It is kind of gross that to pay for normal government functions we resort to police banditry because nobody wants to raise regular taxes a by even a little bit
A guy in a brand new $1.5 million dollar house with a brand new challenger and SUV in the driveway thought it would be sufficient to pay $3 to a driver to have them bring him items that they had to shop for.
His house was 10 miles away. So his tip doesn’t pay for gas. Meaning he wants to abuse the poorest in the community.
He’s used to getting a driver he can walk over and he lost his mind when I told him I wouldn’t give him the order. I explained I’m not trying to hassle him but I do need to be able to live and I can see how expensive all of his stuff is. Lost his mind more.
This is not a rare thing in this super rich community.
A lot of people here are fake as can be and utterly disgusting.
Remember, there is an expense to swapping 25mph zones to 15mph. And as incompetent as most politicians are, they are still aware when something would be as unpopular as further lowering speed limits.
I see most areas slowly phasing out 25mph as new developments and repaved roadways go in.
They just have to change a couple to rake in revenue from speed traps. 35mph -> 15mph for a couple blocks -> 35mph.
Don't need to change a bunch to make this worthwhile for the city.
It’ll be a good revenue tool for the city of falls church. Won’t prevent people from driving whatever speed they want though.
Speed limits aren’t an effective way at slowing down roads in residential districts/areas with high pedestrian traffic. You need to get rid of the 4 lane wide straightaways.
As will Alexandria. They will lower it on Rt 1 in Old Town. Already lowered to 25 north of Old Town.
Probably wouldn't apply to Washington st as that's a NP road.
I’m old enough to remember when speed limits were considered the “maximum safe speed”. Now they seem arbitrary. How are speed limits set, and what analysis required to support the new limit? Do speed limits only have a tenuous connection to safety?
Part of the issue, according to a traffic engineer I talked to, is that various authorities put their thumb on the scale for political reasons, on behalf of constituents who may or may not be actively hostile to the concept of statistical analysis.
They typically use the 85th percentile rule. They set up a speed camera and after they get a bunch of data they set the speed limit around where the 85th percentile speed is.
Speed limits are a combination of politics and engineering. Engineers recommend the 85th percentile but politicians can and will change it.
Also, the Dulles toll road is owned by the airport authority (MWAA) so they don’t have to follow VDOT standards. Im pretty sure they made up their own standards judging from some of those curves and funky lane widths.
Poor nova drivers can't seem to self organize to the proper lane, let alone accelerate and maintain speed up a hill without braking, or figure out how to use their headlights or high beams. Asking them to mange their speed to is just abusing them at this point.
That’s the typical and most common way. There’s actually a pretty nifty tool that NCHRP recently developed that we’re interested in starting to apply; I actually used it in a speed limit study in NOVA in the past few years. That methodology is a lot more robust; while it still takes into account existing speeds, it also takes into account crash rates, traffic signal density, driveway density, on-street parking, pedestrian facilities, the physical roadway conditions like median types, etc. So while it can still spit out the 85th percentile speed, it can round that down or up or even go down to the 50th percentile speed under certain conditions. I think it’s a great step forward in this type of analysis.
They do in relation to severity of a potential accident.
A normal jurisdiction would take into account things like population & traffic density for a given roadway.
But who knows how they actually come up with some of these.
They’ve lost several pets to commuters speeding on through, numerous mailboxes, and several power poles have been taken out. Nobody is writing tickets in Hamilton, they’re just worried that school kids are going to die one day.
Controversial here I know, but lower speed limits don’t make roads safer, road “diets” and design do.
In Nova, speed limits frequently don’t match the size and build of the road.
For example, Wiehle Ave between FX Co Parkway and Reston Parkway is 35. The rest of Wiehle is 45. 45, to me, is appropriate for this road.
The speed limit sign is covered by foliage when it drops, and the police always set speed traps just beyond it in front of the water treatment plant. I got pulled by one once going 7 over (it actually wasn’t until this that I knew the speed changed). The officer said to me “why are you speeding when there are so many houses on this road?”
