Low speed limits in the Atacama desert

This, folks, is the Atacama desert in northern Chile. It is the driest desert in the world. It rains here about once a year.

It is desolate. It is flat. It is the land of strangely low speed limits.

In the U.S, this situation would result in a speed limit of at least 65 mph.

There is apparently a speeding problem out here.

And thus, it appears that the government is trying to fix the problem by setting very low speed limits that they can’t enforce.

Sure, there are some areas where the speed limit is 100 kph (62 mph). But it’s often lower than that, as shown below.

Here, buses and 18-wheelers are limited to 31 mph, and normal cars are limited to 43 mph (a sign about a mile back said 70 kph).

Really? Am I missing something here? I wonder what percentage of traffic actually respect that limit? This isn’t unusual, it occurs in multiple places.

Unrelated—

Here’s a cool feature of the Atacama desert. In the far northern part of the desert next to the coast, the silt builds up in a huge dune around a thousand feet tall.