| I don't know if people share this opinion, but to me speeding is due to the inadequacy and inconsistency of speed limits. Near my home there is a major thoroughfare with a 35 MPH speed limit. It has no homes facing the road, just a few fenced backyards some fair distance away but mostly it has farms, ponds, and golf courses. People regularly go 40-50 MPH down this road. Another major road that crosses this one has a speed limit of 55 MPH. It has several houses directly on it. I've stopped once to let an old man cross the street to get to his mail box. It has a school (where the speed limit drops to 45 MPH). It is too narrow and dark in my opinion to have a 55 MPH speed limit. I believe both roads should be 45 MPH. Furthermore, the freeways through town are 55 MPH speed limit. Ridiculous. Most states have 65 MPH limits even within a city. (I didn't grow up here, obviously.) So naturally there is a lot of speeding. There are probably several rules and reasons for these limits. The 35 MPH road is within city limits while the 55 MPH road is technically in a different township and would once have been considered a farm/country road though it is now a major road to an office building complex and school. We also have to deal with snow and other weather conditions part of the year, and we don't have electronic speed limit signs to change the speed limit or something based on changing conditions. Then there's also the fact that city planners never manage to build sufficient roads until the current ones are overcrowded. So this 35 MPH road probably was not originally intended to be such a major road, but there isn't any other good way to go N-S through that part of town because the rest is all winding back and forth through neighborhoods. I would definitely be in favor of having speed limits that were consistent and actually made sense, then enforcing them very carefully. (Note that the article doesn't say how much over 25 counted as speeding. Did he count 26 as speeding? My own metric is that if it is less than 5 over then it is not speeding.) |
As a planner, I always find this sentiment amusing. The only thing less popular than being stuck in traffic, is the use of eminent domain that would be required to pave ever larger percentages of our urban land.
Planners can't expand roadways into the 5th dimension. Roads require land--a lot of it in fact. Also, it's not like planners don't anticipate that congestion will be increasing if demand for vehicle travel and population also increase.
Lastly, the prevailing wisdom in planning is that "widening roads to combat congestion is like loosening your belt to combat obesity." There's a popular press book that talks about how increasing roadway capacity can paradoxically worsen traffic: https://books.google.com/books?id=ckLcxEb5tM8C&hl=en