I’m talking specifically about obeying the speed limit, doing a full stop at stop signs, etc. After receiving a speeding ticket for doing 53 in a 50, As an experiment I went a full day obeying all traffic laws 100% and it caused so much road rage. For example, there is a 2 lane road near me with a speed limit of 50 (where I got the ticket), traffic usually moves at about 60/65. There was a huge line of cars behind me and nowhere to pull over. As soon as an opening came up on the shoulder I was about to pull over and one of the cars behind me blew past me on the on the right blaring their horn. Then another truck passed me at the next opportunity and brake checked me. Both of these cars proceeded to run a red light about 1/4 mile ahead of me endangering others. By far the worst part of driving on this 2 lane road was the 25 mph work zone which is completely ignored by everyone else. It effectively resulted in me doing 25 mph in a “60” which is very dangerous.
Having needed to spend the entire day pulling over at every opportunity to let people pass I inevitably picked up a drill bit and got a flat tire.
Even matters as simple as stopping completely at a stop sign for 1 second cause immediate anger and dangerous behavior from other drivers.
What on earth are we expected to do? All I want is to avoid speeding tickets and drive safely.
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Speed limits are one of the many transportation issues that have been researched with findings that the US has ignored and the EU has implemented.
Drivers go at the speed they’re comfortable with regardless of any posted speed limits. They dont work. What does work is road design to make it uncomfortable to go faster. Narrower lanes, less vision on intersections, raised crosswalks, among other things.
I don’t think most of the EU really did anything about speed limits
I dont know about how widespread it is, but yeah EU has been doing what Im talking about https://www.pps.org/article/livememtraffic
Speed radars+ removing driver licences if too many infractions?
Not perfect, but a step in the right direction
It is fairly easy to obey the road rules. The problem is that if over time the laws aren’t enforced then it is easy over time for thos laws to erode, and then suddenly it feels weird to obey them.
Do it anyway. If a driver crashes into you because you’re obeying traffic laws, they’re at fault, and their life gets ruined because they’re an awful person. If someone blows through a red light, same deal. If traffic gets backed up for several miles because nobody wants to travel at the speed limit, fuck 'em, they should have left earlier. I enjoy the impotent fury that other drivers feel towards me when I’m going 35 in a 35.
It might be “immoral” and “sociopathic” for me to think this, but if someone is gonna get themself killed because they can’t stand to come to a complete stop at the stop sign, GOOD, I hope they die. The world is better off without them in it. Of course, never block someone from passing you even if they have to break the law to do it. You never know when someone is bleeding out from a chainsaw wound.
I agree with the spirit of this comment, but AVOID CRASHES. Don’t be dead right. A crash can cause you a lifetime of pain, avoid collisions at all costs, even if you have to break some traffic laws to do so.
Get into a potentially fatal car accident on principle? Nah
I have no choice but to do this in my current car, the transmission is fucked and if I accelerate too fast it slips and I don’t go any faster. So I slowly go to the speed limit and slowly slow to a slow stop
And if I really hit that accelerator like people want me to, the thing slips, stops, and then suddenly engages full force and I burn out. So that’s not much safer either
Also be aware that police tend to be a bit more stringent with enforcing traffic rules if you’re traveling through a small town. I read an article long ago (so take this with a grain of salt) that the police department of a small town gets a large portion of its funding through speeding tickets, so there’s a huge incentive for police in those areas to enforce traffic laws as tightly as possible.
In any case, the highest that I’ll do is speed limit + 5 mph when there’s not that many other cars around, and if the other cars want to pass by me, no big deal
I like to live a little more dangerously, so I do the speed limit plus ten.
I do it when I have to drive. If people get angry that’s their problem.
Getting a speeding ticket while going 3 miles over the speed limit sucks so I can see why you’re upset.
I’ve never had a problem just going with the flow of traffic. Sometimes almost everyone is going over the speed limit. I go with that. I’ve lived in Minnesota most of my life. I’m more comfortable than most driving in snow and ice. Sometimes in snowy conditions the flow of traffic seems slower than necessary. Yet, again, I just go with the traffic flow and end up driving a bit slower than I would otherwise. If there’s little to no traffic I just go the speed limit. If someone wants in my lane I let them in whenever possible.
Traffic on that road regularly does 60+ unfortunately. There weren’t any other cars around when I got the ticket.
I’d go with the flow even if they are going over. Drivers going at different speeds can lead to dangerous situations so I try to avoid that most of all. If there’s little traffic then I’d go about the speed limit.
That is still illegal and you can be ticketed for it. That is my point. “Its OK to break the law if everyone else was doing it” is not a valid legal defense. The law states in every state I checked that no driver shall exceed the posted speed limit under any circumstances.
You’re right, you could. I never have been ticketed or in an accident. It’d be better if everyone followed the speed limit, but since that doesn’t happen I try to take the safest approach possible given the situation.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a-day
It’s a feature, not a bug.
