[jfisher4024]

This is like how CI forces developers to write better code by nudging us towards good behaviors. Is it annoying sometimes to write well-formatted code with high test coverage? Sure. Is it annoying to drive at the speed limit? Sure. Ultimately, it leads to a better outcome.

If this gets adopted, within 10 years people won’t be able to imagine how we lived without it

[Cheer2171]

It seems like most Americans genuinely believe they have not only a right to break the law when it comes to speed limits, but an obligation to speed. Or at least they drive like it. "I'm following the flow of traffic" as if other people breaking the law makes it OK? They feel like they have to race other cars on the road.

I had several completely "straight edge" friends who were obsessed with morality and would never break any law. Except get in a car with them and they go 10-15 mph over, but obsessively look for cops. If they see one, they go 5-10 mph under the limit. If they get a ticket, to them it wasn't like they did something wrong, they just had bad luck. I like to go the speed limit in the second from the right hand lane, often behind a large 18 wheel truck, put it in cruise control, and mostly watch the cars fly by me. This idea was unthinkable to them, even when they were not in a rush.

[endominus]

>It seems like most Americans genuinely believe they have not only a right to break the law when it comes to speed limits, but an obligation to speed. Or at least they drive like it. "I'm following the flow of traffic" as if other people breaking the law makes it OK?

That seems to be a true sentiment, though[0][1][2]. Deviating significantly from the speed of actual traffic will likely lead to more accidents. Insisting stubbornly on following the letter of the law when it is actually detrimental to safety is not moral; it is merely pedantic. Fiat justitia ruat caelum is not a particularly healthy view of the relationship between the legal system and society.

[0]: https://trid.trb.org/view/306976 (From the abstract: "A major influence on speed variance is the difference between the design speed and the posted speed limit. It was determined that speed variance will approach minimum values if the posted speed limit is between 5 and 10 mph lower than the design speed. Outside this range, speed variance increases with an increasing difference between the design speed and the posted speed limit. It was also found that drivers tend to drive at increasing speeds as the roadway geometric characteristics improve, regardless of the posted speed limit, and that accident rates do not necessarily increase with an increase in average speed but do increase with an increase in speed variance.")

[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1904038 ("A model of the optimal speed limit is developed which explicitly recognizes the role of average speed, speed variance, and the level of enforcement. An unusual result emerges, namely that a higher speed limit may be optimal when reducing the variance in highway speeds reduces accident externalities.")

[2]: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/17098/... ("Separate studies by Solomon (1964) and Cirillo (1968) concluded that, as vehicle speeds deviated from the average speed of the traffic stream, crash involvement rates increased... Studies throughout the 1970s produced findings consistent with the research... For crash severity, higher vehicle operating speeds are associated with more severe crash outcomes. However, the relationship between crash frequency and speed is not as clear. There is some indication that increasing posted speed limits is associated with an increase in expected crash frequency; however, the relationship between operating speed and crash frequency has yet to be well established.")