Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?

[frigidmagi]

huh

When Lieutenant Gary Megge of the Michigan State Police attends a meeting, he sometimes asks, “How many of you broke the speed limit on your way here?”

Hearing his question, you might assume that Lt. Megge is a particularly zealous police officer. The type of person who walks half a city block to avoid jaywalking on an empty street. The model citizen who defers almost obnoxiously to the letter of the law. But that is not the point of Lt. Megge’s question at all.

“We all speed, yet months and months usually pass between us seeing a crash,” Lt. Megge tells us when we call to discuss speed limits. “That tells me that most of us are adequate, safe, reasonable drivers. Speeding and traffic safety have a small correlation.”

Over the past 12 years, Lt. Megge has increased the speed limit on nearly 400 of Michigan’s roadways. Each time, he or one of his officers hears from community groups who complain that people already drive too fast. But as Megge and his colleagues explain, their intent is not to reduce congestion, bow to the reality that everyone drives too fast, or even strike a balance between safety concerns and drivers’ desire to arrive at their destinations faster. Quite the opposite, Lt. Megge advocates for raising speed limits because he believes it makes roads safer.

Traffic Engineering 101

Every year, traffic engineers review the speed limit on thousands of stretches of road and highway. Most are reviewed by a member of the state’s Department of Transportation, often along with a member of the state police, as is the case in Michigan. In each case, the “survey team” has a clear approach: they want to set the speed limit so that 15% of drivers exceed it and 85% of drivers drive at or below the speed limit.

This “nationally recognized method” of setting the speed limit as the 85th percentile speed is essentially traffic engineering 101. It’s also a bit perplexing to those unfamiliar with the concept. Shouldn’t everyone drive at or below the speed limit? And if a driver’s speed is dictated by the speed limit, how can you decide whether or not to change that limit based on the speed of traffic?

The answer lies in realizing that the speed limit really is just a number on a sign, and it has very little influence on how fast people drive. “Over the years, I’ve done many follow up studies after we raise or lower a speed limit,” Megge tells us. “Almost every time, the 85th percentile speed doesn’t change, or if it does, it’s by about 2 or 3 mph.”

As most honest drivers would probably concede, this means that if the speed limit on a highway decreases from 65 mph to 55 mph, most drivers will not drive 10 mph slower. But for the majority of drivers, the opposite is also true. If a survey team increases the speed limit by 10 mph, the speed of traffic will not shoot up 10 mph. It will stay around the same. Years of observing traffic has shown engineers that as long as a cop car is not in sight, most people simply drive at whatever speed they like.

Luckily, there is some logic to the speed people choose other than the need for speed. The speed drivers choose is not based on laws or street signs, but the weather, number of intersections, presence of pedestrians and curves, and all the other information that factors into the principle, as Lt. Megge puts it, that “no one I know who gets into their car wants to crash.”

So if drivers disregard speed limits, why bother trying to set the “right” speed limit at all?

One reason is that a minority of drivers do follow the speed limit. “I’ve found that about 10% of drivers truly identify the speed limit sign and drive at or near that limit,” says Megge. Since these are the slowest share of drivers, they don’t affect the 85th percentile speed. But they do impact the average speed -- by about 2 or 3 mph when a speed limit is changed, in Lt. Megge’s experience -- and, more importantly, the variance in driving speeds.

This is important because, as noted in a U.S. Department of Transportation report, “the potential for being involved in an accident is highest when traveling at speed much lower or much higher than the majority of motorists.” If every car sets its cruise control at the same speed, the odds of a fender bender happening is low. But when some cars drive 55 mph and others drive 85 mph, the odds of cars colliding increases dramatically. This is why getting slow drivers to stick to the right lane is so important to roadway safety; we generally focus on joyriders’ ability to cause accidents -- and rightly so -- but a car driving under the speed limit in the left (passing) lane of a highway is almost as dangerous.

Traffic engineers believe that the 85th percentile speed is the ideal speed limit because it leads to the least variability between driving speeds and therefore safer roads. When the speed limit is correctly set at the 85th percentile speed, the minority of drivers that do conscientiously follow speed limits are no longer driving much slower than the speed of traffic. The choice of the 85th percentile speed is a data-driven conclusion -- as noted Lt. Megge and speed limit resources like the Michigan State Police’s guide -- that has been established by the consistent findings of years of traffic studies.

