Furthermore, we literally use the phrase, "never got so much as a speeding ticket" to suggest that speeding is the epitome of a minor, inconsequential infraction, when the reality is that we know speeding is a significant cause of and contributor to death, destruction, and injury in automobile crashes.
I do believe all of those are minor infractions (and of course they were inconsequential, except for the delay and expense [if convicted] of the ticket). Revenue enforcement here is mostly done on controlled access highways; it’s shooting fish in a barrel.
There's real political pushback from trying to actually decrease traffic incidents because actions to decrease these incidents result in higher overhead for current drivers, something historically lightly enforced.
Of course they do. The laws they enforce with machine level reliability do not reflect the reality of how society behaves.
Nobody actually cares whether or not people obey the rarely relevant number on the sign so long as people travel a safe and reasonable speed.
Predicated on simply having been driving over the speed limit, the chances of an accident are very low. That's why people don't care about speeding.
(This is one of my big issues with US speed limits. All the discussion around it is always scoped only to other cars for the most part.)
Second, there's the matter of just how damn uncomfortable it is to be around speeding cars when you're not also in a car yourself. People in suburbs don't really think about this because nobody walks anywhere. But I live in a walkable urban environment and the speeders here are an enormous hit to quality of life. They're louder, more aggressive -- it's just really unsettling to be around.
This can be hard to convince suburbanites of, because they conceive of themselves mostly as drivers and not as pedestrians, but even if there were no safety improvements, it would be a huge win for urban environments if we could rein in speeding.
But the reality is that it would also save ~6,000 lives a year in the U.S.
In practice speeding or at least the instance that resulted in getting ticketed is usually inconsequential.
Between highways signed well under the normal traffic speeds, revenue enforcement and fishing stops the overwhelming majority of speeding tickets are trivial. People engaging in the kind of speeding most people can agree is excessive are a tiny minority. If they weren't people wouldn't use a speeding ticket as the epitome of a trivial infraction.
Of course speed is a factor in death and destruction. That's tautologically true thanks to how the equations in Newtonian physics are written but you don't see anyone (who isn't getting laughed at) advocating for the return of the national speed limit for obvious reasons.
- speed is obviously a factor, but there's a wealth of other factors. 90 on a clear highway with little traffic, and the driver is alert? Fairly safe. 90 while weaving between lanes, leaving little reaction time? Not safe. - drivers seriously overestimate their competence. Humans undervalue outlier events. This is the root of the stat about accidents occurring within a mile of home.
That's why we have generally-lax enforcement of motorway limits but "strict" enforcement of urban limits in the UK. I'm not asserting that we've got it right here, but it looks more sensible in my eyes.
Caveat: urban centres are increasingly adopting 20mph. I think there's a tacit understanding that people will drive at 27. When it was 30, they'd do 34, so that's a big increase in survivability.
