I cannot recall having seen any recently but do recall seeing minimum speed limits posted on highways in the USA. That is sort of in line with your suggestion.
I do think there are a number of aspect that matter with both setting speed limits, enforcing speed limits and driver’s actually driving at some given speed. The two main aspects for me would be coordination among the drivers and congestion on the road. Both will have some connection to driver reaction time and vehicle capability (can the car physically change coarse, stop or accelerate assuming the driver has time to react).
Most of that is really situation dependent and even the speed range approach or some set max speed is a poor metric for defining some optimal rule. I sometimes wonder if fewer accidents might occur if outside certain areas (school/hospital zones, residential streets where lots of kids might be playing and the like) no speed was posted. Just have better liability assignment to those not driving at reasonable speeds. (Problematic from a practical perspective but not impossible given “blackbox” recorders and GPS data in cars and simple force analysis of the car(s) involved in any accidents.) A concern here might be that even if we see a reduced frequency of events (seems to be somewhat supported by cases where towns/cities removed stop lights and people started viewing the intersections as if they were 4 way stops—i.e., no one just assumed they had some right of way over the others.) A potential reasons this might not be a good idea would be if frequency declines but the when things go wrong they go very wrong—never have fender benders but cars are totaled and people always crippled or killed would not be an improvement.
But I do think driving habits related to speed seem to be driven more by what would be a common law type process than the statutory “posted speed” law.
The signs I was thinking of were those that stated Minimum 45 MPH on US highways. I think that also went along with the general rule that if you were driving under 45 on the highway you should have your warning flasher lights active.
Probably not, since some U.S. states do post minimum (fair-weather) speeds on Interstate highways. Section 2.2 of this paper includes a slightly dated map indicating the minimum speeds in each state (where applicable).
I cannot recall having seen any recently but do recall seeing minimum speed limits posted on highways in the USA. That is sort of in line with your suggestion.
I do think there are a number of aspect that matter with both setting speed limits, enforcing speed limits and driver’s actually driving at some given speed. The two main aspects for me would be coordination among the drivers and congestion on the road. Both will have some connection to driver reaction time and vehicle capability (can the car physically change coarse, stop or accelerate assuming the driver has time to react).
Most of that is really situation dependent and even the speed range approach or some set max speed is a poor metric for defining some optimal rule. I sometimes wonder if fewer accidents might occur if outside certain areas (school/hospital zones, residential streets where lots of kids might be playing and the like) no speed was posted. Just have better liability assignment to those not driving at reasonable speeds. (Problematic from a practical perspective but not impossible given “blackbox” recorders and GPS data in cars and simple force analysis of the car(s) involved in any accidents.) A concern here might be that even if we see a reduced frequency of events (seems to be somewhat supported by cases where towns/cities removed stop lights and people started viewing the intersections as if they were 4 way stops—i.e., no one just assumed they had some right of way over the others.) A potential reasons this might not be a good idea would be if frequency declines but the when things go wrong they go very wrong—never have fender benders but cars are totaled and people always crippled or killed would not be an improvement.
But I do think driving habits related to speed seem to be driven more by what would be a common law type process than the statutory “posted speed” law.
Could you be thinking of Canadian speed limit signs, which say “maximum”?
I wasn’t but have seen those as well.
The signs I was thinking of were those that stated Minimum 45 MPH on US highways. I think that also went along with the general rule that if you were driving under 45 on the highway you should have your warning flasher lights active.
Sorry, I actually just misread your post as saying “maximum” where you wrote “minimum”.
Probably not, since some U.S. states do post minimum (fair-weather) speeds on Interstate highways. Section 2.2 of this paper includes a slightly dated map indicating the minimum speeds in each state (where applicable).
I actually just completely misread my parents post and thought they wrote “maximum” and not “minimum”.