A remarkable sight!! Four cars loaded with college students hold traffic to the speed limit on I-285 for 30 solid minutes!!
The story is this. A group of college students got together and decided to hold I-285 traffic to the posted speed limit. (I-285 makes a complete circle around Atlanta.) The Atlanta Journal quotes a spokesman for the DOT as saying that if the students weren’t blocking emergency vehicles and were going the speed limit, “they didn’t do a thing wrong.” He added, “In Atlanta… we expect the people going 75 to move over so the people going 95 can have the right of way.”
I’m very familiar with I-285, having travelled it thousands of times. If you do 55, you are risking your life. If you do what traffic is doing, you are subject to a ticket. So what’s a person to do? This will generate some great discussion!
Click on the above image to watch the video. (I wish the audio were better.)
Related Link: AJC’s Article, “Drive 55, Try To Stay Alive” [may require free log-in]
the posted speed “suggestions” are always going to be lower than the pavement allows (on freeways), or else, how would the highway patrol and state troopers get their $$$ coming into the coffers. That’s the only reason there are all those signs. It’s a game.
What if everyone drove exactly the speed limit, always?
I KNOW that if many people tried this, the local governments would suddenly enact legislation to deem it ILLEGAL.
Hilarious! If I remember right, the 55 mph limit was imposed during Nixon’s administration as part of the “we’re running out of oil” paranoia. All states were forced to adopt it or else lose federal highway funds (can you say blackmail?) I think Georgia has left it at 55 mph not because it “saves lives” but because it generates revenue via speeding tickets.
🙂
i think about it so many times.. to do this.. but can’t gather the courage to do it with my audi. some day i’ll take my toyota and try it :). way to go guys. i respect that!
I love it… I have so often thought that the speed limit system in our country is flawed. I’ve heard a quote that if all existing traffic laws were obeyed, most traffic jams/problems would disappear.
I live about an hour from Atlanta; the day I got a job closer to home and didn’t have to commute was a happy day.
(I think 55 came from Carter’s admin, not Nixon’s)
Dumb. Traffic on 285 is bad enough, don’t make me drive slowly when it isn’t congested. Coming from Athens to Vinings, 285 is often the shortest distance-wise, and longest time-wise part of my commute. I hate Atlanta.
Dumb. 285 is already backed up most of the time, don’t mess with it when it does actually move!
Your home should be at least 20 mile from shopping and work. Too bad someone didn’t shoot those idiots. If they don’t like it don’t drive on those roads. If only there were a way to calculate what the delays cost the city’s economy and bill them for that amount.
I am not sure, but there was a study done that showed that driving slower will save lives. If not for anything else, the severity of impact with stationary objects.
Speed limits on interstates are not there to make money, but to assure that there is a modicum of safety. On roads that are slower than 55, say State roads, some of those speeds are legislated by the locals.
When you see a turn that is marked with a speed, there is a process that is done to arrive at that speed. There’s an elongated U-shaped device which is mounted inside a car. It has a ball, and fluid in it. When the vehicle turns, the ball is pushed to one side or another. The idea is to go through the turn at different speeds, with two people in the car. One monitoring the speed, and driving, the other monitoring the device. If the ball is within certain “safe” limits, it is then decided what speed the turn should be posted for. I know, because I did it!
Whoa.
I’m reading a lot of hostile messages (Atlanta folks?) who don’t see the irony in this. These folks were obeying the speed limit. They were one of the few who were (until forced to) not breaking the rules.
Anger at them might be easy as they caused you to be late, but look at the big picture. It’s the rule that’s broken, not those that follow them.
Then again, I’ve heard about this being some in other places where they people doing it got tickets for dangerous driving.
There are several municipalities in Mo. that are funded exclusively by tickets and fines. So I firmly belive that law enforcement and local governments want you to speed. Easy to get revenue that way.
Andy Payne – I did a Google search to refresh my memory. The 55 mph limit was mandated in 1973 during Nixon’s presidency, and made permanent by Congress in 1975, Nixon still President. Then in 1995 Clinton signed a transportation bill that repealed the national 55 mph speed limit and gave the authority back to the states to set their speed limits. Georgia has raised speed limits on the interstates in places to 65 or 70 mph. But some places are still 55 mph.
I grew up in a tourist destination. We would periodically get tired of tourists speeding through our little town, so we would drive back and forth through town at the posted speed limit. We called it “Giving tourists the slows.” Invariably, we headed a long parade of tailgating pissed-off tourists all the way to the city limits, when we would turn around and start in the other direction. Finally, the State completed a bypass that enabled the citizens to cross the street on weekends without taking their lives into their hands.
55 on a 4 lane motorway is a bit… silly.
In the UK it’s 70, but still – if it’s the limit, its the limit. Just because you want to speed doens’t make it legal.
All the hostility here would be funny, if it didn’t show the comments as idiots.
