[MontyCarloHall]

>This maximum would barely change your time to destination

Yes it would. The drive from LA to San Francisco is about 300 miles on Interstate 5. Much of this highway is completely straight, with excellent visibility through an unpopulated desert. When sparsely trafficked (as it is much of the time), it is safe to drive 80+ MPH on I5 for hours at a time. At 80 MPH, this is a 3 hour 45 minute drive. At your proposed 60 MPH, this would be a 5 hour drive.

>but it would save thousands of lives per year.

How many lives do you think would be saved by capping speeds to 60 MPH on I5? If alcohol or distracted driving are not factors, I would say probably close to zero. As a fun aside, the fatality rate on the unrestricted German Autobahn is about half the fatality rate across all US highways, and is comparable to other similar European countries’ highway fatality rates.

I completely agree about lower speed limits in cities, however, where pedestrian deaths are the main concern. While I don’t think a governor in the car would be practical or safe (what if I’m rushing because of a medical emergency?), automated enforcement would serve the same purpose.

[Steltek]

> As a fun aside, the fatality rate on the unrestricted German Autobahn is about half the fatality rate across all US highways

Germany has fanatically strict traffic enforcement, licensing rules, and vehicle inspections, compared to the US. You can't point to just the Autobahn without any further context.

[pkulak]

Gonna go ahead and say the unthinkable here... so what? The person driving fast endangers themselves and everyone else around them. In what other area of society do we tolerate extremely dangerous behavior (40,000+ deaths a year) because to not would be an inconvenience? Guns, I suppose. But I'm not a huge fan or our polices around those either.

[vel0city]

In a controlled access highway (no intersections, no pedestrians, no other kinds of traffic but cars going the same direction) with people paying attention and everyone going roughly the same speed the overall safety doesn't really change from 60 to 70 to 80mph. Texas raised the speed limits on a lot of back country highways to 90MPH. Guess what happened to the fatality rate. Practically unchanged.

[kortilla]

> what other area of society do we tolerate extremely dangerous behavior (40,000+ deaths a year) because to not would be an inconvenience?

Lol, heart disease wipes out an order of magnitude more people every year and we do absolutely nothing to stop people from eating and drinking themselves into obesity. But I guess you’re cool with it as long as it’s just suicide and a strain on our healthcare system?

[pkulak]

You just gave three examples of people endangering their own lives only, not my family. I'm not "cool" with it, really, but it's a whole different discussion.

[axiomsEnd]

And obesity in certainly not connected to the amount of time people in USA spend in cars.

[Shaanie]

Don't forget alcohol, and arguably smoking and being obese.

[pkulak]

Those doesn't endanger other people though.

[vermilingua]

DV statistics say otherwise (for alcohol), second hand smoking is a real problem, and obesity is typically generational.

[unsupp0rted]

People shouldn't really drive 300 miles in individual private vehicles.

Apart from the chance of accidentally killing oneself or others, it's hugely inefficient.

If we changed an interstate full of cars to high speed trains (or hyperloop or whatever) which depart every half hour, it'd be safer, cheaper, cleaner... you name it.

[rootusrootus]

So what should I do? Take a train? Doesn't go there. Bus? Again. Fly? That's not more efficient. Maybe grandma just doesn't need a visit from her grandkids.

Instead, I bought an electric car. I bet it compares quite favorably to a typical bus. And grandma does like to see her grandkids, let me tell ya.

[bee_rider]

I expected to see better performance from the bus, but it is surprisingly poor:

https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint

Haven't dug into their sources, but I assume this is because buses often run with low utilization. Anyway the answer is trains, the answer is always trains in public transit.

[rootusrootus]

Trains are a tough sell, at least in the western US. So much wide open space, trains are slow, high speed trains too expensive to justify given the sparse population.

I remember once doing the math and finding that there are many times when our local light rail is less efficient than just putting four people in a sedan. When the train is full, though, it's unbeatable.

EVs throw another wrench into that math since they're so much more efficient than ICEVs.

[gernb]

The sparse population argument seems kind of BS

Switzerland has a low population and is covered in trains

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32180236

[a4a4a4a4]

> sparse population

> low population

These are not the same thing. Switzerland has a pretty dense population. The section with low population is the Alps, where you're not going to put trains anyway.

https://www.atlas.bfs.admin.ch/maps/13/de/12614_75_3501_70/2...

Most people that live in remote areas have cars anyway, since sometimes busses only run twice a day. It's a tricky problem to measure "access to public transit".

(The BFS is an amazing source for information, they publish all kinds of statistics)

[bee_rider]

Not to mention, eventually the whole grid should be mostly renewable rendering questions of efficiency more-or-less moot.

[ATsch]

> Take a train? Doesn't go there.

