One thing to keep in mind in discussions like this one is that there are many different driving environments, including some that you may not be thinking about because they’re not part of your everyday experience; and what makes sense for some doesn’t necessarily make sense for all.
I still remember a thread from years ago where someone asked what was the point of high-beam headlights on cars. It turned out that this person had never had occasion to drive in unlit rural areas.
So, while some people in discussions like this may be imagining driving on a crowded big-city expressway, others may be imagining driving on a long, flat stretch of lonely highway, or along a winding mountain road, or through a residential neighborhood, or…
For selfish reasons I’d want the limit to be at most 90 anywhere. Because in the ideal world I’d go 82 at the most for mileage purposes. If the limit were 90 and there were light traffic, I’d still go at maximum 85. In light traffic this should give people time to get around me. But in the real world, people would be going 100 mph in the right lane, speed matching the people in the left lane, and not move over until they’ve almost hit me, even with no other cars on the road other than us three.
If the limit were 100 mph, people would be in the right lane going 105 or 110 to my 85 and almost crash into me even in very light traffic.
I am Italian and have lived in Italy when I was younger, then UK (London), and since 2012 I live in Finland. How the authorities handle enforcing speed limits varies dramatically lol… In Italy, especially in the south, most people don’t really respect speed limits in most cases and they just drive like crazy, unless they spot police in the area.
In the UK, just the week before moving to Finland, I received a letter about an “intention of prosecution” because I drove 37 mph on a road where the limit was 30 mph. I was scared and luckily I was able to convert prosecution with a points detraction from my driving license, which in the end didn’t really have any particular effect because when I converted my UK license to a Finnish one the points were reset lol.
In Finland they are also quite strict, and it can get pretty serious if you drive well above the limit. Also, fines here are proportional to your income, so if you earn a lot of money you can expect to pay ridiculous fines (when they only give you a fine).
I rented a car in Umbria, Italy, a few weeks ago. And my guests told me, “don’t speed, there are cameras everywhere.”
But by and large, the posted limit was faster than i wanted to drive on unfamiliar winding mountain roads. Fortunately, traffic was very light, so in the rare circumstance when a car was stuck behind me, i was able to pull over and let them pass me.
Taking your judgment as sound, that suggests that many speed limits in the USA are set for a different and slower standard than the Italians use.
Whether that slower standard is in the name of safety, revenue enhancement, or is simply an acknowledgement that Americans drive more lawlessly than Italians (!) I cannot say.
Part of it was "I’m not familiar with that road, and don’t know what happens after that turn. My guess is I’d drive the same road a bit faster my 5th time. On the other hand, very few drivers overtook me, so perhaps my speed wasn’t so different from par.
Also, i was avoiding toll roads. So i took a lot of twisty back roads, and not the straight, fast Intercity roads.
And the speed limit dropped when the roads entered towns, and then i did slow down due to the speed limit, and due to the risk of pedestrians in the road.
Oh how I wished I had seen this right after you posted it when I was passing by your (relative) way (thru PGH) with my roadster, on the way home from driving twistys
Read car specs in MT or R&T or C&D or some new car. Of course, that’s a new car, with good brakes & good tires & a professional driver who was briefed & has planned for that emergency stop.
Someone driving a beater with bad brakes doing at least three of the following simultaneously - grooming (hair, makeup, shaving, plucking, picking), lighting a cig / dropping ashes, changing the radio or climate controls, eating/drinking, playing with the phone, pressing the save button on the dash cam , looking in the rearview mirror at the passenger in the back seat, etc. will take longer to realize there’s a situation & apply those brakes to stop.
Why do you think they have passing zones on two lane country roads? Where I’m used to driving they are relatively short, maybe a quarter of a mile long where I can safely (if no oncoming vehicles) & legally pass you but I can’t do that at a 2 mph differential.
I would assume they have passing zones to make it safe for people to overtake, when other parts of the road make it unsafe. Why do you think they have them?
A 2mph differential doesn’t sound like a pressing need to overtake at all.
As to passing zones, the common case I encounter is one slowpoke with 4 or 5 cars nearly bumper to bumper behind them. I arrive at the back of the pack and face a decision: Be #6 indefinitely, or pass the group as a group since there’s no space to squeeze in between any of them.
The least bad maneuver IMO is to back off your following distance a bit and be co-speed with the trailer when approaching a passing opportunity then hammer it such that you pass the last car at the very beginning of the passing zone already doing 20mph over the pack’s speed and continuously accelerating until passing the pokey leader. Then reenter the proper traffic lane and resume a legitimate speed.
