Many years ago I was advising some new Jalopnik staffers on how to get around Detroit during the North American International Auto Show. I told them that they will see speed limits on some freeways leading into the city posted at 55 miles per hour and, should they adhere to those speed limits, they should expect to be tailgated, flipped off and generally harassed. This is the Motor City, after all, and people around here motor quickly. Of course, there’s a good reason these roundly ignored speed limits exist, which is why they aren’t changing any time soon.
Detroit has no less than four interstate highways slicing through the city’s heart, as well as two Michigan highways: M-10, known as the John C. Lodge, and M-39, known as the Southfield Freeway. On these two highways, posted speeds are set at 55 miles per hour, but you’d never know it with the way Detroiters drive. Michigan State Police say that about 85 percent of drivers in Michigan stay at or below the speed limit, but that is clearly not the case on the Lodge and Southfield freeways.
The problem is so obvious that the Detroit Free Press asked the Michigan Department of Transportation why it doesn’t just up the speed limit on these freeways to be more in line with, you know, reality. Josh Carey, a traffic and safety engineer at MDOT, gave the Freep a very reasonable explanation:…