The engineers only make the designed safe speed. Government officials make the listed limit. It used to be EXTREMELY popular for government official to knock 20-25% off the design limit of the road, ironically so they can tell everyone how safe they were.
Traffic engineers in the US make too wide roads that psychologically encourages speeding, the posted speed limit doesn’t matter unless police dedicates significant resources to enforcing it
Everywhere in my town was 25mph until about 10 years ago.
A local politician got a few speeding tickets and went nuts over it, now it varies from 25-60mph. Engineers were brought in to advise on safe limits.
Him getting those tickets was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was so miserable driving so slow on big open roads. I could probably sit down and figure up an insane amount of time I’ve saved over the last decade (if I weren’t an idiot).
Not so great for people walking or cycling though. Higher speeds mean more serious and fatal collisions.
Where these modes of transport mix, 20mph is becoming the default choice in western European countries, there is a global declaration on this. If roads feel like they’re made for higher streets: that’s bad infrastructure design.
No one is traveling on a bicycle or walking here. These roads are empty, there’s nothing there. I live in one of the most rural places in the country (United States).
It was seriously 20 miles straight with no houses, wide road, 25 mph. In residential areas there are still 25 mph speed limits.
On our 4 lane road, bicycles are not allowed, yet the speed limit was only 35-40.
Where there are sidewalks, the speed limit is 25 mph. If there are buildings, 25 mph.
Empty roads with nothing but fucking trees should not be 25 mph.
In all of my years driving on those roads, I don’t even think I’ve ever seen a bicycle. A couple of those tiny, slow motorcycles, maybe. I guess they call them scooters
And why do you think this is the case? Could it possibly be because the infrastructure is completely designed for cars, and using anything else is just not safe so you’d have to be a madman to go with these options?
Imran sure, I get rural, cars are good for rural areas, but not for towns etc.
Well, I mean, if a person wants to ride a bike 40 miles for 4 1/2 hours to the nearest Walmart I’m sure they could.
About 4,500 people live here and most of them have cars or they’re stuck.
We have public transit but about 30 people use it. My neighbor said it’s a 2.5 hour ordeal to go to the post office when he could be there and back in 20 minutes in a car. He got old and lost his license.
Engineers should absolutely include traffic calming features to get people to naturally slow down, but everyone should drive the limit.
Speed kills, kinetic energy is not linear.
Cars are tonnes of metal hurtling down the road. Thousands upon thousands die every year, and since the increased prevalence of massive US style trucks fatalities have RISEN, undoing decades of progress. (Both in the US, and elsewhere)
People driving 20 over the limit are arseholes (or have been influenced by car centric infrastructure and culture). Change my mind.
Speeding is never okay. Just that lots of people have convinced themselves it’s no big deal.
Y’all are really justifying some shitty behaviour. Yeah, I get it, streets are designed shittily, and feels like it’s fine to speed (especially, from what I can see, in the US), but this doesn’t absolve you from doing the right thing.
Like, if it were 5 (km/h) over, I could perhaps forgive you. But downvoting me for suggesting 20 mph over is arsehole behaviour? You don’t deserve a licence.
Fuck these carbrains putting their feelings over completely savable lives.
USA is cooked (and Australia, somewhat cooked, since people are buying ridiculously sized cars here too).
Don’t speed, you fuckwits. Better yet, take public transport if you live in a city with cilivised transportation (obviously, not your fault if it doesn’t exist).
I get this is a joke, but speed limits shouldn’t be set by politicians (which I’m hearing apparently is/was a thing?). Politicians have a role to play in getting regulations standards re-written by people who understand the decades of research on this.
Speeding is mostly a design issue, but I still expect people actually follow the rules.
Strong Towns, NotJustBikes, City Beautiful, Practical Engineering, among others have made great videos on this topic.
A lot of people justify speeding, and it’s kinda dumb, if you ask me.
Just because you “feel” it’s safe, doesn’t mean it actually is.
Plus, there’s a fantastic way to reduce road deaths, just have fewer cars, switch to public transport, but that takes a long time to implement if the political will doesn’t exist.
I disagree. There are two roads near me with a limit of 55 mph, and traffic on those roads regularly moves at 75-80. Driving 55 becomes dangerous when all of the other traffic is going so much faster, because nobody expects you to be that slow. You risk getting rear-ended, and if traffic is heavy, people who end up behind you now have to merge into a much faster lane of traffic to get around you.
That’s really dependant on location. I have had plenty of road trips up and down the I5 where groups of cars pass cops on the side of the road going 80, and no one slows down and the cops do nothing.
