11 ms·

Speeding Slows You Down (By a Lot)

ilovecurl 3y ago
"An odd feature of the model is that, the older you get, the quicker your trips become, at least in expectation, and the more you should speed." I am reminded of the track from The Dead Kennedys, Buzzbomb from Pasadena.
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codeflo 3y ago
Why would you add the lost life expectancy to the length of the trip? That doesn’t make any mathematical sense to me. Edit (this might be wrong, see Edit 2 below -- I'm leaving this as is because otherwise, some of the responses don't make sense): I noticed that the calculation is wrong even within the article's own logic. Supposedly, this calculates "the expected length of the trip (including dead time) at different speeds", and does so by adding the expected loss of lifetime to the total trip length. However, you're surely not always going to die exactly at the end of the trip. In fact, you can be expected to die at the half-way point on average, meaning this "total time" in case of death is only half the trip length plus the loss of life expectancy. If you plug this into the equation, the speed that minimizes the travel time dramatically shifts to around 100 mph. And more absurdly, near the end of your life, when your mathematical life expectancy might be measured in hours, it's "faster" according to this logic to just kill yourself and get it over with than to undertake any long trips at all. I wouldn't recommend following this line of reasoning. Edit 2: The above line of reasoning might be wrong, I think I made an error and the calculation is correct within the article's premises. In that case, I take that part back. I still don't agree that adding loss of life expectancy to travel time is a reasonable way to look at things.
- silverbax88 3y ago
  Agreed, risk of injury does not factor into how long the trip would take given faster speeds. This article is an exercise in narrative nonsense.
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    > This article is an exercise in narrative nonsense. I don't think the article intended to be taken entirely seriously. It's narrative nonsense, but I would argue that it's entertaining narrative nonsense. I think it also serves a larger point, not about "optimizing trip speeds" but about putting into easily-digestible context exactly how dangerous driving a car can be.
- sshine 3y ago
  "Time spent dead" is a lot of time added to your trip. But only by a fraction corresponding to the probability of dying.
- crznp 3y ago
  The advantage of driving faster is that you convert driving time into free time. Death converts living time (including free time) into death time. Subtracting them makes mathematical sense: you have more or less free time. Though it is napkin math. Eg: it treats all free time as equivalent. If speeding gets you to a job interview on time, which gets you the job, that is more important than speeding so that you have time to do a crossword. Might as well do the crossword in the car, eh?
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  > In fact, you can be expected to die at the half-way point on average, meaning this "total time" in case of death is only half the trip length plus the loss of life expectancy. If you die an hour earlier in the trip then you're dead for an hour longer.
- actuallyalys 3y ago
  Even if you don't want to treat increased expected loss of life as the same as time saved, it does seem like this could be a good way of (ahem) driving home how much you're risking by driving faster.
whoopsie 3y ago
These numbers poke only a narrow solution. The optimal fastest way is to have the destination speed to you.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  Somewhere sometime a dinosaur cranes its neck and thinks to itself, "I would most certainly love to see that beautiful comet from a closer vantage point."
tzs 3y ago
Note that there are some types of accidents whose probability goes down the faster you go. An example would be getting hit head on by someone who veered out of the opposite lane into yours. The probability of being in that kind of accident goes up as the number of cars that you pass in the opposite direction goes up. Without loss of generality we can assume that there are no entrances or exits on the other lane between your starting point and ending point, because if there are we can simply treat you trip as a sum of separate trips between each pair of consecutive entrances/exits. The number of cars you pass going the opposite way is the sum of the number that were on the road between your start and end point when you started and the number than enter the road while you are traveling. The number already on the road does not depend on your speed. The number that enter while you are traveling does, going down the faster you travel. Hence the faster you go the lower your chances of getting hit by a lane crosser.
- thfuran 3y ago
