I was driving home from work the other day, maybe going a little faster than I should have been, but I started thinking about speed limits. What purpose do they really serve in our society? This column may be a bit out there, but I’m going to argue that we don’t necessarily need them.

How often do people regularly drive faster than the speed limit? If speed limits were effective at regulating traffic, drivers on the highway wouldn’t feel the need to slam on the brakes every time a cop drove by. They’d already be going the speed limit. United States driving regulations are fairly excessive and cause a great deal of overlap.

The rules of the road include both preventative measures, such as speed limit signs, and punishments, such as speeding tickets. If speed limit signs are supposed to dissuade drivers from speeding, they aren’t really doing their job. According to a 2011 survey by Allstate, 89 percent of Americans said they have driven over the speed limit before, and 40 percent said they’ve gone more than 20 miles faster. What exactly does this mean?

Are 89 percent of Americans criminals? Surely that’s not the case. So why are we treated as such? It turns out, speeding tickets are a pretty good source of revenue. According to a 2013 report by the U.S. Highway Patrol, Americans pay about $6.2 billion in speeding tickets alone each year.

This goes without mentioning the litany of other regulations surrounding driving. Parking fines and the accompanying towing expenses, registration card and sticker fees, fines for not having said sticker on your car, moving violations, acceleration regulations… shall I go on?

So let me ask you again, why do we need speeding tickets? If we’re primarily using speeding tickets to raise revenue for the police department, why don’t we just downsize the police force and call it a day? Besides, that would cut costs on the number of highway patrol cars, so the added revenue would no longer be needed, and we wouldn’t all be outlaws.

Instead of levying steep fines on drivers when they’re late for work or in a bad mood and just trying to get home, we should concentrate on educating drivers and developing an easily understandable set of rules. Our current system of regulations emphasizes relying on signs to inform drivers of what they should already know how to do. Not only does this distract from the road, but it also encourages drivers to think less.

If a driver making a U-turn is supposed to yield to cars turning right onto the road, why don’t we stop putting that information at every intersection and just teach it through driver’s ed? The amount of signs on the side of the road is simply ridiculous and almost entirely unnecessary.

Do people really need to be told “yield to oncoming traffic” every time they merge or turn into traffic? Do we need signs to mark the roundabout when the roundabout is clearly in front of us?

What about “WRONG WAY” signs? Those are probably my least favorite. I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I’m not the only one who these signs have freaked out. That moment of terror when you’ve turned onto the on ramp and see “WRONG WAY” on your left and pray that you’re not about to run headlong into oncoming traffic.

Then there are the infamous “No Parking” zones. I’d wager their associated violations bring in a hefty chunk of change, too. Why not just put a different colored line down the side of the road to indicate various parking zones?

In 2006, the European Union removed the traffic signs from seven cities, according to Matthias Schulz, writer for Spiegel magazine. 

“The many rules strip us of one important thing: the ability to be considerate. We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior,” said Hans Moderman, one of the project’s co-founders. 

The number of accidents decreased dramatically after the traffic signs were removed, according to Schulz. 

Now, let’s talk about what regulations of this nature are really trying to do, which is prevent automotive-related injury and death. Is instilling fear in drivers by having police cars constantly patrol the roads and roar off with their sirens screaming every time somebody messes up the best way to keep drivers safe? Police cars are pretty intimidating on the road. When one flies by you, it completely disrupts the flow of traffic and puts everyone on edge.

If we put more emphasis into educating drivers, they would still know it’s a pretty bad idea to fly down Hillsborough Street at 80 miles an hour, but people wouldn’t have to risk becoming a criminal for putting the pedal to the medal when they’re a couple minutes late for work, so long as nobody gets hurt.

Send your thoughts to Travis at technician-viewpoint@ncsu.edu.