• sunbrrnslapper@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      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.

    • klemptor@startrek.website
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      19 hours ago

      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.

      • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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        18 hours ago

        Why don’t they confiscate driving licences and imprison all the criminals who are driving 20-25mph dangerously over the limit?

        • klemptor@startrek.website
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          16 hours ago

          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)_/¯

          • fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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            13 hours ago

            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.

          • AreaKode@lemmy.world
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            18 hours ago

            A single cop car on the side of the road can get everybody to magically follow the speed limit.

            • Einstein@sh.itjust.works
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              17 hours ago

              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.

      • MisterFrog@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        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.

      • Hacksaw@lemmy.ca
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        19 hours ago

        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.

        • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          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 to 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).

            • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              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

        • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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          18 hours ago

          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