Example: Traffic Speed. Everyone always exceed the speed limit on highways. Why do we still have the limit? Like, either enforce it, or remove it. This stuff doesn’t make sense at all.
What is a speed limit on highways?
Confused greetings from Germany.
Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger
- ADAC 1974
You’re not expected to break them. For your example, you’re not supposed to go over the speed limit. And it is, in fact, extremely easy to do so. Most people are fine with it. And, no, it’s not impossible to do so. There is nothing forcing you to go faster for little to no gain and increased risk for you and other.
You expecting to go over tells something about you.
Practically no one actually drives at or below the speed limit in the US, especially on freeways. Whether or not you personally like this doesn’t matter – it’s just how it is.
You’re welcome to try it, but speeding is so pervasive in our culture that this will single you out and Ruggedly Individualistic Americans will get frothingly butthurt at you over it. Prepare to get tailgated, cut off, bullied out of your lane, stuff thrown at your car, etc.
You expecting to go over tells something about you.
I don’t drive, but every time I’m in my parent’s car, they drive the speed limit, then I see cars flying by on the highway, and I’m like wtf.
I double check the spedometer, it points at just below 60, the sign says speed limit is 60. How is everyone going so fast. They must be speeding.
Not just one or 2 cars. Like almost every car.
Edit: This is in the USA, the Interstate-95 / PA-NJ Turnpike btw.
For what it’s worth, the I-95 corridor from about Richmond to Boston, particularly the DC-Balitmore-Philly-NYC part, is probably one of the worst stretches of highway in the country for generalized insanity and phenomenally poor driving skills on display from everyone involved. It is easily my most hated patch of asphalt in the universe.
A small but measurable improvement would be made to the world instantly if every person in DC and Baltimore had their licenses revoked. Although if experience is any judge, that still wouldn’t prevent any of them from still all being on 95, three inches from the car in front and raging over “only” being able to do 80 in a 55.
On the highways here, the original speed limit of 55 was to save our nation’s resources, not just “55 to stay alive” but also it was an efficient speed to maintain and still pretty fast.
Inside the city it works much better to make drivers feel unsafe going fast. Narrower lanes, speed bumps, roundabouts, etc.
In answer to your actual question - some laws are just old and haven’t been unwound yet and others are used as pretext for profiling, police (or,n more properly whoever is running them) like to be able to stop people for no reason but that can be seen as illegitimate, so they keep laws that everyone breaks, jaywalking, etc to have an excuse.
I don’t think there is any one law everybody breaks really but also no person who has lived perfectly law abiding life.
Everyone always exceed the speed limit on highways
You’re projecting yourself
Nah, I don’t even have a license to drive.
Every time I’m in my parent’s car, they drive the speed limit, then I see cars flying by. I’m like wtf.
I double check the spedometer, it points at just below 60, the sign says 60. How is everyone going so fast. They must be speeding.
Edit: And it’s not just one or two cars, its almost every car on the highway.
This is in the USA, the Interstate-95 / PA-NJ Turnpike btw.
This sounds like a distinctly cultural problem where the word ‘limit’ clearly doesn’t mean very much to the population in question.
It’s a limit, not a target, and certainly not a floor as some USAsians seem to treat it.
Here in Australia you can be fined for exceeding the limit by less than 10km/h. Yes, even if you are 1km/h over, and whilst this would probably get thrown out in court you’d still have to take time off to attend court.
It honestly frustrates me so much with the speed limit thing. On a societal level, speed (and differences in speed) tend to be one of the biggest factors in car crashes, so ignoring speeding is just accepting more dangerous roads.
On a peronal level, i try to do the limit or maybe 5-10 over (20 over is the norm in my area, even in school zones). The really frustrating part is as soon as i act like everyone else a try to do 20 over i get a ticket and my insurance goes up. This is frustrating becauae it just feels as if I’m being punished for doing what most people consider to be “safe” and normal. If it was drastically obvious that 20 over is faster than the flow of the traffic, it would feel a lot less frustrating if i get a ticket.
It can actually feel dangerous doing the limit on roads notoriois for 20-30 over. People agressively pass, tailgate and cut you off. Its fucked up but you get more dirty looks for doing the limit than you do for doing 40 over the limit. I think part of this is the north american attitude of cars being an extension of yourself. Someone doing 40 over is both couragous enough to go that fast, and also wealthy enough to own something faster and wealthy enough to afford the ticket, or at least that seems like the trend.
Here we have a blanket 3km/h tolerance so they measure you, take 3km/h off and then use that to see which bracket of speeding you fall into (10, 20, etc).
I’m too German to understand what’s happening here.
They exist just in case they need to crack down on you.
I always think of dog leash laws this way. In many places they aren’t enforced and the majority of dog owners let their dogs off leash. However, if the owner loses control of their dog and it gets into trouble, like biting someone or another dog, then the law can always say, you’re liable because your dog was supposed to be on leash.
I think the same goes for speeding and other laws. It basically puts liability on the lawbreaker if they take a certain risk. If nothing bad happens, fine. But, if something does, then it’s your fault.
