He is talking about highway speeds not side streets in a city.

I grew up in Maine, I-95 while I was younger had a completely baseless speed limit of 65mph. North of Augusta there is an average of about 20 miles between exits and very few travelers, there is no reason what-so-ever to impose a 65mph speed limit.

I now live in Boston and I-95 north to Maine travels though New Hampshire (for a whopping ~10 miles). Everyone knows that you follow the letter of the law in regards to the speed limit in New Hampshire. Why? I assure you it has nothing to do with safety, just as the $2 toll has nothing to do with maintaining 10 miles of highway. The state farms income from that highway in the form of tolls and tickets.

I'll give you speed limits make sense in cities, but given the fact that I've lived in Boston for 6 years now and seen about 3 people pulled over for speeding in that time, it doesn't really appear to be much enforced. Highways on the other hand have absurdly low speed limits and are farmed for ticket income regularly.

I don't think anyone here wants to raise speed limits in pedestrian-heavy areas. Talking about pedestrian fatalities is not constructive to an argument about freeway speed limits.

It's not an argument about freeway speed limits, but about speed limits in general and in principle. I don't know where "freeway" was introduced as a limiter.

Different roads have such widely differing conditions that it's not possible to discuss speed limits in general and come to any meaningful conclusion. Since the implicit point of an argument is to come to a meaningful conclusion, it can be assumed that arguments which do not terminate in a meaningful conclusion are excluded. "In principle" is also not an argument that will fly with a lot of hackers who reject deontology.

That still doesn't change a simple fact: no one said "highway speed limits". That was introduced when things started to look bad. "Speed limits are an artificial government limit designed to make people criminals" was the contention. You can't change the scope of the argument when it suits you. If you believe that speed limits are ok in pedestrian areas, you are not categorically opposed to speed limits. You may be opposed to speed limits on the highway, but that changes the scope of the discussion.

There is implicit context in every argument, which I made explicit in my previous comment. Arguing over the scope of the discussion instead of the substance is counterproductive to arriving at a meaningful conclusion. I bet you were loads of fun in your high school debate class.

You said, in this reply (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528076):

>Example 2: a small town declares with pride that all streets controlled by the city finally have limits of 35MPH or slower, even though there are several roads capable of much higher speeds.

Other relevat comments that set the discussion:

>Or so simple as speeding when you drive? There are many laws which do not function as they should.

and

>By itself, speeding is a victimless crime: if you hit something or someone with your car, you were doing something wrong besides just speeding. The main idea behind speed limits is to "make criminals," in Rand's words. They are a tool that gives law enforcement a valid reason to pull over virtually anybody and everybody on the road. At the end of the day, the result is less respect for traffic laws and police in general, but more revenue for police departments, municipalities, and insurance companies.

So yes, it sounds to me like we're not limiting this to highways, but rather to the governments right to set things like speed limits and whether those limits are effective. Now, if you think that there should be a right to set speed limits in town but not on highways, we need to establish that.

You, yourself, included non-highways in this discussion. I respect your decision to exclude them but clearly you are limiting the scope of the discussion from what you personally set it at.

And of course the scope matter, the relevant facts change(i.e. the politically influenced decision to lower speed limits to 55 MPH) when you change the scope. This isn't a matter substance, it's a matter of deciding what we are all talking about. If you want to just talk about highways, you should do that, but clearly not everyone else feels we are talking exclusivly about highways or they wouldn't have brought it into the discussion.

My other comment was in response to your assertion that speed limits are set by engineers. It was a simple proof by counterexample. I don't see a point coming out of all this, so I'll most likely withdraw from the discussion now.