Quote:
Originally Posted by GoNative
Truly there's no point having a speed limit if you do not enforce it. Create limits that are realistic and police them. Otherwise it creates much more dangerous conditions where you have some few people sitting on the limit and others racing along well over it. Speed limits are not meant to some vague guideline, they should be a true indication of the safe speed to travel. Here they've just defaulted to a ridiculously low limit that doesn't take into account safe limits whatsoever and you have a situation where people just drive at whatever speed they want. That is not safe.
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Don`t get me wrong - I didn`t say I thought the speed limits were good. In fact, I looked into them a while back because I too thought they were weirdly low and meaningless. If they want them to be "safe for such and such speed" displays, then they should be called that.
The bolded part reminded me of the other algorithm factor that I had forgotten about. Kei vehicles and pedestrian/bicycle traffic. Apparently they have to take kei into consideration when setting the limits, and what is safe for a kei is much lower than what is safe for a normal car. And even if you ignore that, I believe it was said that they`re thinking about people having to drive around lower speed keis... There is also some consideration for people walking or bicycling on the edge of the road.
I think there was something like -20km/h off the limit for roads with kei traffic, and an additional -10 for pedestrian/bicycle traffic without a dedicated space for them.
I personally hate keis and would never drive one even if I were paid to, but it can`t be denied that there are a lot of them. A while back there was talk of completely blocking them from using the expressways and raising the speed limits to 100~120km/h (and I had pretty high hopes for this) but there was enough backlash to stop them.
So it seems like they don`t enforce the rules and leave it up to people to take personal responsibility if they get into an accident while speeding. As in the insurance example I gave. Unless you`re going over the limit to the extreme, or are driving erratically, police will not stop you.
Oh, and another random tidbit - apparently the speed cameras will only go off if you`re either going twice the limit or 140+.