An Experiment in Civil Obedience

[billroper]

For my friends down in Atlanta, this five-minute video shows the result when a group of young people decide to obey the traffic laws.

Interestingly, this act of civil obedience would be illegal in Illinois. (Via Instapundit.)

Comments

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

Rolling roadblocks like that are illegal in Colorado, too. I don't know all the details, but the cops can ticket you for cruising in the left lane if you're not passing somebody. We all think the ulterior motive here is to make it easier for people to speed if they want to, since if nobody can speed, the state can't make the ticket revenue it's come to depend on.

[madfilkentist]

Another theory: It's generally understood that "Speed limit n" really means "Speed limit n+10". The cops don't ticket people driving in this range. The legislatures don't want to change the legal limits to match the de facto limits, because that would just create a new, higher set of de facto limits. So anyone who is driving the de jure limit can be blocking people who want to drive up to the de facto limit.

Yes, it's crazy, but it's consistent craziness.

[billroper]

Our priest, Mary, who is a chaplain for the Illinois State Police told us that the police on the Chicago-area expressways (speed limit 55) set their radar guns for 72.

Usually.

[penngwyn.livejournal.com]

My father is a retired traffic engineer.

One of his recurring complaints was "zero tolerance" speed enforcement campaigns. He insisted that the posted limit was *engineered* to be about the 95th percentile speed of traffic moving well under good conditions and within designed capacity of the roadway. [The typical bumper-to-bumper results when load tries to exceed capacity -- you increase the number of vehicles that can be accomodated by dramatically cutting the speed they move at.]

So in general -- ie., unless this stretch has been designed to function as a speed trap -- the n+10 rule pretty much matches the engineering design.
[The other exception is that there are freeways engineered for ~80-90 mph that are politically limited to 55/65/75 by ordinance.]

--

The situation that I encounter far too often has to due with the HOV lane. Vehicles with multiple passengers, whose drivers decide to only do 55 (perhaps because their vehicle is overloaded) shouldn't be scared out of the HOV lane by speeders, so that they putter along in the left single-occupancy lane. Likewise those who assume "it's dark out" counts as an implicit -20 on all posted limits. [It's not a bad rule to follow, but trying to impose it on everyone else is not going to help.]