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I've started treating red lights like stop signs. I'm sick of waiting at a light in a smaller community for 45 seconds when nobody is around. I can see why you shouldn't try running them in larger cities where you have 2 left turn lanes and the like but this is flyover country. It's unfortunate all our laws have to be designed around the lowest common denominator of people who want their hand held from cradle to grave and have no attention to detail and would rather text than pay attention to the road.
As for speed limits, if I wasn't a cheapskate I'd go faster out here in South Dakota, but much above 80 mph and gas mileage really suffers. Once automakers design cars with better coefficient of drag (they can, they're just not as pretty looking so the automakers don't think they would sell) or design cars with fuel cells or other forms of energy that are cheaper, I might go faster. My camry feels alright at 90-100 MPH, but I'd rather be in a full size sedan like an Impala at those speeds. The biggest improvements in drag come from the way you design the back of the car, which can make it look odd looking by what most people think a vehicle should look like. There's also a matter of cooling the brakes if you install them in an aero manner.. you'd want regenerative, prius style brakes in an aero vehicle.
"I have to get above 90 mph before I start to feel any wind load and it has a calculated top speed of about 140 mph with its 102 hp engine (the OEM max speed was 95 mph). The wind load I now have at 80 mph is close to what I used to have at 60 mph. Wind noise is practically non-existent. It's a joy to drive on the highway since it doesn't feel any wind load at normal highway speeds and loses speed MUCH more gradually than a normal car when coasting."
"This car coasts so well that when I switch from driving this car to a "normal" car, it feels as if I am driving on a road covered with molasses, and that, like a powerboat, you have to keep pouring on the power to maintain headway. By contrast, with this car on a level road it only takes a light touch on the accelerator to maintain speed and it takes only the slightests of downhills to maintain speed in a coast. Even a Prius now feels "draggy" at highway speeds compared to this car.
Needless to say, the car gets plenty of strange looks out on the highway and one of my biggest problem while driving out on the highway are the rubberneckers cueing up to stare and take pictures."
Have advances in automotive design, with regards to powertrain, suspension, and handling, resulted in posted speed limits being too slow?
Discuss...
Depends on the car, depends on the driver, depends of course most of all on conditions.
I'll humblebrag and mention I know a fair bit about high-performance riding (motorcycles). I've yet to have my current or previous 911 car out to the track, though. Working on it.
Motorcycle racing with various organizations three seasons...licensed, all that...taught me how to think and react at crazed speeds under controlled conditions (race tracks). The street isn't the track, too many variables.
Even so, my opinion is out in the boondocks, 20 miles from town in low density like we have all over WA and Oregon (and indeed bulk of Western states) could behoove at-minimum higher limits. At best, recommended limits (maximums) only, based on conditions (curves ahead and etc.)
My 911s like to cruise along at 90-120mph or so. They tuck in and just flow right along, the engines not straining all that hard because everything is heavy duty and high performance anyway. Obvious Autobahn influence there. My 991 GTS has monster brakes and I've hauled both of them (former Turbo as-well) down from 140+ mph so fast it left eyeball prints on my sunglasses.
That is the *point* of high-performance Euro cars; BMW M3, 4s, 5s, 6s have crazed limits of performance. Those E and AMG Mercedes, do I need to say more? Any Audi S or RS, same. R8 is a godlike mid-engine monster car, almost a supercar. True supercars like Lambo Murcielago, Aventador or Ferrari 430, 458, and 488 and Porsche GT3 RS are really "only" comfortable when howling at a buck twenty and up. Total waste of time when they're not going around a track or flat out somewhere.
Yes, many cars are vastly greater than sum of the conditions. I wring my GTS out where I can, though those are few and far between places and I lean hard on the radar and laser jammer in case some moron LEO decides that patrolling the back woods is more important than the commute corridors. Thankfully, that is pretty rare indeed, but they do turn up to enforce some godamn "55 zone" crap in the middle of noooooowhere.
You realize that speed limit was one state. Several states surrounding Montana also have that limit, primarily High Plains areas. One small area in Texas is 85.
D'ya think those areas might be a bit different than less flat states or those with congested roads?
