How speeding can waste a year or so of gas in a morning

While I mostly agree, it's worth noting that simply because they are trucks and sports cars listed as part of those unfortunate accidents do not necessarily mean they were speeding. hope everyone was ok.

I've been through Texas in the rain and there are some areas that came down so hard that visibility gets close to nil and all one could do was keep some distance and follow the tail lights ahead of you

 

Good original post. Just to realize that --even in general-- driving in rush hour makes no sense and that everyone should try to avoid it if possible (alternative hours and/or public transportation).

Anyway. One quick response to:

It's off topic, but still:

I was in Dallas TX recently and was amazed with the fact that I had to become a "member" of a "club" to order a single glass of red wine in a bar... They had to explain this guy what a dry area is...

I wonder: Does Dallas have high DUI rates and that's why there are these dry-areas? Or have the dry areas been in effect for quite some time and do we now actually know that it doesn't help???

 

They have dry areas because Texas is a southern state. A bunch of conservative people got control of those states a long time ago. The effects are still obvious. Look at what Texas does to school text books.

Tom

 

Perhaps it was DWT: Driving While Texan.

Tom

 

People will go back and forth on this forever - speeding causes wrecks, going slow causes wrecks....

But in reality, its the speed differential that causes accidents. Traveling at any speed other than the general flow of traffic causes problems. It causes people to change lanes, potentially leading to an accident. It causes people to brake suddenly and hard, or to accelerate quickly while passing. Traveling at a speed significantly different from those around you is dangerous for everyone on the road.

Lets put up a hypothetical situation: Two people are going down the highway at the posted speed limit, one behind the other. They come over a rise to find someone traveling significantly less than the posted limit (say 45 in a 65 zone). The one in front hits his brakes fairly hard when he gets close and realizes the person isn't going to speed up, and the person behind (who was distracted changing the radio or something) doesn't notice and hits them. The slowpoke sees the accident in his rear view mirror and keeps driving, oblivious to the fact that he indirectly caused it.

In this situation, you wouldn't know, just looking at it, what the root cause of the accident was. You won't know that the SUVs or convertibles were actually traveling at the speed limit.

So please, lets leave off blaming one group or the other without actually knowing what happened. It's entirely possible that everyone involved in every accident you saw this morning was going at or under the speed limit when the accident happened. So please, lets avoid blaming one group of people (slow poke hypermilers or gearheads)...

 

Well said, although you shouldn't forget that the ability to drive a car factors in too...

I've recently passed the road test in Massachusetts and 10 yrs ago the one in California and can tell you that they both were a joke compared to driving tests in Western European countries.

In Germany, on parts of the Autobahn where there is no speed limit, the fast guys are on the left and the slow guys on the right. Same in France where the speed limit on the freeway usually is 130 km/h (=80 MPH). I haven't read all the research but the speed difference of the cars on the roads does not cause significant accidents there.

People in those countries are rigorously trained to check traffic from behind before even thinking about a lane change. And if you're not trained, you won't pass the driving test.

 

Speed differential is sufficient for causing accidents, but not necessary. High speed can lead to accidents even without a differential, as can be seen with single car accidents.

Slow speed, on the other hand, is incapable of causing an accident without a speed differential. I suppose one might die of old age, but they won't leave the road surface from driving too slowly.

Tom

 

Agree. The slow speed is not capable of causing an accident but the person who drives at slow speed still can

 

I haven't tested the theory again recently, but I've found the speed differential between my bike and the ground can be fairly painful.

 

Where I do much of my driving, the most deadly speed differentials are, in order:
(1) against oncoming traffic;
(2) against objects affixed to the ground;
(3) against traffic going the same direction.
Driving faster worsens #1 and #2 much more than it helps #3.

As long as I keep seeing the 'speed differential causes accidents' folks keep their speeds high on the non-divided highways, I'll keep dismissing this argument as an immature excuse to drive fast.

This isn't a speed differential problem, it is a driving-too-fast-for-conditions problem. Stationary objects on the road will be even worse than cars going 20 mph under the prevailing speed.

 

They do have a point. If you removed all slower drivers from in front of them, they would have nothing to hit. So there is your answer: one car per road. Or perhaps we could use a staggered start, where the fastest drivers get to go first.

Still, that doesn't help with trees, signs, and bridge abutments.

Tom

 

Here in Atlanta, the ability to drive is a major contributor (or maybe I should say the inability to drive)! I was passed in the suicide lane (center turn lane) yesterday because I had left a car and a half distance between me and the car in front of me! Obviously the jerk who was tailgating me thought I was wasting precious asphalt! Speed limit was 45, I was doing 48, same as the flow of traffic speed... It's idiots like that that cause accidents! And guess what, two miles down the road, I was right next to him at a traffic light!

I lived in Germany for three years, they do it right there! You're more apt to get a ticket for impeeding the flow of traffic than speeding (they do have speed zones monitored by cameras). And, large trucks are confined to the slow lane and are only allowed out of the slow lane to pass a slower vehicle! Implementing these rules (and enforcing them) here in the states would go a long way toward reducing the problems on the road...

 

First off, I'm obviously a "speed differential causes accidents" guy... but i don't keep my speeds unnecessarily high anywhere, and I don't advocate driving faster than safety allows for the given road and conditions. This isn't an immature excuse to drive fast - it's reality.

Driving unnecessarily slow creates problems in the flow of traffic. It causes people to change lanes, to brake suddenly, and to tailgate. Someone doing 40 miles and hour on the highway is just as big a danger as someone doing 80. Someone who doesn't accelerate quickly when turning onto a road or merging onto the highway is a big danger.

When I'm driving, my problem isn't the guy coming the other way - if he stays in his lane and I stay in mine, we're fine. It's all the idiots going the same direction as me. It's the idiots who pull out in front of me going 30 miles and hour less than I am. It's the idiots who tailgate me. It's the idiots that speed past me and cut me off. If everyone drove at a sensible speed with the flow of traffic, we could reduce accidents by a ton.

For your example of an undivided highway (which I drive down several with high speed limits on a regular basis)... If there are two lanes in both directions, and everyone actually went at a reasonable speed with the flow of traffic, who would stay in the more dangerous left lane for long? You might pull over there for a mile to give room for someone turning onto the road, but then merge back to the right.

Speeders are a problem... but so are those that go unnecessarily slower than the flow of traffic.