This has the unintended consequence of people not knowing about the law if it goes unenforced for a long time.
Not knowing the law isn’t an excuse before the law in most circumstances.
Which makes this an issue since no one will go read the whole list of laws
Counter question: do you think everyone is sensible?
Because it can be enforced selectively, and if everyone is guilty of something, anyone in particular can be harassed under the cover of a legal justification.
Yep. And in some places, one can see the enforcement is against minoritites and other scape goats at a disproportionate level. This also has the “bonus” of being able to make one group look like they break the law much more often and are dangerous
Aside from selective enforcement, some laws (like traffic laws) are there for your protection AND to establish liability if something goes wrong.
If the government sets the limit at 30 and everyone goes 50, when an incident occurs, nobody can sue the city for bad roads because everyone was going faster than the intended speed.
Also establishes expectations. Every on the highway knows what the expected speed is. Going 30 in a 65 is way more dangerous than doing 75 when conditions allow.
But doing 55 in a 65 isn’t unreasonable, and 95 is pretty fast and at that speed handling can become difficult on cheap or poorly maintained cars.
There are also conditions where 30 is what you’ll do on a highway if its a blizzard and you’re stuck behind a plow truck.
Anecdotally, I’ve almost never get pulled over in traffic, but the one time I was pulled over, I was doing 76 in a 65 at 5 AM with no other cars on the road and otherwise driving completely fine.
I guess he was bored. Or an asshole. Or both.
Edit: Fixed my paradox
Both times I’ve ever been pulled over for speeding the road was empty except me and i was going the average speed people drive on them. 3 people doing 20 over, a cop can shrug and say i don’t wanna pick one to ticket. A single car not only sticks out as speeding more easily, but there also isn’t much of an excuse for the cop not to pull them over.
Counter intuitively, its easier to get away with speeding when the roads are busy because you blend in. The biggest things you want to avoid when speeding and busy is agressive behaviors and frequent passing. Make it seem more casual and you will blend in with the flow of traffic.
deleted by creator
There was no traffic, he was on the road alone.
Thanks, deleted. Also they said “almost never” which I totally read wrong.
I think he edited the almost in based on his edit note.
Tools in the toolbox. You’ll often hear about police saying they need more tools in the toolbox. What it means is they want to be able to enforce laws against somebody they don’t like selectively.
If you enforce the speed limit religiously, especially around State capitals, the speed limits would rapidly change.
https://archive.org/details/threefeloniesday0000silv
If this topic interests you, I recommend reading three felonies a day, by Harvey silverglate
In general speed limits are enforced IMO, just within a certain level. IE yes everyone exceeds the speed limit… but typically by set amounts. IE I know myself I generally go 9 over the speed limit. I expect to get a ticket if I go 11-20 over the speed limit.
That being said, yeah the social construct is probably intentionally encouraged by cops, so that say when they are pulling over random minorities for an excuse to search the car, they have an automatic excuse for why they pulled them over.
Well, tell that to my local traffic authorities. My wife basically has a subscription with them, we get home a monthly invoice for 30€ because she was driving 55-60 km/h in a 50 zone… Complete with a picture of her face and the car’s license plate :)
Maybe she should stop speeding?
Or learn where the cameras are?
The point was that at some places speed limits ARE enforced.
If it only was that easy. I don’t know if 5km/h over the limit is “speeding”, she just doesn’t pay attention, and we’ve been having this discussion for years… I am trying to convince/teach her how to use the speed limiter, but she always forgets to enable that. And the cameras are not static around here. There are a couple static ones, but the vast majority are mobile. They look like small black boxes on wheels, like a power distribution point. Until you see the flash light :)
Should she be driving if she’s that bad at it?
I got caught once by a speed camera doing 65 in a 50 zone. The camera was in an unmarked van parked on the motorway lay-by (conveniently just after some temporary road works). A few days later the postman delivers a fine in the mail, so I ignored it as it wasn’t sent by recorded delivery (so no proof of receipt). Now, by law in the UK, the police have 21 days to inform you of the offence and three weeks later I get another letter from the cops informing me that I have an unpaid fine. So I write to them and tell them that I never received it and that I have no recollection of being on that road. They then send me photographic evidence of my car being caught at 65 mph in a 50 zone and that I am obliged, by law, to declare who was driving. I write back and inform them that it was so long ago I have no memory of who might have been the designated driver, let alone even being on that road, and that because more than 21 days have passed they have failed to inform me of the offence. They write back with some nonsense about having proof that the letter was sent, but I argue that this isn’t proof of receipt and that I’d be guessing if I declared who I think might have been driving that day. Result being that I never heard from them again.
Take jaywalking for example. Most people aren’t going to be bothered by some woman crossing the street when no cars are around.
Is it worth a cops time who’s within eyeshot to do anything about it? Waste of resources, she’s not endangering anyone.
Same situation but cars are all over, some swerving to avoid or slam on their breaks because she blindly runs out. She gets hit or cars pile into each other.
Cops in eyeshot. Well the drivers certainly are not the ultimate cause of this accident.
That’s my guess anyways.
