If cars are going 37 mph in a zone with a 30 mph, they’re going more than 20% over the limit. Is that “speeding a little?” What’s the threshold for speeding a lot?

Keep in mind also that speed limits are supposed to represent the safe maximum speed most of the time; and they don’t. That’s why drivers don’t respect them.

Moreover, drivers know that the road itself speaks to them about how fast they should be traveling. And the roads are themselves scream “fifty!” half the time.

A more just society might do away with speed limits, recommend cruising speeds w/ variances on highways, and strictly enforce _reckless driving_ bans on urban areas, with tightly built surface streets that physically prohibit speeding.

Putting big signs up that say “30mph!” ’cause there’s houses coming up, with fourteen-foot lanes and ten-foot shoulders and nice banked curves, ain’t gonna do nothin about speed until it’s too late.

I live on a Brooklyn side street, and speeding is physically impossible due to the need to execute a 90deg turn to enter my street. It’s perfectly safe, you could play stickball in the street most days.

Another way of putting this: Cops in America don’t ever ticket you for reckless driving, they bust you for exceeding the speed limit; and they mostly do it in places where traveling extremely fast is _proper_, say on highways, freeways which were designed for 75mph traffic but then tamped down to 55mph artificially by Federal laws before many of us were born.

There is no necessary correlation between exceeding a posted limit and being reckless, and even less correlation between who the cops ticket and who should be de-licensed. When’s the last time you saw a cop give a shit about someone rolling through a red light, overtaking on the right, cutting over a sidewalk in an extremely wide turn?

Four miles over the limit, though. That’s two points on your license!

Surface-street redesigns are the way. The Upper West Side project will show America how.

Just reading the comments on here and elsewhere just shows the pro car attitude of most Americans. Official attitudes seem to be pedestrians are just larger types of road kill and it was their damn fault for being in the road. The UK is experiencing a large scale push to make speeding as socially unaceptable as drink driving has become. Excessive speed kills pedestrians. There has been a large scale program of down grading urban speed limits and in local residential streets the aim is to lower speed to 20 mph. Accidents are not accepted as things that happen, they are due to some one not taking ‘due care and attention’ which is punishable offence. Causing death while doing this is a jail-able offence. Some one was recently convicted for killing a pedestrian, even though they were going the speed limit because the road was narrow and view obstructed therefore it was judged they should have slowed down. Police generally treat accidents as scenes of crime and fault will be attributed to someone where possible.