| >I'm not thinking about screwups, I'm thinking about reckless behaviour and endangering people But who determines which is which? The letter of the law really, really, really sucks when it comes to traffic law. I haven't collected data but I'd wager that pretty much nobody follows the letter of the law for an entire drive from A to B >For example, treating speed limits as suggestions instead of hard constraints That's more human than reckless. Outside of places with Orwellian enforcement (I'm looking at you Europe with all your cameras) they really are. The vast majority of people go at a speed they feel comfortable in the conditions. This is why (conditions permitting) traffic flows at 80 even when the sign might say 55. People only follow the speed limit when they feel it's a comfortable speed. This is why the general recommendation is to set speed limits for the 90th percentile speed. If you don't do this on highways you get people doing the (inappropriately low) speed limit in the wrong lane. Passing on the right, tailgating and all the other things caused by traffic friction which is more stuff for drivers to keep tabs on and that decreases safety for all. There have been studies on this (Google "traffic friction" and filter out everything that has to do with literal friction). If anything speed limits on multi-lane roads should be raised to reflect the speeds people actually drive. I hope we'll see more dynamic speed limits in the future since they'll help a lot. >overtaking in places where it's not allowed. If every 100th instance of an illegal pass (usually on the shoulder when waiting for someone who's stopped to take a left turn or on the right on the highway) in my state resulted in a ticket it would probably be about a year before half the state's drivers hit the three strikes cutoff and had their licensees revoked. The picture I'm trying to paint here is that aggressive enforcement of existing laws would probably be bad for the population at large because people break traffic laws in inconsequential ways all the time and that stronger enforcement of them would just screw people over (unless of course you enforce them so well that important people get screwed which would result in the laws changing) and discretion isn't an answer because that just results in profiling. |