Speed Limit Adherence by Neighborhood

On average,  Americans spend 293 hours driving per year , which is more than seven 40-hour work weeks on the road. That's probably more than most people would prefer, and one way to try to cut down on the hours spent in a car is to get there faster, maybe faster than is technically legal. We were interested in where El Paso drivers tend to drive faster (and slower) than the posted speed limit. Specifically, we wanted to look at how people drive on neighborhood roads and arterials, rather than on freeways or when they are stuck in traffic. So we used average 'free flow' speeds and compared those to posted speed limits. In the map below, you can see which neighborhoods have average free flow driving speeds higher and lower than the speed limits.

As we might expect, drivers in the more rural parts of El Paso tend to drive faster than the speed limit, while drivers in the downtown area tend to drive slower. A wide open road is more encouraging for speed than more congested areas. The same effect could be at work when we see that more neighborhoods on the East side drive slower than the speed limit compared to neighborhoods on the West side. However, there are neighborhoods on either side of the city that defy such a simple explanation. How close to the speed limit do people drive in your neighborhood?

Data on free flow driving speeds is provided by Replica, a private mobility data company. Replica creates a synthetic population to estimate the speed and number of trips taken, aggregated for each roadway. We imported the dataset from Fall 2022 and isolated the roadways that are non-freeway and non-highway. Then we used US Census block groups to define the boundaries of neighborhoods and calculated the average difference between free flow driving speeds and posted speed limits within each block group.

 Check out the data for yourself .