I obviously didn’t answer, but I thought to myself “there literally isn’t a single house on this segment of Wiehle at all, and many fewer neighborhoods branch off from that section than Wiehle on the other side of Reston Pkwy.”
This is just one example. I also think the 50 mph speed for FX Co. Pkwy is silly too. 55 would be fine.
Yep people will naturally go as fast as the road allows them to. Can’t count how many times I’ve been on a straight, wide 4 lane road that has a speed limit of 30 but could be comfortably driven at 45, so most people speed.
Exactly. And it pisses me off to no end because there are people who will go the actual speed limit, and to me, they’re the ones creating danger. Well, the local government is I guess.
Or even worse, come to Reddit and admonish people for speeding when they’re going 15 over in an area where the speed limit is 15 and could be a freeway.
The crazy thing to me is that engineers understood that you needed to widen lanes to make drivers comfortable to drive at high speeds, but for over a century now they have refused to accept the obvious reverse logic that narrowing lanes would cause drivers to slow down.
I know there are some areas in NOVA that can possibly justify the 15MPH. The problem will be enforcement. Just don't ever see this being something LE will take up barring an uproar from a neighborhood over some major issues.
Idk every claim that comes to my desk, the police refuse to investigate and we can never prove speed. Police don’t do shit half the time. A lot of reckless drivers get away with being not-at-fault while speeding down 25mph roads and hitting granny while she slowly makes her left turn from a stop sign.
It's a good thing Dash cams are becoming so much more common. 3 years ago, nobody I knew had one, but these days there is hardly anybody I know that drives without recording everything in HD. That is my experience though, your social circle may be different.
Yeah personally I use one but the general public has not caught on. A lot of claims end up word versus word because nobody thinks to gather up evidence at the scene and the police are useless. The only exception are Teslas which come equipped. Funny enough, you can tell when a Tesla is at fault because suddenly their dash cam “doesn’t work” lol
Surprisingly enough, the amount of damage and displacement from where the impact occurred directly correspond to speed. Silly physics and its kinetic energy impact theory.
Is it not currently legal? A few neighborhoods in the Del Ray area also changed to 20mph speed limits, and so far it seems to be effective based on the data they’ve collected.
It was not legal on king st according to state law. Neighbor hood streets were fine but numbered highways were not legal. Ex King St is State Rt 7. I don't think Alexandria has any other schools outside of Alexandria high School and Minnie Howard that are on State highways.
My guess is that part of the reason for this is that Virginia has a high number of state-owned roads compared to other states. So a lot of residential or commercial streets that in other states might be controlled by the city, town or county (and that body can change speed limits if it wants to) are state owned in Virginia.
So this is giving some level of local control over what are essentially local streets.
It will only matter if they enforce it. I am someone who has two kids under 10 and lives near a playground. The posted speed is 30. My own wife goes 40, and there are regular cars exceeding far past the speed limit. One of the worst offenders is the post office truck. I've informed my local station. They don't care. When a kid gets hit and killed, there will be outrage for a month, then back to normal. I know catching speeders going 100mph on 28 is more important. However, child verses car going 50 is deadly.
Lower speed limits probably make sense for small-ish towns with dense-ish cores that have state highways running straight through the middle. Pedestrian-heavy downtowns with thru traffic is a recipe for danger and they'll want to reduce that danger with lower speed limits.
That said, speed limits are not all that effective in getting drivers to slow down (which is intensely frustrating but whatever), these roads need to be designed to force drivers to slow down.
Why just 15mph? The average gait of a horse is about 4.5 mph. Cmon Virginia, think of the global crisis of warming climactic change….or something like that.
4.5mph statewide now!
Will someone please think of the children!!!
