Even as vehicle deaths have continued falling in most counties, they have risen in this country.
Here’s a stark way of thinking about the problem: If the U.S. had made as much progress reducing vehicle crashes as other high-income countries had over the past two decades, about 25,000 fewer Americans would die every year.
No one drives the speed limit in the UK either. You’ll normally see people going 80-ish to 90mph on motorways where the legal limit is 70.
It’s not necessarily related to road safety in general.
I drive just under the speed limit everywhere at all times. Even 1mph under will cause other drivers to fucking lose it in under 30 seconds of being behind me. It’s glorious.
Honestly car size and driving under the influence probably has got more to do with this than observance of the speed limit.
Canada has the same vehicle size issue. Large pickup trucks/SUVs are similarly popular. Everyone here goes 15km/h over, unless there’s speed cameras which are only by schools.
I wouldn’t be surprised if impaired driving was a big factor, in Canada it’s the equivalent of a felony even if you don’t hit anyone. In the US it seems like people treat it closer to being a speed ticket.
Critical support for America’s war on Americans? Not so sure about this one
It’s like drunk Americans waging war on America’s children. It’s a distinctly different war than America’s children’s war on America’s children and America’s war on black children. But it’s a 1/10 kind of war.
the left ruins everything = (
I’d love to see graphs on how much people in each country drive, as you basically have to drive everywhere in the US due to unwalkable cities and no public transportation.
Yeah I think that if you correct for miles driven the US’ roads are actually safer than most other countries, and the difference comes down to how much of our infrastructure is built to separate cars from everyone else. Still the least total deaths are in the places with the least driving, since having good car-centric infrastructure can’t fully solve the problem.
They set the limit by watching people drive on a road without limits in place and setting it to 80% of the average. It’s by design that people go over.
I’m not sure that’s the case for all roads.
There is explicit policy in some cases to set speed limits lower than actually necessary in order for the ‘slow’ drivers to keep otherwise ne’er do wells in check.
no way is that true?
Orgeoncom is out here spreading misinformation. They actually set it at 85% rounded to the nearest 5mph.
http://www.mikeontraffic.com/85th-percentile-speed-explained/
This is a surprisingly reasonable way to set speed limits
I got over this by getting a sidecar motorcycle. Yes, car behind me, I do have to take this right hand turn at 5 KPH and not one bit higher, thank you very much!
American speed limits are bad and deadly slow
there should be no cars, but if there are cars, care should be taken to minimize the difference in speeds on the road, not necessarily minimize speeds. some people still do actually follow posted speed limits, and some go below it, but many go far over it, this creates a big differential in speed and leads to more accidents, especially in the context of america where all involved are freaks
correct me if I was misinformed tho
ah okay a more nuanced take. I just didn’t want to see someone suggesting that there shouldn’t be a speed limit or something. Ultimately cars will never be safe so
Not to get too deep but it really is the most digestible version of how we have a legal system that ensures everybody is always breaking a law so that selective enforcement and thereby negative consequences are completely arbitrary.
Make sure everybodys always breaking the law then you can arrest anybody at anytime for a totally valid reason.
Seriously, I’m always telling people about this. The most adament speeders are always the “fuck the government”, you can’t tell me what to do, come-and-take-it types, and it just baffles me because like, yeah, they will come and take it; in fact they love to!
You are giving the pigs a free pass to fully legally and justifiably pull you over any time they feel like it.
Obviously they’ll still pull over anyone at any time and retroactively make up a reason, but at least then they are starting on shaky ground, and you’ve got a way better chance of beating any charges later.
If you hate the pigs so much, why would you make their job so easy? Especially if you’re riding dirty in any way, then that just multiplies everything above a thousand times. And naturally, those that are the most cavalier about doing that always seems to be the ones that love speeding the most.
Yra pretty sure it’s where the saying “don’t break multiple laws at once” comes from.
People who ride with me give me shit for driving like a grandpa, then I ask them how many times they’ve gotten a ticket and if it’s more than zero I’m winning in that department.
They should have pot dealers teach defensive driving courses.
What it feels like to drive 5mph under the speed limit when the person behind me is in a sports car:
Nice day, got the windows down, blasting tunes, soaking up the sun and watching the boomer behind me go from ruby to prune colored.
when they either aggressively pass me on a double yellow or get a passing lane i always subconsciously brace myself for a barrage of gunfire right as they pass
i fucking hate this country
Right? Like bro I got the cruise control set to “don’t attract cop attention” but if you want to drastically increase the odds of killing everyone involved in your next accident there are like twenty lanes to my left for you to enjoy.