It should, that's the point. The only reason it doesn't is because the US has been regressing on rail infrastructure for a century.

> Bus? Again.

It should. And it should be so often you don't need to check a schedule.

[ascar]

Biggest problem for any non big-city to big-city transit are the last few miles. In the end my options are often to use a taxi or get a rental car. In both cases the price needs to be added to the cost of public transit making my personal car cheaper, more convenient and often also faster. It's a tough nut to crack. And I'm saying that as a German with one of the best public transport systems in the world.

[cafard]

From San Francisco to Los Angeles, sure. From San Francisco to any one of the many small towns within 300 miles, well, that's a lot of track to lay.

[gernb]

not really. The population of the bay area is on par with the entire population of the country of Switzerland yet they manage to have tons of trains in a much larger area

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32180236

[omgwtfbyobbq]

In the several trips my wife and I have taken between East Bay and SoCal, it's been hard to maintain 80+ mph. Between interchanges, construction, slower drivers, trucks passing other trucks, and so on, we're lucky to hit an average of 70mph.

On the flip side, cruising at 60+mph is totally doable, and while it is ~40+ minutes slower in theory, we only need to stop for gas once at lower speeds, which shaves off ~10-20 minutes.

Also, fighting through traffic takes the same regardless, so it's usually better to adjust when we're driving than trying to drive faster.

[hnov]

An average of 70 means you’re doing at least 80+. Maintaining an average of 80 requires going over 100 on that route in my experience.

[cobaltoxide]

> How many lives do you think would be saved by capping speeds to 60 MPH on I5?

The speed limit was in fact 65 MPH until 1995.

[ineedtosleep]

> How many lives do you think would be saved by capping speeds to 60 MPH on I5? If alcohol or distracted driving are not factors, I would say probably close to zero.

Amazing how you'd think it's actually close to zero. So many dangerous situations are removed once speeding is at least attempted to be removed from the equation.

To name two: reaction times are increased, stopping distances are reduced. I probably know what you'd say next: the driver is distracted. Not the speed's problem. To which I'll say, yeah of course the driver's distracted -- it's because the driver's human and will never be paying attention to the road 100% at all times.

IMO driving speeds, and how a community feels about it, are huge indicators on how hostile and how selfish a community can be.

[ascar]

> IMO driving speeds, and how a community feels about it, are huge indicators on how hostile and how selfish a community can be.

My gosh, you must think horribly about us Germans.

All your points make sense on the surface, but empirically in Germany our high speed roads cause a lot less deaths than regular roads [1]. So while you might think your argument makes a lot of sense other factors are a lot more important. To name one counter argument: I'm much more focused when driving faster and regularly adjusting my speed and hawkishly watching out for slower vehicles that I am passing than when I'm cruising straight at the same low speed for hours. Other than that a lot of terrible accident situations (turns or getting into opposing traffic) don't occur on separated highways.

To be clear, I'm never speeding and I do go slower at all the limited parts of the Autobahn, which are usually limited due to some kind of danger at higher speeds.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Verkeh...

[nonameiguess]

Amusingly enough, though I didn't witness this and can't verify he was telling the truth anyway, my ex-wife claimed that when she went to traffic school, the instructor there told the class the number one cause of traffic accidents on Texas highways was cars going too slow. But I suppose you could argue it's really the opposite even in those cases, that all of the people cutting you off, deciding to get onto a highway doing 20 MPH, doing 40 in the passing lane, or randomly slamming on the brakes because they get spooked by a plastic bag or something, wouldn't be causing accidents if everyone else was also driving really slowly, and the accidents that did happen would be less deadly.

Although, as far as I understand, fatalities on highways are somewhat rare anyway, with most vehicular deaths happening at intersections. After all, it's the stopping force that kills you, and two vehicles doing 80 and 60 in the same direction will collide with less force than one doing 40 and one crossing the path in a perpendicular direction, or two going 20 and hitting head on.

[vel0city]

A ton of highway accidents are people changing lanes going way under the average speed of traffic. If everyone was going about the same speed there would be fewer accidents. If everyone is going 75mph and you decide to go 40mph, you're putting yourself and everyone else on that highway in more danger than if you just went 75.

[throwaway0a5e]

But the accident won't be "your fault" if you're hit from behind and that's what matters more in the minds of those people. It's the Principal Skinner "everyone else is wrong" attitude in real life.

As someone who used to drive a very slow commercial vehicle I absolutely cringe at the people who voluntarily fail to keep up with traffic. It's just not safe and if you're looking in your mirrors you can see all sorts of stupid happen in real time. All sorts of people cutting each other off and getting in each other's way happens as they merge to pass you. All those interactions are potential for something dumb to happen and they are needless.