Yet most speed limits are set below the 85th percentile speed. We first investigated this topic at the urging of the National Motorists Association, a “member-supported driver advocacy organization” that has made raising speed limits to the 85th percentile one focus of its efforts.

One member pointed us to a 1992 report by the U.S. Department of Transportation on the “Effects of Raising and Lowering Speed Limits,” which, beside making the same arguments described above, noted that the majority of highway agencies set speed limits below the 85th percentile, leading over 50% of motorists to drive “in technical violation of the speed limit laws.” Lt. Megge believes the compliance rate in Michigan to be well under 50%.

It seems absurd that over half of drivers technically break the law at all times. It’s also perplexing that speed limit policy so consistently ignore traffic engineering 101. So why do people like Lt. Megge need to spend their time trying to raise speed limits?

How Saudi Arabia Got Us All Driving 55 MPH

"When I drive that slow, you know it's hard to steer. And I can't get my car out of second gear. What used to take two hours now takes all day. Huh, it took me 16 hours to get to L.A."

~ Sammy Hagar’s hit song “I Can’t Drive 55”

In 1973, the Egyptian military crossed the Suez Canal in a surprise attack on Israel. It was the start of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and also low speed limits in the United States.

When the United States began resupplying Israel with arms, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries announced an embargo against the United States and several other countries. Combined with other supply constraints, it led to a quadrupling of gas prices, shortages of gasoline, and long lines at the pump.

In an effort to reduce America’s need for gas, President Nixon issued an executive order mandating a 55 miles per hour speed limit on American highways, which Congress made law the following year. States are officially in charge of setting their own speed limits, but national leaders (semi) successfully cajoled states by tying compliance to federal highway funds. Since driving at high speeds is less efficient, the policy is estimated to have saved 167,000 barrels of oil per day, or around 1% of American motor oil consumption.

Even as the effects of the energy crisis drew down in the 1970s, the new federal speed limit remained. But rather than insist on the limit in order to reduce gasoline consumption, members of Congress maintained the policy because they believed it led to safer highways. This is shown by a debate over a measure passed in 1987, which allowed select states to raise the limit on certain roads to 65 mph. The New York Times reported that “Critics immediately warned that there would be a surge in highway fatalities.” The dissenting chairman of the Public Works and Transportation Committee called it “irresponsible, life-threatening legislation.''

Congress abolished the national federal speed limit in 1995. Many states increased their speed limits before they could even post new signs, but many speed limits remained low. Twenty years of a 55 miles per hour speed limit created a low baseline that drags down speed limits today.

Why Speed Limits Are Low

If you peruse the websites of state’s departments of transportation, you’ll often find a very technocratic explanation of the 85th percentile principle. Speed limits are consistently lower than the 85th percentile speed across the country, however, because there are many limitations on following the principle. Florida’s Department of Transportation, for example, extolls the 85th percentile principle, yet the state legislature sets maximum limits for each type of roadway. Locally, officials can come under pressure from parents and other safety-conscious groups to lower speed limits.

Consistently, the 85th percentile loses out to the perception that faster roads are less safe, so speed limits should be low. It’s a misconception, Lt. Megge says, that he faces often in his work. When he proposes raising a speed limit, the initial reaction is always “Oh my god! You can’t do that. People are already going too fast.” People think raising the limit 10 mph will lead people to drive 10 mph faster, when really changing the limit has almost no impact on the speed of traffic.

The same lack of understanding motivates public health pushes for lower speed limits that influence legislation. The World Health Organization, for example, advocates low speed limits to prevent road fatalities, and cites studies showing that accidents and fatalities increase with traffic speed. “When you look at it from a pure physics standpoint,” Megge says, “and ask would you rather hit a bridge abutment at 10 mph or 40 mph, you can’t argue with that. But when I look at correcting a speed limit, I am not advocating driving faster, and that’s the hard part to get over.”

If someone could wave a wand and get every American to drive below 60 mph, roads would be safer. But since law enforcement can’t keep over 50% of Americans from speeding, putting a low number on a sign can’t make roads safer. 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.

Plenty of public safety advocates of lower speed limits, however, would disagree with the actions of individuals like Lt. Megge. Just as Megge can point to the results on hundreds or thousands of roads which have become more safe or equally safe when the speed limit increased, other researchers looking at data sets of speed limit changes have come to the opposite conclusion and advise that raising speed limits comes with the price of thousands of roadway fatalities.