Source: I’m one of those drivers.
Throw people in jail for driving too fast? That seems pretty extreme.
It’s hard to police speeding on a highway. Typically if you do get pulled over for speeding, it’s because you’re going way faster than those around you. So even in a 55, if everyone’s doing 80, you’ve gotta be doing 95 or more for a cop to single you out and arrest you. (Or maybe the cop has a quota to meet.) And where I live, local cops can’t use radar, so it’s hard to prove how fast you were going.
And then if you do get arrested, you’re most likely to get a ticket and points on your license. Get enough points and they’ll take away your license, but that means you’ve been caught repeatedly. And points expire eventually, plus if you go to your court date and plead not guilty, a lot of the time the judge will just remove the points. So a speeding ticket from years ago generally won’t have any bearing on your life except for the cost of the ticket.
So within reason, you can pretty much speed all the time consequence-free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All fair points for a motorway/highway/freeway/whatever. I’d mistakenly thought the previous post was referring to a smaller local road with a 55mph limit.
I don’t really care so much about what speed people do on motorways, but I have a massive problem with people doing 40-60mph in a 20-30mph limit residential area. Bear in mind where I live in the UK, the cars are driving 2 metres from the front door of everyone’s houses.
Or the road design doesn’t facilitate compliance with the speed limit. This is how policy and guidance on road infrastructure talks about these issues.
I live out in the sticks, and if I don’t go 70, it will take me forever to get where I need to go. Also everyone else is going 70, so the people doing 50 are creating an unsafe situation. It’s the wild west out here.
70 in a 50 zone. Doesn’t matter if its km/h or mph, that’s just idiotic.
exactly, the engineers should never have made a road with that big of a discrepancy between safe speed and listed speed limit
The engineers only make the designed safe speed. Government officials make the listed limit. It used to be EXTREMELY popular for government official to knock 20-25% off the design limit of the road, ironically so they can tell everyone how safe they were.
Traffic engineers in the US make too wide roads that psychologically encourages speeding, the posted speed limit doesn’t matter unless police dedicates significant resources to enforcing it
Everywhere in my town was 25mph until about 10 years ago.
A local politician got a few speeding tickets and went nuts over it, now it varies from 25-60mph. Engineers were brought in to advise on safe limits.
Him getting those tickets was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was so miserable driving so slow on big open roads. I could probably sit down and figure up an insane amount of time I’ve saved over the last decade (if I weren’t an idiot).
Not so great for people walking or cycling though. Higher speeds mean more serious and fatal collisions.
Where these modes of transport mix, 20mph is becoming the default choice in western European countries, there is a global declaration on this. If roads feel like they’re made for higher streets: that’s bad infrastructure design.
https://www.fiafoundation.org/news/stockholm-declaration-focuses-on-reducing-urban-speed
No one is traveling on a bicycle or walking here. These roads are empty, there’s nothing there. I live in one of the most rural places in the country (United States).
It was seriously 20 miles straight with no houses, wide road, 25 mph. In residential areas there are still 25 mph speed limits.
On our 4 lane road, bicycles are not allowed, yet the speed limit was only 35-40.
Where there are sidewalks, the speed limit is 25 mph. If there are buildings, 25 mph.
Empty roads with nothing but fucking trees should not be 25 mph.
In all of my years driving on those roads, I don’t even think I’ve ever seen a bicycle. A couple of those tiny, slow motorcycles, maybe. I guess they call them scooters
And why do you think this is the case? Could it possibly be because the infrastructure is completely designed for cars, and using anything else is just not safe so you’d have to be a madman to go with these options?
Imran sure, I get rural, cars are good for rural areas, but not for towns etc.
Well, I mean, if a person wants to ride a bike 40 miles for 4 1/2 hours to the nearest Walmart I’m sure they could.
About 4,500 people live here and most of them have cars or they’re stuck.
We have public transit but about 30 people use it. My neighbor said it’s a 2.5 hour ordeal to go to the post office when he could be there and back in 20 minutes in a car. He got old and lost his license.
I’m seeing more cities in the US jump onto “20 is Plenty” too!
Was gonna cite 85th percentile speed but TIL on drawbacks
Engineers should absolutely include traffic calming features to get people to naturally slow down, but everyone should drive the limit.
Speed kills, kinetic energy is not linear.
