Posting speed limit signs at the entrypoints to the city

Village speed limit sign at the entrypoint to Warwickshire Village, UK.

There is a letter, "Welcome to D.C. That'll be $125.," in today's Post by someone complaining that while driving on Benning Road, the equivalent of a 6 lane highway where he was driving, a roadway designed to accommodate high speeds, he:

received a speeding ticket for going 45 mph in a 30-mph zone. The lunacy is that the 30-mph speed limit is on a six-lane divided road (Benning Road). This isn't some residential street where a 30-mph limit makes sense but a major thoroughfare into the city.

It's interesting that the letter is steeped in writer's worldview about automobile centricity in suburban locales. It is typical for residential streets in suburbs to have a 30 mph speed limit. In DC the speed limit on residential streets and many arterials passing through neighborhood commercial districts (i.e., H Street NE) is actually 25 mph.

The issue really is that the city, on all city streets, except freeways, has speed limits that are less than what would be present in the suburbs--even though many of the roads, such as on North Capitol between Michigan Avenue and Harewood Road, or the aforementioned stretch of Benning Road, are designed and built to allow for much higher speeds than the posted limit.

While I don't have much sympathy for people breaking the law, the fact is that it would be a good idea to post signs at the entrypoints to the city stating that unless otherwise posted, the speed limit is 25 mph, because city speed limits are significantly lower than those prevailing in the suburbs, including in Howard County, Maryland, where the letter writer is accustomed to driving much faster and not getting tickets for it.

I think such signs are around here and there. But given that the speed limit policy for DC is much different than it is in most other places, it makes sense to post signage notifying people of the difference.

The other point, as always has to do with the fact that many roadways in the city are designed and built to specifications that accommodate speeds much higher than the posted speed limit.

Road dieting us a method for constructing streets (roadway characteristics) and roadsides in ways that better match the desired operating speeds, yielding the preferred behavior through appropriate design and engineering methods.

As mentioned before many times, these points are discussed in the Smart Transportation Guidebook, published by the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Speed Limit Sign

This is interesting too, from the UK. Clearly, in the U.S., people focus more upon the design of the road than the nature of the place in terms of what they think is the appropriate speed to drive, regardless of the land use context. Again, this is addressed very thoroughly in the Smart Transportation Guidebook.