few minutes back and are gonna pass another one again, why not just stay in this lane?)
Since the US infrastructure system is a colossal piece of shit, highways built 40 years ago still stand exactly as they were then today having to accommodate multiple times more traffic than they were ever meant to. This breaks down the road rules when its bumper to bumper and every lane is backed up.
Meanwhile, the leftmost lane attracts people wanting to drive faster than traffic, the people who just want to get one car ahead, as well as the people who just want to drive without having to let cars in all the time.
If there's only two lanes -- like on most rural interstates -- and sufficient volume exists to prevent the left lane from actually clearing out cars, this creates a tragedy-of-commons situation in the left lane where there's more empty space in the right lane than in the left. A subset of people will then use the empty slots in the right lane to try to get ahead, making the situation even riskier.
But this poster's right; the root cause is not enough lanes to ensure a high level-of-service.
It would be much more informational to take into account things like average number of cars traveling between various locations, number of lanes between said locations, residential density...
By that logic, that would mean at 11pm at night on US-101 between SF and San Jose, I shouldn't need to pass anyone on the right, but I guarantee you there's always drivers lingering in the left-most lane.
Yes, but not normally observed in more densely populated areas. In Los Angeles, for example, it's use any lane you can to pass. I've personally witnessed people, who were driving slower than the flow of traffic, move all the way to the left to "get out of the way" of other drivers. It's well-intentioned, though poor understanding.
Licensing needs to be more rigorous, but many cities rely very heavily on commuting without a proper public transportation infrastructure in place.
That said, if you do have an accident at those speeds... The one wreck I saw looked like a tin can had met a hydraulic press.
Also, speed limits on the Autobahn are lower in construction zones, urban areas with more traffic, and anywhere the roads are not that great (still good by Jersey Turnpike standards).
The stretches with no speed limit are really well maintained.
Sure, as an Austrian I prefer driving on German autobahns as well (due to better perceived discipline), but the US trip was something else entirely - and I've come to think that it's maybe because almost every car has cruise control.
It's not even the speed differences between different lanes, but staying in lane, setting CC and not having to correct it for a really long time is not something I was used to, and going 600km or more a day left me far less tired than over here.
EDIT: Maybe there are intra-US differences as well? Since most here seem to talk about California...
Outside of the big cities, it can be much more relaxing. I drove across the mid-west and did the same as you. Drive at 70-80 mph and not take the cruise control off for hours.
Laws for passing on the left was intended for roads with one lane going in opposite directions.
Driving the speed limit is considered normal speed according to case law. Slow traffic is going 10 on a 25.
Also, I pass people on the right all the time, but I blame them for it. :-) If people don't want to be passed on the right, they shouldn't drive on the left. Simple enough.
On a highway with no speed limit and only 2 lanes, the difference between the right lane and the left lane is just so freaking huge, you are stressed out every time you need to pass a truck or slower car, and almost always see your random Ferrari / Maseratti / Porsche approaching at a fraction of second of the time you spend on the left lane.
I would advocate for no speed limit on highways with >= 3 lanes, but would put a limit of 140-150 on those with only 2.
I have noticed that a lot of people change into the middle lane for no reason at all. This results in you having to pass on the right, especially if there is a slow driver on the left lane. So now you have to change 2 lanes to pass 2 cars....
Fact is, if you learn how to drive well and everyone else does as well, then driving is not at all stressful. You can still use your cruise control in Germany, just not on the left lane (if you are going 80 or whatever).
In Germany it is in one direction only. Left to overtake, right to pull back over. In addition you do have to monitor your back mirror more carefully, which people in the US do not seem to do (though they should). In Germany, virtually no one plays with their phones on highways.
Also, traffic deaths are more than half in Germany than in the US, despite higher speeds [0].
I feel like traffic rage in the US is much more prevailent, particularly in the east coast. Having said that, Dutch or Danish traffic is far more relaxing. But also much much slower...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Because people know cars can fly past them with more than 200 kmh, they also actually stay to the right and use the left lane to pass and not to cruise. All in all it's a pleasant experience and all a driver really needs to wrap his head around is to keep as much track of the traffic behind and as in the front.
Germany is the best country in the world in which to drive.
Drivers are trained well. They look before they turn. THEY DON'T USE THE LEFT LANE AS A CRUISING LANE - they move over, pass, and return to the right lane. They use their turn signal.
You can go very, very fast in situations where it's warranted. In situations where it's not, people slow down. As someone who walks, rides a bike, and enjoys not being deafened by road noise in towns, this is good.