Perfect example of lowering a speed limit is on the road in front of my home. The current speed limit is 25mph and it leads to OLGC. There are two speed tables that people constantly bottom out on because they’re going way too fast. But the assholes that are running late for work or church constantly brush off the speed limit and haul ass down the street anyways.
15 mph - especially considering how very few people honor speed limits as actual limits & instead invent a 'rule' that they can go 9mph over - will save a lot of lives and also make streets waaaay more pleasant for everyone outside of cars. In Alexandria since you have to stop every block in a lot of places, hitting the gas and getting up to 25/30 mph between stops doesn't actually meaningfully shorten your trips by more than a few seconds total. 15 mph would mean fewer dead/injured pedestrians and that's what I care about. Yes we need to redesign all of our streets to make going faster than the speedlimit very uncomfortable or even impossible. But starting with reducing the limit - for those who aren't sociopaths more concerned about getting places a few seconds faster - this will be totally fine here. Once I stopped driving like a suburbanite/rural person living in the city my own stress level went way down. I leave a minute or two earlier and never ever get mad about anyone slowing me down because I stopped driving like an ass and started driving like I'm a member of a community who cares about my neighbors outside of cars. If you live in NoVa, it's worth it to shift to thinking like a person who lives in a city. Driving will never, ever be fast, convenient or pleasant at any time window when other people are also trying to go places. That's reality in 100% of the cities around the world. It's smart to just get over this fact. Also accept that it's ok to slow drivers down to make things safer for others. We kill 40k people and injure over 2M annually on our roads. It's ok to make some changes to improve that. And it's ok if it makes commutes slightly longer. Cars will always be geometrically inefficient for travel in cities. Traffic will always be miserable. We can't change that but we can save people's lives.
https://preview.redd.it/vv80qvaos59d1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=9f8a85db09e47e3e2a327d59d7fe926f4d39c704
Annnnnnnd that's the end of Georgetown Pike as a commuter road. 15 MPH . . . old men in golf carts gonna take over . . . Like a beach community but instead of playing bocce by the ocean they plan little coups and such. I can hear the Great Falls Citizens' Association moaning from my house
Town of Occoquan just blew their load again... Crazy to me that a stretch of road can have two different speed limits in the opposing directions (the bridge across Occoquan river).
I bet Arlington will.
And, really? There are area's where it makes sense. For anyone complaining that 15MPH is so slow? Get out of your car and run a 4 minute mile, then get back to me.
Good if there is a product on the market that kills 100s of people every year and leave 1000s more in this state disabled then the state should do something about it. People talking about it as a waste of money but the people dying have a estimated $5 Billion economic impact each year in just our state.
There are studies in places like Portland that when they changed their municipal speed limit from 25 to 20 in 2019 they saw significant changes in the amount of cars speeding. It was a 33% reduction for cars over 30 mph and 50% reduction for cars over 35 mph. There need to be structural improvements too but there is evidence that speed limits do matter.
Lowering speed limits without doing anything else is a half measure.
The real solution is to design roadways for the speeds you want. No excessively wide turn radii, raised crosswalks/continuous sidewalks, narrower lanes and bulb outs. In addition, near side signals should be considered to keep drivers from overrunning every stop bar.
Speed and red light cameras are still a good interim measure, because then enforcement can occur without LEOs interacting with people, which is safer for all. The end goal of cameras also must be identifying areas where road safety projects should be considered, not just a cash cow.
:-/ I just got pulled over for doing 27 in a 25 school zone, but they’d added an inner ring of 15 mph. The deputy stopped me and said do you know how fast you were going? I said 26-27? He said yes 27. I said 27 in a 25, he said no it’s 15, I said omg I’m sorry I thought the sign said 25, he said that one does, but there’s another one that says 15 now, I guess you missed the flashing lights? Is there something wrong with your eyes? I said I’m a school librarian and parent, I would never intentionally speed in a school zone. He said Oh well I guess you are capable of reading then? Or do you not know how to read numbers, here, read this to me…holding up the speedometer- it says 27 sir. Right?! Wow it’s a miracle, a librarian that can actually read numbers. Fortunately this fine officer didn’t give me a ticket, content with being a complete arse and insulting me for several minutes. Btw this was way after school was out, no busses, cars, or pedestrians anywhere. I’m not some reckless driving scofflaw, I just drive like, well, a librarian.
