Fuck Cars

You’re suggesting they add even more potholes to motorways?

I think its by fines actually.... Just got a $609 USD speeding fine... I speed less since then

There's a concept in road design that says the engineer must first determine the design speed, which is basically how fast they want traffic to be able to flow. This part of the process is generally not part of any public hearing or put to a vote by public officials - it is just decided on and then they move on to the next step.

There's also a prevailing concept in road design that seems to indicate that high traffic speeds are a design issue, but low speeds are an enforcement issue. The road is designed to accommodate the highest amount of traffic anticipated in the future without really thinking about if that's even a good fit for the area.

Once the road has been built to exacting standards (which means it is far too wide and flat,) the city steps in and slaps a speed limit on it, often at odds with the design speed.

When residents get worried about all the speeding cars, they petition the city for a traffic study to see if anything can be done. The engineers conducting the traffic study determine that the road is capable of handling higher speeds than the current limit, and so to cut down on speeding the recommendation is to increase the posted limit.

It's amazing to me how much influence the engineering team has on the design with basically no accountability. You can try to reduce speeding by putting up speed traps and police patrols, but at the end of the day people will drive as fast as they are comfortable with and that is often a result of the design of the road they are driving on.

Yea around here we have 4 or more lane highways with 60mph speed limits. You could almost double that safely if people actually used the lanes properly when not passing. Instead we have to deal with a mix of assholes going all different speeds trying to get around the people going 60 in the left lane and god help you of there's a cop around.

I can't really make sense of what you're saying. If the road is straight and wide but also has a low speed limit, that's not sending mixed signals. Rather, it's suggesting that you should drive slow even though your instinct tells you that you could drive quickly, presumably because there are either obstacles creating blind points that could lead to pedestrian or bicycle involved accidents, small children playing nearby, or cars turning onto or from side roads that you might strike if you're driving at the speed that your gut tells you is safe.

In other words, you shouldn't trust your gut when deciding how fast is safe on a road because your gut is often mistaken about the finer points of road design.

Also, you wrote that a slow driver would be an obstruction to other vehicles including trucks. I think you were wording that as a bad thing, but in reality it's a good thing. One reasonable driver can force a dozen bad drivers to slow down.

Another way to say it, is that they haven't installed enough average speed cameras.

If you install a few of those, suddenly drivers do manage to keep to the speed limit.

The US system is stupid. Most drivers drive too fast and overestimate their driving capabilities.

UK highways departments have had essentially zero budget for 2+ decades now. There's no funding to completely retrofit every single residential street to match the new signage. Most of them are already incredibly narrow and tight compared to your average North American street.

In Denmark we have the lovely new law that if you drive more than 100% over the speed limit and over 100 kmh or drive over 200 kmh at all or drunk driving with over 2‰ they confiscate the car and you are not getting it back at all. They confiscate the car regadles of who owns the car (with very few exceptions) and that is also if it is leased. So far since when the law started they have confiscated over 2000 cars in two years. It's my favourite law of all laws right now. The fine for driving crazy is also nicely proportional to your income and it removes the car so the person cannot just drive without license afterwards.

What do you do with all those seconds you save each day?

Same. Speeding tickets are so fucking expensive where I live. Guaranteed to be at least $300 at a minimum. I can't afford that, so I barely go over to mitigate the effect of being the slowest driver on the road. In general though, idgaf.

I also drive a Prius, so it's at least somewhat expected ha

That soudns great. But why spend that money on traffic calming? Let's just use that money to install additional speed-camera's and build more roads that encourage more speeding. Revenue generation must be priority number one for every government!