Speeding...or just going with the flow?

An interesting post came up in the forums on edmunds.com concerning gas prices. The poster was responding to an earlier comment from a Chicago area commuter who said he traveled at or slightly below the speed limit, mostly on 4-lane roads, on his drive to work. Others however drive like crazy only for him to catch up with them at the next red light -- the all-too-familiar "hurry up and wait" syndrome.

Here is the response to the commuter:

I'm not advocating that a person drive like a madman. I'm simply saying that if you drive at exactly the speed limit or a couple miles below on a road where traffic can't pass you then you are going to p___ people off. I've driven throughout most of this country and, for whatever reason, I've noticed that everywhere our speed limits are set artificially low. I've noticed that most people deal with this by driving around 6-9 mph over the limit, which is typically below what will put them at risk of a speeding ticket. Let's say the limit is 55 mph and you choose to drive 54 and have a bunch of people stacked up behind you that would otherwise be driving 63 mph. Would these people behind you really be saving all that much time? Probably not. Guess what, you're not saving all that much money [on gas].

My experience is the opposite of yours. I routinely drive a route that has a 12 mile stretch of road where it is almost impossible to pass. The posted limit is 50 mph but it is safe to travel considerably faster than that. Until a few years ago the predominant speed on this section of road was 60 mph, [but] it is now 50 mph. When you finally get to the end where there is room to pass you typically have 20+ drivers behind one guy that felt he was justified in imposing his will on everyone else.

I don't care if a person wants to drive slower to save a few bucks on gas. Just don't disrupt the flow of traffic.

I am especially amused by his saying, "for whatever reason, I've noticed that everywhere our speed limits are set artificially low." And my response would be, "in whose opinion?"

Well, I can tell you in Michigan that the speed limits aren't artificially low. Cars are allowed to go 70 mph on the metro Detroit freeways, and even major roads in the area with traffic lights like Telegraph Road have a 50 mph speed limit.

Most states west of the Mississippi have rural interstate speed limits of 75 mph for passenger vehicles. In Nevada, you can go 70 mph on the rural 2-lanes. On busy city streets in Los Angeles, the speed limit is 35. New Mexico allows 70 mph on undivided 4-lane US 550 (with conventional intersections even). The blanket speed limit in Manhattan is 30 mph. Certainly fast enough in all cases. I wonder if people driving on the parts of I-10 and I-20 in Texas that are now posted at 80 mph are complaining this speed limit is "artificially low" and bump it up to 86 to 89 mph.

If I'm "disrupting" someone's progress on a 2-lane road (one lane in each direction) by going the speed limit, my response is "too bad." However, I will encourage following drivers to pass me, if legal. If someone gets really obnoxious, like flashing his lights, flapping his arms, or getting so close I can't see his headlights, then I'll find a safe place to pull over. Or I wave them around in a legal passing zone. Funny thing, some of these people WON'T pass when you wave them around! Do they think I'm bluffing or somehow misleading them into a head-on crash?

Karl gets a speeding ticket

I like Karl Brauer, the Editor-in-Chief of the popular edmunds.com website. However, the other day he was grousing on his blog about a speeding ticket he received on his daily 50-mile commute from Ventura County to the Edmunds' offices in Santa Monica, California, next to Los Angeles. He was traveling in a new Mini Cooper S test car and had been stopped for going 72 mph in a 55 mph zone. He took some photos of the road after his stop, and they didn't look too different from my photo of US 6 in the east central part of the state near Bishop, close to the Nevada line. US 6, however, has 65 mph speed limit.

As Karl put it, "... it's been about 2.5 years since my last ticket, so I was due. Considering I drive approximately 30,000 miles a year (much of it on cop-addled Pacific Coast Highway) I don't feel a smidge of guilt at that rate of citation collection. And like nearly every speeding ticket I've ever received, this one had nothing to do with public safety. How do I know? Because...where I got the ticket -- a deserted stretch of road through flat, deserted farmland where you can see forever and there are no cross streets for a good 10 miles. The speed limit is 55, but Officer Williams says I was doing...(dramatic pause)...72.

