I've always found cars to be much more disruptive in the suburbs because they drive so much faster in the suburbs. Cars drive by a suburban sandwich shop that I like to go to so fast that they shake windows. The speed limit on the road is 25.
This is definitely the issue from what I see. I have a neighborhood road that runs in front of my home. Speed limit is 25 mph. Doesn't matter, cars still do 55 or more at times. When I was growing up, you'd never see anyone going that fast down a residential street.
Our community is a short cut. Its 25Mph even outside school hours. Its at the bottom of a hill. Someone blew by me this morning doing easily 50Mph. We've had someone roll their SUV onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing my wife and kids - and that driver was going uphill! So totally get it. I've usually got the fastest car in sight, and I'm doing the speed limit through town. On the freeway I go the same speed as everyone else. Sometimes a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower. Data shows that driving at the speed of traffic, or slightly faster, is less dangerous than driving 5mph slower. Where I live, the freeway is regularly 75mph, even though the limit is 65mph. With the obvious exception of rush hour, when I encounter a traffic knot, its because two people are driving slower than the rest of traffic wants to, and everyone has to negotiate around them. One could view the 50 people wanting to pass the two as the problem, or we could criticize the two traveling the speed limit. In the absence of those two people, the safety of the other 50 would increase. Conversely, in the absence of those other 50 people, the safety of those two would increase. Seems an obvious choice to me. Its easy to point out yahoos who run red lights or speed through town, but these are not representative, and doing 10 mph over the limit through a school zone is not remotely like doing 10mph over the limit on a freeway.
I dont think ive ever seen a fast car on a dense city street (difficult to go fast when theres gridlock) whereas speeds above 55 mph were common on the 'nice' suburban street I grew up on
When I lived in Lincoln Park, Chicago (a dense urban neighborhood), there were no speed limit signs. I think the speed limit was 25 mph, but between the narrow streets, parked cars, frequent intersections, and lots of pedestrians, I rarely felt comfortable going faster than 20. They could have had 100 mph stop signs all over the place and I still wouldn't have gone faster than 20.
I have driven through such areas (mostly in Texas) and I found it very unsettling that the speed limit was so high. In other areas, it's not uncommon for the speed limit to be reduced to 25 (or maybe 35) in a residential area.
Be careful with your average speeds. I often drive in excess of 70mph on the (65mph limit) freeway in LA, and I am far from the fastest car. The key difference is that I don't drive in rush hour. A 25mph speed limit would be absurd.
Michiganian here ... I've watched the speed limits increase over the last few years on all but residential roads and though my take is anecdotal, it's a fantastic thing as far as I'm concerned.
I used to drive 62 miles round trip to work, worked at home for a bit in between and am now back to about a 30 mile round-trip commute. Both were split equally on surface and freeway roads. Back when the speed limits were lower it was generally expected that most drivers -- during rush hour (assuming one could reach the speeds) -- would drive 50 MPH in a 40 and around 55 in a 50. It always surprised me -- every morning and evening on about a 6-mile stretch of road marked 40 MPH, there wasn't a car driving under 50 (and when that rare driver arrived, he was often tailgated so hard that traffic safety decreased considerably for him). Then, out of the blue, almost every road I took to work was changed to 50 MPH. Surprisingly, people weren't suddenly driving 60 MPH. I'm now on a similar commute as I was years ago, taking that same road, and people are consistently driving between 50 and 55 MPH on it.
I love our 85th percentile rule. It makes sense -- that one driver who's obeying the speed limit is being tail-gated by everyone else, reducing the distance between him and other cars, which increases accident probability and the relative severity of the accident since it will happen at a higher speed due to reduced braking time. When everyone is going about the same speed on the road, cars tend to be more spaced out and the relative difference in speed between the two objects colliding affects the severity of the accident.
There's also a lot of misconceptions about how speed is enforced -- at least in my area -- and what rules exist around speeding. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it used to be that you were legally allowed to exceed the speed limit by 10 MPH on a freeway to overtake a vehicle in the passing lane. I have family who work in traffic patrol for the county and this topic comes up regularly. The department they work in encourages targeting people driving in excess of the speed of traffic, not folks who are keeping up with the speed of the cars around them. Of course, you can be pulled over in this scenario, and you are breaking the law[0], but at least in my area, it's not encouraged. An orderly system is safe, an outlier is unsafe, so they aim for folks who are driving in the left lane on a freeway in low traffic volumes, folks going over 20% of the speed of others and exceeding the speed limit, people jumping solid lines[1] and the huge problem caused by large numbers of people running red lights and failing to yield right-of-way when turning left[2].
[0] Both of them will tell you "If I want to pull you over, I can find a reason". A common one is those plastic covers/dealer advertisements around license plates or things hanging from a rear-view mirror. Some of the plate variations are legal (but there are very specific rules and almost all of them are not -- it's just rarely enforced), but most things hanging from the rear view mirror are obstructions.
