I asked my driving instructor about this today, and he said it has a lot to do with the width of the road (or more to the point, the distance from objects at the side of the road). This might another factor which causes you to drive faster on motorways, Pushkin.
I tried driving with my eyes off the speedometer, and even as a novice there is already a sensation of ‘going too fast’ (i.e., over 30, which is usually the limit where I’m learning). But I have to focus on it, and shouldn’t be wasting attention on it at this stage.
There are three levels at work here. I’ll list them in order of increasing significance.
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The basic physics. Velocity is purely relative, and an observer in a closed system moving with uniform translational motion has absolutely no way to determine that she is doing so. What is measurable is acceleration. When you accelerate your car, suddenly you have net forces - that’s what you actually feel.
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Visual cues. Obviously a car is not a closed system, you can look out the windshield. We learn how to judge our speed by watching how fast we go past things outside of us. This means that factors like the size and shape of the road, traffic, and the density of visual landmarks (in a city vs. on a desert road) are very important.
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Tactile cues from the vehicle itself. This is by far the most significant factor. We learn from the visual cues what our car/truck/whatever feels like at different speeds, and so we can “feel” how fast we’re going.
We also learn to cross check the sensations from each of these with the speedometer to provide a common speed scale for all of us.