Was just thinking to myself, man I think smoking weed is less dangerous than speeding, on a macro level. And then I wondered, just how bad is speeding really?

Lets look at increased deaths
increased accidents
increased costs

maybe the US should go down to a 55mph limit like a civilized country

Or go to the metric system Canada has 100 km and 110 km speed limits on Highways 68/62 MPH

I think distracted driving kills more folks than speeding and doubt that 5 or 10 MPH decrease would have a large impact

How would changing the speed limit change how fast people that are already speeding drive?

55 mph? obvious troll post

I can't drive 55

It's not the speeding itself that creates the deadliest outcomes, it's the speed delta. Most studies that suggest lower speed limits save lives are focused on city streets and vehicle vs pedestrian outcomes. Getting hit at 25 vs 35 mph while jaywalking is a big difference.

There's a YouTube channel where a cop in Arizona goes around writing tickets all day long for people driving the speed limit in the left lane. He writes them tickets for impeding traffic. Every single time, his cam will catch the driver saying, "I was going the speed limit!" and he says, "Yeah, and you've been doing that in the passing lane for the last 3 minutes that I've been following you. Slower traffic to the right!"

It's people like that who cause freeway accidents moreso than the speeders.

There have been studies that show higher interstate speed limits save lives by siphoning the riskiest drivers away from lower speed limit highways.

There's a long stretch of I-94 in Milwaukee that has posted speeds of 55mph. Whenever there isn't congestion, traffic is consistently flowing at 75+. Approximately everyone speeding 20mph over. I know this because I'm one of those drivers every day. Almost nobody drives 90+ mph on the sections where the limit is 70.

Smoking weed is more harmful to your health than speeding and it's not even remotely close. Not to mention the harm to your finances. I'm sure drugs aren't cheap, and when you roll up to a job interview smelling like weed, your papers go right in the bin.

damn you

I remember when it was 55. It was excruciating.

I think the claim was about dangerousness for others.

One weird/unexpected outcome (at least by me) of cannabis legalization was that we now have sufficient data to claim that driving under cannabis influence isn't particularly dangerous to others, certainly far less than alcohol or other substances.

Not sure what it has to do with speeding though

The US has so many sparsely trafficked and wide open spaces where a 55 mph limit would be ridiculous-- like much of the midwest, great plains, and parts of the west.

"Would it save lives" also is not the correct question to be asking from a policy perspective.

If we reduced the speed limit to 10 mph, traffic fatalities would go down to very low levels. But the economic impact would be immense and we would all go insane.

I don’t understand why you made this post. Nobody is suggesting 10mph

Mexico has like a 55mph limit


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What if it saved just one child though?

I know that no one is suggesting a 10 mph speed limit. My point is that any national-scale change in speed limits would have safety, economic, and social consequences. When setting policy on speed limits, all those factors should be taken into account.

Now do lockdowns

Analysis of proper policy on lockdowns obviously requires consideration of the same factors. And you certainly will not find any posts from me asserting otherwise.

In my city we got to 30 km/h for the vast majority of roads which is like 18 mph. Because of crazy talk like that by crazy leftists.

The only saving grace is that being Italy, most of us simply completly disregard those limits except where we know there is a speed camera, then you accelerate more afterwards to make up for the lost time.

Do you live in some hill town with extremely narrow streets and tons of foot traffic? I don't remember driving that slowly in Italy, but it's been quite a while.

I like Mexico. I go there all the time. I don't think the US should aspire to follow Mexico's lead on things.


The city I live in has just completed a study of all the speed limits it has control over. All the recommendations for individual streets/roads were to increase the limits.

Bologna, Italy, but that isn't about the medieval historical city center, it's about suburbs as well except some very big roads which were kept at 50 km/h (30 mph, the standard italian urban speed limit).

It's a very recent development, a crazy trend of some ultra-radical-leftist cities in europe. It's linked to the "15 min city", the marxist (the actual inventor of the idea is an actual self defined marxist architect) urbanistic plan which wants to ban you from being able to drive around too much.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2...-is-it-working

Notice how in the assessment about whether "it is working" or not, there is not even a mention of the costs for every single individual in terms of time for every single trip. That's how the left operates.

We are talking a 500k people city, purple are the only roads where 50 is still the limit, rest of yellow is all 30 (i repeat: 18 mph).

If i had described this possible outcome 10 years ago as one of the many reasons the left is a threat to humanity, i would have been called a conspiracy theorist and so on.

Now it's law and we can manage only because we have a strong internal sense of spite of insane laws, so we mostly simply disregard them. That includes public bus drivers who , if they followed the limits, couldn't actually do their job following time tables.

18 mph is insanity. We have 15 mph school zones in the USA, and I genuinely think people make somewhat of an effort to obey that rule during the 15 minutes of the day that kids are being actively dismissed from school in the afternoon, but for the other 99% of the day the sign is really just road decoration.

In front of schools and hospitals we do go very slowly because it makes sense, we typically did even before official speed limits in those areas was lowered to 30 (18 mph) well before this recent insanity.

No one complained, both rightwing and leftwing cities implemented those changes and so on, but we are talking decades ago.

Y'all realize it was lowered to 55 as much in reaction to the gas crisis as due to safety concerns?

I have never once read or followed the speed limit, speed limits are for nerds.