[1] There are many places on the freeways in Michigan where the lane markers are solid white and for some reason, people don't understand that it's illegal to change lanes -- that's why they're solid. Aside from safety (they're put in due to increased blind-spots that make lane changes unsafe), they're often located in areas where people are entering the freeway and backups occur. Folks who panic at merging traffic or just don't want to slow down will jump lanes ... causing a worse backup.
[2] I realized this is going to sound uncommon to folks who don't live here, so pardon the long explanation. Easily the most common issue on road-ways in my area is people failing to yield when turning left at an intersection (my cousin/uncle will tell you this, but if you live here you're either already aware of the problem, or you aren't realizing you're doing it). Red light running is also more common here than in most of the country because of the frequency with which people encounter one-way intersections. It's legal, everywhere (except NYC and a probably a few other corner cases), to turn left on red when the road is one-way. Where I live, every road over three lanes (and many under) are engineered using the "Michigan Left" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_left). Often, though becoming less common, the "turnaround" is configured so that you can only turn left onto the same road heading in the opposite direction. Everything's fine when this is the case. However, it's grown popular to position these turnaround lanes in places that coincide with large retail business entrances or moderate traffic side-roads. All bets are off here. Because people are used to turning left on red in these turn-arounds, they assume they can also, legally, go straight into the side-road/business on red. Go ahead and google for signs telling people not to run red lights ... I couldn't find any. We have several of them on Hall Road in Macomb County. People are also used to "just going" when it's green, but you can't do that if the turnaround has traffic entering the road on the other side -- all of that traffic is turning right and has the right-of-way, just like in any other intersection -- left must yield unless they have a green arrow. I've been honked at on more than a few occasions by other drivers for not just plowing into the intersection, or not running the red to enter a side-street when traffic is clear but the light is red. Worse, once they put these hybrid side-street/turnarounds in, it destroys any advantage that the Michigan Left supposedly provides. It's already at a disadvantage since a portion of the traffic now has to pass through an intersection twice, but now the advantage of the "increased flow due to reduced traffic light phases" is overcome by the backups occurring in both turnarounds bleeding into a lane of traffic and the sudden pouring in of new traffic -- which has priority over existing traffic due to right-of-way -- entering in from popular businesses and busier side-streets (and, yes, a vein is popping out in my forehead now).
What's the problem with the marked cars driving the speed limit? If all the cars drive at the speed limit, that's good, right?
I always thought the speed limit was there as a speed limit. I've found that in Australia, speed limits are obeyed much more than in North America, where they seem to be suggestions or lower bounds on speed.
Many times in Canada I've been travelling in traffic that's doing 30 - 40 kph over the speed limit. That's enough to get your car confiscated in Western Australia!
Your average driver drives way, way too fast on your average residential street and especially parking lots. I've noticed an uptick in the amount of times I've been illegally passed on residential streets in the last 10 years. My street is only around five-six small lot houses long and I'm almost impressed with how fast people manage to drive on it.
Of course, I'm not sure that it has much to do with the speed of the car they are driving.
This is quite different to my part of inner-suburban Australia. I find drivers here to be almost universally polite and accommodating. And there is barely any speeding. Someone doing more than 1-3 km over the limit on the expressway is a clear outlier. Maybe it's only like this around here though.
I have driven tens of thousands of kilometres in the US on roadtrips, and the driving there is quite insane - speeding and dangerous, aggressive manoeuvres. Doing 10-20km over the limit is standard and anyone sticking to the limit is the outlier.
So that would be no where at all where I live. Every single house in this city is on some street that is surrounded by a larger grid of arterial roads, all of them with 35mph speed limits which, when unimpeded by traffic, turn into 45mph minimums and drivers will go out of their way to be a dick to you if you don't adhere to this unspoken rule.
In Germany a speed limit doesn't mean it's always reasonable to drive at maximum speed.
E.g. there are narrow streets in citys with cars parking on both sides. The official speed limit is 50 km/h. If you drive at this speed you straight up murder any pedestrian coming out behind of a car. If you do this you'll be pleaded guilty, because your speed was not appropriate to the situation. You even have to learn this exact situation when you make your drivers license.
An other funny example. Where i lived was road with a bend, where an ordinary person should maybe drive 50 km/h. It was borderline questionable to drive through there with 70 km/h and a good car.
Directly before the bend the speedlimit changed from 70 km/h to 100 km/h. There where a lot of accidents, because even germans don't understand the meaning of german speed limits.
This may depend on region. I'm in Europe, where the city speed limit is at 50 km/h and frequently reduced to 30km/h and where you can get literally stuck between buildings in a few places with a larger car.
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