"I didn't intend to do 72, but I was playing with the radio in our new Mini Cooper S, and the turbo engine (especially if you've hit the "Sport" button) has a habit of creeping up in rpm if you don't watch the speedo. I'm sure that in another 10 seconds or less I'd have scanned the gauges, seen my speed and eased back on the throttle. This is assuming that it was really me doing 72 mph. There were three cars in front of me, but when I pointed this out to the officer he insisted his radar could ferret out my speed from the others'.

"...Let me just clearly state that, in my opinion, 72 mph on that road, under those conditions, is still not unsafe in any way, shape or form. And if you think it is, then, also in my opinion, you're an idiot. The careless part was not using my radar detector to avoid a purely revenue-oriented speed trap.

"As I've said many times before, the concept of citing people for bad/dangerous driving doesn't bother me, but the concept of citing people for revenue generation does. The reason police patrol these areas isn't for public safety but because they know speeding is still a possibility. In much of Southern California speeding isn't a problem because traffic makes it a non-issue. But on certain stretches of PCH, as well as much of Ventura County, people still have the potential to speed. Of course, this is where speeding is least likely to actually cause a problem...but that's beside the point...right?"

Ironically, I was speaking with a co-worker the same day Karl posted the above rant. The co-worker had recently lost her 95-year-old dad. She mentioned he always rued the one day in his long life that he was ticketed for speeding -- 2 or 3 mph over the posted 35 mph in a small town in his native Virginia on a Sunday morning. Now THAT's patently unfair! Car speedometers even today, let alone years ago, were not that accurate.

But 72 mph in a 55 mph zone on a 2-lane road? Inexcusable. In Virginia, where I now live, the maximum speed limit on ANY 2-lane road is 55 mph, due to topography, population density, and a lack of those nice paved shoulders on most such roads. And radar detectors are illegal. So if you get stopped for speeding, and the cop sees your radar detector, you get busted with another fine.

Even in the tiniest VA towns, the speed limit often drops to 25 mph, yet within the Los Angeles city limits when I was there in December 2005, most speed limits seem to be 35 mph. On that trip, my wife and I flew out to meet our son and drove back east across the country. California allows 65 mph on US 395 (almost all 2-lane) once you leave the L.A. megalopolis, with only a few slowdowns through the infrequent small towns.

We went north past Lone Pine to Bishop, and then headed northeast on US 6 to the Nevada border. The road again was 2-lane with a 65 mph limit. In Nevada, the limit went up to 70. But one big difference is that the road is nearly deserted in parts of Nevada. There was one approximate 150-mile stretch east of Tonopah (beyond the split with US 95) where we encountered only THREE oncoming vehicles, NONE going in our direction, and none entering from mainly unpaved side roads!

I haven't been in Ventura County north of L.A., but from Karl's frequent description of road conditions, there's a lot of commuter traffic, much busier than US 395 or 6, and therefore evidently has lower speed limits on its 2-lane roads for safety reasons. So his photo may haven been a tad misleading. There's only a thin yellow line separating you from oncoming disaster. It's a lot easier to handle an emergency at 55 than at 72 mph, and the odds are stacked against you in a Mini if you were hit by oncoming traffic. This isn't like south central Nevada where you really do have the road to yourself!

Karl brings up a point so often raised by enthusiasts. They claim speeding tickets are revenue generators, but police pay no attention to true examples of "bad/dangerous" driving, such as tailgating, weaving through traffic without signaling, and (the horror!) "camping" in the far left lane of multi-lane highways, blocking speeders' progress. As I have said much earlier on this blog, the go-fast crowd has pretty much convinced themselves that speeding, in and of itself, is harmless, and police should be concentrating their efforts on all these other lawbreakers! The irony is that the blatant speeders, who insist radar detectors are needed for their adventures, are in my experience also the ones who commit these other "bad" behaviors: tailgating, weaving, improper passing, and not giving slower drivers who happen to be in the left lane adequate time to move over to the right!