My experience driving has primarily been California, Ireland, and Germany, and Germany has been _far_ superior to the other two.
I've always wanted to take a dash cam and compare the driving styles when driving to the Eurotunnel in the UK and then driving across Belgium. The ring around Antwerp is an absolute mess of people driving in a dangerous manner.
Belgian drivers typically will leave no more than a 1 second gap. In the UK this is repeatedly drummed into you that it should be 3 seconds.
Also I find Belgian and Dutch drivers react erractically, they will switch lanes erratically and move very close to the car in front before switching lanes often without indicating. Germans and British seem to leave much more room and perform maneouvres in a much more deliberate manner.
Certainly with Belgian drivers, this is back up with statistics, their death rates per 100k population are 2x that in the UK and 1.5x Germany [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
> Rush hour - 80 km/h
Does "rush hour" mean something different in Germany? You couldn't go 80 km/h in rush hour if you tried.
Is it possible you live in NRW? It's a bit extreme there. Much fewer speed cameras in other parts of the country.
If you cannot check your speedometer, and safely navigate in the trafic at the same time, you should stop and look inwards. It is not hard.
1) The "priority road" system, indicated with diamond signs, for right of way on secondary roads. This isn't quite as weird for outsiders as the weird British Columbia flashing green lights thing (wtf), but still, almost caused an accident the first time I encountered it at night.
2) When traffic is stopped and you want to allow emergency vehicles, you make a gap between (California) lanes 1 and 2, i.e. where Californian motorcycles go; in the US (and everywhere else I've seen), emergency vehicle drive on the shoulder. Either makes sense, but knowing what's going to happen is good. I naturally pulled toward the right in the leftmost lane until I looked behind me and saw flashing lights coming up fast.
As far as I can see those limits exist to make the politicians responsible for them look concerned about safety.
I'd say in the UK it's pretty similar as well. The standard limit on single-carriageway roads, unless indicated, is 60mph/97kmh. This could be anything from a bypass around a town, to a small country road with tight bends and steep drops at the side.
The limit is usually only lowered if going through a town/village (typically 30mph or 40mph) or if there is a some sort of danger that you wouldn't expect, like a hidden junction on a bend.
Communities need to enforce zoning that makes certain areas (malls, downtown, etc.) pedestrian areas only. Additionally, separate bicycle traffic onto different paths.
That would probably increase safety quite a bit.
I refuse to speed; I think it is immoral. This is because I ride a bicycle everywhere, and the extent to which people speed on surface streets has an obvious and tangible effect on my safety. My town has a narrow bridge that used to be the only way for cyclists to get across the river, where drivers routinely exceed the 35 mph speed limit by 20 mph or more. It is terrifying, and people have gotten killed. I wish they would put a speed camera on that bridge.
The argument that "the speed limit doesn't matter because people will travel the same speed" only makes sense under the assumption that the only people who will use the public roads are drivers who feel like they can do whatever they want. Plenty of drivers feel entitled to run red lights, too, and that causes more collisions.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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/
In general, I think speed limits can be higher on highways, but should be much lower and actually enforced in town. Fast cars are absolutely terrible for the safety and comfort of walkers and bikers.
People seem have a bias towards thinking about speed limits in terms of interstate travel speeds, which frequently have been raised to 70–80 mph anyway.
Perhaps this is because most speeding enforcement is on interstates and there is relatively little enforcement of speed limits on surface streets unless they are very egregious.
In my area the state and/or county went to great lengths to create a bidirectional bicycle highway alongside (but physically separated from) some of the freeways, but the city can't be bothered to provide bicycle lanes and street lights along the full length of any of the major roads through town. During most of the year I prefer to stick to the major roads in the early morning hours because the vehicle traffic usually keeps the coyotes away. The only thing more likely to cause a driver to hit me than swerving to avoid an animal (assuming I'm complying with the laws while riding my bicycle in the street) would be if the driver is impaired or passes too close, either of which is a law I would be much happier to see an officer enforce than the speed limit.
Every time a car, train, boat, or plane crosses paths with one of the other modes of transportation on that list we make sure that someone has to have a lapse of attention, poor judgment, or some form of vehicular malfunction to violate the right of way. When it comes to a car, bicycle, or pedestrian, though, we tell them it's ok to share the same road and pretend that there's nothing wrong with that assumption, even when more people every year seem to be completely unaware that they're supposed to share the road with bicycles (and more cyclists seem to be unaware of which side of the road they're supposed to be on or that any laws regulate them).
Then they built a ped bridge, and threatened to kick off cyclists because cyclists are vehicles that travel 10-20 mph faster than pedestrians (and don't integrate well with pedestrian traffic generally).
