| > 1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)? As are most limits. I get that driving on a motorway at say 85 mph is probably not that much dangerous than the speed limit (70 mph) but 100? 120? 140? I know about Germany, but would you say that Britain's or Slovenia's road are designed and kept to the same standard? > 2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars. how do you constrain speed on a motorway? > The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit. In this country (UK) there is this myth that the cameras are money making devices, when during the 2008 crisis they were turned off to save money for some constabularies, this is the same type of argument. |