Cars are tonnes of metal hurtling down the road. Thousands upon thousands die every year, and since the increased prevalence of massive US style trucks fatalities have RISEN, undoing decades of progress. (Both in the US, and elsewhere)
People driving 20 over the limit are arseholes (or have been influenced by car centric infrastructure and culture). Change my mind.
Speeding is never okay. Just that lots of people have convinced themselves it’s no big deal.
Edit because of downvotes: https://www.bts.gov/content/motor-vehicle-safety-data
Y’all are really justifying some shitty behaviour. Yeah, I get it, streets are designed shittily, and feels like it’s fine to speed (especially, from what I can see, in the US), but this doesn’t absolve you from doing the right thing.
Like, if it were 5 (km/h) over, I could perhaps forgive you. But downvoting me for suggesting 20 mph over is arsehole behaviour? You don’t deserve a licence.
Fuck these carbrains putting their feelings over completely savable lives.
USA is cooked (and Australia, somewhat cooked, since people are buying ridiculously sized cars here too).
Don’t speed, you fuckwits. Better yet, take public transport if you live in a city with cilivised transportation (obviously, not your fault if it doesn’t exist).
20 over the speed limit? that’s ridiculous no one should be driving over 25
I get this is a joke, but speed limits shouldn’t be set by politicians (which I’m hearing apparently is/was a thing?). Politicians have a role to play in getting regulations standards re-written by people who understand the decades of research on this.
Speeding is mostly a design issue, but I still expect people actually follow the rules.
Strong Towns, NotJustBikes, City Beautiful, Practical Engineering, among others have made great videos on this topic.
A lot of people justify speeding, and it’s kinda dumb, if you ask me.
Just because you “feel” it’s safe, doesn’t mean it actually is.
Plus, there’s a fantastic way to reduce road deaths, just have fewer cars, switch to public transport, but that takes a long time to implement if the political will doesn’t exist.
I disagree. There are two roads near me with a limit of 55 mph, and traffic on those roads regularly moves at 75-80. Driving 55 becomes dangerous when all of the other traffic is going so much faster, because nobody expects you to be that slow. You risk getting rear-ended, and if traffic is heavy, people who end up behind you now have to merge into a much faster lane of traffic to get around you.
Why don’t they confiscate driving licences and imprison all the criminals who are driving 20-25mph dangerously over the limit?
You ever tried to pull over an entire freeway full of cars at once?
A single cop car on the side of the road can get everybody to magically follow the speed limit.
That’s really dependant on location. I have had plenty of road trips up and down the I5 where groups of cars pass cops on the side of the road going 80, and no one slows down and the cops do nothing. Source: I’m one of those drivers.
same on I10. that bit in texas where the limit goes up to 80 is nice tho
For a minute, maybe. Foot goes back down when the cop’s out of view in the mirrors.
nah, it just gets them to slow to 20 over the limit here
Not personally, no - but the police would only need to catch a handful each day to get things moving a little more safely in the area.
Throw people in jail for driving too fast? That seems pretty extreme.
It’s hard to police speeding on a highway. Typically if you do get pulled over for speeding, it’s because you’re going way faster than those around you. So even in a 55, if everyone’s doing 80, you’ve gotta be doing 95 or more for a cop to single you out and arrest you. (Or maybe the cop has a quota to meet.) And where I live, local cops can’t use radar, so it’s hard to prove how fast you were going.
And then if you do get arrested, you’re most likely to get a ticket and points on your license. Get enough points and they’ll take away your license, but that means you’ve been caught repeatedly. And points expire eventually, plus if you go to your court date and plead not guilty, a lot of the time the judge will just remove the points. So a speeding ticket from years ago generally won’t have any bearing on your life except for the cost of the ticket.
So within reason, you can pretty much speed all the time consequence-free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All fair points for a motorway/highway/freeway/whatever. I’d mistakenly thought the previous post was referring to a smaller local road with a 55mph limit.
I don’t really care so much about what speed people do on motorways, but I have a massive problem with people doing 40-60mph in a 20-30mph limit residential area. Bear in mind where I live in the UK, the cars are driving 2 metres from the front door of everyone’s houses.
Because the road design at fault, not people.
Make roads narrower, and people will drive slower
If everyone is driving that fast and there aren’t accidents happening consistently then the posted limit does not reflect the reality of the road.
Or the road design doesn’t facilitate compliance with the speed limit. This is how policy and guidance on road infrastructure talks about these issues.
I live out in the sticks, and if I don’t go 70, it will take me forever to get where I need to go. Also everyone else is going 70, so the people doing 50 are creating an unsafe situation. It’s the wild west out here.