Traffic planners and motorists seem to revere throughput above all else.
Traffic planners revere throughput. (Cars per hour) Motorists actually revere the inverse. (Hours per car) Use the time unit of your choice.
It's some kind of sin to travel at or below the speed limit, regardless of your mode of transportation.
It is actually against the law to impede traffic. How slow is impeding is evidently a matter of opinion. I don't care so much if someone wants to go slow as long as they allow others to pass.
Road diets are interesting in that they're one of the 'traffic calming' tools that planners like to toy with when designing our streets. Their purpose is to slow traffic, making crashes more survivable for motorists, pedestrians, and bicyclists, and they're a useful way to reduce noise as well. But think about that for a moment. Road diets reduce speeds. Why not simply reduce the speed limit? We know that on a road with a 35mph limit, traffic travels at 40-45mph without much concern over speeding tickets. There are just too many roads, too many motorists, and not enough cops. Road diets are an engineering solution to a law enforcement failure, or put slightly differently, they use engineering to change behavior.
A ticket for 36 in a 35 zone is overzealous. By the time someone is going 10 over at city speeds, they probably deserve a ticket. I am one of two or three drivers in the Tulsa area that tries to drive approximately the speed limit. Mostly I get to follow 3 lanes of traffic going 30 to 40 in a 50 zone. However, posting speed limits at 10 to 15 under what is reasonable is not the answer.
One bicycling advocate and a good friend said, "We spend hundreds of thousands in tax money to build traffic calming devices, but bicyclists do that for free!" What a radical.
It may temporarily "calm" traffic but the net effect is to enrage motor traffic. Be careful out there. You may have the right of way but you may also wind up dead right.
An interesting exercise in traffic throughput is to examine throughput vs. speed. There are a few assumptions necessary, the biggest one being that each car follows the car in front by a fixed time interval, such as 2 seconds. Another assumption is that the interval is from the front of one car to the front of the car following it (to remove car length). If you accept those assumptions, cars per hour (throughput) is independent of speed until the speed gets low enough that it is impossible to be only 2 seconds behind the car in front of you. This all falls apart when you consider traffic lights and the time it takes for traffic to start moving when a light turns green.
