At what point do we withdraw our consent to be governed?

I live right by Interstate 81, and after 10 people died in 18 months in violent crashes PENNDOT decided to reduce the speed limit from 65 to 55 for an 8 mile stretch. Recently they passed a law that the fines in the reduced speed limit zone would be doubled, as if it were a work zone.

However, this has done nothing to mitigate the speeds on the highway. Traffic still flows at a brisk 70 miles per hour, with the cops pulling out the occasional sucker.

Now, I’m sure that I’m going to get the indignant people who claim to follow the speed limit at all times in here. I consider that to be irrelevant, because my experience has not borne that out. But let’s say for the sake of argument that 95% of all people show total disregard for the posted speed limit.

Why would that not invalidate the law, practically speaking? It’s clear that people are not following the law, so does that mean that by ignoring it they are voting with their right foot that the law is not going to be followed and therefore is essentially null and void? Laws are created to control behavior, but if the people choose en masse to defy the law are they not withdrawing their consent to the law? The people didn’t pass the law, and by breaking it they are clearly indicating that they have no intention of following it.

Thoughts?

In theory, the people are in control of what the laws are, through their elected representatives. If enough people were pissed off at the reduced speed limit, a grass roots lobbey would arise, and eventually get enough votes in the legislature to overturn the law. It’s called democracy.

But democracy doesn’t mean that if enough people decide to break the law, that the law is void. On the largest scale, that was decided by the Civil War. Our system is set up on the presumption that people are supposed to get off their duffs and DO something within the legal framework, if they don’t like the status quo.

Actually, if the OP’s theory worked, there would no longer be a War on Drugs…

Got nothing to do with law, has to do with custom, which trumps law.

In Texas, it is the custom to drive like a drunken yahoo with more horsepower than horse sense. Pass all the laws you want, you’ll have no effect on the custom, short of the highway patrol hauling scofflaws from behind the wheel and hanging them from the next overpass.

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

One of the best books I’ve ever read on this topic is Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes, by Robert C. Ellickson. It’s a study of how California ranchers settle disputes with results that are often radically different than what is actually dictated by law. It’s an interesting study with implications for the limits of what public policy can accomplish.

I’m with Doors. As far as I can tell, the only effect of ridiculous speed limits is to enable a revenue stream based on speeding tickets. People naturally tend to drive as fast as conditions and human limitations tend to provide for — individually on sparsely traveled roads, rough average in moderate traffic, lowest common denominator on densely populated thoroughfares. They should just replace speed limit signs with “Drive Safely” signs and only bust folks whose driving negatively affects other traffic.

And quit using it for a goddam revenue stream.

Actually, that’s the only reason for speed limits on interstate highways - they were designed for military vehicles at WEP going 70 MPH and passenger cars going 120 miles per hour. Having driven many hundreds of miles at the latter speed and above, any accident that occurs on an I-way is either due to driver error or mechanical failure - and the latter is damned rare as modern cars can run flat-out for hours on end and tires don’t blow out at high speed. The “driver error” part is mostly down to the abominable driver training and lax enforcement of “dangerous driving” laws; our highway patrolmen won’t actually look for bad drivers when speeders bring in a hundred dollars a time, take about 15 minutes to catch and write up, and almost never (<10%) contest the ticket.

Studies have shown that the fewest accidents of any group occur at the 85th speed percentile and above - and the Autobahn, in Germany, has very few crashes at all, fewer than any other road system in the world per vehicle-mile. Of course, when a 150+ MPH wreck happens, it’s a doozy - look up “Turbo Rolf”, a Mercedes test driver, who was blamed for a crash involving a Kia even though no contact between the cars was ever made. That Kia was unrecognizable as having been an automobile.

I’d argue that since:

  1. increasing limits decreases fatality rates
  2. the faster the road, the fewer the fatal accidents
  3. we don’t obey the limits anyway
    there should be no speed limit on a dry Interstate or other limited-access divided highway.

elucidator is right; guilty as charged. It would take brutal rulers like that to regin in this place. As it is, our elected officals are just like us. Heck, Jim Hightower used to brag about how he drove his Charger SE. I heard rumors about LBJ’s driving, but never heard of him being quoted about it.