As a note, traffic injuries and fatalities were higher fifty years ago, both on a per mile driven basis and absolute numbers.
It's not one state. Two pictures two states. The 80 mph speed limit picture was Kansas in the 1950s. Today people in Kansas who get excited about them raising the speed limit to 75 mph, don't even realize that's 5 mph slower than the speed limit their grandparents had 60 years ago to cruise down the same roads in a car with no airbags and no seat belts.
Even in the 80 mph states, that is not the highest speed limit that most of them have had in the past.
With the speed limits at present we are dealing with 40K deaths a year usually caused by some moron doing something stupid,IMO higher speed limits in America would just cause more accidents and death.
If you were driving a car back around 1905-1910 and you were going over 10 miles an hour, you were considered speeding and they would write you a ticket. They referred to speeders as "scorchers" back then. I actually read an old newspaper clipping about cops pursuing a car going at top speed and the only way they could catch him was when one of the cops jumped out of the police car and chased the driver down on foot.
Have advances in automotive design, with regards to powertrain, suspension, and handling, resulted in posted speed limits being too slow?
I.E.: Was 30mph on a local street fine for cars from the '50s-'60s, but feels slow in a car built after the year 2000?
Discuss...
30 MPH is PLENTY fast enough for city streets, residential streets in particular.
You want to speed, go out on the highway and do it. DO NOT come into a residential neighborhood where there are kids playing, balls rolling into the roadway, etc., and think that 40+ is an appropriate speed to be be traveling.
I live on a street with a 25 mph speed limit adjacent to an intersection with a street with a 30mph speed limit. I work from home most days so I am familiar with the traffic patterns.
During the 4 busiest hours of the day, basically midday, about 6 cars per minute pass down my street with about 4 times that on the intersecting street. There is also heavy pedestrian traffic on both streets as the location is adjacent to a busy retail/restaurant area and in close proximity to a university, and also has a fair amount of bicycle traffic.
At the intersection itself, which is a two-way stop, there are approximately 2 car crashes per week, usually fairly low speed, but enough to hear tires screeching as someone blows the stop sign and the oncoming traffic tries to avoid the collision.
The sheer stupidity, high number of accidents, potential for killing people crossing the streets and cyclists, not to mention the increased noise of higher speed traffic on low posted speed streets is enough to tell me that however responsive the cars may be, the speed limits are fine as they are.
It's not about safety, it's about the 10 billion dollars a year that speeding tickets generate for the government. How can anyone justify speed limits being lower today, than they were in the 1950s, when cars had no seat belts, no airbags, and very little crash protection of any type?
Montana lost the "reasonable and prudent" daytime speed limit many years ago due to a lawsuit filed by a damfool Eastern "celebrity" who didn't like the fact that he got a speeding ticket for doing something like 130 MPH on a two lane highway. He claimed "reasonable and prudent" was too vague, and the Highway Patrolman didn't have adequate guidance in the law to write the ticket.
Montana recently raised the speed limit on freeways to 80 MPH, to match some surrounding states. The speed limit on most secondary roads is still "only" 70 MPH, or as posted.
Some areas have posted limits that appear to be too low, some are obviously too high.
On a side note, many (if not most) cars in the '40s, '50s, and to a certain extent the '60s were not capable of sustained high speed driving. I got my first driving license in 1958, so I remember those cars (and those highways) quite well!
If you were driving a car back around 1905-1910 and you were going over 10 miles an hour, you were considered speeding and they would write you a ticket. They referred to speeders as "scorchers" back then. I actually read an old newspaper clipping about cops pursuing a car going at top speed and the only way they could catch him was when one of the cops jumped out of the police car and chased the driver down on foot.
Not exactly. The first state speed limit was Connecticut. It was 12 mph in cities, and 15 mph on country roads. Speed limits generally increased from that point on until the 1950s, when police departments started buying radar guns to mass enforce the speed limit. Then when governments realized what a cash cow speeding tickets were, they started lowering the speed limits to catch more speeders, and generate more revenue. Many states didn't have any speed limits until that point. Only recently have speed limits started to go back up, as police change their focus from catching speeders to catching distracted drivers. Which is proving to be even more profitable for them.
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