alt Hacker NewsThat … is definitely not how things work in the US. Municipalities set speed limits based on a variety of things including but not limited to maximizing revenue, the streets city council members live on, random news reports about speeds in adjacent jurisdictions, and so on.
Were a car to refuse to exceed the speed limit, it would be dangerously slow almost everywhere in the united states, arguably reducing safety substantially.
Replies
This is the justification you make to yourself. People drive the speed limit. I do, never had a speeding ticket. It has never been dangerous.
I find driving in the US kind of weird. Most people are driving 5-10 mph above the speed limit. Not slower, not faster. So why not make the speed limit 5-10 mph faster? But then I guess that people will go over that speed limit.
Maybe the posted speed limit doesn't include the tip.
There are an enormous number of 2 lane roads in school zones. When there's only one lane of travel in your direction, what's the argument that driving the speed limit could be dangerously slow?
When I lived in Maryland, the state cops would sometimes do this thing, where a cop car would be in each lane, going exactly the speed limit.
No idea if they still do that.
How is it possible to drive 'dangerously slow'? Nobody should be driving at a speed (regardless of the limit) where they cannot react in time to a slow or stopped vehicle appearing ahead of them.
If folks are actually interested in how speed limits are set in American cities, I'd encourage them to read about the process in their municipality rather than absorbing information from message board conspiracy posts. In practice, there are indeed several competing pressures that dictate speed limits.
One source of pressure to keep speeds high is that if municipalities can classify a street as a collector or arterial, they can get federal aid for projects related to the road. As such cities will often want to bring a local road up to collector or arterial status so that they can get higher federal funding for it. (Collectors and arterials usually are larger streets with higher speed limits, though the biggest gray zone is between collectors and local roads and often the biggest difference is indeed the speed limit.) Urban planning discourse about "stroads" in the US is largely a story of local roads that have eventually been classified as collectors or arterials so retain the residential or commercial density of a slower road but are expected to have the speeds and vehicle volumes of faster roads.
(FWIW I first saw this on city-data in the early 2000s and vaguely heard my parents' generation say similar things to this comment, but when I actually started listening and attending local meetings I realize that it's mostly an urban legend that gets repeated to each other.)
This is a very weird argument. How can a car be dangerously slow if all the other cars stick to the speed limit as well? Any danger can only come from a difference in speed. So the danger is actually not the car observing the speed limit, it is the other cars that do not. Notably, any reduction in danger that flows from breaking the speed limit is only for the car and other cars breaking the speed limit, in no case it is for pedestrians, cyclists or other non-vehicle participants in traffic.