Ok, I wasn’t sure where to put this, move it to where it’s appropriate. Recently, many people I’ve talked to around town and I have noticed that the speed limits have gone up. What was once 35 is now 40 and what was 40 is now 45. The original speed limits have been there for decades and only changed to a lower one (25) when the number of school children in the area increased. However, many people have gotten into their heads that the cities and/or states are trying to encourage faster driving, more gas usage and thus buying more gas and paying the taxes along with it to fatten the coffers. Anyone else notice this in their area?
Out of curiosity, where do you live?
Although I am not a Traffic Engineer, I do design roads and have learned a little bit about setting speed limits over the years. There are a number of factors that are involved in setting a speed limit. Hopefully the road authority is not letting non-professionals determine these and even more hopefully professionals are not allowing the possibility of revenues to influence their decisions.
Safety is always supposed to be the first consideration. Another factor is what speed do people want to drive? If you have an area that has proper visibility and no other reason to keep it low, it can actually be safer to allow slightly higher speeds. It is counter intuitive, and can piss people off who live in an area who wanted lower speed limits, but it is true in some circumstances.
Crashes are generally more dangerous as speed increases. (I think it is related to the square of the velocity.) But if you have an area where the limit is set at 30 mph, and the majority of people are driving 35, that is unsafe too and the added 5 mph does not make that much difference in crashes. I would say that it is more likely that the local road authority either got someone new in a position with different ideas than prior staff, or they had a full traffic study done of the area and the changes were the result of the study.
The increase in fuel efficiency is causing a strain on revenue, but hopefully no road authority would compromise safety for revenue. Of course, if you live in [insert your choice of corrupt area], all bets are off.
I live in California. So, it’s not surprising that with the budget crisis that this idea of a gas tax conspiracy (There was a proposed 12 cent increase that was removed from the final budget) started around the same time.