Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Aug 06, 2014, 1:13 AM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #190

Spooky23 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of truth to that. Many places use 7-10 mph over as a threshold. Smaller tickets always get plead down, and cops get measured by collars or tickets. I don't think skirting the limits has much impact on behavior as the limits go up. In my personal observation, I've observed little if any difference between highway driving on the Deegan Expressway in NYC (50 mph), i95 in South Carolina (70/75) or the mass…

Is the statistic NYC posts a lie? For a few years they've had signs up claiming that 80% of pedestrians hit at 30 mph survive, while 75% of pedestrians hit at 40 mph were killed. That seemed like a pretty good reason to have lower speed limits in pedestrian areas to me.

Post by easytiger » Wed, Aug 06, 2014, 1:13 PM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #147

mrgriscom wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm annoyed that the taboo thing to say in this discussion is whether increased traffic fatalities is always an inherently bad thing. When you're talking about societal-scale policy, it's impossible to make anything 100% safe; rather, it's about acceptable trade-off in risk. We could make a universal speed limit of 10mph and traffic deaths would probably vanish, but we don't because the impact on transport is too gre…

The tradeoff for speeding is stupidly small. Average US worker spends 25 minutes on a one-way trip to work. Lets assume an average speed of 60mph (hint: it's slower). If you went at 70 instead of 60, then you'll save a whole 3.5 minutes. Here( http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jWbI1mK... ) is a link to a NHTSA presentation on speed limit changes and its effects on crashes. Notably, when states were…