[woodruffw]

Speed limits are a blunt instrument, because "slow" isn't the real goal: the goal is to get people to drive safely, and one way they currently don't do that is by driving at reckless speeds (regardless of what the limit happens to be.)

[1123581321]

You don’t know which speeds are actually reckless. Using speed limits to inform your opinion is circular. It depends on the design and condition of the road, the quality and features of the car, and traffic, weather and environmental conditions.

[woodruffw]

I didn’t say that I did know. It’s a general point, one that I can make by pointing to any particular example of reckless driving (of which there are many, including ones I have been personally subjected to.)

[1123581321]

Yes, you did. You said you didn’t think there was any excuse for going 93 in a 55.

[woodruffw]

The context is important: the author describes their joyride through a collection of twisty backroads in Virginia. It’s not the speed itself that makes it inexcusable.

[stefan_]

Well we have the stats and at 30mph already a pedestrian has a low chance of survival. So there is a perfectly good case to be made that just exceeding 20mph is reckless. Maybe we just limit cars there, then at least we are not "circularly informed", whatever that means.

[1123581321]

It means to use posted speed limits to decide what is a safe speed, rather than to evaluate the actual risk or at least have some model for what makes a number unsafe other than what the sign says. Your method, picking a number based on pedestrian survival rate, wouldn’t be that.

[hedora]

Ah, but posted limits are a terrible signal of safety, at least in all the states I've lived in.

One state likes speed traps for out of towners, so the speed limit is 55mph (and not enforced) on 1.5 lane gravel country roads, but 35 for four lane divided roads just outside city limits.

The other state decided to upgrade the roads in affluent cities/towns so existing speed limits would be 10-20 mph too low, but then didn't raise speed limits afterwards. So you need to know what the road budget was a few decades ago in order to compute safe speed from the speed limit signs. (Or, just use common sense...)

[1123581321]

Exactly so. And those particular examples (lowering them for revenue or aesthetic purposes) can actually mean decreases in safety and wellbeing, beyond the ordinary dangers of arbitrary set speeds, as stakeholders internal or external to the police department pressure officers to spend too much time tending the road.

[charcircuit]

Pedestrians don't walk on country roads.

[throwaway0a5e]

Some do. And those that do know what they signed up for and behave accordingly.

It's like walking along a rail line. When traffic does show up you stay well out of its way.