They will, if for nothing else, than as a built-in speed trap.
The city of Orange will gladly add yet another speed trap to their town
Definitely. 55, 45, 35, 25, 15 ....
Even better, 55, 15...
I always liked how they lead you into the town with those speed limits reductions to be honest.
I can hear the ~~armed revenuers~~ Emporia cops and judges drooling about the increased revenue from 200 miles away.
Man I hate driving through Emporia…. I always tell my friends to slow down when driving through emporia when I invite them to the beach.
It is kind of gross that to pay for normal government functions we resort to police banditry because nobody wants to raise regular taxes a by even a little bit
A guy in a brand new $1.5 million dollar house with a brand new challenger and SUV in the driveway thought it would be sufficient to pay $3 to a driver to have them bring him items that they had to shop for. His house was 10 miles away. So his tip doesn’t pay for gas. Meaning he wants to abuse the poorest in the community. He’s used to getting a driver he can walk over and he lost his mind when I told him I wouldn’t give him the order. I explained I’m not trying to hassle him but I do need to be able to live and I can see how expensive all of his stuff is. Lost his mind more. This is not a rare thing in this super rich community. A lot of people here are fake as can be and utterly disgusting.
Remember, there is an expense to swapping 25mph zones to 15mph. And as incompetent as most politicians are, they are still aware when something would be as unpopular as further lowering speed limits. I see most areas slowly phasing out 25mph as new developments and repaved roadways go in.
They just have to change a couple to rake in revenue from speed traps. 35mph -> 15mph for a couple blocks -> 35mph. Don't need to change a bunch to make this worthwhile for the city.
Yokel cops don't ticket yokels in this context though. It won't be that unpopular
It's not the cops I'm talking about, it's any BOS members/mayors/etc that vote to decrease speed limits.
Stick it to the speed traps by not speeding.
Queue the "Got caught doing 85 in a 15, should I get a lawyer?" posts.
Used to be 35 mph, now 15 mph, I was clocked at 36 mph - reckless driving ticket!
Straight to jail
It’ll be a good revenue tool for the city of falls church. Won’t prevent people from driving whatever speed they want though. Speed limits aren’t an effective way at slowing down roads in residential districts/areas with high pedestrian traffic. You need to get rid of the 4 lane wide straightaways.
Falls Church will definitely view this as a revenue opportunity. But it won’t change traffic patterns or enhance safety.
As will Alexandria. They will lower it on Rt 1 in Old Town. Already lowered to 25 north of Old Town. Probably wouldn't apply to Washington st as that's a NP road.
Falls church can already do this though, this new law only applies to towns and counties.
I’m old enough to remember when speed limits were considered the “maximum safe speed”. Now they seem arbitrary. How are speed limits set, and what analysis required to support the new limit? Do speed limits only have a tenuous connection to safety?
Part of the issue, according to a traffic engineer I talked to, is that various authorities put their thumb on the scale for political reasons, on behalf of constituents who may or may not be actively hostile to the concept of statistical analysis.
They typically use the 85th percentile rule. They set up a speed camera and after they get a bunch of data they set the speed limit around where the 85th percentile speed is.
They absolutely do not, just look at the Dulles toll road. speed limit would be at least 70, probably higher if they did that.
It’s more of a case by case basis. VA seems to limit highways to 55 in urban areas.
If you look, in northern VA the limits all seem artifically lower than in the rest of the state. It's not just the toll road
Speed limits are a combination of politics and engineering. Engineers recommend the 85th percentile but politicians can and will change it. Also, the Dulles toll road is owned by the airport authority (MWAA) so they don’t have to follow VDOT standards. Im pretty sure they made up their own standards judging from some of those curves and funky lane widths.