  The closing speed between you and the swerver is almost certainly positively correlated with collision rate. Given that the base rate of even seeing someone swerve into opposing traffic is so low, I'd expect that effect to dominate. Even if not, severity of injury definitely strongly positively correlates with collision speed.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    and also assumes reaction time speeds up proportionally with speed. it's the opposite
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barrkel 3y ago
Well I guess if you die, then your trip took infinite time (you never arrive), so it does tend to push up your probability weighted average. But it's a push.
- dev_tty01 3y ago
  Fortunately, since you are dead you don't care how long the trip took.
- konschubert 3y ago
  If you die, you lose the rest of your lifetime. It's not infinite.
jp57 3y ago
When people say “the probability doubles” they really mean that the odds double, right? If my probability of dying is .6, it can’t double to 1.2. However if my odds of dying are 3:2, they can double to 6:2 or 3:1 or P=0.75. The odds can continue doubling indefinitely and P will asymptotically approach 1.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Likely they're talking about small probabilities and meant what they said. If not, who knows. (Quite probably not even them)
  - giantg2 3y ago
    I assumed it did actually double as 1 in 100 million miles is an extremely small number to begin with.
- kragen 3y ago
  when they're talking about probabilities like the one in 600 thousand of dying on this trip, they are the same if you have a model where a probability goes outside the (0, 1) range for some input parameter value, that obviously isn't a valid answer, but it may just mean that the parameter value is well outside the model's range of validity. you are surely right that if we extrapolate this probability model of doubling the risk of death per 16 kph speed increase beyond about 400 kph we get invalid probabilities, but i think that probably the model breaks down well before that point
photochemsyn 3y ago
The safest driving speed on busy roads is the speed everyone else is going. If everyone would drive this way, overtaking accidents (often very serious injury-wise) would be eliminated. This means slow drivers are just as dangerous as fast drivers, and also points to why self-driving cars would greatly reduce highway accidents. Assuming they'd all be monitoring each other's speeds, they could coordinate like swarms of drones, and thus could drive safely at faster speeds. To go even faster, the cars could link up into a single line, under coordinated control, and zip along like a high-speed train (which is why trains are the most efficient transport system, at a nice optimum balancing speed and energy consumption). However, this 'train of cars' has some advantages, as you could then just detach from the train and drive on independently to your local destination, avoiding the last mile problem.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  "Trains" of linearly packed self-driving cars are an interesting idea. It would be fun to watch the emergent ripples of inevitable flow disruptions spread through such auto-mata.
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  Another possibility that's fun to imagine in a world where every car is self-driving and connected to all the other cars is traffic meshing at speed (say, 25mph) through intersections. You wouldn't need traffic lights anymore, because the vehicles would be able to set their spacing and velocity correctly to avoid colliding. Unfortunately, self driving cars can barely figure out how to merge onto a freeway so we may be some decades away still.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  In my country (the UK), the penalties for driving dangerously due to being too slow are usually greater than the penalties for speeding. Being unreasonably slow could make other drivers more likely to overtake and have a head-on collision, or hit other cars when re-merging back onto their side. Single-track country roads are the most problematic, though, as everyone has a different idea of what the safe speed is - and the limit is as high as 60 miles/hour! I wouldn't be against simply reducing the national speed limit for roads without markings to 30, so that at least then people could be reasonably expected to drive at that speed, rather than at an unspecified speed anywhere up to 60.
alexwhb 3y ago
While the methods in this post may not be a super accurate depiction of reality.. I did find it entertaining. Additionally I agree generally with the point the post is making. It is shocking to me that we accept so whole heartedly the risk associated with driving when, comparatively, it is shockingly unsafe relative to other modes of transportation. In the US somewhere around 41,000 people die per year from traffic accidents. If we compare that to train travel (especially in Europe where safety standards are significantly better) it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 32x safer. Additionally we accept the liability of a car shockingly easily. Yes we all should have insurance, but that insurance only goes so far. If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter. There are several other downsides we accept that I won’t get into, but it’s pretty interesting to me that especially US society has accepted these facts so seemingly easily.