The speed limit in Texas is basically anything within 10 mph of the posted speed limit. Certain localities are more strict, but you notice them quckly, as everyone is doing the speed limit all of a sudden. I see people pass police cruisers that are doing 5-8 mph over the speed limit, and not get pulled over. This is not unusual. I drive 50 miles of I-20 each day, and I drive all over DFW for my job. I cannot count the number of times I have dropped 5 mph to be within this range when in sight of a cop, knowing he is waiting for the guy going 90 that will surely be by in moments.

I have also been given a ticket for going 3 mph over the speed limit on I-35W. I was the only car in sight, and the officer was a state trooper. It stuck, so I am sure the law is legally valid, if applied randomly. Which does make it suck as a deterrent.

It seems to me that mass disobedience of a law only makes it invalid when a populace is willing to disobey it blatantly, and continuing to until they are made to stop by force. After that, the law * may* be changed due to popular outrage, but that is only sometimes. If you pay the fine, that seems like obeying the law, or at least acknowledgeing its validity. Now if everyone refused to pay their tickets, and had to be arrested to serve the warrants, you might have some civil disobedience there.

When Kerry wins the election. aww, come on, you know someone is dying to make a Bush snipe, so this is a pre-emptive snit.

My guess is that they don’t get rid of the laws that no one follows so that they can be covered if someone gets hurt. Jay-walking for example, is a crime that all and sundry commit. Were there no law against it, it’d be easy for some moron who ran out into traffic to somehow claim that the city was at fault for not protecting his welfare. I think without these seldom followed laws, we’d see even more stupid suits like the fast food ones, because people want to blame everyone but themselves for their own self-inflicted harm.

No. Unless juries consistently return not guilty verdicts for speeding. Most people are simply playing the odds. They know there is little chance of getting caught. Have PENDOT put up photo radar every 1/4 mile along there and watch the speed go down.

Maybe, but you have to define “en masse”. Also you have to more strictly define the nature of the defying. If 95% of people who served on juries returned not guilty verdicts for speeding, or if 95% of people who voted on speeding laws voted to raise them, then you might have a point. But simply because many people speed does not mean that they actually oppose the speeding law.

I don’t think so. The main feature of design related to speed is the superelevation on the curves. The equations for superelevation are independent of vehicle weight so the notion that you can design a road for two different speeds for two different vehicles is ludicrous. If you’re driving that fast, you’re taking your life in your hands and, infinitely worse, the lives of the people that share the road with you. At higher speeds you have less room for error and your reaction time is more critical. Slow down and stop gambling with our lives.

chaparralv8: Studies have shown that the fewest accidents of any group occur at the 85th speed percentile and above

Where do you get the “and above” part? I found a cite (pdf) of a 1985 FHWA report saying that the 85th speed percentile vehicles have the lowest accident involvement rate. But that doesn’t mean that vehicles traveling at higher speeds also have low accident rates.

Perhaps the banking is independant, which I suspect it is in the range of vehicle weights we’re talking about, but trucks and esp. tractor-trailers (and those mini train tractor double trailor) will need a wider lane as they have more natural ‘sway’ and add to that the driver sway. IIRC a double T-T has about 4 ft of sway (2 each way). Wind can also cause swaying outside the lane.

I also think speed limit laws when the limit is set unnaturally low actually cause more fatalities because there is a greater differential of speeds. The NYST celebrated it’s lowest fatality rate when the limit went to 65 (It may have been lower since then but fell to a low that year), but they downplayed the raising the limit and credited the ‘rumple strips’ cut into the shoulder.

The worst is when speed limits are set assuming that people will exceed them by 9-14 mph, this IMHO is criminal to set up such a limit.