None of these studies mention the 85th percentile principle -- at least in our review of them -- and Lt. Megge expressed surprise at researchers coming to this conclusion. Given that debates over speed limit laws often enlist experts who make clashing predictions about the effect of raising speed limits, we got the feeling that speed limit policy would be a lot more consistent if the public health community and traffic engineers collaborated more often.

The other reason speed limits may remain low, which John Bowman, Communications Director of the National Motorists Association strongly insists on, is that cities and police departments use traffic citations as a revenue generating tool. As Bowman says, when speed limits are artificially low, it’s easier to give out citations and pull in fine revenue.

Due to concern about such “speed traps,” Missouri passed a law in the 1990s that capped the amount of a town’s revenue that could come from traffic tickets. In 2010, auditors discovered that Randolph, Missouri, generated 75% to 83% of its budget from traffic tickets. The tiny town of around 50 residents, which is located near several casinos, employed two full-time and eight part-time police officers, turning it into a speed trap poster child.

Figuring out how common the tactics used by Randolph’s police department are around the country is difficult, as is tying it to a conscious decision to keep speed limits low. Each town or city makes its own decisions, which makes it difficult to know how comprehensively speeding tickets are used as a revenue generator. Further, it is very easy for police departments to defend pushing officers to issue more tickets as a goal intended to further roadway safety -- as the LAPD did when found in violation of a state law banning traffic ticket quotas last year.

In our conversation, Lt. Megge stated that he believes speed traps to be a “big problem” and counter to police officers real role of altering dangerous behavior. In a Detroit Newsarticle about a number of towns ignoring state law by not reviewing the speed limits on stretches of their roads, Megge said that he believes the communities did so in order to avoid revising speed limits upwards. This allows them to keep collecting ticket revenue on “artificially low” speed limits.

Slowing Down

Given the inevitability with which most drivers speed, it’s heartening that roadways can be made safer through the very achievable means of traffic engineers setting more realistic speed limits -- rather than the nearly impossible goal of getting everyone to drive ten to twenty miles per hour slower. But it also seems counter to other goals. Most people may drive at a reasonable rate, but is that speed low enough to accommodate bikers, protect children at play, and make our cities more walkable?

“I don’t want to lie to people,” Lt. Megge tells us. It may make parents feel better if the speed limit on their street is 25 mph instead of 35 mph, but that sign won’t make people drive any slower. Megge prefers speed limits that both allow people to drive at a safe speed legally, and that realistically reflect traffic speeds. People shouldn’t have a false sense of safety around roads, he says.

If people and politicians do want to reduce road speeds to improve safety, or make cities more pedestrian friendly, Megge says “there are a lot of other things you can do from an engineering standpoint.” Cities can reduce the number of lanes, change the parking situation, create wider bike paths, and so on. It’s more expensive, but unlike changing the number on a sign, it’s effective.

Raising speed limits up to the speed of traffic can seem like surrendering to fast, unsafe driving. But it would actually accomplish the opposite. If advocates like Megge are right, following the 85th percentile rule would make roads safer, and it would also mean taking speed limits seriously.

In its 1992 report, the U.S. Department of Transportation cautioned, “Arbitrary, unrealistic and nonuniform speed limits have created a socially acceptable disregard for speed limits.” Lt. Megge has worked on roads with a compliance rate of nearly zero percent, and a common complaint among those given traffic citations is that they were speeding no more than anyone else. With higher speed limits, Megge says, police officers could focus their resources on what really matters: drunk drivers, people who don’t wear seat belts, drivers who run red lights, and, most importantly, the smaller number of drivers who actually speed at an unreasonable rate.

It seems counterintuitive, but it’s a formula Americans should love: Raise speed limits, make roads safer.

[Josh]

Personally, I just can't wait until we hand it off to robot cars. Most people are nowhere near as competent behind the wheel as they think they are, and if you watch traffic you can see that outside of long-shot country highway/country drives most high speed recklessness is utterly pointless.

I see that one illustrated regularly on my commute to the office. Right now there's a major intersection I cross. The next section is rated at 50mph, which undershoots it a bit (natural flow on that road is probably more in the area of sixty.)

Right now it necks down for construction, so you go from four lanes to two. As I'm one of the boring ten percent who generally drives the rated (I try not to be in a hurry and I've still got a Class A CDL that soaks up points in a bad way if you start accumulating them) normally there's at least one or two hotdogs that will kill half the world trying to blaze around me.