- kragen 3y ago
  i just spent three hours on the bus today and i would much rather have spent an hour in a car instead, though my risk of dying would surely be higher there are a lot of places within 100 km of my house that i'd enjoy visiting but where public transport doesn't go. if i had a car, i could go there easily. if that means shortening my life expectancy by 20 minutes, that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. the risk i'd be imposing on innocent people around me by driving a car is ethically trickier
  - jethro_tell 3y ago
    I'd you shorten your life expectancy by 20 min but get 2 hours back today it seems like a fair trade. And that's why public transit in the us is such a mess, if you want people to use it, you have to make it fast and frequent before people need it, so when you do use it, you thin, huh, that's not too bad.
    - kragen 3y ago
      well, i wasn't actually dead on the public transit, although on the bus whose air conditioner was broken it felt like it part of the time
giantg2 3y ago
This is idiotic. The penalty wouldn't apply to the trip if you didn't incur it (die) during the trip. Also, as they noted, there are a bunch of other factors. Some of those factors are equally or more important as the ones they are looking at, such as alcohol impairment (both about 30% of traffic fatalities). The biggest fatality risk factor is not being buckled in. About 45% of all occupant fatalities are people who were not buckled. This will greatly skew the stats if not properly accounted for. Edit: why disagree?
- bagels 3y ago
  I found the same thing when researching motorcycle fatality rates. Yes, they are dangerous, but something like 50% of fatalities involved a drunk motorcycle rider. I don't recall the stats for not wearing gear.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    It really is surprising to dig into the stats around alcohol, drugs, and non-use of existing safety systems. We end up with a lot of discussions on all sort of new laws but a lot of the problem is that the existing laws and tools aren't used. I was not aware of the 50% alcohol involvement in motorcycle fatalities, but it doesn't surprise me. About 35% of all vehicle fatalities involve drunk driving, 50% of all pedestrian deaths involve either the driver or pedestrian being drunk, and 20% of cyclist fatalities invovle drunk cyclists (I assume alcohol is a factor for many other cyclist desths too). Then we have 45% of traffic fatalities that don't wear a seatbelt, about 35% of child fatalities did not use restraints, and 80-90% of child restraints are misused. I'm not sure about motorcycle accidents, but 60% of cyclist fatalities did not use a helmet. The drunk driving and not properly restraining kids are really the biggest issue since it affects others. Things like not wearing a helmet, cycling DUI, and not using a seatbelt are a little more Darwinian in thier punishment.
    - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
      >but 60% of cyclist fatalities did not use a helmet. I wonder what portion of those would have been a fatality even with a helmet. Cycling helmets are flimsy things.
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standardUser 3y ago
> Maybe highway miles are much more dangerous than non-highway miles, and we shouldn’t be on the highway at all. I imagine it's pretty hard to get seriously injured or die when not on the freeway. I've long thought that should be the primary application of self-driving technology. It's ultra-simplified and relatively standardized compared to other types of roads, and it's where the most life and limb can be saved. Not to mention the potential to alleviate traffic, which would save people vastly more time than just driving too fast. Also, will everyone please use you blinker for fuck's sake? If moving your wrist slightly is just too much of a burden for you, then stop driving, you're not cut out to pilot your own anything.
- brk 3y ago
  >I imagine it's pretty hard to get seriously injured or die when not on the freeway. I don't have data handy, but it seems like an awful lot of fatalities occur in and around intersections (which imply not-a-freeway). Freeways feel like they are safer overall, most of the time you are moving in the same direction as the vehicles immediately surrounding you, which reduces the chances for head-on or side collisions, which seem to be particularly fatal. However, an actual freeway crash also feels like it has a higher probability of being fatal. Proportionate to miles driven they may be less common, but like a plane crash, they are noteworthy when they do happen and make for "better news".
  - standardUser 3y ago