The only way I can see us climbing out of this unfair ‘tax’ is to have the enforcment tolerance posted along with the speed limit. Something like:

Speed Limit 55
Enforcement
Tolerence:
70
MPH
Not a perfect solution but you get the idea. This would allow everyone to travel safely at the natural speed but also let everyone know that if your are nailed at 71 mph you will be facing 16 miles over the limit not one.

You’re probably right, kanicbird. I should have replied at work and gotten out the old trusty green book (AASHTO Design Manual). Lane and shoulder widths and vertical curves also get into the mix. But I am reasonably certain that if the curves were banked for 100 mph, that you’d feel an inward slip rounding a curve at 70 mph.

Maybe someone could post some cites to those surveys that show higher or non existant speed limits equal safer roads? Intuitively it does not make sense to me. At higher speeds you have less time to react, you have less ability to recover from a mistake, and any accident will be that much more catastrophic. These are indisputable laws of physics. So how does this translate into statistically safer roads?

I found one web site the supported this claim but it destroyed any credibility when it pointed out that aircraft travel at even higher speeds than cars. Obviously aircraft undergo much more rigorous safety and traffic control procedures and they aren’t traveling nose to tail.

I can’t fathom how the roads can be safer with people who can barely control a car at 60mph free to travel at 120mph.

One of the problems IMHO is that we design cars that can go 150mph that feel like you are driving 40mph. This lulls drivers into a false sense of safety and security. They don’t realize how much energy a car traveling that fast actually has. That’s what we need. Grandpa falling asleep at the wheel at 100 mph and crashing into someone like an unguided missle.

The need for speed is a purely psychological one. A typical 20 mile trip takes 20 minutes at 60mph. The same trip takes 13 minutes at 90 mph. Is that extra seven minutes worth the additional risk?

Getting back to the OP. You cannot simply “withdraw your consent” to be governed. You either have to vote in new lawmakers, convince the lawmakers to change the laws, move to another country or lead some kind of revolt or something. Society cannot function if people are able to arbitrarily decide which laws they will follow. By the same token, in any free society, the mechanisms must be in place to peaceably change the laws that are unfair, unjust, or just not liked.

You want to protest the speed laws? Have a mass speed limit rally where you and and a couple hundred volunteers clog up a major highway by driving exactly 55mph.

Yeah!! The nerve of them taking our money and frivolously squandering it on roads and schools!!

Maybe they should just stop hauling away the wrecked cars… I know I’d slow down…

The State of Delaware passed SB38 recently because a small town police force of four officers were collecting obscene amounts of revenue because they extended their town limits to include a two-mile stretch of US-113, and promptly dropped the limit to 35mph for those two miles. There was no hazard – except that caused by drivers braking suddenly to comply with the law – and the revenue was collected largely from residents of Dover and Rehoboth who never saw the benefits of their “tax” dollars. That stretch of road is surrounded by marshes and farmland, and you are far more likely to hit a deer or a chicken than a pedestrian.

The curves aren’t superelevated much on most I-ways (I think most of them have a zero-lateral-acceleration speed of between 55 and 85 MPH) - however, the radii of these corners are large enough to allow travel speeds of up to 120 MPH with less than about .5 g acceleration - I know I still have some grip in reserve for avoidance maneuvers or corrections for oil etc spilled on the roads. I don’t go this fast on crowded urban freeways; there are too many cars, not enough runoff, usually tighter corners, tighter enforcement, and the higher probability of road rage directed at anyone making decent progress.

As for the 85+ percentile speed stats, they’re usually presented in the form of a table or graph. The National Motorists’ Association (www.nma.org) used to have a really good one on their site and the Association of British Drivers has one as well (www.abd.org.uk) I think the sharp uptick above the 97th percentile is due to the difficulty of observing drivers above this percentile speed - policemen will definitely go over anyone driving that quickly, and police chases typically end in crashes. In addition, above the 97th percentile you get drivers running from the scene of a crime; this also has a very high probability of ending in a wreck.

chap, I cannot find the graph you speak of on the ABD website, and your link to nma.org is the National Mining Association homepage. Do you have any better cites?