Now this is where it gets funny, because coming off the light at the last intersection, the next light is about three miles off and there's no sane rate of speed that's going to catch it green. So the guys that take all the stupid risks to get around me meet me at the next light. Then they peel off that light and slice and dice through the growing traffic to... meet me at the next light.

And because my travel lane for my office is usually the least congested, the funniest part is sliding into the turn lane to make the final turn for my office and watching that same guy finally catch up and pass me again. Happens pretty much every day.

Basically, if you're not clearing more than a hundred miles, there's no real gain from speeding. You'll have a more relaxing drive. I saw that shit over and over when I was a truckdriver, see it now as a four-wheeler. Most speeding is about ego, not efficiency.

[Hotfoot]

Yes, everyone speeds, and yes, the speed limits are lower than the nominal safe velocity for a given stretch of road. However, to echo Josh, there's a lot of fucking morons out there on the roads, like the people who pull 75-85 or more in the fast lane and only keep a car length and a half between themselves and the poor bastard in front of them. I've seen ten cars or more in that formation at a time, and if one of them has to come to a stop for any fucking reason, THEY ARE ALL DEAD.

Yeah, speeding doesn't gain you a lot of fucking time, that much is true, and I'll admit, there are times I will just slam the accelerator to pass someone who's doing 5-10 less than the speed limit just so I can do 5-10 above it, and yeah, when the dude's doing 50, that's probably not the smartest thing to do (though in Jersey motherfucker if you're doing 50 in a 65 or god help you a 55 without your blinkers on you're going to get someone slamming into your backend).

It's long been just considered common knowledge that speed traps are just that, traps. The point of them is less public safety at this point and more extra revenue from the perspective of the average citizen. No idea if it actually comes to that much money at the end of the day, but as long as you've got two brain cells to rub together you can avoid basically every one of them. Some might still get you, but as long as you talk to the officer respectfully and don't try to pull obvious bullshit, most of the time they'll just let it slide.

But yeah, I've done the zen driving shit a lot as well, and I always laugh when the motherfucker that blasted past me giving me the finger for only doing 10 over the limit in the middle or right lane ends up side by side with me at the traffic jam or next light.

Problem is, raising the speed limits won't really do anything anymore. Not really, not unless you do what we did in Jersey, and even then I doubt it will work long term. See, in Jersey, we have stretches of road that were once 55 MPH zones, but were made 65 MPH zones, but with the caveat that points and fines DOUBLE in the 65 zones. For a while, the joke was that you slowed down when you hit the 65 zones from the 55 zone, and it's kind of true. I once clocked speed of traffic in a 55 zone at 85, and in the 65 zone it went down to around 75. Weird, but it happens. That said, some motherfuckers will always speed, and the disrespect of the speed limits won't go away quickly.

Meanwhile, robot cars are a nice idea, the concept of not having to worry about shitty fucking drivers would be glorious, but you KNOW there would be some dumb motherfucker who longs for the old days and things he's Mario Fucking Andretti and ends up killing a bunch of people even with that. I'll be honest though, doing a fucking road trip without having to drive would be fucking glorious. Fuck, the pictures I could take, being able to play games with the passengers, all that shit? That'd be nice, not going to lie.

[Lys]

I've long known that a lot of roads are engineered for higher speeds than the posted ones, and that generally traffic will want to flow at the road engineered speed rather than the whatever the legal limit is. I'm all for raising the limits according to the 85th percentile rule given that it's shown that it increases traffic safety. It also has the nice benefit of making it easier for the police to catch the assholes who speed without regard for actual safety, since a reasonable speed limit means only a fraction of cars will be going over it, allowing the police to focus on them. I mean there are a lot of stretches of road in the United States that are long and straight with little in the way of on or off ramps, and it's quite safe to have a 90 mph limit on those. I suppose it would be nice if you could get people to drive safely but sometimes it's better to adapt the law to reality than to try and get reality to adapt to the law. A law that nobody obeys accomplishes nothing save increase contempt for law in general among populace.

[rhoenix]

Alright, as much as I enjoy driving 5-10 mph faster than the posted speed limit most times, I have to play devil's advocate here.

Let's say all freeway speed limits were raised by 10mph; so you'd see posted speed limits going from 65 to 85 in most places. However, the best argument I've heard regarding posted speed limits is the kinetic impact a car of average weight and mass would have at that speed.

The kinetic force of an impact goes up rather sharply the faster you're going - F = MA, after all. Raising the speed limits would also raise the actual speeds people would go, since most people would always exceed the speed limit, since most people are used to doing so regularly.

