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There's A New Push To Put The Brakes On LA's Rising Speed Limits

by Ryan Fonseca 

February 6, 2020

Years of research, the rules of physics and common sense all point to an established fact about street safety: the faster people drive, the more dangerous and deadly our roads become.

Despite that fact, Los Angeles and other cities across California are regularly raising speed limits on their streets. They're doing that in order to enforce speeding laws in accordance with something called the 85th percentile rule, which roughly says if enough people are driving a certain speed, that should be the speed limit.

If that seems like a counterintuitive and incredibly flawed process to make streets safer, a broad coalition of public safety agencies, advocates and lawmakers across the state agrees. And now a new bill introduced in Sacramento aims to give cities more control over how they set and manage speed limits.