The road was built when it was owned and operated by VDOT. It was only purchased by MWAA in 2006, which I am sure was just a few years ago.
Poor nova drivers can't seem to self organize to the proper lane, let alone accelerate and maintain speed up a hill without braking, or figure out how to use their headlights or high beams. Asking them to mange their speed to is just abusing them at this point.
Or go down a hill without slamming on the breaks, which is the cause of the worst backups.
OMG FLASHING LIGHTS THAT ARE YELLOW ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD?!?!?! WHAT DO I DO? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I'M GONNA DIE!
That’s the typical and most common way. There’s actually a pretty nifty tool that NCHRP recently developed that we’re interested in starting to apply; I actually used it in a speed limit study in NOVA in the past few years. That methodology is a lot more robust; while it still takes into account existing speeds, it also takes into account crash rates, traffic signal density, driveway density, on-street parking, pedestrian facilities, the physical roadway conditions like median types, etc. So while it can still spit out the 85th percentile speed, it can round that down or up or even go down to the 50th percentile speed under certain conditions. I think it’s a great step forward in this type of analysis.
Sounds like it's just politics.
They do in relation to severity of a potential accident. A normal jurisdiction would take into account things like population & traffic density for a given roadway. But who knows how they actually come up with some of these.
Outside of residential areas their purpose is to fund the police. So they’re generally set 15-20 mph below the actual safe speed.
Just another way for small towns to generate revenue.
"35 in a 15? Here's your summons for reckless driving."
Hamilton VA is tripping over themselves to get new signs.
They’ve lost several pets to commuters speeding on through, numerous mailboxes, and several power poles have been taken out. Nobody is writing tickets in Hamilton, they’re just worried that school kids are going to die one day.
Controversial here I know, but lower speed limits don’t make roads safer, road “diets” and design do. In Nova, speed limits frequently don’t match the size and build of the road. For example, Wiehle Ave between FX Co Parkway and Reston Parkway is 35. The rest of Wiehle is 45. 45, to me, is appropriate for this road. The speed limit sign is covered by foliage when it drops, and the police always set speed traps just beyond it in front of the water treatment plant. I got pulled by one once going 7 over (it actually wasn’t until this that I knew the speed changed). The officer said to me “why are you speeding when there are so many houses on this road?” I obviously didn’t answer, but I thought to myself “there literally isn’t a single house on this segment of Wiehle at all, and many fewer neighborhoods branch off from that section than Wiehle on the other side of Reston Pkwy.” This is just one example. I also think the 50 mph speed for FX Co. Pkwy is silly too. 55 would be fine.
Yep people will naturally go as fast as the road allows them to. Can’t count how many times I’ve been on a straight, wide 4 lane road that has a speed limit of 30 but could be comfortably driven at 45, so most people speed.
Exactly. And it pisses me off to no end because there are people who will go the actual speed limit, and to me, they’re the ones creating danger. Well, the local government is I guess. Or even worse, come to Reddit and admonish people for speeding when they’re going 15 over in an area where the speed limit is 15 and could be a freeway.
The crazy thing to me is that engineers understood that you needed to widen lanes to make drivers comfortable to drive at high speeds, but for over a century now they have refused to accept the obvious reverse logic that narrowing lanes would cause drivers to slow down.
Sussex Co. revenue windfall incoming! 460 will be 15 MPH from Petersburg to Suffolk now.
Small towns on RT 15 are literally salivating rn. They should make it illegal to suddenly go from 55 to less without rumble strips and a neon sign.
Jesus what a waste of time and money
I know there are some areas in NOVA that can possibly justify the 15MPH. The problem will be enforcement. Just don't ever see this being something LE will take up barring an uproar from a neighborhood over some major issues.
It will get enforced at the scene of accidents. Extra citations. You lose your right of way privileges when you violate the speed limit.
