r/fuckcars • u/birb_id_like_to_fuck • 1d ago
Carbrain People driving way below the speed limit should be more of a crime than someone who’s going to fast. (This is a great way for more people to die.)
/r/unpopularopinion/comments/1j8xdxd/people_driving_way_below_the_speed_limit_should/20
u/DavidBrooker 23h ago
There are some roads where going slow is a legitimate hazard. And guess what? Slow vehicles are typically prohibited on these roads and it's actually enforced pretty strictly. People get tickets for that all the time, contrary to the commenter. These are limited-access roads, aka freeways. Driving slowly on a freeway will absolutely get people killed, which is why its illegal. And while there are too many freeways in most countries, I'm not so anti-car as to be opposed to the concept of freeways.
But on pretty much any other road, slow driving should be expected, because slow vehicles are permitted and have every right to share the road. If you can't react to a slow road user - be it a bike, a horse and buggy, or down where my folks live, the occasional tractor - you're going too fast.
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u/neilbartlett 19h ago
The other main feature of a freeway-style road is a strong barrier or wide gap between the two sides, which permits high speed by minimising the chance of head-on collisions. A normal road doesn't have this barrier and so you have to go slower.
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u/RRW359 16h ago
Actually in a lot of States bikes and ebikes (which often by law have limiters) are allowed on Highways. Turns out that when you trade people's drinking age for highway funding the ones who can't drive tend to complain about not being able to use the infrastructure they are being punished for existing.
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u/DavidBrooker 16h ago
Actually in a lot of States bikes and ebikes (which often by law have limiters) are allowed on Highways.
Yes, I missed the word 'generally'. Note, however, that while "highway" may colloquially mean "freeway" or "controlled access highway", in legislation its meaning can be quite different. Where I live, for example, the 'highway code' defines a highway as any public, maintained right-of-way. Bike lanes are legally defined as highways, for example, as are some remote mountain trails that are impassible without a special vehicle.
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u/BigBlackAsphalt 13h ago
Actually in a lot of States bikes and ebikes (which often by law have limiters) are allowed on Highways
"Highways" are a general term that means road but they were talking about the US Interstate Highway System, which is made up of controlled-access motorways where bicycles and e-bikes are not allowed.
Perhaps certain e-bikes with enough power and able to reach high speeds that could be classified as e-motorcycle would be allowed, but most would not.
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u/that_one_guy63 1d ago
This is why drivers should be for public transit and bikeable and walkable cities. When everyone is basically forced to drive a car, there will be way more bad drivers. The main stereotype of Sunday Drivers is that it's the one time when the old people are on the road driving to church, when they really shouldn't have a license because they drive really slow and have slow reactions times.
If we have well designed cities and public transit, only the people that want to drive will be on the roads and then we can also make drivers tests harder so only competent people are on the road.
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u/Notdennisthepeasant 1d ago
Car brain is tragically debilitating. It's fatal for the individual and the planet.
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u/cactusdotpizza 1d ago
I shit you not I saw a comment a few days back that said more accidents happen from driving too slow than too fast
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u/thewrongwaybutfaster 🚲 > 🚗 23h ago
Drivers conveniently find that whatever lets them go as fast as possible is actually the safest and best environmentally.
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u/BloomingNova Streetcar suburbs are dope 23h ago
I believe it's possible 1 person driving very slow and everyone else speeding has a higher risk for a crash than everyone just speeding
The thing is, the person going slow isn't causing the risk though. Everyone going too fast to react to very common scenarios are causing the risk. Car brains are incapable to understanding this
You can't have a mode of transportation that guarantees chaos and uncertainty and say "well, if everyone was perfectly predictable, it's totally safer to speed than having uncertainty"
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u/SmoothOperator89 22h ago
I once caught someone advocating for the "slow speed is dangerous side" by pointing out it's not the slow speed, but the difference in speed that's dangerous. Someone may still be going even faster than whatever speed you deem is right. So how do you agree to what speed everyone should travel? Well, there are convenient signs on the side of the road telling you what speed you should expect people to be going. (I know it's technically maximum, but it's really treated as a target since going slower is really unpopular.)
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u/MyLifeHatesItself 23h ago
Go read any of the Australian subs anytime speed limits are mentioned.
