Commuting- Do police set up speed traps during rush hour in your town ?

[Cary]

Oh, another pet peeve:

Setting up miles and miles of "construction zones" with no one working and reduced speed limits, so that tickets issued can double revenue per citation.

[bazookaman]

I'm not sure where "obeying the law" came into things. The OP was talking about the idiots that slam on their brakes when they see blue lights. Thereby increasing the chance of accidents. If everyone is going the posted speed limit of 55mph (obeying the law) and someone sees blue lights, more than likely they will slow down...a LOT. Regardless of whether they are obeying the law or not. It's just a built in response. I try NOT to do so, but all it takes is one bonehead in the front and it jams everyone up.

[Black]

Cary wrote:
The common practice for setting speed limits if that of the 85th percentile. Use of the 85th percentile speed concept is based on the theory that:

The large majority of drivers:
- are reasonable and prudent
- do not want to have a crash
- desire to reach their destination in the shortest possible time
- a speed at or below which 85 percent of people drive at any given location under good weather and visibility conditions may be considered as the maximum safe speed for that location.

In places where a vast majority of traffic exceeds the posted limit, those limits should be reconsidered. The 55 MPH speed limit has created a nation of scofflaws.

When I lived in Los Angeles, the speed limit on Franklin Ave. was increased from 30 to 35 MPH. There was public outcry about the lack of concern for safety. The traffic department and sheriff talked about the 85th percentile rule in explaining the increase. Guess what? Accidents went down the following year.

The Interstate system was designed for 85 MPH speeds, by the way.

In my opinion, speed limits should be reasonable, not arbitrary. Following arbitrary rules just because they are rules is ridiculous, in my opinion.

New Jersey just made a big deal of raising the fines for driving too slowly, supposedly reducing the possibility of road rage. Thing is, they already had the law on the books. It was never enforced. Did raising the fines do anything except possibly raise revenues?

Having said that, the intention of the NJ law is good. If someone wants to drive at 50-55 MPH, they should stay to the right. Issues arise when a slow moving vehicle (and yes, 55 is often considered slow) sits in the left lane, forcing cars to pass on the right. That, and the relative difference in speeds of vehicles, lead to accidents.

Lastly, traffic enforcement is (again, in my opinion) about revenue generation, not about safety enhancement. Red light cameras, for instance, have to produce a minimum revenue per camera according to the agreements between municipalities and the camera system companies. Famously, Lockheed Martin demanded that certain underproducing cameras in San Diego (IIRC) have their yellow light duration reduced. The result? More tickets, along with more rear end collisions.

/rant off

I disagree on almost every point here.
Red light cameras are a weak attempt to compensate for the lack of police on the road. I'll take 'em.
The idea that 55 mph was meant to increase safety shows a lack of historical perspective. In the 70s it was determined that less fuel is consumed when vehicles travel at 55 mph than at higher speeds-- it was enacted as part of a conservation effort. If you don't think conservation should be a priority, just say so.

[OWC Jamie]

Plenty of state cops here during rush hour when 495 becomes a parking lot.
( haven't travelled 495 during rush hour for 25 years, this is awful )
I don't think they are there for speeders but for aggressive drivers and to try to smooth out traffic from the speeding up and slowing down that happens. ( and the subsequent rear-ending)

We used to have the traps at night for drunk drivers.

[M A V I C]

Robert M wrote:
Mavic,

Seriously. You're playing semantics. People follow the law. The likelihood of a collision is reduced to a vastly lower level. That was the intention of my support for what Matt said. If I wasn't clear, then I apologize. Bear in mind, if you're driving slowly, the person behind will in turn be forced to slow down. If he/she is following the law, paying attention, etc, then it will be a non-issue. Maybe an inconvenience to those who break the law but that's their problem.

My point is, you're claiming that a crash of no fault of your own is somehow "not a problem".

My jaw dropped when you said this: "If the car in front slows down and I have to slow down because of it, it causes my brakes to wear, I have to use more gas to accelerate up to speed and it takes time out of my life. Those are all certainly problems someone can experience even if they're following the law."

With all due respect, the above statement is ridiculous.

Robert

Far less ridiculous than you claiming a crash is "not a problem".