Limited only by the road’s difficulty versus your car’s ability to accelerate, corner, and brake.
Since you went to the helpful effort to consult wiki to generate that tidbit of information, it’s a shame you didn’t paste in some of the links you already had so the rest of us could more easily learn what you did.
A quick search turns up this article
which says the rate in 2018 in Italy was 8.3 fatalities per billion km of travel.
It also says the rate for the USA in 2019 was 1.10 per 100 million miles.
Those two years are close enough I think we can ignore that difference.
Converting the US number to the same units as the Italian number say that’s 1.10 * 10 * 1.609 = 17.69 per billion km.
Dividing 17.69 by 8.3 we get 2.13. So the US fatality rate is a bit over double the Italian rate.
Your “order of magnitude” conclusion clearly is including other factors or starts from very different baseline.
I would hope you have the statistical sophistication to realize that comparing raw numbers of people killed is simply useless. If Italy’s population magically doubled, so would their fatalities. Would that make Italian drivers any less safe in so doing? Of course not.
Both triumph and tragedy in the world scale by the headcount.
If you’re doing 52 in a 55 I can’t safely pass you within the legal passing zone if I only do 55. Why do you get to set the speed for everyone else on the road?
That’s a weird way to frame it. Nobody is obliged to drive at exactly the speed limit. Not every stretch of every road is even safe to use at the full limit. Not every stretch of every road is safe for overtaking.
So sometimes you won’t be able to drive at the speed you want to drive at. It’s an excellent opportunity to develop patience.
It’s called a speed limit, not a speed entitlement.
Full size pickups are great for towing & hauling; their downsides are fuel economy, getting in & out of them, especially for someone short, & their cornering ability because they are long, high, wide, & heavy. A sporty two-seater isn’t good for hauling the family or even getting groceries for the family but it can eat twisty roads all day long. Some people are more skilled drivers than others. Some people need to get somewhere & some people want to drive their car in a sportier fashion while others are out for the proverbial Sunday drive.
I know that every stretch of road isn’t safe to pass on that’s why I specifically called out legal passing zones in my post & I wasn’t the only one in this thread to state that one needs to exceed the speed limit to pass in a passing zone on a two-lane road.
Let me ask you, if you’re driving on a country road & there are no cars in front of you & a line of cars behind you, do you speed up to the speed limit, pull over when safe & available to let them pass or do you rub your hands together & gleefully state, “This is my day to teach everyone…patience”?
I drive at the speed I feel is safe for the road conditions and otherwise seems comfortable and desirable, which is some number less than or equal to the speed limit.
Most of the passing zones I can think of are stretches of dual carriageways in hilly areas, designed to allow traffic to sort itself out between slower and faster moving vehicles. In practice, I often end up slowing down and keeping left in these zones, as they typically start on an upward incline and I have a small car with a small engine.
Traffic generally gets to overtake me when it it is safe and appropriate to do so, without any explicit action on my part.
Drivers that want to overtake when I’m driving at say 2mph below the speed limit are usually not desiring to go only 2mph faster; they typically want to go a lot faster. I would rather have such drivers ahead of me than tailgating me, but sometimes there is simply nothing I can do to accommodate their desire to drive at speeds above the limit.
I understand the logic of what you’re saying about executing an overtake more quickly, but for the roads here, you’d be describing something that is a net negative.
By which I mean if it were permitted to break the speed limit to overtake someone who (according to the calibration of your own speedometer) is driving fractionally below the limit, that would, I feel, grant license to people to overtake more, and in places where it is less safe than at present, and some of those attempts would result in things like head on collision with vehicles that were unseen at the start of the manoeuvre.
Allowing speeding when overtaking is essentially:
‘You must stay at or below the speed limit, except when you are performing a manoeuvre that is already inherently more risky’
There are two elements to “risk”: likelihood of occurrence of [whatever] and severity of consequences should [whatever] occur.
In the case of passing, and especially when passing involves entering the unoccupied lanes used for the opposite direction of travel, doing it with greater acceleration to greater speeds both decreases the likelihood of occurrence of a conflict that may lead to an accident while also increasing the severity of those accidents that still occur. Without more statistics we can’t say which factor predominates.
We can say that personal preference as to risk assessment may focus on either the likelihood or the severity while ignoring the other in ways that are not fully logical nor rational.