[regularfry]

> if you hit something or someone with your car, you were doing something wrong besides just speeding.

Only if you assume the driver has perfect knowledge of the nearby pedestrians, the road surface, what other road users are going to do before they do it, arbitrarily fast reaction speeds and flawless judgement. Oh, and brand new brakes.

Shit happens. Speeding makes it much worse when it does.

[CamperBob2]

Shit happens. Speeding makes it much worse when it does.

Statistics repeatedly fail to bear out your assertion. Promised increases in death rates that accompany increased highway speed limits essentially never materialize.

Modeling drivers as ideal gas particles whose collision rate is proportional to speed is simply wrong.

[regularfry]

When in a hole, stop digging.

> Statistics repeatedly fail to bear out your assertion.

Except they don't: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1108.p...

More interestingly: http://www.trb.org/Main/Blurbs/157220.aspx

I'll leave off the usual pedestrian fatality statistics here, because you seem not to be interested in that, and it's shooting fish in a barrel.

> Promised increases in death rates that accompany increased highway speed limits essentially never materialize.

From the second link's abstract:

    ...a speed limit increase from 55 to 65 mi/h on the average section would
    be associated with a 24% increase in the probability of an occupant being 
    fatally injured, once a crash has occurred.

That study looked at actual collision data. Where people had raised the speed limits, and actually seen actual increases in actual death rates.

> Modeling drivers as ideal gas particles whose collision rate is proportional to speed is simply wrong.

Don't do that, then. It's not directly proportional to speed, but there is a positive correlation. If you're going to convince me that speed limits are pointless and irrelevant, you're going to need to explain away some pretty basic physics.

[VBprogrammer]

I present this more as a interesting anecdote than a real argument but the fatality rate on the roads in Germany (where the autobhans have no enforced speed limit and seeing someone drive at 150mph is not uncommon) is considerably lower than in the US.

The reason this isn't a particularly great comparison is that driver training, car design and even the German attitude to driving are all built around the potential for high speeds.

[CamperBob2]

When in a hole, stop digging.

Always good advice.

  When the speed limit went up on 
  four stretches of road between Nephi and 
  Cedar City, accidents went down by 20 percent, 
  according to the three-year study by UDOT.

http://fox13now.com/2012/09/19/freeway-speed-limit-may-incre...

[graue]

Collision rate isn't what we want to minimize; fatality rate is. And the odds of pedestrian death in a collision are about 5% at 20mph, 45% at 30mph, and 85% at 40mph. Source: http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm

As a side note, when claiming statistics support your point of view, please cite those statistics. Keeps everyone honest. Thanks.

[mbell]

He is talking about highway speeds not side streets in a city.

I grew up in Maine, I-95 while I was younger had a completely baseless speed limit of 65mph. North of Augusta there is an average of about 20 miles between exits and very few travelers, there is no reason what-so-ever to impose a 65mph speed limit.

I now live in Boston and I-95 north to Maine travels though New Hampshire (for a whopping ~10 miles). Everyone knows that you follow the letter of the law in regards to the speed limit in New Hampshire. Why? I assure you it has nothing to do with safety, just as the $2 toll has nothing to do with maintaining 10 miles of highway. The state farms income from that highway in the form of tolls and tickets.

I'll give you speed limits make sense in cities, but given the fact that I've lived in Boston for 6 years now and seen about 3 people pulled over for speeding in that time, it doesn't really appear to be much enforced. Highways on the other hand have absurdly low speed limits and are farmed for ticket income regularly.

[nitrogen]

I don't think anyone here wants to raise speed limits in pedestrian-heavy areas. Talking about pedestrian fatalities is not constructive to an argument about freeway speed limits.

[stinkytaco]

It's not an argument about freeway speed limits, but about speed limits in general and in principle. I don't know where "freeway" was introduced as a limiter.

[nitrogen]

Different roads have such widely differing conditions that it's not possible to discuss speed limits in general and come to any meaningful conclusion. Since the implicit point of an argument is to come to a meaningful conclusion, it can be assumed that arguments which do not terminate in a meaningful conclusion are excluded. "In principle" is also not an argument that will fly with a lot of hackers who reject deontology.

[stinkytaco]

That still doesn't change a simple fact: no one said "highway speed limits". That was introduced when things started to look bad. "Speed limits are an artificial government limit designed to make people criminals" was the contention. You can't change the scope of the argument when it suits you. If you believe that speed limits are ok in pedestrian areas, you are not categorically opposed to speed limits. You may be opposed to speed limits on the highway, but that changes the scope of the discussion.