In an uncertain world, people's lives are always endangered on some probabilistic level - knowledge isn't absolute. That said: The most dangerous times, drivi

In an uncertain world, people's lives are always endangered on some probabilistic level - knowledge isn't absolute. That said: The most dangerous times, driving, tend to be when you don't have enough time - not necessarily when you're close to someone but in terms of the amount of time you'd have to make an observation, make a meaningful decision, and react to unexpected developments - this is something like a function of the number of decisions that must be taken for a given distance in a given environment modified by the speed you're doing... (I'll just call that your time horizon.) If you're going faster than the vehicles around you, then you tend to have a lot of small time horizons where the decisions you have to take are potentially quite dense (the other guy does something requiring your reaction, you don't have a lot of space - decisions/space go through the roof, speed remains high.) Take here for instance: http://youtu.be/hMjKiP6Xup8 http://youtu.be/hMjKiP6Xup8 If that guy had rolled, they'd have been too close. Or here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nghau2LfjmE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nghau2LfjmE Hear the sound of their engine where they've shifted down while/after braking? Or here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx1zNTQpzmo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx1zNTQpzmo Visibility's awful. Their horizon's what? A few seconds? One of the people is telling the other guy that they're going too fast and to ease off. Driving fast, of itself, isn't particularly dangerous as long as you have good sight lines - driving at a different speed to traffic around you on the other hand is. I mean we've, I assume, all driven. We know that people do stupid things and you have to drive in a manner to account for that. I think their actions pretty much unquestionably increased their risk compared to their not driving above the speed of surrounding traffic. Now, whether that makes them more dangerous than your average driver is highly debatable. They seemed to know what they were doing, which lots of people don't really when you start thinking of how far out to potential hazards they start taking action and use that to infer how often they're taking observations or predicting. In other words, how bunched up their OODA loop is compared to the speed they're doing. Lots of people drive in a very rushed fashion rather than driving fast but smoothly. -shrug- Personally I think that driving in the rain stuff was very dangerous. But, if someone has to do something irresponsible, I'd rather it be people like them than some idiot kid who's just figured out the accelerator goes all the way down :p