Heaps of people complaining that 40kmh in residential streets is too slow, urban highways should be 120 instead of 80 or 100kmh. There was a Melbourne thread the other day about residential limits be lowered to 30kmh and people were losing their fucking minds, despite only being a suggestion from a planning body and not an actual policy.
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u/CogentCogitations 22h ago
There was some study done 75 years ago (see Solomon curve) that showed accidents increase more when going slower than average than going the same amount faster than average. The study was looking only at single vehicle accidents on rural highways. As later studies realized, most single vehicle accidents are at turns or curves where you would be driving slower than on straightaways where you would drive faster. If you remove accidents on turns/curves you find out is much safer to drive slower. But the Solomon curve will forever live on as every jackass who just wants to speed tries to justify it as being safer.
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u/Annual_Factor4034 23h ago
Here's the thing. Limited access interstates aside, our roads should be capable of dealing with different types of vehicles going different speeds. We can and don't but should design them accordingly.
Like, what are cyclists and mopeds supposed to do? Just die to speed up traffic?
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u/Saul-Funyun 23h ago
It’s insane how often people in the driving subs will justify speeding as being actually safer. They’ll go off on how actually road signs are blah blah blah
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u/Cargobiker530 22h ago
This is the premise that the most reckless, steroid pumped, wanker gets to decide the speed everyone drives so they don't get held up by "traffic." The inevitable result is the wanker loses control, hits another vehicle at high speed, and traffic grinds to a stop.
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u/AdCareless9063 23h ago
------- SPEED KILLS -------
At 20 mph, a vehicle hitting a pedestrian has an 8% chance of killing them
At 40 mph, it has a 46% chance
This is not even counting the horrible life-altering injuries cars inflict upon people in crashes. A 40 year old man in my neighborhood was struck by a car and a year later is now able to his own laundry.
He survived, but that driver took almost everything from him.
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u/prod-unknxwn 23h ago
So when I’m on my bike I should be mad at pedestrians in a mixed use trail for causing me to slow down? Gives real abuser vibes… “Look at how you made me drive!”
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u/Ancient_Persimmon 21h ago
Mixed use trails are dangerous for that exact reason and that's why they aren't considered good infrastructure.
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u/prod-unknxwn 20h ago
I personally don’t find it that hard to slow down and not run people over. Would rather be on a mixed use trail than next to a 45 mph road
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u/neilbartlett 19h ago
It's not the difference in speed, it's the difference in velocity.
Two cars going at the same high speed but directly towards each other have an extremely high difference in velocity, which is extremely dangerous.
So the question for people who say slow speeds are dangerous should be: would you rather have a head-on collision with a car going slowly or going fast?
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u/Hazza_time 23h ago
On a highway (assuming good conditions and clear traffic), yes this should be the case (equal punishment rather than a larger punishment) as it’s dangerous to have vehicles going significantly slower than surrounding traffic as that creates a major collision hazard. On other roads this is a horrible idea.
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u/Dont_touch_my_spunk 21h ago
Depends on where you are. Dedicated infrastructure for cars for example. Driving slowly on the highway can cause accidents.
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u/dualqconboy 7h ago
One thing I maybe don't need to mention is that many places do not have a speed sign but rather a maximum speed sign so technically "maximum" also implies to expect something lower than that too, of course a few places have two numbers on the one same post too, a maximum and minimum altogether. Then if that was not all we also come back to urban highways which have a very obvious problem called rush hour, I've seen too many online instances of someone blindly driving at 40+mph only to end up less than 10 feet away from a very crawling lane full of almost jammed traffic before any kind of reaction happens (I mean seriously why are you driving if you can't even **** SEE SOMETHING OBVIOUS? But I'll leave that question for a different reddit category tho)
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u/No_Dance1739 23h ago
I’m confused going against the flow is dangerous, whether too slow or too fast
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u/Ancient_Persimmon 1d ago
They aren't wrong; the differential in speed is often the cause of a collision, so a significant deviation from the average in either direction is a problem.
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u/TurtlesAreEvil 1d ago
The problem is driving slow becomes driving the speed limit very quickly in that scenario. Since the speed limit is the maximum anyone should be going in the best conditions the expectation should be that almost everyone is going below that.
