The D.C. Examiner says the city's Police Chief is irate because drivers are buying a "new technology [that] streams to iPhones and global positioning system devices, sounding off an alarm as drivers approach speed or red-light cameras."
The Chief pushes the safety button, of course, but DC has 290 traffic cameras,which is 10% of the nation's total, and collected $1 billion from 2005-2008. No D.C. dweller believes that this is about safety.
In D.C., as in many other places, speed limits represent a compromise. Neighborhoods and goo-goos want them set low, drivers and realists want them high. The outcome is to set them low and not enforce, or enforce sporadically. Most D.C. drivers are speeding most of the time, and often by more than a little, and safely so, because the limits are consistently 15 to 20 mph below safety requirements.
Technology is making the speed limits enforceable, which disrupts the bargain and throws the system into disequilibrium. Multiply this by all the other areas of life in which analogous compromises have been in place for decades and one sees the outline of serious problems.
The imposition of the 55 mph speed limit on Interstates, for reasons having nothing to do with safety, did much to delegitimize government. It has been raised to 65, but, on most Interstates, that is ignored, unless traffic requires it.
Lack of concern for maintaining legitimacy is endemic to D.C. though: "Washington insiders seem to think it is cute that voters expect Members of Congress actually to have read the complex and expensive bills that they pass before they, well, render them into law," notes Tigerhawk. "On the contrary, it is not cute, quaint, or unsophisticated but rather essential that these representatives of ours put in the hours to know what they are voting for. It is, in fact, necessary to the proper operation of the republican form of democracy."
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