by tfourb | 2025-04-28 19:00:11+00:00
>Increasing the speed limit to the 85th percentile so that you do not have the few people who actually obey it posing a hazard to others does make things safer.

[citation needed]

Seriously. That is a pretty bold claim that you should be able support with actual studies, if true. You have several things working against your hypothesis:

- While it may be true that driving at the legal speed limit might slightly increase the risk of accidents when many other drivers drive faster than the speed limit, a general increase of the speed limit might severly increase risk for everyone.

- Many people do not drive above the speed limit, because they have a "higher normal", but because they feel entitled to "drive faster". I.e. they claim that they are "better drivers", they have a superior need to arrive faster, etc. Those people will just adapt their behavior to the new, higher speed limit and again drive above that, making the entire exercise pointless and dangerous.

- A potential and less risky alternative would be improved enforcement of the current speed limit.

There are probably plenty of other arguments that actual experts in this field would bring up.

>Getting cars off the road sooner by reducing travel time, decreases the number of cars on the road. This increases the distance between cars and accidents only when the distance betweeen a vehicle and something else reaches 0.

That makes no sense at all. It has been proven in both theoretical and practical tests that driving "all out" does not decrease travel time drastically in almost all circumstances. But it substantially increase the risk of accidents. So any minuscule decrease in car density will be far outweighed by increased accident risk per kilometer driven.

>Forcing people to drive slower therefore causes collisions by bringing cars closer to one another.

It's actually the other way around: Forcing people to drive slower drastically reduced the risk of collisions because people are slower and have more time to react. It also reduces the incidence of traffic jams (because sharp braking prevalent with speeding drivers is a main contributor to traffic jams), which are in turn a major factor in collisions.

>As for severity, people drive much faster in Germany where there is no high way speed limit for much of the autobahn yet their autobahn network has half the fatalities that U.S. highways have.

You'll have to control for other factors, of course. Cars in the US are much larger and heavier than in Germany, for example. In statistics, you want to compare apples to apples, so you control for vehicle weight when trying to make observations about the impact of speed on accident severity.

>As for your link, it talks about pedestrian safety.

True. But the same holds true for vehicle collisions. It's really basic physics. All other things being equal, faster cars have more energy. More energy = more severe accident outcomes.

>Did you post the first link that seemed to agree with your position as part of some fallacious appeal to authority because logic failed to agree with your preconceived notions that you were never equipped to defend?

No. There are plenty of other sources that support my views, i.e.

https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/eu-road-safety-po...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014... ("Impact speed was found to have a highly significant positive relationship to risk of serious injury for all impact types examined.")

Where are your sources?