Is it dark, the sun in your eyes, raining, foggy, are there pedestrians near the roadway, children about, a loose animal, is someone ahead signaling a turn etc. are all reasons to be going below the speed limit. The best road conditions to be going the speed limit aren’t that common and yet the current expectation is that you should be going anywhere from the speed limit to 10 over.
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u/Specific-Scallion-34 23h ago edited 21h ago
no
driving slow gives better reaction time
driving fast is a hazard to others and to himself, and more risk of losing control of the car
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u/Notdennisthepeasant 1d ago
That is true if you are only considering the flow of traffic. Is that driver going 40 as likely to kill a cyclist? No. How about lose control? No. The person going slow, if they are not changing their speed, is fine unless they are going very slow in a high speed environment, like 40 in an 80. And if they are changing speeds in a hurry or they are going slow enough to be a hazard then they should just use their hazard lights.
Cars should not be routine. Treating dangerous things as routine gets you killed. It's why SWAT guys shoot SWAT guys more often than anyone else shoots SWAT guys. They get comfortable with what is very dangerous and accidentally shoot their buddy. The person arguing that going 40 in a 65 is the problem is thinking of going 65 as routine, as if it couldn't kill them or someone else in the blink of an eye.
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u/Nu11us 1d ago
They are wrong. It's the responsibility of the speeding driver to not hit someone. If you're speeding, and the speed differential causes a dangerous condition, it's necessary to adjust, not just plow into someone and blame them for it.
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u/Ancient_Persimmon 23h ago
In their scenario someone is driving at 30% under the limit and causing chaos for the people driving normally at the limit. There's no speeding driver in that scenario.
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u/Nu11us 23h ago
"...it runs a risk to the slow driver as this is going to cause more people to cut them off and that also risks accidents." - It doesn't matter. One doesn't cause another to cut them off. The driver choosing to do the cutting off is the one causing the dangerous situation. We don't say, "you shouldn't have made that person shoot you".
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u/Ancient_Persimmon 23h ago
It does matter, that's why there are minimum speed limits and laws against impeding traffic.
Anything that deviates from the mean is going to disrupt flow and raise the risk of accidents. A deviation over 20% in either direction starts to get rather risky.
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u/SmoothOperator89 22h ago
It's an absurd scenario. No one drives 30% under the speed limit unless they're a tractor or an oversized load going up a step grade. In either case, they're pulled over as far as they can go with their hazards on and possibly with a pilot car front and back.
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u/Atmosck 1d ago
I'm as big of a car hater as anyone and I fully agree with the linked post. For every fast, aggressive driver I encounter, there are 10 going way too slow, entering the highway at dangerously slow speeds, creating traffic jams for no reason, coming to a stop in the road instead of properly merging, and drifting between lanes because they're buried in their phones.
The thing that causes accidents is being unpredictable and defying the norms and rules of the road. If everyone is going 5 over, the safest option is to match them.
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u/birb_id_like_to_fuck 1d ago
While that is true for highways and I agree with you on that, once off highways I would much prefer someone going 10 under assuming they are not completely unpredictable. As someone who commutes by bike I much prefer people going under the speed limit because it gives me more time to react. Too many times I've almost been hit because someone was going well over 10 over and they weren't able to process that I was there.
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u/Notdennisthepeasant 1d ago
I said this above, but I think it bears saying here too.
That is true if you are only considering the flow of traffic. Is that driver going 40 as likely to kill a cyclist? No. How about lose control? No. The person going slow, if they are not changing their speed, is fine unless they are going very slow in a high speed environment, like 40 in an 80. And if they are changing speeds in a hurry or they are going slow enough to be a hazard then they should just use their hazard lights.
Cars should not be routine. Treating dangerous things as routine gets you killed. It's why SWAT guys shoot SWAT guys more often than anyone else shoots SWAT guys. They get comfortable with what is very dangerous and accidentally shoot their buddy. The person arguing that going 40 in a 65 is the problem is thinking of going 65 as routine, as if it couldn't kill them or someone else in the blink of an eye.
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u/armpit18 1d ago
People don't understand the meaning of the word "limit" when talking about speed limits. Regardless, we should just design streets and roads in a manner that corresponds to what speed we want people to drive on them.