Because a wide swath of speed limits are not credible, and are deliberately set unrealistically low in contravention of traffic studies, civil engineers’ best practices and experience, and common sense simply as a revenue grab via fines and to have a convenient legal justification to pull over and harass undesirable people, i.e. minorities.
You ever drive through an all-white beach down in Nowhere, Florida or someplace and wonder why all of the sudden the speed limit on their major six lane thoroughfare is suddenly 20 MPH? You’d better believe the people who live there aren’t the targets of getting pulled over constantly.
Edit to add: This is before getting into the possibility of emergencies, fleeing disasters, getting someone to the hospital, etc.
Yeah, America would rather enforce with tickets than with good engineering and reasonable rules.
My city, medium-sized and in the US, used to post 85th percentile speeds and quartiles whenever they did speed studies. Sometimes they overrode it, rarely did they explain why, but at least they showed that they had gone out and observed that actual section of road. We have a different mayor and probably a different council at this point and I haven’t seen a speed study on the city website in some time, though they seem to be paving and doing a better job of making car friendly and bike friendly routes interact better. I am a firm believer that road design is 2/3 of how people drive and only the tiniest portion is fear of enforcement. We should keep in mind though that speed doesn’t have to be the enemy. Germany has speed too, but their 30kph neighborhood roads don’t look like wide open airport runways. That’s why I’m baffled by the freeway speed cams some states are doing. The freeway is statistically the safest place for an American to drive (except maybe on their gaming console). Suburbia and rural roads are much less safe because of higher speeds, intersections, 2 way traffic, and unprotected turns across oncoming lanes.
To your point about little towns, I’m still irritated with Wyoming State Patrol in Rawlins, WY for giving my a ticket for passing a Semi at 79 in a 70 on a clear and sunny day, safely, and carefully. It’s just the ticket lottery. Set a low enough limit and you can pull over Mother-fucking-Theresa for breaking the law.
Because a wide swath of speed limits are not credible, and are deliberately set unrealistically low in contravention of traffic studies, civil engineers’ best practices and experience, and common sense simply as a revenue grab via fines and to have a convenient legal justification to pull over and harass undesirable people, i.e. minorities.
You ever drive through an all-white beach down in Nowhere, Florida or someplace and wonder why all of the sudden the speed limit on their major six lane thoroughfare is suddenly 20 MPH? You’d better believe the people who live there aren’t the targets of getting pulled over constantly.
Edit to add: This is before getting into the possibility of emergencies, fleeing disasters, getting someone to the hospital, etc.
Yeah, America would rather enforce with tickets than with good engineering and reasonable rules.
My city, medium-sized and in the US, used to post 85th percentile speeds and quartiles whenever they did speed studies. Sometimes they overrode it, rarely did they explain why, but at least they showed that they had gone out and observed that actual section of road. We have a different mayor and probably a different council at this point and I haven’t seen a speed study on the city website in some time, though they seem to be paving and doing a better job of making car friendly and bike friendly routes interact better. I am a firm believer that road design is 2/3 of how people drive and only the tiniest portion is fear of enforcement. We should keep in mind though that speed doesn’t have to be the enemy. Germany has speed too, but their 30kph neighborhood roads don’t look like wide open airport runways. That’s why I’m baffled by the freeway speed cams some states are doing. The freeway is statistically the safest place for an American to drive (except maybe on their gaming console). Suburbia and rural roads are much less safe because of higher speeds, intersections, 2 way traffic, and unprotected turns across oncoming lanes.
To your point about little towns, I’m still irritated with Wyoming State Patrol in Rawlins, WY for giving my a ticket for passing a Semi at 79 in a 70 on a clear and sunny day, safely, and carefully. It’s just the ticket lottery. Set a low enough limit and you can pull over Mother-fucking-Theresa for breaking the law.