[ryantgtg]

In California, you literally can't "slap a 25 sign on a stretch of road where 90% of people feel like 30 is reasonable 90% of the time." That would be a violation of the vehicle code, which states that speeds are determined by the 85th percentile of operating speeds.

[dsfyu404ed]

As far as "laws CA has that most places don't have" that seems like one of the few reasonable ones. (and I say that as someone who has spent way to much time reading up on traffic and vehicle speed related things). In addition to delivering reasonable speed limits in most places it prevents towns from lowering speed limits in key areas to enable law enforcement rent seeking and probably saves countless hours of arguing over speed limits in local government.

[ryantgtg]

Another perspective is that "speeding leads to increased speed limit."

Generally, many streets are not designed in a context-sensitive way, but instead designed to fit the standards of a limited functional roadway classification system (arterial, collector, local). The passive safety approach of the '60s, as championed by the NHTSA, assumed that crashes are inevitable, and so the safety focus was put on preventing injury after a crash. Thus arterials, for example, have a similar design in which many roadside objects (trees, signs, lights, bollards, etc) were removed, with a "soft landing" on the side. And now we have big wide straight streets that, in their design, encourage us to drive faster.

There are extensive efforts to revise this CA law because of the unintended consequence that it makes roads more dangerous for non-vehicular travelers.

[amanaplanacanal]

Unfortunate when that "soft landing" is a pedestrian or somebody on a bicycle :( At least the driver wasn't injured, I guess.