    From what I'm reading, collisions are far more common on regulars roads/streets, but injuries and fatalities are much more common on freeways. This is relating to motorists/passengers. Pedestrians and bicyclists are obviously at significant risk whenever they are around cars, and they are almost never around cars on freeways. One exception is motorcycles, which are apparently at less risk on highways than other streets.
  - LorenPechtel 3y ago
    Yup. Miles driven actually have little impact on accidents. Rather, it's interactions that matter. Miles of you all going down the same freeway at about the same speed involve almost no interactions. (This is also why airplane fatalities bear little relationship to the flight time--because they're mostly takeoff and landing. Accidents when you're peacefully up at cruise altitude are rare.)
tra3 3y ago
I’ve learned “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” from shooting sports, but I find it applies equally well to most (all?) areas of life. When I started driving, I used to speed to the next stop light, change lanes frequently. I stopped doing this when I got older, partially because I see people that zip around at the same stop lights anyway.
- bagels 3y ago
  It is also a phrase used in motor racing, hah.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    It makes such a huge difference when you can smoothly move through the corners, smooth keeps your tires in traction and so you actually HAVE grip to push with, if needed. Plus the flow you can get into when hotlapping is so meditative for me lol
- whateveracct 3y ago
  This is why I always try to pass people who brake for no reason. Some people are constantly on their break - it's just how they drive. It's nice to not have all those brake light signals to constantly react to.
1970-01-01 3y ago
I love a good bullshit analysis. Yes speed kills the average driver (the one with one ovary and one testicle) so you shouldn't do it. In fact, you'll get there sooner by going under the speed limit. Your mileage does not vary.
tdrz 3y ago
I think it remotely applies to working, as a founder, at a startup. You might go real fast for a while, but then you (might) burn out and quit altogether.
bdcravens 3y ago
Never mind death, a collision (even a minor one, where you simply exchange insurance information) or a ticket will kill your "productivity" gained. I used to be the crazy driver (and occasionally that personality comes out to play), but these days I usually just set my cruise to whatever is practical (in large cities, it's not the speed limit, but a bit higher to match others), and let adaptive cruise do most of the work.
bagels 3y ago
If you die, this doesn't increase trip length. I'm not sure I'd care how long it took if I were dead even if it did. When the trip is completed successfully, you've arrived sooner and the habit of speeding will only then affect risk on future trips, there is no post facto cost (ignoring automated speed traps).
m1n1 3y ago
Driving aggressively occasionally causes others to slam on the brakes to avoid accidents, which creates standing waves also known as traffic jams. So speeding at least slows everyone else down.
pierat 3y ago
Not driving at all is infite speed to your destination?
LorenPechtel 3y ago
And to throw out another factor that messes up this analysis: Most accidents involve the interaction of two cars. The faster vehicles get to their destination the fewer vehicles are on the road at any one time and thus the fewer interactions there will be. I have no numbers on how big an effect this would be.
jdboyd 3y ago
I found this very entertaining. However he also forgot to include anticipated delays from speeding tickets. I'm sure there are other things that should have been factored in as well, such as sometimes increased waits at lights because you arrived earlier at it, so 25 or 65 would make no difference in how long it takes to get to the ither side of the light.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  The big one is stress from the hustle and bustle in the outside lane. I tend to drive at 65mph on our motorways which is 5mph less than the limit. Fast enough to not get stuck between the trucks but you don't spend the whole journey trying to squeeze past people who are doing the same as you.
JackSlateur 3y ago
It is funny how much people correlate speed with death rate Better correlate death rate with Time spent on the road
iJohnDoe 3y ago
FWIW - just estimates. I had a 30 mile commute. If I drove 65-75 I could make in about 25 minutes. One night I was on-call and drove really fast in the middle of the night and it took about 18-20 minutes. I realized it was never worth it to shave off a handful minutes and drive way too fast to any destination. Basic math. When you get to a certain speed, you’re shaving off seconds/minutes. 65mph is certainly better than 35mph. 90mph isn’t really better than 65-75.
tim333 3y ago
Including changes to life expectancy can be an argument for cycling if you are middle aged. What it takes in terms of accidents and pedal time it gives back in less heart attacks.