Your not expected to obey all laws all the time, its a tool in the toolbox for selective enforcement punishment, taxation.
Ironically, self driving cars will do more to make traffic laws more sensible, since the cars will OBEY every law, no matter how silly… and that will back up traffic until the law is fixed.
I’ve always thought that if you want to fix bad laws, go to the capital city where the law makers are and obey the law very carefully, such that the cost of obedience is paid by the lawmakers.
If everyone followed the law, there would be no problem. The problem is that bad and unsafe driving is normalized in our society.
I feel this places blame directly on the users of the road instead of the designers of the road. People just drive in ways they feel are safe. We could absolutely drive better as a society but realistically the countries with safe driving have designed the roads a lot better than we have. This is likely because America is so damn huge and we have very little federal regulation on what a road needs to be safe. So a road in the US could be gravel or worse, just two tire marks in the grass. A road also could be a 50 mile an hour street with intersections every block or two making them extremely unsafe and inefficient.
Our road design is trash and it’s really the root cause.
One thing though is the speed that feels safe for a driver does not always line up for what is safe for other users of the road. Bigger cars make drivers feel safer at the expense of everyone else.
You mean pulling over as in stopping at the side of the road to let people pass because you were abiding by the speed limit? That sounds so wild to me.
I absolutely love driving the speed limit exactly when someone behind me thinks I want a longer trunk, maybe a tiny bit slower if they’re persistent.
They’re usually able to keep a bigger distance all of a sudden.That said, the speed is usually at most at 10kmh above the limit so I guess it’s not too bad yet. Aside from the occasional idiot that thinks curves with little visibility are superior to straight sections where you can see the next 500 meters for taking people over.
I’m not sure where you live, but in many places if the speed of traffic is faster than the speed limit, you’re expected to follow that, if you can do so safely, because driving slowly causes the reckless behavior you mentioned and can actually be more dangerous
Your right, but this also creates a catch-22, where you have to break at least one laws. Your either impeding the flow of traffic, or your speeding. Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t.
I was going ten to fifteen over in the right lane on a major street and I literally felt fear for my life the way people around me were driving. People were raging at me for not running red lights! It was insane.
lol ever driven on a freeway near los angeles? Driving at the speed limit is guaranteed to get you rear ended.
And I thought my local New Zealand town had bad drivers, my god. Are the drivers all suicidal over there??
You would come to Wellington and cum at how respectful the drivers are there
I think traffic laws in many cases cause more issues than they solve, though I don’t know enough to really say which types of laws are problematic.
I do notice that a lot of drivers which go over the speed limit because it’s too low tend to overdo it, driving too fast instead, for example. On roads where the speed limit is fairly high most people seem to drive at a speed close to it.
I also read a study a few years ago which claimed that removing speed limits actually causes most people to drive slower, but I can’t find it right now.
That study was in like central Amsterdam or Rotterdam or some other old European town with a city center that was meant for horses and people. It’s not applicable to like busy thoroughfares
IIRC the one I read was about some county in the US which temporarily had speed limits removed for some reason, in the last few decades at most.
Oh interesting. Hope you can find it I’d like to see it.
After receiving a speeding ticket for doing 53 in a 50
This sounds too ludicrous not to be made up.
I’ve received a LOT of speeding tickets in my life. The only time I’ve EVER gotten a ticket for doing <5 mph over the posted limit is when I was actually doing +14 over the posted limit but the cop wrote it for 10 less than actual because he had to write a ticket but didn’t want it to be excessive…so the final ticket ended up being 54 in a 50 zone.
I can’t imagine anyone not being able to beat a +3 over speeding ticket in court. I probably wouldn’t even call my attorney for that and would just fight it myself.
One time when I lived in Utah, I literally got pulled over for driving the speed limit. Literally. The cop told me that I needed to go with the flow of traffic instead. He didn’t give me a ticket, but it was still an annoying interruption to my day, and I assume it gave him a power boner of some sort.
But another time, living in the same area, I got pulled over by a different cop for going with the flow of traffic, because speeding isn’t justified even when everyone else on the road is.
As another comment said, you’re fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t. Although, I do prefer the alternative of going with the flow of traffic to avoid road rage incidents as you’ve pointed out.
I think I would have demanded a ticket in your case. I would have really liked to see how that played out in court.
When I was in drivers’ ed they told us that even if the speed limit is, say, 35 mph, it’s safer to go 45 mph if everybody around you is also going 45 mph. I think most cops are also aware of this, so I wonder if you were just picked on to fulfill a ticket quota or something. Also differences that small in mph are very questionable for a ticket because speedometers can vary wildly and most if not all speedometers have a very minor margin of error. For example you could have been radar tracked at 53 but your speedometer could have been closer to 51 or 50
