Fuck CBS — what a shit hole

Those cases are almost certainly because someone set a standard for roll, visibility, and reaction times relative to weather — because an objective reason is better than no reason. You have to account for cars that aren’t yours, people who don’t see as well as you, weather that isn’t today, and visibility that isn’t now.

The speed limit changes didn’t make sense to you at that time, and they were maybe was set to an older standard for vehicular performance, but it was set for a reason.

For example do those roads allow bicyclists? If so you need to add margin for error that the vehicle in front of you behind a blind corner is going a lot slower than you anticipate. Vulnerable road users are still road users.

I have worked for almost 10 years around road safety.

Yes and no — there are basic rules with basic margins of error — but as you point out, there’s also political forces that have nothing to do with safety.

In a straight flat road with no other vulnerable road users, the safety margin between 40 and 60 in a modern car is negligible. But on that same road the margin between 60 and 80 is not.

And places change — what was once an isolated country road can easily become a suburban junction. Your example of a child getting hit can either be political reaction, or a lagging indicator that children have become more common in that place.

Edit: the counter point to “oh the state just wants money” is that the state has to pay for roads, and people hate paying taxes. Maybe instead of playing games with fines, voters should just pay for the public services they want? That is part of the reason enforcement is not more serious in many places — it’s not be because voters care about safety — they just don’t like paying fines for rules they chose to break.

1. Psychology — our minds are thinking about what we do next, so the present is regularly seen as an impediment to getting to the future — our destination. If we speed, we are able to do things we want to do next, sooner. After which we will rush to do the thing after that.

2. Physics — the roads are built according to how curvy the land underneath them is, and according to how much reaction time you need to respond to changes on the road — for example due to weather. Most people speeding are decreasing their calculated and often legislated margin of safety.

3. Economics — automatic enforcement is not necessarily cheaper — and when it is deployed, people just learn where it’s deployed and stop breaking the law in that one place. In many places traffic fines pay for public services, so you don’t actually want to stop the behavior outright, you just want to catch the people in the act.

4. Economics — safety isn’t the only constraint on speed — travel time is important. People tend to do more ecologically important things when they arrive compared to when they travel. Significantly slowing everyone down would have a measurable impact.