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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Almost everywhere I drive, people usually speed. As a result, the speed limit is a constant distraction - I have to pay attention to what it is on the current stretch of the road (some of the roads I have to drive on to get to work change speed limits 3-4 times) and to the average speed of people in each lane, and figure out whether it's in my best interest to drive at the speed limit, or whether I'm going to have people constantly merging around me if I don't speed.

If the speed limit was gone, I'd just pay attention to the velocity of other drivers and make sure I have plenty of room in front of me to stop - which I try to do anyway. I wish some states or counties would try making changes to speed limit policies.

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They would except for two powerful motivators to maintain artificially low limits:

1) On city and suburban roads, parents demand extremely low speed limits in the name of child safety. This results in 25MPH and 35MPH zones on roads where reasonable drivers would normally travel 40MPH or higher.

2) Traffic ticketing is a significant source of income for the local government and police agencies. Artificially low speed limits allow speeding tickets to be written on a regular basis.

Your points are valid concerns, however the article is about highway speed limits. We could remove highway limits while maintaining them inside neighborhoods.

Indeed. And of course the real solution to point 1 is to design roads in residential areas so that reasonable drivers travel slowly. E.g. narrow the roads. There was an interesting article about these efforts on Reddit years ago. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space has something on it.)

This absolutely works. The road I bicycle to work on is about the width of one large delivery truck. A normal car barely has clearance for two people on its side. The end result is that cars drive no faster than me on my bicycle, and sometimes much much slower.

Don't forget it gives authorities a reason to pull over almost anyone without needing a reason (except speeding which everyone is doing)

Personally I think speeding IS a reason. It's true that people can keep safe distances without speed limits, however it's undeniable that people who go much faster than the average speed are dangerous. Limiting the speed is one way to try to get everyone to drive the same speed. It's a system and as long as everyone sticks to it, there are less accidents. If you change the system, no problem, but don't give this as an example to declare a country a police-state. Your speed is completely in your control.

If that is the case, then they should pull over everyone who is speeding and give them all tickets. They don't do this. Everyone behaving normally is always in violation so the police pick and choose who they give tickets to.

The extreme version of that is called a police state.

I definitely consider this a bug, not a feature. I don't want to live in a world where authorities can arbitrarily pull people over. That leaves a lot of room for corruption.

As far as I know, there's nothing legally stopping them from pulling people over arbitrarily anyway, speeding or no.

As for the 1), making streets much narrower and equally usable would probably help. Wide streets encourage mindless cruising as if nothing could happen, no matter what the speed limit.

There have been a number of documented cases in Europe where removing all traffic signage in a dangerous crossing or a small town has caused the accident counts to plummet.

If there are constantly pedestrians, bicycle riders, motorcycles, and cars on the very same road with no clear distinction between where each one should roam, everybody suddenly becomes super careful.

Right. When the choice is drive legally and be a hazard or drive safely and break the law, what are you really supposed to do? Risk a crash or risk a ticket. Either way, it sucks. When you give people no good options, how do you expect them to drive?

Indeed. It is perverse that in order to be a good citizen, one must break the law.

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