I believe it 100%.
I started riding with a Garmin bike radar and installed an app that tells me exactly how fast a car is going when it passes, and the majority are over the speed limit.
Just the other day, in a 60 km/h zone, I clocked two cars going 125 km/h.
If I thought for a second that police would charge these drivers using photo/video evidence, I’d fork over the $500 to get the radar with a camera built-in and report each and every speeding driver that passes me.
In Denmark we have the lovely new law that if you drive more than 100% over the speed limit and over 100 kmh or drive over 200 kmh at all or drunk driving with over 2‰ they confiscate the car and you are not getting it back at all. They confiscate the car regadles of who owns the car (with very few exceptions) and that is also if it is leased. So far since when the law started they have confiscated over 2000 cars in two years. It’s my favourite law of all laws right now. The fine for driving crazy is also nicely proportional to your income and it removes the car so the person cannot just drive without license afterwards.
This sounds like a money-making opportunity. If 85% of drivers insist on breaking the law, they should pay. We can then use that money to redesign the road for more traffic calming.
That soudns great. But why spend that money on traffic calming? Let’s just use that money to install additional speed-camera’s and build more roads that encourage more speeding. Revenue generation must be priority number one for every government!
In the US speed limits are set by 85% of traffic speed on a road. So if the road was set for 30mph, and then you changed it to 20MPH with no other changes, you will immediately get 85% of drivers breaking the “limit.”
Another way to say it is that UK’s department for transport has incompetently designed 85% of their 20mph roads.
UK highways departments have had essentially zero budget for 2+ decades now. There’s no funding to completely retrofit every single residential street to match the new signage. Most of them are already incredibly narrow and tight compared to your average North American street.
Hmm, sounds like the infrastructure for personal vehicles is pretty unsustainable, perhaps we should start closing off streets so that traffic will naturally be limited to locals only thus solving the problem from the demand side.
Another way to say it, is that they haven’t installed enough average speed cameras.
If you install a few of those, suddenly drivers do manage to keep to the speed limit.
The US system is stupid. Most drivers drive too fast and overestimate their driving capabilities.
Cool create perverse incentives that do nothing to physically stop a car from barreling down a residential street, but also generate tax revenue so now the government is further discouraged from fixing the problem of a car barreling down a residential street, lest they lose revenue. Good job!
@PowerCrazy @mondoman712
The 85% rule is insane. Basically, it means that speed limits are set by the most dangerous drivers.
The streets in my town were set out over 120 years ago. But as usual, cars have usurped the rights of prior users to the point where KSIs or peds and cyclists run at 4x the UK rate, and I don’t even live in Florida. I mean, jaywalking laws were brought in to ease drivers’ consciences about the number of pedestrians they were killing.Oh for sure. Road design is a disaster for anything other then highspeed thorough-fares, which would be better off as trains. It sucks.