The article acknowledges this partially with the "85th Percentile" metric they're using for traffic engineering, but this, in turn, means we'll likely be seeing a higher percentage of fatalities from car accidents. Is being able to go faster on the freeway worth this?

I acknowledge the argument, and I also acknowledge the thought behind it - but the heart of it seems to be simple impatience, rather than an actual issue at hand.

[Lys]

The argument put forth by the article is that raising a speed limit that's below that of actual traffic has a negligible effect on average speeds. To wit, if the average motorist is doing 85 in a 65 zone, then raising the speed limit to 85 won't make the average motorist start doing 105, or even 95, but rather they'll continue going at 85 mph same as before. What will change is that the fraction of people who were doing 65 in accordance with the law will now be doing 75 or 85. This increases traffic safety because in the grand scheme of things the danger from travelling 20 mph below the flow of traffic is far greater than the danger from travelling at 85 mph. If it were possible to make everyone go at 65 as per the posted limit that would be better, but it's not feasible to do so. Engineering must be done with a view toward what's possible, not what's ideal.

Also, if you're talking about kinetic energy, the formula is Energy = one half mass x velocity squared.

[rhoenix]

The argument put forth by the article is that raising a speed limit that's below that of actual traffic has a negligible effect on average speeds. To wit, if the average motorist is doing 85 in a 65 zone, then raising the speed limit to 85 won't make the average motorist start doing 105, or even 95, but rather they'll continue going at 85 mph same as before.

What will change is that the fraction of people who were doing 65 in accordance with the law will now be doing 75 or 85. This increases traffic safety because in the grand scheme of things the danger from travelling 20 mph below the flow of traffic is far greater than the danger from travelling at 85 mph. If it were possible to make everyone go at 65 as per the posted limit that would be better, but it's not feasible to do so. Engineering must be done with a view toward what's possible, not what's ideal.

Also, if you're talking about kinetic energy, the formula is Energy = one half mass x velocity squared.

The entire point of it making traffic safer by increasing the speed limit seemed counter-intuitive to me, and still does. However, it appears that traffic studies agree with the rest of you in this matter:

In 1987, many states raised the maximum speed limtis from 55 to 65 mph on portions of their rural interstate highways. There was intense debate about the consequences of this change. Proponents of differing views on the impact of the higher speed limits quickly rushed with early data to support their positions.

Latest national figures show a continuing gradual decline in mileage death rates and in actual numbers of highway deaths. Rural freeway deaths - locations most impacted by the higher 65 speed limit were 2,870 in 1988; 2,775 in 1989, and 2,728 in 1990. Despite these figures, critics of the higher speed limit continue to resist the change.

Charles Lave, Chairman of the Department of Economics of the University of California, Irvine suggests in his study, "Did the 65 MPH Speed Limit Save Lives?" that states which had adopted the higher speed limit actually showed greater improvement in their overall statewide fatality rates than those states which maintained the lower maximum speed limit. Dr. Lave is no stranger to this issue. He was amember of the Transportation Research Board Committee for the Study of the Benefits and Costs of the 55 MOH National Maximum Speed Limit.

In 1984, this Committee produced the Special Report 204, "55: A Decade of Experience" which gave qualified support in favor of maintaining the lower maximum speed limit on all roads because of projected estimates of lives saved through the national speed mandate.

Why did the higher speed limit on rural interstate highways result in lower fatality rates? Dr. Lave's study suggests the following events may have taken place:

1. Drivers may have switched to use the higher speed roads which are safer and better designed
2. highway patrols may have shifted resources to activities with more safety pay-off, and
the speed variance among cars declined - it might decline on the interstates as law-abiding drivers caught up with the speeders, and it might have declined on other highways as their speeders switched to the interstates.
3. Dr. Lave reports that his evidence indicates that events (1) and (2) actually did occur but no evidence is available to support or deny the occurrence of the reduction of the speed variance.

Dr. Lave's report was supported by grants from the AAA Foundation for Traffice Safety and the University of California Transportation Center.

So. Going by past experience with raising speed limits appears to agree with the opinion posited in the OP and by others here, but I'm still of the opinion that speed limits right now are a good medium between expediency and safety, and should not be changed, unless I am presented with excellent evidence and reasoning to do so.

As for the force vs. velocity equations, you may very well be correct, as it's been quite a while since I've looked up all my equations from physics. However, neither equation disagrees with the fact that kinetic force rises rather quickly with greater speed, which was my entire point.