"An odd feature of the model is that, the older you get, the quicker your trips become, at least in expectation, and the more you should speed." I am reminded of the track from The Dead Kennedys, Buzzbomb from Pasadena.

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bo0tzz 3y ago
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codeflo 3y ago

Why would you add the lost life expectancy to the length of the trip? That doesn’t make any mathematical sense to me. Edit (this might be wrong, see Edit 2 below -- I'm leaving this as is because otherwise, some of the responses don't make sense): I noticed that the calculation is wrong even within the article's own logic. Supposedly, this calculates "the expected length of the trip (including dead time) at different speeds", and does so by adding the expected loss of lifetime to the total trip length. However, you're surely not always going to die exactly at the end of the trip. In fact, you can be expected to die at the half-way point on average, meaning this "total time" in case of death is only half the trip length plus the loss of life expectancy. If you plug this into the equation, the speed that minimizes the travel time dramatically shifts to around 100 mph. And more absurdly, near the end of your life, when your mathematical life expectancy might be measured in hours, it's "faster" according to this logic to just kill yourself and get it over with than to undertake any long trips at all. I wouldn't recommend following this line of reasoning. Edit 2: The above line of reasoning might be wrong, I think I made an error and the calculation is correct within the article's premises. In that case, I take that part back. I still don't agree that adding loss of life expectancy to travel time is a reasonable way to look at things.

silverbax88 3y ago
Agreed, risk of injury does not factor into how long the trip would take given faster speeds. This article is an exercise in narrative nonsense.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  > This article is an exercise in narrative nonsense. I don't think the article intended to be taken entirely seriously. It's narrative nonsense, but I would argue that it's entertaining narrative nonsense. I think it also serves a larger point, not about "optimizing trip speeds" but about putting into easily-digestible context exactly how dangerous driving a car can be.
sshine 3y ago
"Time spent dead" is a lot of time added to your trip. But only by a fraction corresponding to the probability of dying.
crznp 3y ago
The advantage of driving faster is that you convert driving time into free time. Death converts living time (including free time) into death time. Subtracting them makes mathematical sense: you have more or less free time. Though it is napkin math. Eg: it treats all free time as equivalent. If speeding gets you to a job interview on time, which gets you the job, that is more important than speeding so that you have time to do a crossword. Might as well do the crossword in the car, eh?
8organicbits 3y ago
> In fact, you can be expected to die at the half-way point on average, meaning this "total time" in case of death is only half the trip length plus the loss of life expectancy. If you die an hour earlier in the trip then you're dead for an hour longer.
actuallyalys 3y ago
Even if you don't want to treat increased expected loss of life as the same as time saved, it does seem like this could be a good way of (ahem) driving home how much you're risking by driving faster.

whoopsie 3y ago

These numbers poke only a narrow solution. The optimal fastest way is to have the destination speed to you.

Nevermark 3y ago
Somewhere sometime a dinosaur cranes its neck and thinks to itself, "I would most certainly love to see that beautiful comet from a closer vantage point."

tzs 3y ago

Note that there are some types of accidents whose probability goes down the faster you go. An example would be getting hit head on by someone who veered out of the opposite lane into yours. The probability of being in that kind of accident goes up as the number of cars that you pass in the opposite direction goes up. Without loss of generality we can assume that there are no entrances or exits on the other lane between your starting point and ending point, because if there are we can simply treat you trip as a sum of separate trips between each pair of consecutive entrances/exits. The number of cars you pass going the opposite way is the sum of the number that were on the road between your start and end point when you started and the number than enter the road while you are traveling. The number already on the road does not depend on your speed. The number that enter while you are traveling does, going down the faster you travel. Hence the faster you go the lower your chances of getting hit by a lane crosser.

thfuran 3y ago
The closing speed between you and the swerver is almost certainly positively correlated with collision rate. Given that the base rate of even seeing someone swerve into opposing traffic is so low, I'd expect that effect to dominate. Even if not, severity of injury definitely strongly positively correlates with collision speed.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  and also assumes reaction time speeds up proportionally with speed. it's the opposite
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barrkel 3y ago