Driving the speed limit doesn’t bother me – What does are morons that go slow in the passing lanes. As I remember back in my days of driver’s ed, the left lane should be used for passing only. If you’re not passing a car, you should not be in that lane. You try something like that on the Autobahn, and you’ll quickly realize what “flash to pass” means – or you’ll get that MB-SLK so far up your tailpipe, every time you smile, you’ll see the MB logo in your mouth…
I live in Atlanta and drive on 285 daily. It can get pretty scary at times. You just have to keep up with traffic; which mean going 75+. Otherwise you risk being killed.
I’m amused by this, but it’s never a good idea to try to be the traffic cop. Let the pros do it.
Strictly from an engineering view, freeways tend to perform better when _everyone_ drives the same speed, whether that is 45 on boulevards, 55 or 65 or more on the expressway. But as speed increases, people will not go faster than the fastest speed at which they feel safe.
Then you have drivers who may be distracted or angry or inexperienced or stoned. Mistakes and stupidity seem more hazardous as speed increases, and people react by slowing down. But everyone slows down differently, so instead of the flow rolling at a common speed, now there is chaotic traffic flow – like turbulence in water.
When freeways are full, these small disturbances in the flow have greater impact on the flow, causing traffic jams. If everyone drove within 5 mph of a reasonable number, there would be fewer problems.
Of course there are always people who think their time is more valuable than everyone else’s, so they will drive faster no matter what the cost to themselves or the public.
I have driven in Atlanta many times and from I can tell the speed limit is the correct speed for their driving skills.
Man, I always wanted to add a long shaft with a set of balls under my truck that I could extent and ram jerks like this in the rear. By the way the speed in a turn is determined by Radius and Banking.
I remember reading that in Colorado you can be ticketed for not keeping up with the flow. So if my memory is right, you can get a ticket for doing the speed limit.
Ron….Nixon was gone by 1975….Ford was President that year, Mr. I never met a football helmet I liked….lol
The interstates in Arizona are 75, but as you get to a certain point near Phoenix or Tucson it drops to 55.
My uncle used to be a long haul driver and he hated when he had to go into California from Arizona, because California still has a max 55 for trucks and he said it was impossible to change lanes many times because all the cars would zoom around him, not allowing him to make a safe lane change.
yep – its all about quotas. the police have certain quotas to make, and having a speed limit that is an inconvienance to everyone guaretees those quotas. if the speed limit was 55 and everyone always went 55, then the cops dont have any funds to buy those flashy new tazers.
Joshua – right you are about Nixon and Ford. Nixon resigned in 1974. Thanks for the clarification. 🙂
> There are several municipalities in Mo. that are funded exclusively by
> tickets and fines. So I firmly belive that law enforcement and local
> governments want you to speed. Easy to get revenue that way.
I can live with this, and the contradictions of “the flow of traffic”,
UNTIL a speeding ticket jacks up my insurance rates.
Not cool. And not a good predictor of risk.
People were doing this in Maryland 15 years ago… to protest the Governor who wouldn’t raise the limit above 55 anywhere within the state.
If it gets people to raise the speed limit, not a bad idea. If it’s people trying to get everyone else to drive slow, boo.
55mph. That’s just too fast! I live in Seattle, and I am lucky if I can make it to 30mph on 405 for the drive home. 🙂
If I had the time I would start an initiative in California to make traffic enforcement revenue neutral. Why should government benefit financially from moving violations?
Road design is a typical government structure. Another exapmle where government could take clues from the business world to stay on top of issues. They build roads that work in theory (on paper) then put it in to practice, wonder why it doesn’t work, and the proceed to build more of the exact same and wonder why those don’t work either.
Any business that operated that way would go under in a day.
Hilarious!
Unfortunately, no particular speed works very well on 285. Like a lot of city highways it’s a mix of drivers with Autobahn delusions, space cadets with cell phones spot welded to their heads and Mr. Magoo, change the radio station while inadvertantly crossing 5 lanes types. These folks can do pretty much whatever they want, since on any given day on 285 you will see more purple 1955 Bentleys than police cars.
Even the police or troopers you do see, understandably seem very disinterested in risking their necks getting out of their cars to write a ticket while having to stand on the shoulder next to the chaos.
The 55 MPH speed limit may seem a little on the slow side, but God help the slow motorist if they raised it much higher. The reason I say this is for example, a few years ago a friend and I were headed somewhere on a Saturday morning before the traffic was heavy. He had just bought a new Acura NSX and offered to let me test drive it. We hit an open stretch of 285 and he said something like “open it up some if you want”, so I eased it up to around 90 MPH. I decided to stop at 90 because to my left a guy in 20 year old Nissan clunker with mini-spare smoked me from the slow lane. That’s a sign fron God telling you what you are doing is pointless.
I’m surprised the folks doing the pace car thing survived. They must have had too many cars between them and the “good ole boys” following them, for the GOBs to get off a clean shot. Most people don’t know this, but those guys can hook their boots under the dash, open the truck door and shoot from under their F-150s, like Buffalo Bill bagging bison.
Photon torpedos — need I say more?