Yeah, that one in particular has caused problems in the context of new Highway Code directives where motor vehicles are supposed to wait for pedestrians to cross at junctions (even if there is no marked crossing) - if the junction has multiple lanes, the pedestrian can easily be obscured by the vehicle that has stopped in one of the lanes, and they cross out into the other lane where drivers simply haven’t seen them.
But one way in which courtesy can and does work is just looking ahead - in traffic where the vehicles are all evenly-spaced and there’s someone waiting to make a turn, you can sometimes see that half a mile off and it’s not difficult, and inconveniences nobody, to just ease off the throttle a tiny amount, to allow a useful gap to slowly open between yourself and the car in front; there are circumstances where you shouldn’t do that, probably, but plenty where you can.
Likewise if you are on the main carriageway and a sliproad/onramp is merging, there is often ample time to glance across and make a tiny adjustment in your speed so that when the joining vehicle reaches the merge point, you’re not alongside each other.
The sort of considerate driving I am talking about could probably be summed up as:
This happens all the time at a T-intersection near me. When I’m at a stop and signaling a left turn from the bottom of the T, a driver crossing from my right stops and very kindly tries to wave me through. Then they get mad when I refuse to go and wait for them to continue. They have right-of-way in this situation, and were I to attempt my left turn and something bad happened it would be MY fault.
I realize these people think they’re being courteous, but it drives me f**ing crazy.
The other point about having to break the speed limit to avoid an accident - that’s happened to me too. Without going into the whole story, I once accelerated to avoid an airborne SUV coming at me on an angle. I was at a highway speed initially, so I’m guessing I reached at least 80, and a good thing I did. Had I been a few feet (or possibly inches) behind, it would have taken off my head.
Breaking the law to avoid an unforeseeable potential accident is such an exceptional set of circumstances I don’t think any reasonable person would consider that worthy of prosecution, but it’s also probably a sufficiently rare event that it would seem silly to write down specific laws about it.
Provisions for emergency-only speed exceedances would need to be written into any software controlling self-driving cars and more importantly, any software controlling automatic law enforcement. Be that roadside camera/radar setups, or software in “smart” cars that prevented the driver from manually exceeding the speed limit as suggested up upthread, or worse yet tattle-tale software installed in cars that would “phone home” to the authorities each time a car exceeded the posted limit.
And if the software is to contain those exceptions, there probably needs to be something in the plain language code law to permit that.
The common law is mooshy and hard to devine, but abounds in common sense and the wisdom of hundreds of years of experience of humans interacting both well and badly. And in dealing well with the rare exceptions and exigent circumstances. Code law is doubtless utterly necessary in a complex modern world. But suffers from the defect of zero flexibility beyond what is written into the law itself.
There’s a legend in my family that my grandfather was once stopped on the FDR Drive in Manhattan, not for driving 90 mph* (which he was), but as the officer told him, because he was weaving from side to side.
*the current speed limit on the FDR Drive is 40 mph.
All this about “keeping up with the flow of traffic” sounds like a bullshit excuse by speeders for breaking the law. I stay exactly at the speed limit in the right lane, and if any problem arises, it’s the fools who think they can speed in the right lane.
In Maryland last year, idiots speeding on the highway caused a collision that sent one car flying like a missile that landed on top of highway workers. It killed
Rolando Ruiz, 46 of Laurel; Sybil Lee DiMaggio, 46, of Glen Burnie; brothers Carlos Orlando Villatoro Escobar, 43, and Jose Armando Escobar, 52, of Frederick; and father and son Mahlon Simmons II, 52, and Mahlon Simmons III, 30, of Union Bridge.
Now all that’s left of them is six empty seats at their families’ dinner tables. When all they were doing was working hard to earn a living.
This is why everybody needs to Slow. The Fuck. Down. Already.
I’d be interested in seeing objective comparisons of the effects of driving at the speed limit vs. at the prevailing speed of traffic in situations where that prevailing speed is significantly above the posted speed limit.
(That linked article is irrelevant to that particular point, since “At the time of the crash, both vehicles were reportedly traveling at speeds in excess of the posted speed limit and greater than the speed of the adjacent traffic.” But I don’t dispute that speeding can be dangerous and bad.)
When friends from “the city” visit us, one of the things I like to do is challenge them to drive a road nearby at exactly the speed limit (not above nor below).
It’s a back-road posted at 40 mph. The road is serpentine and treacherous, about two miles long. I can do 15 mph the entire way if the weather is good. Attempting to drive it at 40 is hilarious.
Which is rather the exception that proves the rule.
A road with a speed limit so fast as to be impractical / impossible is exceedingly rare and therefore noteworthy in itself. The opposite case is as common as air.
When I was on the San Jose Traffic & Parking commission, a bunch of people complained about non-local speeders cutting thru their neighborhood, and making things dangerous for Moms driving their kids to school. Some even asked for speed bumps. So, we asked the SJPD to do some extra enforcement. You know who they caught and ticketed for dangerous speeds- the Moms driving their kids to school. Not outsiders.
I suspect the same thing about people here who want tickets issued for driving 1mph over- they are the ones driving too fast.
There are undoubtedly some real-world, unforseeable potential-accident situations where the safest course of resolution is to speed up a bit.
Like for example you see an HGV go out of control on the opposite carriageway of a motorway - it looks like it will cross through the central barrier and collide head-on with you. If you slow down or stop, that will still happen; if you speed up, you might be able to get ahead of the place where it crashes through.
Of course you might not, and I’m not suggesting this specific thing is very common, or that many drivers would have time to figure out what they need to do in time, but there are certainly situations where acceleration is probably the least worst option.
That is exactly what happened to me, as I described a few posts back. Thank og I didn’t have some sort of governor on my accelerator to make sure I didn’t speed.
I like the Canadian approach. Officially I recommend going the posted speed. However…
Except in school zones, bad weather, when unsafe or when police present, enforced limit is generally 15km/h above posted.
On major highways, enforced limit may be 20km/h above posted limit.
Québec has a “minimum speed” on major highways, which is awesome.
Going 50km/h above any speed limit is “racing”, involving high fines and possible car confiscation. This is generally too fast, for sure. No problem with this.
I dislike the Delaware approach of giving out of state cars a ticket for going 1 mph above posted limits (allegedly).
The assholes on the highway are, in the main, not, and it’s them I have to gauge myself against. Countless times I’ll see the limit drop from 70 to 55 in a work zone, I’ll slow down to match, and all the vehicles I just passed now come back at me, with a vengeance. I thus have to fudge my speed a somewhat higher than the strict limit, or risk an iffy situation. [When I reach the end of the zone, back to my normal speed I go, and back they all magically vanish in my rear view]
Your own argument is basically ‘nuh uh’.
I don’t want to drive faster than the limit. I’ve often actually thought I would like a car that capped my speed automatically, but it is absurd to imagine that in contrast to all the possible accident-avoidance (braking, swerving, ditching, etc), speeding up is the one that simply never, ever could possibly work.
Braking swerving and ditching change the direction your car is going very quickly. Mashing the accelerator does not. Most cars likely can go from 60 to 0 faster than from 60 to 70.
And, when you’re at risk of an accident, adding energy by going faster makes an accident more dangerous.
You can try to accelerate your way out of an accident, but you better damn well be right, because if you’re wrong you may just kill yourself or someone else with that extra speed.