Speed Limits Catching up to Drivers – Re-post

This month, the British Columbia government raised speed limits across the province on rural highways.

Most of the changes were a bump of about 10 kilometres per hour, including portions of the Sea-to-Sky now set at 90 km/h, and some parts of the Coquihalla now at 120 km/h. Immediately, everybody started driving at the speed they were driving at anyway.

Despite protests from police groups and some environmental groups over the potential impact on safety and pollution, the change is a welcome one. The thing is, it’s not really a change in speed on our roads, it’s just a change of the numbers on those funny little signs you see on the side of the road. What? That’s how fast we’re supposed be going? Oops.

Speed limits, as Homer Simpson famously observed, are just a suggestion — like pants. At least that’s the way most North Americans seem to view them, with the average speed travelled on the road routinely exceeding the posted limit.

Routinely — that’s the word to focus on. Rather than the limit being an absolute ceiling that no one would trespass over, it’s become the baseline speed which drivers seldom drift below. It’s almost a lower limit, rather than an upper one.

Moving the speed limit up, you might imagine, would just cause everyone to drive 10 km/h faster than they did before, but the evidence indicates that simply doesn’t happen. B.C. has raised speed limits before, on the Shuswap corridor, and average speeds did not change one whit. Collisions were actually reduced over the time period, even though traffic increased.

People tend to drive at a speed that they feel reasonable and prudent for the road conditions dependent on the time, the weather, and the traffic level. The same person will drive more slowly on a crowded rainy afternoon on the Upper Levels Highway than they will on a bright and sunny morning with nobody else on the road. Of course they would — that just makes sense.

Traffic, it turns out, has a natural flow, and while we need guidance when approaching a tight corner or an area with cross-traffic, drivers tend to travel at the speed everyone else does. It’s the old George Carlin line: everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac, everyone who drives slower is an idiot.

Thus, setting speed limits below what people ordinarily travel makes maniacs of us all. It’s especially frustrating when a speed trap crops up in an area where everybody is travelling faster than the limit every single day — which little fish is going to get picked off? Who gets culled from the herd?

For instance, last week there was a speed trap set up under the Lonsdale overpass, facing Westbound. On Monday, I followed an unmarked police Tahoe on the same route, and as I slowed to something approaching the speed limit, they continued on at a rate that would have fetched a ticket costing several hundred dollars and points on your license. Were they driving dangerously? No: it was the speed everybody else was doing. It could be argued that it was me, dawdling in the slow lane, that was causing the hazard by creating a variance in traffic speeds.

Frustrating? You bet — I may have bitten a chunk out of my steering wheel.

Happily, the raised speed limits also reduce somewhat the further frustration of our 40 km/h excessive speeding law. While the principle is relatively sound – surely anyone travelling that much over the flow of traffic is at super-maniac status — it makes passing an outright hassle.

Travelling back from Calgary a while ago, I was stuck behind a slow-moving RV on a winding part of the Trans-Canada. As the brief passing lane opened up, the flow of traffic (and the RV) sped up — they always do, don’t they? Getting around him took a lot of oomph. If there’d been a sudden speed trap, I might have got a ticket, but the guy in the minivan behind me might have had to walk home with his car on a flatbed. Behind us, the RV again slowed to sub-limit speeds as the bends came up. That extra 10 km/h cushion would help.

I’d say that if speed limits were correctly set, 90 per cent of people wouldn’t even think of brushing their brake pedal if they saw an officer with a radar gun on the side of the road. Too-low limits create an us-and-them cat-and-mouse game with the highway patrol, which shouldn’t be the point. Do we need patrols to catch those who would double the limit using the road as their own personal racetrack? Absolutely, but those folks are going to be out there breaking the law by 50 or 100 km/h regardless, and they’re going to do it whatever the limit is set at, high or low.

If I’d my druthers, I’d alter every single highway speed sign in B.C. to read “-ish” as in, “100 km/h-ish”. The speeding ticket would be outlawed, and there would be no more speed traps.

Ah, but there’s a second part of this plan. Officers of the law would receive special training allowing them to issue tickets for being a jackass. Travelling 120 km/h up the Sea-to-Sky at 6 a.m. on a perfect summer Sunday in a car with good brakes and tires? Not being a jackass. Going 100 km/h on the Upper Levels in a monsoon on three bald tires and a donut spare? License and registration, please.

Using your cellphone while driving would earn you double jackass points, and drinking and driving would receive a punishment slightly more strict. Like being fired out of a catapult from the top of Grouse.

Earn enough jackass points, and you’d be required to affix a large paper-mâché donkey to the roof of your Audi. Oh, and I’d bring back the pillory too, and replace ticket-based revenue generation by selling rotten cabbages to throw. It’d be a grand day out — bring the kids!

A lovely thought, but enough of the flights of fancy. The increase in speed limits for B.C. is a step in the right direction for most motorists. It’ll create slightly safer roads, let people drive at a reasonable rate of speed without feeling like a criminal and allow us to all get where we’re going safely. If that isn’t the point of having rules for the road, I don’t know what is.

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