It’s really empowering to make a full stop at a stop sign. Seen some old people in SUVs get visibly irate in my rearview mirror.
Stopping at a stop sign will get you deported from California.
being the one person wearing a mask
Every day without fail there is an accident on the road I take to work. Usually at night. I sometimes have to take the back roads because one time, when passing by an accident, the authorities had not yet swept up the glass and I had to get a new tire. Another time, I got to the intersection in a school zone and I thought I was safely away from the main road. Nope. Some asshole who got there after me ran through the stop sign at around 40 mph, and I caught it just in time to back up when I was trying to exercise my right of way.
Sometimes they put little wooden crosses on the side of the road to mark the area where someone died. My guess is, if they did that for every accident on that stretch of road, the roadside would just be full of little crosses like an American WWI cemetery.
i don’t get how you guys die so much on the road.
if theres one thing you do well its gotta be roads. they all look clean and are so wide i can’t fathom how or why mortality is so high for traffic accidents in the us. your cars are all packed with airbags and safety stuff too.
If they planted a tree instead of little crosses there would be green belts all across america.
well, there’d be little stumps from the brush cutter anyhow
DOT can’t let us have nice things
need that clear recovery zone brah otherwise good things might happen
if you suggested a car insurance ad instead you’d be hired as a marketing expert
I drive through rural areas for work and I can’t tell you how many crosses, flowers, and memorials I pass each day. At this point I think I’m desensitized to it.
I think the saddest auto accidents for me to hear about was when I learned a kid I went to high school with died in a crash. He was supposed to graduate that year. I knew his mother, who was a teacher at the school and an overall nice person, and I met the guy a couple of times. I used to grade his papers as a TA too. It’s just devastating to think someone is cut down like that without getting to see the wide breadths and deep depths of life. Plus the sort of horrible grief his mother probably went through. Nobody should ever have to go through that.
a girl i went to high school with was in a car crash just a year after graduation. coma for over a month, severe brain damage. major cognitive impairments and requiring constant at home care from her parents, one of whom died after about a decade of doing that. everything about the aftermath is emotionally crushing.
sometimes it feels like one of the great riddles of improving and lengthening my life is trying to structure it so that i don’t have to drive much at all.
hate to be a spoilsport but it’s more to not be around cars. you can walk or cycle fine and that saves you from some heart problems but it does usually highly increase the chance some moron is going to kill you
i guess I should clarify that I am not looking to have a 60 minute pedestrian commute alongside a road either. that’s why it’s a puzzle and not a simple substitution. I have been pedestrian-ing for several years now and know/experience the risks with open eyes.
by “not driving” I mean, not having a car/car adjacent commute. I mean being far removed from cars for many/most days of the week. i.e. living where I work, where I mostly eat/kitchen gardening, etc, having near access to passenger rail for longer distance trips.
meanwhile companies are puzzled why people don’t want to risk their lives to come into the office.
One of my childhood friends and first girl I ever kissed was killed by a drunk driver in a hit and run.
My dad’s best friend died with three other people in the car when he crashed off a bridge driving drunk in high school in the 70s.
I’m literally only here because my dad happened to be busy that evening.
Damn that sucks. One of my dad’s friends nearly killed himself on a dirt bike because he sped out of his driveway and forgot to take the chain down that blocked it. Clotheslined himself at like 40 mph
I had a friend killed in an auto accident and another one barely made it through a crash caused by a drunk driver.
I also knew a guy who completely destroyed his new sports car through reckless driving and somehow was both completely unscathed, and completely paid out by the insurance company.
mfw I’m surrounded by imbecile pilots wielding licenses to kill
The best advice I’ve ever heard for driving is “assume every other person on the road is actively trying to kill you and react accordingly.”
“trying to wave me through when you have the right away? no fuck you you are trying to kill me (or scam me)”
also why i have a dashcam
Scientists have yet to find a fetish too hyper-specific to be visually represented on the Internet
Add in each of those people nearly hitting you with a 2-5 ton machine
IIRC a big problem is the psychological effect of having giant roads with wide lanes and lots of shoulder. Drivers “feel” like the “safe” limit is higher than it is. Roads could be re-engineered so that drivers didn’t feel comfortable past a certain speed. They aren’t, because that would be too expensive (and woke).
Traffic calming.