Well I guess if you die, then your trip took infinite time (you never arrive), so it does tend to push up your probability weighted average. But it's a push.

dev_tty01 3y ago
Fortunately, since you are dead you don't care how long the trip took.
konschubert 3y ago
If you die, you lose the rest of your lifetime. It's not infinite.

jp57 3y ago

When people say “the probability doubles” they really mean that the odds double, right? If my probability of dying is .6, it can’t double to 1.2. However if my odds of dying are 3:2, they can double to 6:2 or 3:1 or P=0.75. The odds can continue doubling indefinitely and P will asymptotically approach 1.

thfuran 3y ago
Likely they're talking about small probabilities and meant what they said. If not, who knows. (Quite probably not even them)
- giantg2 3y ago
  I assumed it did actually double as 1 in 100 million miles is an extremely small number to begin with.
kragen 3y ago
when they're talking about probabilities like the one in 600 thousand of dying on this trip, they are the same if you have a model where a probability goes outside the (0, 1) range for some input parameter value, that obviously isn't a valid answer, but it may just mean that the parameter value is well outside the model's range of validity. you are surely right that if we extrapolate this probability model of doubling the risk of death per 16 kph speed increase beyond about 400 kph we get invalid probabilities, but i think that probably the model breaks down well before that point

photochemsyn 3y ago

The safest driving speed on busy roads is the speed everyone else is going. If everyone would drive this way, overtaking accidents (often very serious injury-wise) would be eliminated. This means slow drivers are just as dangerous as fast drivers, and also points to why self-driving cars would greatly reduce highway accidents. Assuming they'd all be monitoring each other's speeds, they could coordinate like swarms of drones, and thus could drive safely at faster speeds. To go even faster, the cars could link up into a single line, under coordinated control, and zip along like a high-speed train (which is why trains are the most efficient transport system, at a nice optimum balancing speed and energy consumption). However, this 'train of cars' has some advantages, as you could then just detach from the train and drive on independently to your local destination, avoiding the last mile problem.

Nevermark 3y ago
"Trains" of linearly packed self-driving cars are an interesting idea. It would be fun to watch the emergent ripples of inevitable flow disruptions spread through such auto-mata.
jcgrillo 3y ago
Another possibility that's fun to imagine in a world where every car is self-driving and connected to all the other cars is traffic meshing at speed (say, 25mph) through intersections. You wouldn't need traffic lights anymore, because the vehicles would be able to set their spacing and velocity correctly to avoid colliding. Unfortunately, self driving cars can barely figure out how to merge onto a freeway so we may be some decades away still.
seabass-labrax 3y ago
In my country (the UK), the penalties for driving dangerously due to being too slow are usually greater than the penalties for speeding. Being unreasonably slow could make other drivers more likely to overtake and have a head-on collision, or hit other cars when re-merging back onto their side. Single-track country roads are the most problematic, though, as everyone has a different idea of what the safe speed is - and the limit is as high as 60 miles/hour! I wouldn't be against simply reducing the national speed limit for roads without markings to 30, so that at least then people could be reasonably expected to drive at that speed, rather than at an unspecified speed anywhere up to 60.

alexwhb 3y ago

While the methods in this post may not be a super accurate depiction of reality.. I did find it entertaining. Additionally I agree generally with the point the post is making. It is shocking to me that we accept so whole heartedly the risk associated with driving when, comparatively, it is shockingly unsafe relative to other modes of transportation. In the US somewhere around 41,000 people die per year from traffic accidents. If we compare that to train travel (especially in Europe where safety standards are significantly better) it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 32x safer. Additionally we accept the liability of a car shockingly easily. Yes we all should have insurance, but that insurance only goes so far. If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter. There are several other downsides we accept that I won’t get into, but it’s pretty interesting to me that especially US society has accepted these facts so seemingly easily.

