[mjevans]

No, at least not for I-405 / I-5 near Seattle.

These roads, due to a complete lack of effective urban planning and development, are several times over capacity.

I like to think that this heuristic would be effective for such cases.

* Aim for a hard speed limit (maybe the actual speed limit).

* Actually obey the law of this state: Keep Right Except to Pass.

* ALWAYS allow merges (from either side) with higher priority.

Edit:

After reading the github link from one of the other posts I want to expand why I disagree and suggest always allowing merges.

It is to allow traffic to leave the freeway (merge right to exit) as well as to enter the freeway (merge left, mostly to enter at all, but also in case they're going a long distance or need to get to special use lanes on the left).

[PantaloonFlames]

> Aim for a hard speed limit (maybe the actual speed limit).

That's not gonna work. Depends on the day, the time, the weather, rain, fog etc. Some days, traffic flows at 70 on 405 during rush hour. If you go the legal speed limit you will be the dangerous blockage that makes everyone else down, and makes a few people unnecessarily grumpy. Other days it's misty because the water on the road gets stirred up by all the trucks. It's impossible to go the speed limit on these days, the flow is going 45.

There is no hard rule, except: go with the flow. SEE the traffic. BE the traffic. Do not FIGHT the traffic.

[ThrustVectoring]

Enforcing a speed limit on freeways is completely possible. They've got it done in England. What you need to do is capture license plates on entrance and exit, and calculate the average speed for each car's trip. If the speed limit is 50 MPH for traffic-flow reasons, and you do your 15 mile commute in 15 minutes, you're getting a "60 in a 50 MPH zone" ticket in the mail, every single time.

People will learn in a hurry that speeding is pretty much pointless and self-harming.

[noarchy]

They've really got the surveillance state thing down to a science there, if they're doing things like that. In North America, where there are cameras, they tend to only look at your speed at a specific moment.

[bsder]

This works in the UK because

1) a lot of non-artery roads are really shitty in the UK 2) the UK is an island with lots of rivers and lakes so you may not have an option besides that particular road 3) UK average trips are likely much shorter

If they enforced speed limits on roads in the US with that technique, that road would simply stop being used. There are almost always other options, and the further you are traveling, the more options there are.