[Lys]

It's been empirically found that setting speed limits in accordance with actual traffic patterns makes the roads safer. How does that not constitude "excellent evidence and reasoning to do so"? The point here is that the current speed limits are making the roads less safe, raising them makes them more safe. As nice as it would be if motorists followed the posted speed limits, the fact is that they don't, and by not posting speed limits that reflect the reality of traffic flow we are endangering the minority of motorists who do follow the law. Given that we cannot make the majority follow the law, the next best option is to allow the minority to legally go as fast as everyone else is already going. This makes the roads safer because it decreases accident rates and fatalities with it.

It's true that going faster makes accidents more lethal, but this is offset by the overall reduction in accidents. Suppose that in a given stretch of road over a given span of time there are 100 accidents resulting in the deaths of 40 people. Now suppose that a higher speed limit decreases the accident rate by 50%, but also increases the lethality of accidents by 50%. Beforehand 2 people died for every 5 accidents, now 3 people die for every 5 accidents. It may seem that things are worse, but remember that there are now only 50 accidents on that stretch of road per unit time, resulting in the deaths of only 30 people instead of 40. Raising the speed limit has saved lives.

[rhoenix]

It's been empirically found that setting speed limits in accordance with actual traffic patterns makes the roads safer.

Be very careful with something like this, as this is a broad statement to make when you dangle empirical evidence with it.

On the freeway I drive to and from work each day, the posted speed limit is 65. I often seen people going 75 in the slower lanes, particularly as I approach Roseville - 80 to 90+ is more common in the faster lanes, even more so at night, when I'm driving home.

Without any provisions for sanity attached, the flow of traffic around where I use the freeway should be 85, going by the logic above. The faster someone drives, the less control they have over their car (versus going slower speeds, due to momentum), and the less reaction time they have to respond to an issue that may arise.

How does that not constitude "excellent evidence and reasoning to do so"? The point here is that the current speed limits are making the roads less safe, raising them makes them more safe. As nice as it would be if motorists followed the posted speed limits, the fact is that they don't, and by not posting speed limits that reflect the reality of traffic flow we are endangering the minority of motorists who do follow the law. Given that we cannot make the majority follow the law, the next best option is to allow the minority to legally go as fast as everyone else is already going. This makes the roads safer because it decreases accident rates and fatalities with it.

It's true that going faster makes accidents more lethal, but this is offset by the overall reduction in accidents. Suppose that in a given stretch of road over a given span of time there are 100 accidents resulting in the deaths of 40 people. Now suppose that a higher speed limit decreases the accident rate by 50%, but also increases the lethality of accidents by 50%. Beforehand 2 people died for every 5 accidents, now 3 people die for every 5 accidents. It may seem that things are worse, but remember that there are now only 50 accidents on that stretch of road per unit time, resulting in the deaths of only 30 people instead of 40. Raising the speed limit has saved lives.

The problem is that this is not as simple an equation as you're presenting it to be.

First, the "overall reduction in accidents" is a misnomer. There was a reduction in fatal accidents in the data I saw (which is the very thing I found counter-intuitive), but not an overall reduction of accidents total, which is an important distinction.

Second, the faster one goes in a car, one needs commensurately faster reflexes to compensate if something happens.

Third, the faster one goes in a car, the more likely it is that they could lose control over the vehicle if they have to make a sudden turn of the wheel.

Those factors always must be considered alongside any increase of speed limit, and these are the reasons I'm rather cautious about being okay with increasing the speed limit overall.

If one makes the argument that "Daly City's posted speed limit on its freeways is 55, and that's too slow, given that it only connects Daly City with Jamestown," that's an argument I can accept, and even agree with. The speed limit in this case would be a viable option, since it would focus on one area, and that to resolve a problem for commuters.

But the article appears to advocate for a blanket increase of speed limit across the nation, which is something I cannot agree with.

[Lys]

Did the data you see actually list total accident rates? Because my understanding is that raising the speed limit reduces the number of fatalities by reducing the number of accidents, not by making the accidents that do happen less fatal.

The matter of reaction times cannot be considered in isolation. Sure if you're doing 65 you have more time to react to sudden changes in traffic conditions ahead of you than if you were doing 85, but if the drivers behind you are all doing 85, then you are giving them less time to react to you. There's a trade-off here between better reaction times for you and worse reaction times for everyone coming up behind you. The data seems to support that the safety increase from increasing your own reaction time is outweighed by the safety decrease in reducing everyone else's. You might say that the other drivers shouldn't be doing 85 in a 65 zone, and that's all well and good, but it's irrelevant in the face of the simple fact that they don't. You have to make concessions to reality.

