How is it even possible/practical to obey traffic laws?

I have a hard time reconciling that with my observations in Europe:

• People travel significantly faster than in the U.S., for example on the autobahn
• Taxi drivers routinely do things I consider crazy in order to get around old European cities, like driving up on sidewalks, passing on narrow two-lane roads
• There are a lot of narrow mountain roads and people seem to drive way too fast to be safe

I've never felt like European drivers were "more safe".

The only differences I can think of that are positive for Europe:

• Less drunk driving
• Traffic circles instead of stop signs

I don't think most of the EU really did anything about speed limits

It’s actually impossible to obey road rules, by design. Any cop will tell you that, if they follow you for long enough, they will have an excuse to pull you over. Being too close to the lane markers. Marginally over the speed limit. Cracked windshield. Something dangling from your rear view mirror. Phone/GPS mount on windshield or dashboard. Following distance. Weaving inside your lane. They can even tailgate you and bust you for speeding if you speed up. I even know someone who got a ticket for not speeding up with a cop car tailgating him - with no lights on - for blocking an emergency vehicle.

You can obviously make it more likely you will get pulled over. Excessive speed, dangerous driving, or being of an ethnic minority all should be avoided. But honestly, the only thing actually protecting you is the herd around you and the cop not wanting to be bothered.

Four way stops are even more exciting.

NotJustBikes have a video about the only stop sign on the Nederlands.

I have never been honked at for stopping at a posted stop sign. Maybe that's how they do it in some other regions of the US, but that's not how it works in the Pacific Northwest. Are you certain you weren't honked at for doing something else and just mis-associated it with stopping at a stop sign? Was it a 4 way stop and you didn't go when it was appropriately your time to go?

Exactly. Especially this complaint about stop signs. That's not something that a normal motorist would encounter during a normal day of driving. If you ever happen to encounter a stop sign, as rare as they are, and feel that you then can't spend a minute to make a proper stop there then the real problem certainly must be in your mind.

I think it depends largely on where you live. There's a reason it's called the "California Stop." And arpund Boston, the shoulder is a completely additional, auxiliary lane, which so. many. people. use.

There's a funny video where a group of people got on the Atlanta 285 loop, spread out across all lanes, and did the speed limit for a few miles. They had a camera set up on an overpass to watch the procession come around a curve. They say they did it to show how stupid the speed limit on the loop was, and I'm sure it was infuriating for the miles of cars backed up behind them, but... yeah. It showed few people there obeyed the speed limit. I don't know if this is the original; I don't remember it being edited by a spastic gerbil, but that's what I could find before I lost interest.

Getting a ticket for going 3 over is silly. That part does seem contrived, and if contested OP could easily get that thrown out. I suspect either OP was being a douche in some other way, and the cop put something down to harrass them, or they dropped a "0" in the retelling.

You do? To be frank, I rarely do unless I'm unfamiliar with the intersection, and neither do 95% of the other people I see on the road. I live in the US.

I think I would have demanded a ticket in your case. I would have really liked to see how that played out in court.

Op is full of shit. I've stopped at every stop sign the entire time I've been driving and there's never been any issue. This is a troll. Plain and simple.

American cops are a bit more lenient, but you will get penalized for it on the driving test.

In Argentina it's against the law too. I have never seen anyone, ever, stop at a stop sign. At most people slow down a little more than usual. Not even cops stop at stop signs. But if you don't stop in your driver test, they can theoretically deny your license. So this is definitely a regional thing.

Fwiw, I visited a lot of South American countries, and Argentina is one of the most respectful of traffic laws. But yeah, stop signs are merely a suggestion at best. People slow down way more in a "dangerous crossing" sign, than a stop sign.

In Brazil too, but we don't ever get pulled over for that, so nobody really stops, just slows down and if they see someone coming they stop. I've seen cops running red lights just because there was no one crossing.

Same in the UK. But here most signs are 'give way' so there can be confusion when there's an actual stop sign.

The Fuck Cars community is so prevalent over here on Lemmy it's crazy. I wonder why that is.

Btw you guys do you, no hate or whatever I just see this sentiment everywhere on other people's posts.

In most jurisdictions police can do you for even 1mph over. There are a number of things in their favour, as they'll have multiple pieces of evidence (device readout + police statement minimum) against only you and your word. Some places will also give you a far worse outcome if you lose in court than if you just accept the ticket. At the very least you should talk to a lawyer first about how best to take it to court and the likelihood of winning.