If a problem can occur for a driver who follows the law - no matter how minor - it still disproves the statement "not a problem if you follow the law." Generalizations like this are incredibly easy to poke a hole in. I'm surprised you don't see that.

[Robert M]

Mavic,

Yes. My calling a crash a problem was ridiculous. Just as other statements in this thread are ridiculous. And, I'll admit that saying it like that was a mistake. I was _far_ from my best when I wrote that and could have gotten my point across in a much better manner.

It would have been far better to say, "If people followed the law, the number of issues we face while driving would be reduced dramatically."

"If the car in front slows down and I have to slow down because of it, it causes my brakes to wear, I have to use more gas to accelerate up to speed and it takes time out of my life. Those are all certainly problems someone can experience even if they're following the law."

Is it reasonable to say that the above mentioned statement was intended to be ridiculous and I should have recognized it from the start and responded accordingly?

Robert

[Cary]

Black wrote:
[quote=Cary]
The common practice for setting speed limits if that of the 85th percentile. Use of the 85th percentile speed concept is based on the theory that:

The large majority of drivers:
- are reasonable and prudent
- do not want to have a crash
- desire to reach their destination in the shortest possible time
- a speed at or below which 85 percent of people drive at any given location under good weather and visibility conditions may be considered as the maximum safe speed for that location.

In places where a vast majority of traffic exceeds the posted limit, those limits should be reconsidered. The 55 MPH speed limit has created a nation of scofflaws.

When I lived in Los Angeles, the speed limit on Franklin Ave. was increased from 30 to 35 MPH. There was public outcry about the lack of concern for safety. The traffic department and sheriff talked about the 85th percentile rule in explaining the increase. Guess what? Accidents went down the following year.

The Interstate system was designed for 85 MPH speeds, by the way.

In my opinion, speed limits should be reasonable, not arbitrary. Following arbitrary rules just because they are rules is ridiculous, in my opinion.

New Jersey just made a big deal of raising the fines for driving too slowly, supposedly reducing the possibility of road rage. Thing is, they already had the law on the books. It was never enforced. Did raising the fines do anything except possibly raise revenues?

Having said that, the intention of the NJ law is good. If someone wants to drive at 50-55 MPH, they should stay to the right. Issues arise when a slow moving vehicle (and yes, 55 is often considered slow) sits in the left lane, forcing cars to pass on the right. That, and the relative difference in speeds of vehicles, lead to accidents.

Lastly, traffic enforcement is (again, in my opinion) about revenue generation, not about safety enhancement. Red light cameras, for instance, have to produce a minimum revenue per camera according to the agreements between municipalities and the camera system companies. Famously, Lockheed Martin demanded that certain underproducing cameras in San Diego (IIRC) have their yellow light duration reduced. The result? More tickets, along with more rear end collisions.

/rant off

I disagree on almost every point here.
Red light cameras are a weak attempt to compensate for the lack of police on the road. I'll take 'em.
The idea that 55 mph was meant to increase safety shows a lack of historical perspective. In the 70s it was determined that less fuel is consumed when vehicles travel at 55 mph than at higher speeds-- it was enacted as part of a conservation effort. If you don't think conservation should be a priority, just say so.
Agree or not, traffic engineering studies show, over and over again, that 85th percentile is the safest speed for the majority of drivers.

Red light cameras may be an attempt to compensate for lack of police, but as a revenue aggregation stategy primarily, and only secondarily for enhanced safety. There have been any number of studies showing increased rear end collisions, and increased cost due to red light cameras.

If nothing else, red light cameras are supported/promoted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a private group owned by insurance companies, whose main goal is to increase revenues for insurance companies.

And you're right - the 55 MPH speed limit started with fuel conservation in mind, but was quickly subverted to "55 saves lives".

It was never "determined" that 55 MPH was optimum (some believed 40 MPH was optimal), but assumed that 55, along with a ban on ornamental lighting, closing gas stations on Sunday, and a 15% reduction in gas production would yield a 2.2% reduction in gasoline consumption.

According to the US DOT, all of the above measures combined amounted to a 1% reduction in gasoline consumption. Independent studies claim 0.5%.

Maybe ornamental lighting should be banned again... :-)

It has also been proven that 55 MPH was not safer. When limits were increased to 65 MPH, highway fatalities were reduced 3.4% - 5.0% (see 85th percentile traffic engineering...).