Nobody is advocating raising speed limits across the board. What is being advocating is using sound engineering principles to determine posted speed limits, because it is idiocy to make road design decisions based on intuition. If this means an overall increase in speed limits across American roadways then so be it. However, which roads will have their speed limits changed and by how much is to be determined on a case by case basis after taking into account the various factors that play a role in road traffic. It's not about eye-balling traffic and making judgement calls, but rather cold and dispassionate data analysis that gives predictable results. It has been shown that a speed limit which does not reflect the road's natural traffic flow patterns will kill people. Given that we want to reduce traffic fatalities, it is not a hard conclusion to reach that speed limits should reflect traffic patterns.

I will point out that there are situations were a road may be far more dangerous that it appears and in those circumstances natural traffic patterns may result in elevated accident rates. There's a nasty turn as I-90 approaches the waterfront in Cleveland that's a good example of this. However, I would argue that if most speed limits reflect the actual speed of traffic then motorists will by and large be used to respecting the posted speed limit in their daily driving instead of ignoring it. If drivers are accustomed to going 10 or 20 over without consequence, they might be ill inclined to follow the posted speed limit in stretches of road that are more dangerous than they look. On the other hand, if they are accustomed to the bulk of their driving being within the speed limit, they might be receptive to obeying a speed limit that is below what they would otherwise be comfortable with.

[Josh]

Meanwhile, robot cars are a nice idea, the concept of not having to worry about shitty fucking drivers would be glorious, but you KNOW there would be some dumb motherfucker who longs for the old days and things he's Mario Fucking Andretti and ends up killing a bunch of people even with that. I'll be honest though, doing a fucking road trip without having to drive would be fucking glorious. Fuck, the pictures I could take, being able to play games with the passengers, all that shit? That'd be nice, not going to lie.

The idiots who think they're ace hotrodders will happen a few times, and in time it'll be prohibited to operate in urban areas under your own control. Hell, eventually they'll take out manual control altogether.

Our current style of driving will eventually be looked back at as barbaric in the same way people look back at leaving horse corpses in the city streets or the old construction methods, something that was acceptable in our time but totally insane now that there are better systems.

Hell, car ownership in general is probably going to go out the window. It's already at revenue-neutral to slightly more expensive than Zipcar service in Frisco.

(Or the Bay Area, as Havoc would have it.)

What gets me when you think about it is how different the future will look once the changeover goes fully into effect- no more traffic signals, speed limit signs, parking lots, etc. It's going to be a totally different world.

[General Havoc]

Hell, car ownership in general is probably going to go out the window. It's already at revenue-neutral to slightly more expensive than Zipcar service in Frisco.

I'm not sure why you would use as a citation for your arguments the ownership patterns from a place that DOESN'T EXIST.

Now if you had referred to the city of San Francisco, then I could mention that this city is a unique situation relative to the rest of the country, and that what's true within the city respective to car ownership is definitely not true in the greater Bay Area as a whole.

[Josh]

Hell, car ownership in general is probably going to go out the window. It's already at revenue-neutral to slightly more expensive than Zipcar service in Frisco.

I'm not sure why you would use as a citation for your arguments the ownership patterns from a place that DOESN'T EXIST.

Now if you had referred to the city of San Francisco, then I could mention that this city is a unique situation relative to the rest of the country, and that what's true within the city respective to car ownership is definitely not true in the greater Bay Area as a whole.

It is a unique situation, but Zipcar and affiliated services are also in their infancy. Costs are going to come down, especially when automation replaces the human drivers.

Also, Frisco! It's the place where you live. Geez. Look out the window, dude.

[General Havoc]

Frisco is a bullshit name someone not of this city made up as a vile insult. If I live there, then you live in the Kingdom of Eternal Cockjobbery, and I demand that DS alter your title to reflect this, as it's where you live... man.

[Lys]

Just so everyone knows, these notes I'm taking are not ammunition additions for the list of things Havoc hates. They're for a completely unrelated ornithology project.

[Charon]

From now on whenever I refer to where Havoc lives I'm going to sing the tune "Rice-a-roni, the San Francisco treat!"

Partly because I know he can come up with no worse insult for where I live than "Buffalo".