Idk every claim that comes to my desk, the police refuse to investigate and we can never prove speed. Police don’t do shit half the time. A lot of reckless drivers get away with being not-at-fault while speeding down 25mph roads and hitting granny while she slowly makes her left turn from a stop sign.
It's a good thing Dash cams are becoming so much more common. 3 years ago, nobody I knew had one, but these days there is hardly anybody I know that drives without recording everything in HD. That is my experience though, your social circle may be different.
Yeah personally I use one but the general public has not caught on. A lot of claims end up word versus word because nobody thinks to gather up evidence at the scene and the police are useless. The only exception are Teslas which come equipped. Funny enough, you can tell when a Tesla is at fault because suddenly their dash cam “doesn’t work” lol
Hard to prove speed when the vehicles are no longer moving though. Not impossible but the juice isn't worth the squeeze for a speeding ticket.
Surprisingly enough, the amount of damage and displacement from where the impact occurred directly correspond to speed. Silly physics and its kinetic energy impact theory.
I think it's mostly just for Alexandria so that they can have 15 miles per hour in their school zones legally.
Is it not currently legal? A few neighborhoods in the Del Ray area also changed to 20mph speed limits, and so far it seems to be effective based on the data they’ve collected.
It was not legal on king st according to state law. Neighbor hood streets were fine but numbered highways were not legal. Ex King St is State Rt 7. I don't think Alexandria has any other schools outside of Alexandria high School and Minnie Howard that are on State highways.
Ft Belvoir has several 15 mph zones. Trust me, it is NOT easy to drive less than 15 mph on a road.
My guess is that part of the reason for this is that Virginia has a high number of state-owned roads compared to other states. So a lot of residential or commercial streets that in other states might be controlled by the city, town or county (and that body can change speed limits if it wants to) are state owned in Virginia. So this is giving some level of local control over what are essentially local streets.
It will only matter if they enforce it. I am someone who has two kids under 10 and lives near a playground. The posted speed is 30. My own wife goes 40, and there are regular cars exceeding far past the speed limit. One of the worst offenders is the post office truck. I've informed my local station. They don't care. When a kid gets hit and killed, there will be outrage for a month, then back to normal. I know catching speeders going 100mph on 28 is more important. However, child verses car going 50 is deadly.
Lower speed limits probably make sense for small-ish towns with dense-ish cores that have state highways running straight through the middle. Pedestrian-heavy downtowns with thru traffic is a recipe for danger and they'll want to reduce that danger with lower speed limits. That said, speed limits are not all that effective in getting drivers to slow down (which is intensely frustrating but whatever), these roads need to be designed to force drivers to slow down.
If there's also an emphasis on traffic calming & safe street design, this would be a godsend for so many residential neighborhoods.
I can’t for Manassas to start lowering the already-ridiculous 25mph zones down to 15mph.
Its for areas of minimal lanes in very pedestrian areas and also school zones, this is a good thing
Why just 15mph? The average gait of a horse is about 4.5 mph. Cmon Virginia, think of the global crisis of warming climactic change….or something like that. 4.5mph statewide now! Will someone please think of the children!!!
Perfect example of lowering a speed limit is on the road in front of my home. The current speed limit is 25mph and it leads to OLGC. There are two speed tables that people constantly bottom out on because they’re going way too fast. But the assholes that are running late for work or church constantly brush off the speed limit and haul ass down the street anyways.
And how will lowering the speed limit change that?
