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.
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.
True, but traffic not following “the algorithm” is more dangerous than moderate speeding.
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, 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.
Is this some kind of American thing?
Canada too. Sometimes it seems like the speed “limit” is actually the minimum most people are expected to go (if possible) on Ontario’s highways, especially the busiest ones. Enforcement is almost entirely done manually and barely exists, if it’s being done at all.
A lot of roads and highways are very over-engineered here with wide & forgiving lanes, with broad shoulders at the side. The actual speeds that can be accommodated in the design are far greater than the posted limit.
the hell
To expand on what Grappling said, I’ll give you an example. A few years ago the city repaved a decrepit section of road into a smooth and wide open road that is wide enough for 4 lanes but made into 2 wide ones with massive shoulders. There are no pedestrians on this road and you can comfortably go 80-100km/h. The speed limit they set? 50. While it’s not every road, it is definitely a lot of roads that get treated like this. It results in getting very comfortable with breaking the speed limits because the speed limits are
stupidnot matched to the designs of the roads.In Canada, the speed limits are kind of designed for bad conditions. Because somehow, in the cities, many people are too stupid or stubborn to go below the speed limit in the snow.
So in clear conditions, the speed limit should be higher than it is.
Also, at least around where I live, the roads are designed to support higher speeds than the speed limits indicate. So we have roads designed for 50km/h, but the speed limit is 30km/h. 50km/h feels nore comfortable to drive.
Why don’t we just redesign the roads to make them less comfortable to speed in? Well, how else are we going to issue tickets where officers can choose who gets fined, and sometimes even get to search a car out of the deal??
North American driving culture sucks. For the past 70 years cars have dominated at the expense of all other modes of travel. They’re deeply embedded into our culture, infrastructure, planning processes, transportation engineering, and daily lives. They have become synonymous with freedom of movement for a lot of people who can’t imagine any different way to get around. Speed limits and enforcement in their minds are seen as an infringement on their rights. It will be a long and uncertain process to enact change, ripe for disruption and setbacks, but the status quo isn’t working, we’ve hit the limits of cars’ ability to scale, and with the internet showing how things are in the rest of the world, some people are waking up to what’s possible when you aren’t dependent on cars to get around safely and reliably.
no idea where you’re from, but it’s true in many European countries too
So you can selectively punish.
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.
It’s not just a matter of others getting butthurt. It’s actively dangerous to be driving at a different speed from the rest of traffic, regardless of whether you’re going faster or slower.
If that’s true, then it would be a good idea to have everybody converge on a particular speed. It doesn’t seem practical to negotiate that speed amongst a constantly-changing set of drivers, it probably needs to be chosen in advance. That seems like a natural function of government, to choose the consensus speed through a process designed to represent everybody in the community.
To communicate to drivers entering the roadway this consensus speed which everybody must travel at—for safety—the government could, say, post it on signs located along the roadside.
But that’s probably just a ridiculous fantasy. How then should all drivers negotiate the consensus speed to ensure safety?
No negotiation is needed. As long as everyone agrees to follow everyone else (i.e. no one tries to overtake and you keep a constant gap with the car in front of you), then everything will naturally fall into place.
Given those conditions, everybody drives the speed of the slowest driver.
Yes? I get the impression that you mean to disagree with me, but I can’t tell how.
I don’t know if my explanation of the phenomenon is correct or not. I don’t know much about the science of traffic dynamics. All I know is that when you’re on the road, pretty much everyone ends up at approximately the same speed. That speed can differ relative to the speed limit depending on time of day, road and weather conditions, which road you’re on, etc. and there’s no one to tell me what speed to aim for. I just look at the flow of traffic and follow it. That’s all.
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Textbook case of a cognitive bias. If you’re going the speed limit, every car that passes you is speeding. You don’t see all the other cars doing the speed limit.
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’s so the police always have something they can stop you for.
Bureaucracy is a nightmare. There’s national laws, local laws, technical laws, practical laws, petty laws, incompetent laws, minority laws, old laws nobody bothered to get rid of, potential laws for possible situations that might happen at some point in an imaginary future… and so on.
Basically, it depends on who writes the law and why. All laws are subjective to humans, by humans and against anything that annoys the specific humans in charge at any given point in time.
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
expected … traffic speed
You’re not supposed to be speeding you know?
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I’ll never forget my first time driving in Southern California.
I was doing 85mph in a 70mph zone and a prius flew past me.
Where I live, if you’re driving the speed limit on the highway, you’d best be in the slow lane…and you’d still have people passing you.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