[Josh]

Frisco is a bullshit name someone not of this city made up as a vile insult. If I live there, then you live in the Kingdom of Eternal Cockjobbery, and I demand that DS alter your title to reflect this, as it's where you live... man.

Why yes, we are the best Cockjobbers in existence and it's nice to finally get some recognition for that fact.

Damn, I feel bad for fucking with you if you're going to be so gracious about all this.

[Dark Silver]

Kingdom of Eternal Cockjobbery

I'm feeling Magnanimous this evening.

So let it be written, so let it be done.

[Josh]

EVEN BETTER.

*preens*

[rhoenix]

Frisco is a bullshit name someone not of this city made up as a vile insult. If I live there, then you live in the Kingdom of Eternal Cockjobbery, and I demand that DS alter your title to reflect this, as it's where you live... man.

Because all nicknames for cities are secretly meant as vile insults, right?

San Francisco, or "Frisco," is certainly not better than every other city in the entire United States of America, in that it somehow is too good to have a nickname. That somehow, due to the fact that it was partially built on landfill, or the fact that it's next to Oakland, it is above the common unwashed masses of cities that deign to allow the fell mark of a nickname to be given to them with sickly evil smiles.

[Josh]

Hey, you know what my hometown gets called?

"Slowdeatha"

[General Havoc]

Because all nicknames for cities are secretly meant as vile insults, right?

San Francisco, or "Frisco," is certainly not better than every other city in the entire United States of America, in that it somehow is too good to have a nickname. That somehow, due to the fact that it was partially built on landfill, or the fact that it's next to Oakland, it is above the common unwashed masses of cities that deign to allow the fell mark of a nickname to be given to them with sickly evil smiles.

Right, because the city I have referred to nightly in your presence as SF for eight years is clearly too good to have a nickname.

What we are too good for is a bullshit nickname used by tourists and fakers. Oh but don't take my word for it...

How about a County Judge?

http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hgoe82.htm

COURT OBJECTS TO WORD 'FRISCO.

Judge Mogan Rebukes Angeleno for Using Slang in His Petition for Divorce.

Because he referred to this city as "Frisco" on four occasions while testifying before Judge Mogan yesterday in his petition for a divorce, Hal R. Hobbs, Los Angeles automobile dealer, was threatened with internment.

"What do you mean by 'Frisco'?" asked Judge Mogan.

"Why, San Francisco, of course," said Hobbs in surprise.

"No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles," said the court. "I am the chairman of the County Council of Defense, and I warn you that you stand in danger of being interned as an alien enemy. Don't do it again."

How about legendary local reporter Herb Cain? Who was so adamant on the subject that he named his book Don't Call it Frisco.

Caress each Spanish syllable, salute our Italian saint. Don’t say Frisco and don’t say San-Fran-Cis-Co. That’s the way Easterners, like Larry King pronounce it. It’s more like SanfrnSISco.

How about His Imperial Majesty Joshua Abraham Norton the First, Emperor of These United States and Protector of Mexico?

Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word "Frisco," which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of a High Misdemeanor, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars. Furthermore, whoever shall be heard to repeat their utterance of this insulting word shall be bodily pitched into San Francisco Bay.

So go on. Tell me about how I'm a hipster who's taking insult. Bash me for standing up for the name of my city. I will gladly place myself in the ranks of the above esteemed gentlemen in toeing the line against this menace in my own turn rather than that of an outcast dog who snarls and spits at the shining city he inhabits, or mocks those with the vaguest hint of civic pride. If it is Hipsterism to defend the good name of the city you love, then all these men I have cited are Hipsters, and so am I.

Oh, and the city's built on in-fill, not landfill, you damn central valleyite.

[frigidmagi]

Well I don't care about the reporter any, but if his Majesty the Emperor says I'm not to call it Frisco... Then I don't call the damn city Frisco. The word of the Emperor should be good enough for any red blooded American and I know we are all true patriots here *looks at you all with narrowed eyes* aren't we?

[Lys]

Wait, wait, wait, you mean that both the nickname Frisco and San Franciscans hating on it dates back to the mid-19th century? Holy shit, I did not see that coming. So to refer to that fair city as Frisco is to stand with a legion of assholes a century and a half old! This is amazing, you should be proud of yourself Josh.

Also, just so we're all clear, what an actual hipster would do is embrace the Frisco nickname 'ironically'.

[Josh]

Oh I'm proudly defiant. Also I recognize no Emperor but the God-Emperor, and he guides my hand as well as my sharp tongue.