That sounds like a really bad idea. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to go over the limit situationally.
Especially when other drivers could potentially put you in harms way that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to evade.
Also what if you need to rush to the hospital and don’t have time for an ambulance? Not great but better than someone dying because they didn’t get attention in time.
Even ambulances aren’t supposed to speed. They get their time savings with light switching devices and having traffic get out of the way. 99 percent of survivable medical crises have an hour to reach modern medicine as long as proper first aid has been applied.
It’s also almost universally better to slow down than speed up to avoid an accident. Braking changes your speed far faster than speeding up. It also gives you better traction, (literally it loads the front turning wheels with extra weight), and makes a hit more survivable.
We all want to feel like we’re in a Hollywood movie, but we just aren’t.
I really think you are missing the point here. You say overspeeding may save you, which i think is a very theorical and not frequent occurence but ok, for the sake of argument let’s allow 20kmh above the maximum speed limit, in my country that would be 150kmh, enough to get out of dangerous situation, still way bellow what modern car can do.
And you really dont want to go above this kind of speed in urban environments if you’re not a trained professional. Speed limit exist for a reason which extends beyond “when you agree with them” raming in another car and transforming a 1 people emergency into a multiple people one is not a risk we should consider acceptable.
The arbitrary speed limits are often because many city planners still use the 80th percentile rule. Basically, they do a traffic study, then set the limit at what 80% of people are comfortable driving at. So that means 20% will naturally feel like they can go faster. And as they reach the 99th percentile, they’ll feel like they can go much faster.
The issue with this 80th percentile thing is that it has very little grounding in traffic safety or reality; Many roads are needlessly wide and give drivers an unrealistic sense of safety. They’ll feel like they can go 40 or 50MPH, when it’s really a street that is cutting through a neighborhood and is frequented by children playing, bike riders, etc…
While i dont necessarily agree with you, it is not my point. I am not saying we should limit the speed according to local speed limit, just that there is no reason ever for an individual car to go above 150kmh (or whatever the highest allowed speed in a country+15% is)
Speed limits are set according to a number of factor from noise, local crash history, density of pedestrians, threshold of the safety equipments (such as rails) , willingness of the governing body to review it, etc
While some are not good, I would definetly argue that not all the reasons can be assessed from the driver perspective.
That sounds like a really bad idea. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to go over the limit situationally.
Especially when other drivers could potentially put you in harms way that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to evade.
Also what if you need to rush to the hospital and don’t have time for an ambulance? Not great but better than someone dying because they didn’t get attention in time.
Even ambulances aren’t supposed to speed. They get their time savings with light switching devices and having traffic get out of the way. 99 percent of survivable medical crises have an hour to reach modern medicine as long as proper first aid has been applied.
It’s also almost universally better to slow down than speed up to avoid an accident. Braking changes your speed far faster than speeding up. It also gives you better traction, (literally it loads the front turning wheels with extra weight), and makes a hit more survivable.
We all want to feel like we’re in a Hollywood movie, but we just aren’t.
I really think you are missing the point here. You say overspeeding may save you, which i think is a very theorical and not frequent occurence but ok, for the sake of argument let’s allow 20kmh above the maximum speed limit, in my country that would be 150kmh, enough to get out of dangerous situation, still way bellow what modern car can do. And you really dont want to go above this kind of speed in urban environments if you’re not a trained professional. Speed limit exist for a reason which extends beyond “when you agree with them” raming in another car and transforming a 1 people emergency into a multiple people one is not a risk we should consider acceptable.
I agree that there’s rarely a good reason to speed. However, most speed limits are fairly arbitrary. Some are too fast, some are too slow.
And the individual driver is not the arbiter of that. Just because someone feels the speed limits are wrong doesn’t justify speeding
The arbitrary speed limits are often because many city planners still use the 80th percentile rule. Basically, they do a traffic study, then set the limit at what 80% of people are comfortable driving at. So that means 20% will naturally feel like they can go faster. And as they reach the 99th percentile, they’ll feel like they can go much faster.
The issue with this 80th percentile thing is that it has very little grounding in traffic safety or reality; Many roads are needlessly wide and give drivers an unrealistic sense of safety. They’ll feel like they can go 40 or 50MPH, when it’s really a street that is cutting through a neighborhood and is frequented by children playing, bike riders, etc…
While i dont necessarily agree with you, it is not my point. I am not saying we should limit the speed according to local speed limit, just that there is no reason ever for an individual car to go above 150kmh (or whatever the highest allowed speed in a country+15% is)
Speed limits are set according to a number of factor from noise, local crash history, density of pedestrians, threshold of the safety equipments (such as rails) , willingness of the governing body to review it, etc While some are not good, I would definetly argue that not all the reasons can be assessed from the driver perspective.