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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know why Virginia has always been so notoriously draconian about speeding? Is it DC-adjacent policy wonks outsized faith in the effectiveness of top-down prescriptions, lots of DC politicians flagrantly violating the law, culture clash between stuffy suburbanites and yokels (Virginia was the first place I ever saw a trans truck), or what?

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It's a massive source of state and local revenue. They have laws on the books (improper driving) which exist solely to negotiate down to.

Virginia also has the shameful distinction of being the only state in the USA to outlaw radar detectors (I think they are also outlawed in DC). Totally ridiculous and draconian. Anyone should be allowed to observe RF or lack of RF that gets broadcast to them.

Virginia is like this in many ways. It’s a police state.

The yankees' roads are all really bad. Old, narrow, sharp turns, and often crowded. I hate driving up there.

By comparison, Texas we have long open stretches and up to eight lanes each way, so obviously it's less of an issue.

I'd actually assume it's due to proximity to DC, which would tend to massively increase the population of "but the data say"-type technocrats.

Texas has an above average rate of road deaths per capita. Virginia is below average.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_road_...

Is it common to refer to Virginians as being Yankees? Growing up in New England I would have assumed they’d avoid the term by being in the Confederacy

Per E.B. White:

"To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast."

Growing up in Vermont, this was clearly written before Red Sox fandom took over

No, they're both south of the Mason-Dixon line and Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. Texas is considered less South, culturally, than Virginia.

No. Outside DC metro, VA is the south (or Appalachian, which can be similar, but is distinct).

These days, it’s not really about the Confederacy, just culturally.

Yeah, I don't really consider virginia part of the south, culturally. Maybe it was different in the past but proximity to DC has rotted any of that away.

I can see parts of Virginia not feeling culturally like a lot of the rest of the south but I’m still intrigued by the use of yankee. Like is someone from Wyoming a yankee because they aren’t from the south or is it more cultural to you?

Nope, yankeedom as I see it is Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

There is another, semi-derisive, use in which it means any non-southerner. But that is less common and context-dependent.

We're talking about interstates though. And from my New Englander perspective traffic mostly self regulates without draconian speed limit enforcement, it's the slow end of the distribution that is far more scattered and worse for road safety.

For surface roads, I'll take our bespoke road layout over a grid any day. Although I do share the sentiment that driving in the Northeast Megalopolis is much more suffocating than the rest of the country. Coming back from a road trip and hitting New York State is like vacation is over, time to get home on the interstate.

I really like the grids for cities. Say what you want about traffic in Houston or Dallas but, though they move tons of people, driving their is way, way better than e.g. Boston.

I don't object to bespoke layouts out in the country so much as that the "through roads" in the northeast are extremely un-fun to drive on if you have distance to cover. Probably bias from how I grew up, but when I have hundreds of miles to go, I like hopping on a nice, wide FM and opening the throttle.

> the "through roads" in the northeast are extremely un-fun to drive on if you have distance to cover

It's not the roads themselves, it's the sheer number of people.

Also the definition of "through road" is much different. You can't just get on any random numbered route and once you're "out of town" you're good - because there is no "out of town". Traveling longer distances you focus on interstates plus a handful of controlled-access state/US routes. For example, don't get on (a non-interstate-part-of) US route 1 expecting a nice drive. They let the US route get built up with businesses and lights, with the expectation that trough traffic will be using I-95.

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