At 12:10 PM 1/5/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Punch wrote:
>
>>oh I understand what speed your talking about, but everyone refers to the
>>highway lanes as the slow lane the middle lanes and the fast lane, yet there
>>is only one speed limit for the highway! if everyone was obeying the law,
>>and not racing nobody would need to pass, and the only cars in the slow
>>lanes would be trucks ascending hills!
>
>How do you figure? The speed limit is just that - the *limit*. Which
>implies that you are allowed to go slower. In New York, it's perfect
>legal to go 55 in a zone posted for 65 - as long as you're less than 15
>MPH under the limit you don't even have to put on your hazard
>flashers. In fact, it's even *technically* illegal to pass someone who's
>doing 65 in a 65 zone, because you're then doing more than 65. Slower
>traffic must stay to the right.
>
>Which means that yes, 99.99999% of all drivers have broken the speed laws
>and yes we're all "criminals". Fortunately most officers don't go by the
>letter but rather the spirit of the speed limits.
You also need to be going noticeably faster than the speed limit due to the
potential for inaccuracy in speed measurement (your speedo vs. the cop's
speedo/radar, etc.) The California Highway Patrol will generally not stop
you on the freeway unless you are going way faster than the traffic around
you or constantly weaving in and out of lanes. They rarely use radar on
the freeway (except in more rural areas and on smaller highways), so they
are basically stopping people who do things to make themselves stand out.
FWIW, I've been going 80+ on certain stretches of freeway and still been
passed by dozens of other cars going at least 10-15mph faster than me.
-Bill
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 06 2004 - 11:45:41 EST