Your situation sounds ripe for change. Look into street calming demonstrations, and seek neighborhood support to do one as well as possibly painting lines to narrow the lanes for drivers.
Just don't be surprised that drivers try to drive highways like highways, even when you try with signs to tell them that it's a low speed road.
But when driving on a limited access highway,I will speed most of the time because the speed limit is based on a now defunct national motor vehicle maximum speed law that was repealed over 20 years ago instead of an actual traffic and engineering study.
- make roads narrower (either by optical illusion with narrower painted lanes or physically)
- reduce stretches of straight road: traffic circles are great at breaking up a straight line
- remove all straight lines from highways, making them perpetually in a slight curve. This is something that has been done in many place in Europe for newer highways. This breaks up the monotony of being on a straight stretch of highway and therefore feeling the need to drive faster. As an example, notice the slight curves in the limited access highway (A5) and compare to the 2-lane road that runs parallel to it (D605) in segments of straight lines:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/A5,+France/@48.4802471,2.7...
The government recently increased the speed limit on a long highway I take a few times a year. Honestly a lot of people were driving at or below the limit and I felt no reason to speed. The highway also seemed to move better and felt a lot safer with fewer lane changes needed.
But it seems wrongheaded to focus on 85/15 out of safety, in areas where the safety concerns are for surrounding property, bikers, and pedestrians. I'd love to see more emphasis on designing roads for intended speed limits.
Instead, many people seem content to do a bad job modulating their speed with the pedal on hills, and average just under the speed limit instead; or swerve like a maniac across as many lanes as it takes to get ahead a few car lengths. It's really frustrating.
That's the behavior of my wife's cruise control on her truck; we have to set it to account for 8-10mph slop on either side of the set point, depending on the slope of the hill. It's not even an old truck...
That's why it's so bloody dangerous that clueless folks plod along in the left lane obstructing traffic. It's extremely common to see 1/4mi or more of open roadway ahead of knotted up traffic driving the same speed.
* speed limits are set at the 85th percentile of speeds to minimize speed variance, giving slow drivers a target speed and thereby making them go faster than they might otherwise go (but still at a safe speed).
* larger variances in speeds correlate with both greater traffic and frustration. if highway patrol could enforce just one law, it should be that drivers should move to the right if they are not passing cars on the right. this allows faster cars to clear out of congestion, increasing the overall average speed and throughput for a given section of road. it also reduces overall frustration.
* traffic enforcement as a revenue generator creates a perverse incentive and adversarial relationship largely exacerbated by artificially low speed limits. let's abolish those limits and bad incentives and give the police more time to develop relationships within their community.
* change the term "speed limit" to "safe speed" on signs (along with commensurate fines/laws), because that would have the same normalizing effect on speed variance, while also removing the revenue incentives for police.
* distracted driving is the real killer on the roads, not speed. changing roads to make them more hazardous (like narrower lanes, obstructing sightlines) probably reduces distracted driving more than it reduces speeding (just my conjecture), and thereby lowering accidents. i don't mind narrower lanes and such, but i'd advocate separating cars from bikes and pedestrians as much as possible so that cars can still move at a good clip while providing greater safety for pedestrian and bike traffic.
Well that will never happen..
At the other extreme, on neighborhood streets in residential areas, the rationale for the 85th percentile rule (reducing the speed differential between cars traveling in the same direction) is absurd: these speed differentials are much lower and much less important than other speed differentials. If a car driving down my street at 30mph has trouble dealing with a car going the same direction at 20mph, it will also have trouble with the kids playing basketball in the street, or the car headed the opposite direction without room to pass, or the car backing out of a driveway, or the bike going 15mph. Conflicts between drivers headed the same direction are a non-issue on these types of streets.
And there are streets in the middle. A major commercial street in my town is four very narrow lanes (the right lane is actually less wide than a city bus, so when a bus is traveling the same direction you must enter the oncoming lane if you try to pass), with very small blocks, crosswalks at every intersection, tons of pedestrians and cyclists, tons of cars turning left across traffic, etc. Should this be set at the 85th percentile speed? Although it's more debatable, again, I don't think that the speed differential between cars traveling the same direction is likely to be a major contributor to fatal accidents here--on a busy urban street like this the danger is much more likely to arise from the speed differential between pedestrians and cars, a car turning left and an oncoming car, cyclists and cars, etc.
Obviously this applies less to country roads where pedestrians are rarely encountered, speed limits are well over 40mph and drivers often should be paying more attention to the bends ahead of them than the notional speed limit when judging how fast to go anyway.