End of the day, with the way car speedo's over-read, for you to be doing 53 mph your needle would've been reading ~56, which is well over.

reddit post about possibly uncalibrated speed meters

Yeah wtf, cops in socal don't typically even bother unless you're doing 15 over. Must have been desperate to hit their ticket quota

If that many people are 'breaking the rules' then maybe we need to look at the rules rather than asking 95% of drivers to change their habits. I know in my state the speed limit is capped at 65MPH on the freeway, but the second you cross the border, the "maximum safe" speed on that same freeway somehow jumps 5-10MPH. How is that possible?

The reality is that it's a game like the other commentor pointed out. We're allowed to break the rules and drive 80MPH with the rest of traffic so long as the state can quickly and easily generate additional revenue off of it by catching a few stragglers each day and charging them hundreds of dollars in fines.

More than that, if you're at the front of the line, that indicates you're holding up traffic (even if it is "worse speeders" you're holding up) and creating a dangerous situation.

If you're speeding and someone is tail gating you, just let them pass.

The point is even doing 1mph over the speed limit is breaking the law, and there's no excuse for it. If you were doing 51 in a 50 and all of the other traffic was doing 65 mph it makes absolutely no legal difference and there is no argument to what everyone else was doing, because the fact is that you are actually exceeding the speed limit in that scenario. Your driving is dangerous because you were driving too slow, but your ticket would be because you were driving too fast. Its the whole point of my original post, what are you supposed to do exactly?

Yeah that’s weirdly strict. In Florida, going 5mph over the limit means the only thing that cop can do is give you a “warning”. That effectively means it never happens because they aren’t going to waste their time on that (unless maybe you’re black or something like that).

In practice, most people go 10 over and cops don’t do anything about it unless it’s close to the end of the month and they haven’t met their quota yet.

Your system isn’t designed to extract as much capital as possible. It’s not the same.

My speedo is accurate I checked, but yes that is the argument I would use in court and honestly I would win. The point of the post is that I was actually breaking the law where no reasonable person would expect me to follow the law.

In Canada they actually cannot give you a ticket if you go x over the limit. The amount changes based on the max speed.

I agree with the spirit of this comment, but AVOID CRASHES. Don't be dead right. A crash can cause you a lifetime of pain, avoid collisions at all costs, even if you have to break some traffic laws to do so.

In principle, sure their behavior causing an accident is their problem.

In reality, if someone crashes into you because you're following the law, it still results in you having to deal with the accident (which could mean you're dead or permanently disabled).

If someone is tailgating me they are in the wrong. I'm still going to do what is necessary to get out of their way ASAP, because the longer they are there the longer they have to potentially kill me with their behavior. It doesn't matter if I'm in the right if I'm dead.

I have no choice but to do this in my current car, the transmission is fucked and if I accelerate too fast it slips and I don't go any faster. So I slowly go to the speed limit and slowly slow to a slow stop

Get into a potentially fatal car accident on principle? Nah

It might be "immoral" and "sociopathic" for me to think this, but if someone is gonna get themself killed because they can't stand to come to a complete stop at the stop sign, GOOD, I hope they die.

That's not immoral or sociopathic, that's just plain dumb and shortsighted.

How exactly do you imagine someone ends up dead after running a stop sign? It very often involves a violent crash that may very well kill innocent people who did nothing wrong. They unfortunately don't take only themselves out of the gene pool.

I don't think "not wanting to be the target of others' road rage for actually following traffic laws" is childish, tbh

I feel this places blame directly on the users of the road instead of the designers of the road. People just drive in ways they feel are safe. We could absolutely drive better as a society but realistically the countries with safe driving have designed the roads a lot better than we have. This is likely because America is so damn huge and we have very little federal regulation on what a road needs to be safe. So a road in the US could be gravel or worse, just two tire marks in the grass. A road also could be a 50 mile an hour street with intersections every block or two making them extremely unsafe and inefficient.

Our road design is trash and it's really the root cause.

Everyone would follow the law if it was enforced consistently. The authorities know that, and enforce it inconsistently so that they can fine people at random. It's a money-making scheme.

Many laws are. But basic things like speed limit serve a very good purpose: reducing fatalities caused by cars. Speed limits are proven to do this.

You know after thinking about it, its only really been a huge problem on this one road where I live. The speed limit varies between 35,45,50 mph and theres one construction zone that is 25 mph. As a whole traffic goes about 60-70mph throughout. Its a windy valley road that is frequented by bicycles and hikers and people have absolutely been killed there in speed related accidents. I sent a message to the sheriff’s department voicing concerns but I’ve heard complaints from neighbors about it for years and its still a huge problem.

On other roads especially highways its mostly no problem to avoid speeding as long as you stay in the right lane, after all trucks avoid speeding most of the time for efficiency and safety reasons, unless you hit a 50-55mph zone like for construction. Those are nearly always ignored by other drivers. Slowing down to comply with the speed limit is likely to get you rear ended since so many are distracted. If you’re lucky enough not to be rear ended it usually results in getting flipped off, but sometimes road rage incidents can escalate.