kragen 3y ago
i just spent three hours on the bus today and i would much rather have spent an hour in a car instead, though my risk of dying would surely be higher there are a lot of places within 100 km of my house that i'd enjoy visiting but where public transport doesn't go. if i had a car, i could go there easily. if that means shortening my life expectancy by 20 minutes, that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. the risk i'd be imposing on innocent people around me by driving a car is ethically trickier
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  I'd you shorten your life expectancy by 20 min but get 2 hours back today it seems like a fair trade. And that's why public transit in the us is such a mess, if you want people to use it, you have to make it fast and frequent before people need it, so when you do use it, you thin, huh, that's not too bad.
  - kragen 3y ago
    well, i wasn't actually dead on the public transit, although on the bus whose air conditioner was broken it felt like it part of the time

giantg2 3y ago

This is idiotic. The penalty wouldn't apply to the trip if you didn't incur it (die) during the trip. Also, as they noted, there are a bunch of other factors. Some of those factors are equally or more important as the ones they are looking at, such as alcohol impairment (both about 30% of traffic fatalities). The biggest fatality risk factor is not being buckled in. About 45% of all occupant fatalities are people who were not buckled. This will greatly skew the stats if not properly accounted for. Edit: why disagree?

bagels 3y ago
I found the same thing when researching motorcycle fatality rates. Yes, they are dangerous, but something like 50% of fatalities involved a drunk motorcycle rider. I don't recall the stats for not wearing gear.
- giantg2 3y ago
  It really is surprising to dig into the stats around alcohol, drugs, and non-use of existing safety systems. We end up with a lot of discussions on all sort of new laws but a lot of the problem is that the existing laws and tools aren't used. I was not aware of the 50% alcohol involvement in motorcycle fatalities, but it doesn't surprise me. About 35% of all vehicle fatalities involve drunk driving, 50% of all pedestrian deaths involve either the driver or pedestrian being drunk, and 20% of cyclist fatalities invovle drunk cyclists (I assume alcohol is a factor for many other cyclist desths too). Then we have 45% of traffic fatalities that don't wear a seatbelt, about 35% of child fatalities did not use restraints, and 80-90% of child restraints are misused. I'm not sure about motorcycle accidents, but 60% of cyclist fatalities did not use a helmet. The drunk driving and not properly restraining kids are really the biggest issue since it affects others. Things like not wearing a helmet, cycling DUI, and not using a seatbelt are a little more Darwinian in thier punishment.
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    >but 60% of cyclist fatalities did not use a helmet. I wonder what portion of those would have been a fatality even with a helmet. Cycling helmets are flimsy things.

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standardUser 3y ago

> Maybe highway miles are much more dangerous than non-highway miles, and we shouldn’t be on the highway at all. I imagine it's pretty hard to get seriously injured or die when not on the freeway. I've long thought that should be the primary application of self-driving technology. It's ultra-simplified and relatively standardized compared to other types of roads, and it's where the most life and limb can be saved. Not to mention the potential to alleviate traffic, which would save people vastly more time than just driving too fast. Also, will everyone please use you blinker for fuck's sake? If moving your wrist slightly is just too much of a burden for you, then stop driving, you're not cut out to pilot your own anything.

brk 3y ago
>I imagine it's pretty hard to get seriously injured or die when not on the freeway. I don't have data handy, but it seems like an awful lot of fatalities occur in and around intersections (which imply not-a-freeway). Freeways feel like they are safer overall, most of the time you are moving in the same direction as the vehicles immediately surrounding you, which reduces the chances for head-on or side collisions, which seem to be particularly fatal. However, an actual freeway crash also feels like it has a higher probability of being fatal. Proportionate to miles driven they may be less common, but like a plane crash, they are noteworthy when they do happen and make for "better news".
- standardUser 3y ago
  From what I'm reading, collisions are far more common on regulars roads/streets, but injuries and fatalities are much more common on freeways. This is relating to motorists/passengers. Pedestrians and bicyclists are obviously at significant risk whenever they are around cars, and they are almost never around cars on freeways. One exception is motorcycles, which are apparently at less risk on highways than other streets.
- LorenPechtel 3y ago
  Yup. Miles driven actually have little impact on accidents. Rather, it's interactions that matter. Miles of you all going down the same freeway at about the same speed involve almost no interactions. (This is also why airplane fatalities bear little relationship to the flight time--because they're mostly takeoff and landing. Accidents when you're peacefully up at cruise altitude are rare.)

