Speed Limits
I'm a big believer in obeying speed limits. I
think Americans drive too much, and when we drive, we drive too fast.
The thing that really baffles me,
though, is that we bother having speed limits that are universally ignored.
When I go 25 mph on our local street, which has a normal town speed limit of 25
mph, cars will often pile up behind me, beeping, flipping me off, or roaring
past in their SUVs. This is a narrow city street with no sidewalks, in which
pedestrians walk on the shoulder, and the neighborhood often has children or
animals crossing the road. And the whole road is less than a mile long before
it reaches the major artery, so this speed doesn't gain
much.
Theoretically, if a police
officer catches someone going 26 mph, it's a $100 fine. If they're doing 40,
it's a $100 fine. In real life, an officer is never going to give a ticket for
26 -- it's too nitpicky. What's the real speed limit? It's a secret. Try
asking a cop -- they won't tell you. While it is a fact that you can roar past
a cop doing 73 in a 70 zone with zero fear of being pulled over, they'll never
admit it. On the interstate, I pretty much figure that I can safely go 12 mph
beyond the speed limit without fear. This is borne out by the observation that
at that speed, almost as many cars pass me as cars I
pass.
My guess is that tickets are only
issued at 16 mph or more over the speed limit -- and that has a $175 fine. I
still observe lots and lots of folks traveling at that sort of speed, and
they're almost never caught -- but they do slow down when they see a cop.
Anyway, the fact is that our speed limit is enforced with a random and large
fine.
In addition to the hefty fine,
I'm told that one's insurance rate may well double, meaning that your auto
insurance could cost an extra $400 per year for 5 years. That's a $2000 fine,
in effect. Ouch! You can go to traffic school to remove the ticket from your
record, though, so this "fine" only goes into action if you get two tickets in
one year.
I'd say that 99% of
speeding goes completely unpunished, while 1% or less gets a $175 fine (plus
traffic school), and a miniscule percentage gets a second ticket and the nasty
$2000 insurance penalty. The penalty is so large that folks fight the heck out
of it, and quite often beat it somehow. The net result is that everybody speeds
and nobody worries about it. Oh, and cars kill almost 1000 pedestrians a year
in California (two last year here in Citrus Heights) -- and we won't even talk
about bicyclists.
Everybody hates the
automated radar guns that mail out computer tickets, and rightly so. It's a
surprise $100 penalty for virtually everybody who passes one until they figure
out where they are. Unfair, and especially unfair to those for whom $100 is a
lot of money. But I sure do hate it when we have laws that are only enforced
sporadically and subjectively.
Would it
be nice if there was a huge network of speed-monitoring devices, such that you
got a bill at the end of the month for $0.10 (or whatever) for every minute you
spent 1 mph over the speed limit? I'm not sure -- but I strongly suspect folks
would slow down.
I also think it should
be illegal to hit pedestrians. If you look at the statistics, pedestrians being
killed by cars have been relatively flat since the 70s. I have no data, but I
believe that the number of pedestrians has plummeted in that time, meaning that
the actual danger of being near cars has gone up a lot.
Filed Sat
- April 30, 2005, 10:17 AM in
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