It's not a valid defense. I tried using it once and the judge said, if they all drove off a bridge, would you too?

You will have better luck arguing the 3 mph is within the margin of error of the radar gun, that you were on a hill that was slightly accelerating, you slightly sped up to avoid and accident, etc.

That looks like a pretty interesting book, will definitely give it a read.

I personally feel that speed limits, etc are actually quite reasonable given the average human's response time, and the fact that impact force increases non-linearly with increased speed. I think the bulk of the problem is that so many drivers far over-estimate their driving abilities and are out of touch from the outside world being completely isolated in their cars. The fact stands that if you hit a pedestrian at 25 mph, they have a 75% chance of survival but at 35 mph it is 75% likely to be fatal. The 2-lane road in my original post has a lot of hikers, bicyclists, and even horseback riding not to mention the deer that regularly jump out in front of you. Efficiency of literally every car on the road goes up just by slowing down a bit, too. Don't people like spending less on gas?

Funny you mention the self-driving car thing, I'm a tesla FSD beta tester and thats how I made sure to obey every limit and road rule to the T. It was the only way I could get through it since obeying the laws gave me so much anxiety I wanted to speed up at every chance. Using the FSD in real life, though it has a setting to always go x% over the posted speed limit. As if the word "limit" has lost any and all meaning in our society.

I think it probably depends on your jurisdiction

This is the real answer. There's a town near me that used to be training grounds for new sheriff's deputies. The accepted rule was to never deviate by even 1mph there. I recently heard that training doesn't happen there anymore, but I'm not willing to risk it unless I'm in the middle of a bunch of other cars that are also going above the limit so I don't stand out.

I like to live a little more dangerously, so I do the speed limit plus ten.

Traffic on that road regularly does 60+ unfortunately. There weren’t any other cars around when I got the ticket.

My wife once got a ticket in Boston for an expired meter. The meter was labeled as being in effect until 6pm. The ticket was issued at around 6:30.

When she went to fight it the traffic judge was adamant that she should know all meters in the city are enforced until 8pm. He let it go but warned her not to do it again.

A few weeks later she ran into one of the parking enforcement people who said that they know a handful of meters are labeled wrong, but despite reporting them nothing ever happens. He said they do try to be lenient and ignore cars parked in those spots between 6pm and 8pm but sometimes they’re just so frazzled from the day that they forget…

I had this experience in driving on wide open highway in nevada, the speed limit was 80 and to my surprise traffic was moving at maybe 83-ish. If I was doing 80 exactly it wouldn't cause any issues at all. That speed can easily be considered safe by anyone because there's effectively nothing to hit.

However, I still think that speed limits (25/35/50mph zones) are actually reasonable and the issue is that the majority of people vastly underestimate how impact forces and stopping distances are effected with increased speed. Decades ago, doing 60mph in a car was generally terrifying, now cars are so smooth and refined that it feels like nothing. I don't care how well-engineered your car is, though, it doesn't change the amount of force created on impact. In fact its even worse now with cars being so much heavier in general.

That study was in like central Amsterdam or Rotterdam or some other old European town with a city center that was meant for horses and people. It’s not applicable to like busy thoroughfares

lol ever driven on a freeway near los angeles? Driving at the speed limit is guaranteed to get you rear ended.

And I thought my local New Zealand town had bad drivers, my god. Are the drivers all suicidal over there??

You would come to Wellington and cum at how respectful the drivers are there

In california, near an upscale/wealthy neighborhood with otherwise low crime. Its how the police department stays well funded I'm sure.

Virginia is really bad about traffic cops like that.

Im talking about “rolling stops” like everyone does. Slow down to 0.5mph and look both ways before continuing.

Car drivers are the only group of people who can disregard the laws that govern them, risk the lives of everyone around them, and then cry that 1% of the time they get penalized for it.

Exactly. It's also a "jerks on power trips" scheme for the police. A ticket for going 53 in a 50 zone will be dismissed by any judge, but the cops know you probably don't have the time to waste taking them to court over $100.

I'm terms of other impatient drivers, that's why you have a middle finger on each hand.

Many places? Where are you from? I’d like to see that written down in a law book before putting that theory to the test 😉

I'm in the US, California specifically. I actually thought this was true here but I can't find any state law where the "limit" in speed limit is not a hard limit. You can get a ticket for doing 11 mph in a 10mph zone, but the only leeway is a 10% suggestion given to police officers to allow for speedometer calibration. It will likely get thrown out in court but they can still ticket you for it.

Your right, but this also creates a catch-22, where you have to break at least one laws. Your either impeding the flow of traffic, or your speeding. Damned if you do, Damned if you don't.