Mageth

You're all wrong. Speed doesn't kill; running into things is what kills ya.

If people would only stop running into things in their cars, the car death rate would go way down.

I say this half-jokingly. Better drivers, safer roads (e.g. replacing dangerous intersections with roundabouts), and safer cars are more effective ways to lower the automobile death rate than simply lowering speed limits.

Loren Pechtel

You didn't show your math for us to check. However, I think it's flawed:

1) *VERY* few people lose the whole 75 years to traffic accidents. Most have already lived some.

2) On the other hand, time spent driving isn't neccessarily of no value.


I agree with the guys who say that speed isn't a big issue anyway. What I see is that aggressive drivers are generally speeding--and it's a lot easier to define them as speeders rather than aggressive drivers. The former is easy to determine, the latter isn't.
Furthermore, it's in law enforcement's interest to demonify speeding as that justifies traffic fines.

Over the years I've been hit by several morons. Never was speeding an issue. All were caused by someone not paying attention (once I think the primary culprit was the geezer who stopped across my lane rather than the woman who rear-ended me. The geezer was turning {left turn across my lane into the oncoming stream} too slowly so I had gently applied the brakes to give him more time to clear. He then stopped completely blocking my lane. I then stopped. Since my brake lights were already on when I slammed on the brakes the gal behind me didn't get the usual warning and came up a hair short on braking distance.)


I have also seen a reasonable argument that increasing the speed limit can actually *SAVE* lives. Reason: Not counting impaired drivers (sleep/dui) most accidents involve at least two cars. If everyone drives faster there will be fewer cars on the road at any given time and therefore fewer interactions to lead to accidents. Obviously each interaction is more dangerous though. We don't have enough data to indicate which effect dominates.

NialScorva

One thing I like about driving on the highways here in DC is that the drivers are generally competent. Mean, aggressive, rude, and generally assholes... but competent. You can assume that they are going to do whatever is most useful to them in the short term, and thus traffic is very predictable. Every near-accident I've been in over the past couple years has involved someone with out of state plates or was rather old.

It's all about predictability.

elwoodblues

Damn, beat me to it, Loren...