Lastly, many studies have been done, acknowledging that the 55 MPH speed limit has been ignored almost universally (again, depending on who you want to believe - 80% to 95% of the populace) (see 85th percentile traffic engineering...)

Here's a summary of the issues, stated much better than I can:

James Baxter, head of the National Motorists Association:
In the fall of 1973, in response to the OPEC oil embargo, President Nixon issued an executive order mandating a 55 mph national maximum speed limit. The following January, Congress made it official and passed a "temporary" one-year continuation of the limit. And so began a 22-year odyssey where reality and rational public policy never crossed paths.

Initially, this law was passed to conserve motor fuels, but it soon became lauded as a safety measure. It was for safety purposes that the law was made permanent in 1975. (It was eventually learned/admitted that the reduction in highway fatalities in 1974 was largely the result of reduced travel. The high fuel costs and recession in 2008 had exactly the same effect, although to a lesser degree, because fuel availability was not an issue, unlike the 1973-74 era.)

Motorist compliance with the 55 mph limit was always problematical and became more so as time progressed. Ticketing binges, threatened financial sanctions, relentless PR, and increased fines and penalties failed to stem noncompliance. Despite increasing noncompliance and increased highway speeds, fatality rates continued to decline, contradicting the folklore that higher speed limits and higher speeds result in more serious accidents.

In 1982, congressional proponents of the 55 mph speed limit, frustrated with their inability to bludgeon the populace into compliance with it, passed legislation commissioning the National Academy of Science to do a "study of the benefits of the 55 mph National Speed Limit." Although the intent was to bolster political and public support for the law, the outcome was to be just the opposite.

While the academy study, done by the Transportation Research Board, labored to put a positive spin on the most ignored law in the nation, it also undermined the propaganda that had supported this law from its beginning. One such revelation was that the law had virtually no meaningful effect on fuel utilization. The TRB researchers estimated that if the speed limit were raised from 55 to 65, national fuel consumption would increase by .018 percent. Saving less than two tenths of one percent in fuel consumption seems a poor tradeoff for putting 200 million motorists through the misery of going back to a 1930s speed limit.

In 1987, a small dose of rationality infected Congress and the states were permitted to raise interstate speed limits to 65—fatality rates continued to decline. In 1995, as one of the few meaningful accomplishments of the "Republican Revolution," Congress repealed the mandatory 55 mph limit in its entirety, and yes, fatality rates have continued to decline.

If this 22-year experiment in politicized "command and control" traffic management had any value, it would be the lessons we should have learned. For example, any student of human nature knows that we should pay attention to what people do, not what they say. In the late 1970s, a Gallup poll reported that 80 percent of the American public supported the 55 mph speed limit. At the same time, a similar percentage of drivers on the interstate system were exceeding that same speed limit. One of the last sates to increase its speed limit was New York. Toward the end of that state's dogged retention of 55, the level of motorist compliance was less than 5 percent. Obviously, painting numbers on a sign and issuing millions of tickets didn't have much effect on traffic speeds. Not that there weren't effects. These were golden years for the radar detector business and small towns along major highways raked in huge amounts of fines, fees, and surcharges.

But what about fuel utilization? Cars going 55 mph get noticeably better mileage than cars going 75 mph. With arbitrary, low, speed limits, that advantage is reduced by interrupted traffic flow, darting, weaving, braking, and accelerating as faster traffic beats its way through slower traffic scattered across all lanes of the highway. Compare this with a highway with a more reasonable and accommodating speed limit where the traffic moves more in sync and there is less braking and accelerating and the slower traffic stays out of the left-most passing lane.

The main reason a lower speed limit cannot have a material effect on fuel consumption, besides being ignored by motorists, is that the preponderance of motor fuels is consumed on streets, roads, and highways that already have lower speed limits and, more importantly, lower speeds. Only 20 to 25 percent of all traffic volume is on highways with speed limits above 55 mph, and this traffic is already achieving superior fuel economy to that of traffic plodding along in urban and suburban areas. (Only 1.2 percent of the nation's 3.8 million roadway miles are interstate highway.) Add in conditions like congestion and bad weather where speed limits become even more irrelevant and it should become obvious that changing numbers on speed limit signs on roads where perhaps 15 percent of all fuel is consumed will not yield the nirvana of "energy independence."