American driver entitlement is the purest, most potent form of entitlement.
I don’t know if you knew this, but with regard to US Interstates, there’s a common saying that goes “nine you’re fine, ten you’re mine.” It’s essentially saying “under 15 kph you’re fine, but over 15 you’re busted for speeding”. That is, if you want to exceed the already quite high speed limit, you should feel safe doing up to 9 additional mph over that. And they’re actually not wrong; many police literally don’t enforce traffic law up to that point, or they only do so if they really have a bee in their bonnet. In large part this is because nearly every driver’s doing it, which is one of the main reasons why cameras are useful: it doesn’t have to stop your car, ask if you know why it pulled you over, listen to you try talking your way out of a ticket, be subject to human biases such as ethnicity, gender, and personality in determining whether to let you go with just a warning or not, and generate enough paperwork to disincentivize the enforcement of traffic law as written.
Except in a school zone, if you get pulled over doing within 5 mph (8 kph) of the speed limit, it’s seen by drivers as a huge power trip and something you should gaslight the court into believing you didn’t do, and from 5–10 mph, it’s basically seen as getting unlucky. The state of speeding in the US is so dire that even asserting that speed limits should be enforced as marked is something that will get you shouted down.
American driver entitlement is the purest, most potent form of entitlement.
I don’t know if you knew this, but with regard to US Interstates, there’s a common saying that goes “nine you’re fine, ten you’re mine.” It’s essentially saying “under 15 kph you’re fine, but over 15 you’re busted for speeding”. That is, if you want to exceed the already quite high speed limit, you should feel safe doing up to 9 additional mph over that. And they’re actually not wrong; many police literally don’t enforce traffic law up to that point, or they only do so if they really have a bee in their bonnet. In large part this is because nearly every driver’s doing it, which is one of the main reasons why cameras are useful: it doesn’t have to stop your car, ask if you know why it pulled you over, listen to you try talking your way out of a ticket, be subject to human biases such as ethnicity, gender, and personality in determining whether to let you go with just a warning or not, and generate enough paperwork to disincentivize the enforcement of traffic law as written.
Except in a school zone, if you get pulled over doing within 5 mph (8 kph) of the speed limit, it’s seen by drivers as a huge power trip and something you should gaslight the court into believing you didn’t do, and from 5–10 mph, it’s basically seen as getting unlucky. The state of speeding in the US is so dire that even asserting that speed limits should be enforced as marked is something that will get you shouted down.