Your comment got me curious about Smeed's law, the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeeds_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Your comment got me curious about Smeed's law, the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeeds_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeeds_law). Smeed himself took his law as expressing a truth about group psychology: people would take advantage of improvements in automobiles or infrastructure to drive ever more recklessly in the interests of speed until deaths rose to a socially unacceptable level, at which point safety would become more important and recklessness less tolerated.