Once you get past that light they’re all pretty well timed. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one light was purposefully timed to meter highway traffic into the rest of the system. I usually only stop at that light and then catch greens the rest of my drive.

Yup same here. I just mentioned it to someone else. It has 400 permanent residents and regularly got $1mil/year from speeding tickets. The newer chief has been trying to use more targeted systems to prevent speeding in the worst places. So last year it was only $250k. But they keep the reputation.

Oh, interesting. When I mentioned small towns I had a particular one in mind. Their reputation that you shouldn’t go even 1 over. Before cameras 98% of all their police activity was writing tickets. Now the cameras have issued 60,000+ tickets their first year for a town of 396 people (2020 census).

It’s a busy highway off ramp onto a busy street. The street gets priority much of the time and then the highway gets protected turns onto it. People turn right on red the whole cycle, so the lane is usually moving fairly slowly the whole cycle

I mean sure, but then I’d be going 85 in an urban highway corridor. I do see people doing that, but my goal is to make it to work at all, not make it there fastest. When I drive the speed limit it means I wait an average of 30 seconds at that light. When I go over it’s closer to 2 minutes.

I’ve been working to remove “car accident” from my vocabulary. Practically none of them are ever truly accidental. But “was involved in” really takes the cake.

The amount of times I get honked at for “going slow” when I’ve set my cruise control to the exact speed limit is kinda ridiculous. There’s a stretch of my daily drive where ambient traffic will go 10–15 above. I stick to the right lane and eventually catch up once the road narrows down ahead.

The math is easy. Going 80 or 50 there’s a 9 minute difference, but that’s the whole ±15 range. It’s only a 3 minute saving to go 15 over, if I even could. Then I hit red light at the end of the off-ramp with a 4 minute cycle. It’s literally not even worth it. Just gonna be the same green light.

Oh, and I can separately set an ad hoc max speed using cruise control settings. If I press cruise it will keep that speed itself. If I hold cruise it will instead set the max speed but leave me in control. No matter how far I press the pedal, except flooring it, it won’t go over the limit I set.

My car has a setting to do that. But even with that turned off the car will change the detected speed limit in my instrument cluster red to tell me I’m over the limit. Some nav apps beep when you go over, too.

Ex. if you were driving on the highway & the GPS has a glitch, it could just keep highway limit until the next good GPS data. Sure, this means it might not catch that you’re on the off-ramp & keep that high limit until later. That’s still already better more often than now without limiters

The only issue I’ve had with it isn’t technical, but with the dataset. It was built when this one stretch near me was a work zone for several years. That stretch still has the work zone speed limits set. So it seems like the main issue would be better data access. The system itself works great.

My car has speed awareness on highways. Well actually it displays the current speed most of the time, but I can set my cruise control to the speed limit on highways and it will change as I cross geofences. It can ignore short errors in GPS lock by assuming I’m on the highway and works very well.

We already have cars driving themselves around going the speed limit. That’s one of the only parts of driving they actually do fairly consistently. Turns out they just read the street signs and then use a couple common fall-backs. A speed regulator can have looser failure states than “self driving”

It really depends on the size of the town. Officially the speed limit is the true limit. Any speed over that has always been up to the cops’ discretion. Cops in smaller towns with quotas to meet are a lot less lenient.

Whenever I bring up speed limiters people always tell me about different times they needed to speed up to avoid a bad situation. But in all my time as a fairly defensive driver I have never once encountered a situation where slowing down to give myself more space or time has not been the solution.

I drive 20 miles on the highway every single day. I have literally thousands of examples all measured. Going 80 or going 50 (limit ±15) gives about 5–7 minutes’ difference (out of ≈35) in my drive given the lights I hit on either side.

If you make an unsafe maneuver to get around another car, for whatever reason, that’s on you, not that car. If it seems unsafe to change to a much faster lane, then don’t. I promise you can wait a few more seconds, probably not even a minute, and the other lane will have a space for you to get over.