Fixing Speed Limits

We have a problem in this country with speed limit signs on the road. People ignore them. Part of the reason people ignore them is because they’re not real indications of the speed limit. The signs which suggest speeds for exit ramps and corners are no better. If a sign suggests taking a corner at 40, I can take it safely at 55 in my van 9 times out of 10. These signs have lost credibility. On I-95 Northbound just below the I-695 junction (a 65 MPH road) there is even a sign suggesting you take the corner at 65 MPH (translation: we know you’re speeding and that’s ok, but we really think you should slow down here). (Edit: This sign is no longer there) Of course no slowing down is actually necessary to take the corner safely. If you want people to listen to you, you need to earn their respect – it’s a simple fact of talking to groups of people.

I suggest a campaign to fix that by changing the following things: raise all speed limits on highways by 15 MPH, on all other roads by 10 MPH and then enforce it for real (and publicize this fact well). Wait, Mike, do you mean that the speed limit will actually be a limit? Yes, yes I do. Does that mean that if I go over the limit by 1 MPH I could be pulled over? Yes, yes it does.

This change will alleviate two big problems:

1) You won’t have this problem of a policeman being able to decide if they want to pull over somebody doing a normal speed. There shouldn’t be any judgment in it – judgment leads to biases, and this causes a problem. There are all kinds of features that may make you more or less likely to get pulled over: kind of car, color of your car, color of your skin, what lane you’re driving in, time of the month…etc. All of these really are unfair and arbitrary. Sure people with sports cars buy them to drive fast. But if they’re driving the same speed as I am, they deserve to get pulled over no more or less. I even like the fact that it works this way – I drive a big, boxy brown van. I’ve gone through at least 50 speed traps in my life at 10-over (and occasionally at 15-over when going with traffic) and I haven’t ever been pulled over (Edit: This is no longer true - I now have one ticket for 64 in a 50 in over 10 years of driving.) But this is really a stupid system. We can’t stop policemen from being biased for people who are actually speeding. If they want to pull over black people more than white people it’s difficult to stop them – but we can at least make it so that any people driving a normal, safe speed are immune from getting ticketed for doing nothing wrong. Partly this silly system stems from the fact that we don’t want people to drive fast. It uses more gas, and, in principle, is more dangerous. But that’s not reality. Reality is that people do drive that fast, and we need to work with reality rather than spending time wishing it were different. Our society seems particularly bad at problems like this.

2) It will add credibility back to the signs, not to mention the government that put them there. We obviously need to reevaluate our speed suggestion signs too for this to work – some of them are actually accurate, but most are not. This makes the corners where the speed sign is actually accurate treacherous, since people don’t believe the signs. If people actually know to listen, I think it would lead to fewer accidents.