Id like them to make it 5mph so left lane campers now need 1 hour to go 5 miles “because its the law”
15 mph - especially considering how very few people honor speed limits as actual limits & instead invent a 'rule' that they can go 9mph over - will save a lot of lives and also make streets waaaay more pleasant for everyone outside of cars. In Alexandria since you have to stop every block in a lot of places, hitting the gas and getting up to 25/30 mph between stops doesn't actually meaningfully shorten your trips by more than a few seconds total. 15 mph would mean fewer dead/injured pedestrians and that's what I care about. Yes we need to redesign all of our streets to make going faster than the speedlimit very uncomfortable or even impossible. But starting with reducing the limit - for those who aren't sociopaths more concerned about getting places a few seconds faster - this will be totally fine here. Once I stopped driving like a suburbanite/rural person living in the city my own stress level went way down. I leave a minute or two earlier and never ever get mad about anyone slowing me down because I stopped driving like an ass and started driving like I'm a member of a community who cares about my neighbors outside of cars. If you live in NoVa, it's worth it to shift to thinking like a person who lives in a city. Driving will never, ever be fast, convenient or pleasant at any time window when other people are also trying to go places. That's reality in 100% of the cities around the world. It's smart to just get over this fact. Also accept that it's ok to slow drivers down to make things safer for others. We kill 40k people and injure over 2M annually on our roads. It's ok to make some changes to improve that. And it's ok if it makes commutes slightly longer. Cars will always be geometrically inefficient for travel in cities. Traffic will always be miserable. We can't change that but we can save people's lives. https://preview.redd.it/vv80qvaos59d1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=9f8a85db09e47e3e2a327d59d7fe926f4d39c704
Annnnnnnd that's the end of Georgetown Pike as a commuter road. 15 MPH . . . old men in golf carts gonna take over . . . Like a beach community but instead of playing bocce by the ocean they plan little coups and such. I can hear the Great Falls Citizens' Association moaning from my house
Town of Occoquan just blew their load again... Crazy to me that a stretch of road can have two different speed limits in the opposing directions (the bridge across Occoquan river).
lol just wait for Route 29 in Greene to do this for a speed trap.
It's almost impossible to drive 15 mph.
I bet Arlington will. And, really? There are area's where it makes sense. For anyone complaining that 15MPH is so slow? Get out of your car and run a 4 minute mile, then get back to me.
My vehicle barely idles at 15mph, I’d have to ride the breaks through the zone.
Good if there is a product on the market that kills 100s of people every year and leave 1000s more in this state disabled then the state should do something about it. People talking about it as a waste of money but the people dying have a estimated $5 Billion economic impact each year in just our state.
Yeah but there's not exactly a mountain of evidence to suggest this will change that.
There are studies in places like Portland that when they changed their municipal speed limit from 25 to 20 in 2019 they saw significant changes in the amount of cars speeding. It was a 33% reduction for cars over 30 mph and 50% reduction for cars over 35 mph. There need to be structural improvements too but there is evidence that speed limits do matter.
Lowering speed limits without doing anything else is a half measure. The real solution is to design roadways for the speeds you want. No excessively wide turn radii, raised crosswalks/continuous sidewalks, narrower lanes and bulb outs. In addition, near side signals should be considered to keep drivers from overrunning every stop bar. Speed and red light cameras are still a good interim measure, because then enforcement can occur without LEOs interacting with people, which is safer for all. The end goal of cameras also must be identifying areas where road safety projects should be considered, not just a cash cow.
:-/ I just got pulled over for doing 27 in a 25 school zone, but they’d added an inner ring of 15 mph. The deputy stopped me and said do you know how fast you were going? I said 26-27? He said yes 27. I said 27 in a 25, he said no it’s 15, I said omg I’m sorry I thought the sign said 25, he said that one does, but there’s another one that says 15 now, I guess you missed the flashing lights? Is there something wrong with your eyes? I said I’m a school librarian and parent, I would never intentionally speed in a school zone. He said Oh well I guess you are capable of reading then? Or do you not know how to read numbers, here, read this to me…holding up the speedometer- it says 27 sir. Right?! Wow it’s a miracle, a librarian that can actually read numbers. Fortunately this fine officer didn’t give me a ticket, content with being a complete arse and insulting me for several minutes. Btw this was way after school was out, no busses, cars, or pedestrians anywhere. I’m not some reckless driving scofflaw, I just drive like, well, a librarian.