Accident rates are only a concern because of harms from accidents, including, most especially, fatalities.
I have never paid too little attention to the speed limit being 25mph. I have always been very well aware of being in such a residential zone.
It's a fun (and annoying) game to observe how people's speed varies compared to the limit. I almost always go at the limit plus 5MPH unless that would make me dangerously slow. Sometimes this makes me the fastest car on the road, and other times the slowest.
There's a road I drive about twice a day where the first half has a 25MPH limit and the second half is 35MPH. I'm usually a slowpoke on the first half, building up a queue of cars behind me, and then end up the fastest car around on the second half. (And to preempt any haters, the 25MPH segment is less than a mile long, so I'm not severely inconveniencing people.)
Rural interstates here have a 70MPH limit, so I go 75MPH. Most people go 65-70MPH. As you get into the city where I live, the limit drops progressively to 55MPH, and most people go... 65-70MPH.
The randomness of having a human officer grab me (not the other 1,000 people) off the road for going too fast feels unfair and ineffective.
There are stretches in DC with exactly that strategy. As a consequence, people speed and then hit the brakes right before the cameras.
I'd love to know the accident stats right around those stretches.
I don't think I've ever seen anywhere with them with less than, say, half a mile separation between junctions. At that point, you just get normal speed cameras.
[1] https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
You need to fix the core speed limit problem before fully enforcing the limits.
That wand exists - it's called "enforce the law". Increase penalties, or decrease them if you need a revenue-neutral plan, but enforce that 60MPH is a limit, not a suggestion.
This article parrots the same concept as most speeding solutions: speed doesn't kill, only variance in speed is dangerous. That makes perfect sense. So why increase the possible variance from zero, and why let people complain about driving at the limit being too slow? If you're above the limit, _you_ are increasing the variance, and _you_ need to slow down.
Enforcing the limits when they are artificially low helps no one except for the police.
Sufficient enforcement will, over time, reduce speed variance, which is the behavioral problem which leads to the conclusion that speed limits are "too low". So, no, increasing enforcement of limits that are "too low" based on the variance of speeds produced on those roads given present enforcement patterns helps safety in the same way as raising speed limits does, by reducing speed variance. And it does so without increasing the number of people who are driving faster than is safe for their own abilities because of traffic pressure.
Now, you might argue that the cost of enforcement or the travel time make it undesirable.
Forcing everyone to drive at a slower speed than what's safe by force does not actually make the road safer. 100% enforcement of current speed limits would not actually make things better.
Yes, and I directly addressed it's points. Did you read my post? Because you don't seem to address what I've said, and you ignore that I've more directly dealt with the points made in the article than you do in yours.
> 85% of people drive at a safe speed regardless of what the speed limit is.
No, traffic engineers have come to the conclusion that, because speed variance is a significant source of risk, the safest speed limit (considering auto vs. auto issues only) is the 85th percentile speed of traffic on the road, which (at least with patterns of enforcement over the time the rule was found and since) seems not to vary much based on posted limits, in any case.
That's the 85th percentile rule, and it's the single most common rule for setting speed limits in the US. Its incorporated in federal guidance, its incorporated in most state laws (though with some exceptions—e.g., school zones, upper highway speed limits—in virtually all of them).
Given that the 85th percentile speed will rarely fall on exactly a convenient numbee, you'd expect nearly half of limits to be below that because of rounding, and add in some conditions which create downward departures in limited cases, and, sure, as the article body says, most (>50%) are below. But that's not the headline's "every speed limit".
Not is it clear, as I stated previously, that the 85th percentile rule is ideal for safety for mixed use. There's considerable global evidence that lower speed limits are better for that.
Enforce limit, speed is now 45 to 55 = 10MPH max variance, a 60% reduction.
Enforcing limits will reduce variance. Please explain how this is flawed?
But the sign clearly said 60. Further more, you know you can get ticketed. Even if the limit is artificially low and the police are doing it for revenue raising reasons, why not just slow down regardless of the conditions?
It seems irrational to me that you would go faster on a street where they enforce the limit just because the conditions are good. Why even bother risking the ticket and losing points on your license.
I drive in Sydney. There are signs well in advance of red light cameras and speed cameras. And people still speed through them. There are certain roads where I see the camera go off quite regularly. Hell, a couple of times I've seen signs, slowed to match the limit and people behind me will change lanes and speed to over take me, triggering the cameras. Sometimes I am already over the limit, and the person behind me will decide I am not over enough, change lanes and speed to overtake.
Fortunately the cops in CA don't share your opinion.