[PRCo] Highway Speed Limits

[Joshua Dunfield]

On 11.07.2013, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
> There was also an interesting news item floating on the internet this week
> …. German politicians about to put speed limits on the remaining portions of
> the Autobahn (-en) that have no posted limits.

Really?  They made some noise about that a couple months ago, but it
sounded like it wasn't going anywhere, despite the usual evidence that
it would save lives.

> My own opinions about those high limits?   The fit a lot better in a nation
> like Germany than they ever would here because the Germans were not allowed
> to teach their own kids how to drive.  ...  The German highway
> fatality rate is 15% lower than the US (that's fatalities per vehicle mile)
> in spite of the fact that they have 6.6 times more people per square mile
> than we have.   I think that says something for better training and better
> acceptance of rules.   Rules?   It isn't a cat and mouse game like here.
> If the speed limit is 80 km/hr, they don't shade it upward by 10 or 15 like
> we would.   They accept the rules.

No question that German drivers are far more competent than Americans.
 And they follow the rules, more or less.  The 30 km limit, which
applies to most streets in Kaiserslautern, isn't followed terribly
well.  A number of streets (like the one I live on) are
"Verkehrsberuhigter Bereich", traffic-calming zones, where you're
supposed to drive "as slowly as possible, in no case faster than 7
km/h".  7 km/h is a brisk walk.  No one actually follows that.  The
nicer drivers (in practice, probably the ones who *live* on those
streets, and don't want to annoy their neighbors) will go 20.

When I see exceptionally bad driving in Kaiserslautern, I assume it's
an American from the base.  I gather it's not entirely trivial to get
the US military's European driver's license, but it's got to be easier
than going to German driving school.  If you just happen to be
American, and not military, many US states have reciprocal agreements
that let you exchange your state license for a German license...which
never expires!  The wisdom of letting someone with an American level
of driving education drive on a highway at 240 km/h, perfectly
legally, escapes me.

The funniest story I have, though, is that Kaiserslautern drivers have
a reputation for tricking outsiders into getting speeding tickets.
There's a major street with a 50 km limit; it has speed cameras.
People from out of town tend to speed on it (I'm sure the locals did,
too, until the cameras were installed), and supposedly, some local
drivers will watch for out-of-town cars behind them (you can easily
see where a German car is registered from the first letters of its
license plate), and as they approach a speed camera, the KL driver
will slow down just enough to goad the following car into passing, but
not enough to allow the following car to stay under 50.  Ka-ching!

-j.