There are countries where traffic fines are based as a percent of salary rather than flat rates. That way the rich are equally incentivized to obey the laws.
That being said I’ve always felt frustrated by speeding tickets. Everyone goes 5-10 over the limit at all times so it makes a system where cops can basically pull over everyone and give them a ticket at will.
It seems like if it’s a limit, it should be an actual sensible number and be an actual limit. Instead of this kafkaesque system where everyone can be deemed guilty at will.
Likewise I feel other behaviors like tailgating and aggressive driving aren’t enforced and (imho) cause more accidents.
The collective insanity that we as a society have around setting sensible maximum speeds for roads is one of my bigggest pet peeves.
so in a world without speed limits, people can individually decide what speed a road "feels like". in a world with speed limits, people can still do that but there's a sign stating a preferred speed for the road and an (admittedly flawed) enforcement mechanism.
I really can't fathom how the former leads to less "deviation" than the latter.
my understanding of the post is that he proposes speed limits should not be set so low as to increase the deviation between people following the speed limit and following their intuition i.e. they should approach average intuitive speed of the drivers using the road.
This depends on the locale, and what you consider "political". For example, in NYC it is entirely "political/financial. For some time now the city-wide speed limit has been set at 25 mph, with thousands of speed cameras that automatically ticket people. While on some streets this may be reasonable, it is certainly not reasonable city-wide (which includes all the outer boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx). In her annual address this month, Governor Hochul announced that the city-wide speed limit will be lowered even further, below 25 mph! This means that at the maximum legal speed, your car will be passed by bikes, mopeds and even fast runners. This is clearly not a safety issue, thought some will argue it is "safer" (and it would be safer still if the speed limit was 0, nobody would ever die from an auto accident!). It a combination of a money-making scam and a political ploy to curry favor from the small (but politically powerful) group of New Yorkers who want to eliminate cars all together.
The ticket is to design roads such that people naturally drive at safer speeds. The collective insanity is that we as a society allow engineers to pretend that features intended to speed up traffic are a safety mechanism.
There are no tickets or fines, just chagrin. It works surprisingly well.
Some people insist on going 50 anyway and I swear some people think that if they go 80 they'll also get the green lights. :)
In some countries such deviations aren't punished. Either they simply don't have a fine/points for going 5-10kmph above the speed limit, or have a relative window depending on the speed. The error of the measuring device might also be considered. And until recently most cars had a builtin "error" in the speed reading of up to 10% mainly to account for slight differences in tire wear and to remove any legal liability from the manufacturer in case of false readings. These days I've seen plenty of cars being spot on because they use GPS to measure so that changes that "buffer". So going 5 over limit usually means a bit more.
Too much flexibility for the police officer isn't great, I agree. It incentivizes abuse of power. The case above isn't one of those though.
California has a requirement that speed limits be set based on a speed survey, except for like school zones and highways posted at 65 or more.
That doesn't help much if you get a ticket for 70 in a 65 when prevailing traffic was doing 75, but at least it prevents some abuses.
But speeding probably get attention because it's objective. Harder to testify about tailgating distance, because there's no printout from the speedgun.