tra3 3y ago

I’ve learned “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” from shooting sports, but I find it applies equally well to most (all?) areas of life. When I started driving, I used to speed to the next stop light, change lanes frequently. I stopped doing this when I got older, partially because I see people that zip around at the same stop lights anyway.

bagels 3y ago
It is also a phrase used in motor racing, hah.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  It makes such a huge difference when you can smoothly move through the corners, smooth keeps your tires in traction and so you actually HAVE grip to push with, if needed. Plus the flow you can get into when hotlapping is so meditative for me lol
whateveracct 3y ago
This is why I always try to pass people who brake for no reason. Some people are constantly on their break - it's just how they drive. It's nice to not have all those brake light signals to constantly react to.

1970-01-01 3y ago

I love a good bullshit analysis. Yes speed kills the average driver (the one with one ovary and one testicle) so you shouldn't do it. In fact, you'll get there sooner by going under the speed limit. Your mileage does not vary.

tdrz 3y ago

I think it remotely applies to working, as a founder, at a startup. You might go real fast for a while, but then you (might) burn out and quit altogether.

bdcravens 3y ago

Never mind death, a collision (even a minor one, where you simply exchange insurance information) or a ticket will kill your "productivity" gained. I used to be the crazy driver (and occasionally that personality comes out to play), but these days I usually just set my cruise to whatever is practical (in large cities, it's not the speed limit, but a bit higher to match others), and let adaptive cruise do most of the work.

bagels 3y ago

If you die, this doesn't increase trip length. I'm not sure I'd care how long it took if I were dead even if it did. When the trip is completed successfully, you've arrived sooner and the habit of speeding will only then affect risk on future trips, there is no post facto cost (ignoring automated speed traps).

m1n1 3y ago

Driving aggressively occasionally causes others to slam on the brakes to avoid accidents, which creates standing waves also known as traffic jams. So speeding at least slows everyone else down.

pierat 3y ago

Not driving at all is infite speed to your destination?

LorenPechtel 3y ago

And to throw out another factor that messes up this analysis: Most accidents involve the interaction of two cars. The faster vehicles get to their destination the fewer vehicles are on the road at any one time and thus the fewer interactions there will be. I have no numbers on how big an effect this would be.

jdboyd 3y ago

I found this very entertaining. However he also forgot to include anticipated delays from speeding tickets. I'm sure there are other things that should have been factored in as well, such as sometimes increased waits at lights because you arrived earlier at it, so 25 or 65 would make no difference in how long it takes to get to the ither side of the light.

tonyedgecombe 3y ago
The big one is stress from the hustle and bustle in the outside lane. I tend to drive at 65mph on our motorways which is 5mph less than the limit. Fast enough to not get stuck between the trucks but you don't spend the whole journey trying to squeeze past people who are doing the same as you.

JackSlateur 3y ago

It is funny how much people correlate speed with death rate Better correlate death rate with Time spent on the road

iJohnDoe 3y ago

FWIW - just estimates. I had a 30 mile commute. If I drove 65-75 I could make in about 25 minutes. One night I was on-call and drove really fast in the middle of the night and it took about 18-20 minutes. I realized it was never worth it to shave off a handful minutes and drive way too fast to any destination. Basic math. When you get to a certain speed, you’re shaving off seconds/minutes. 65mph is certainly better than 35mph. 90mph isn’t really better than 65-75.

tim333 3y ago

Including changes to life expectancy can be an argument for cycling if you are middle aged. What it takes in terms of accidents and pedal time it gives back in less heart attacks.