Conflict of Interest 3182Baseless buttumption and obviously incorrect. Practically your entire discourse consists of baseless buttumption. If *you* were doing 78 in...
Conflict of Interest 3185I wish I could tell whether you are kidding or not. When people see a marked cruiser, they know that they might possibly get in trouble...
No, you simply don't understand what you are trying to explain, which makes it impossible for you to convince anybody that you are right. You make two mistakes in three sentences. First, you are buttuming that a driver won't do 90 in a 55 zone. There are plenty of drivers who do 90 and faster in 55 zones. I'm not saying that's OK, but it does happen. Your third sentence read OK up to and including the word "comfortable". Again, you are making an buttumption about drivers that is wholly and completely FALSE. There may be a few (very few) drivers on the road that spend every second of their time behind the wheel thinking about cops and how to avoid getting caught speeding. 99.99% of drivers however DO NOT THINK OF COPS unless a cop is in plain view. Do not kid yourself that drivers are thinking about you when you aren't around. Nobody else believes that, as you are one of the few people in the world who thinks that way. The vast majority of drivers drive the way they always drive, without giving it much thought at all. That is, until they see a marked police cruiser nearby. Only THEN do they bother to think about cops. And as soon as the cop car is out of sight, it is out of mind again.
If someone is doing 78 in a 55 zone (for example), that is the speed at which they feel comfortable driving. Speed limits and cops have NOTHING at all to do with that. If the speed limit was abolished, that person wouldn't drive 90MPH where he-she was previously driving 78. Well, -some- drivers would, but so few that the 85th percentile speed would change less than 5MPH. It has been proven that changing the speed limit posted on the side of the road has a negligible effect on the 85th percentile speed of that road, no matter how far UP OR DOWN the speed limit is changed. So it is WRONG to buttume that drivers are basing the speed they drive even partially on what they think they can get away with. For most drivers, this is absolutely FALSE.
If what you claim is true, then raising or lowering the posted speed limit would have a direct linear effect on the 85th percentile speed of any particular road. This doesn't happen, so you are wrong. -Dave
