Originally Posted by
The Human Car
The chart has two logical outcomes 1) is that motorists obeying the speed limit is more deadly to pedestrians and cyclists then motorists that speed. Or 2) the police are not enforcing the speed limit in high bike/ped crash areas.
There is at least one more explanation: car versus bike/ped interactions are much more common in highly populated areas. This additional explanation has nothing to do with speed!
Since there is a lower percentage of people driving in highly populated areas, the %tickets/population must "logically" be less!
Originally Posted by
The Human Car
Maybe, this is due to the difference in average speeds on road-ways. That is, in rural areas, there are more higher speed roads OR the focus on monitoring speed is on the higher speed roads.
Originally Posted by
The Human Car
Talking to local police they have confirmed that they do not ticket drivers driving 40mph in a 25mph residential or school zone.
Since we don't know what the "non-local" police do, this piece of information isn't useful. It's possible that the %tickets/population is higher in rural areas because it's easier and more profitable for cops to give tickets in those places (plus, the cops might have less other things to do).
Originally Posted by
The Human Car
When looking at bike/ped crashes you are looking at mostly pedestrian crashes. And for MD you are looking at mostly crashes on 25mph roads, essentially the same roads a lot of residents are clamoring for traffic calming.
Another false causality. You might see the close to the same number of pedestrian accidents if people drove the speed limit because very few pedestrians are walking in the vacinity of high-speed roads. Residents would "clamor" for traffic calming even if speeding was rare.
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I don't disagree that there might be a problem. I don't think the "statistics" provided do much to illuminate the real causes of the problem. It is
very difficult to prove causality of complex phenomena with simple statistics.