Who has the most mph over speeding in a prius?

I was not cited, but pulled out to pass a combine, and discovered it was a convoy of 5 combines. I was doing 95 MPH when I pulled back in my lane.

 

Uhm, wow. If driving 5 mph over causes such a significant change in fatalities, then either your speed limits need to be udpated or your roads re-designed. That's an engineering issue, not a driver issue.

But color me skeptical that the emotional appeal is backed up by statistics.

 

All true, but mine was a four lane divided highway, straight for a distance farther than I could see. It was a moneymaker, not a safety issue.

 

get a good radar detector, Uniden R3 has saved me several times

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

It is also an issue of geography and budget. The local tax base just doesn't support a full rebuild, especially when so much of the local land is completely tax exempt.

The speed limits are already lower than the straight flat zones that many travelers are coming from, but many refuse to slow down sufficiently to compensate, so claims that it isn't a driver issue are absolute BS.

 

Where does this privileged, self-entitlement attitude come from? Why do so many people believe themselves to be exempt from safety rules and practices?

More people are killed with cars than with guns, and the serious injury gap is more than an order of magnitude wider, yet so many drivers don't give a rip.

When speeding becomes a matter of how much 'allowance' the local cops give, then VIP privilege and White Privilege are unavoidable. No wonder DWB (Driving While Black) has become such an issue for those who lack White Privilege.

My rural home area has held the line on speed allowance for decades, but many other areas have simply given up and allowed speeds to float much higher, because enforcement is so impractical when tens of thousands of people disobey simultaneously. They have 'herd protection' coverage because the cops can do nothing but throw up their hands and let it go. But many don't realize this mass-disobedience effect, and expect the same allowance to be universal across the the country. Sorry, it isn't and never has been.

When one drives in other areas without that protection of being inside a big herd, one shouldn't get upset when nabbed because the local practice is not the same as the laissez-faire practice on one's home turf.

 

most accidents are caused by distracted people not speeding, I'm sure using your cell phone, eating, applying makeup, playing with the radio, or trying to make that yellow light has a lot more impact on the amount of accidents than anything

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Bull_!

Total distracted-driver-related traffic deaths, including those who are also speeding, are in the 16-35% range, depending on who is counting.

And by counting first cause only, the rationalizers and excusers are ignoring the aggravating factors that regularly turn likely non-fatal crashes into fatal ones.

 

Lots of factors can cause accidents, higher speeds increase the odds of a near-miss becoming a collision, involving more vehicles and increasing the severity of injury.

 

of course if in a wreck higher speeds would result in higher deaths, you too are rationalizing a mute point, it's like saying motorcyclist are to blame because of higher deaths riding bikes when most of those accidents are due to automobile idiots not paying attention or blaming guns for gun related deaths..... you drive safe and I'll continue to speed on the "highways" of this great nation...... if I'm speeding and some person swerves in my lane on their phone I'll take the blame

 

The big misconception is that speeding 5 or 10 mph is dangerous. In most cases it's speed differential that's dangerous not speeding.
For instance, half the people on a highway doing 85 and half the people doing 45 is a very dangerous situation. Everyone doing 85 and everyone doing 45 are not a dangerous situations. It's also more dangerous to go 5 mph under the speed limit than it is to go 5 mph over the speed limit. The safest speed to drive is NOT THE SPEED LIMIT. Driving WITH THE FLOW/SPEED of traffic is always the safest speed.

 

What most folks pushing this argument ignore, is that the deadliest speed differentials are vs on-coming (head-on) traffic, vs cross traffic moving at a right angle to themselves, and vs stationary objects attached to the ground. Compared to these, the speed differential vs co-moving traffic is a much less deadly problem.

That is merely a self-serving, blame-shifting rationalization, unconnected to reality.

I'm reminded of such claims every time I hear reports of 10, 20, even 50+ car pileups.

Such claims also remind me of the time (a quarter century ago) that Snoqualmie Pass / I-90 was warming up from an extreme winter cold wave. Typically it gets very slippery at the top, but that time I breezed along quickly on clear bare asphalt at the top, above average (slow) traffic speed. But as we descended below 1500 feet it became quite icy and I slowed considerably. Unfortunately, other traffic was treating it as typical winter conditions and speeding up at lower altitude, mindless of the deteriorating conditions, and I was soon one of the slowest cars on the road. Next morning, news reported over 100 separate crashes (mostly onesy-twosy incidents) in that section of I-90 alone.

Nowadays, WSDOT simply closes the pass outright for cleanup after just a few spinouts and collisions, usually from people going too fast for their tires and conditions 'to keep with the (too-fast) flow'. This happened again this Friday afternoon sometime after I went through. This now typically happens dozens of times each winter, sometimes as much as three times in a single day of adverse conditions. Road improvements have greatly reduced the closures for avalanche control and cleanup, but closures for 'multiple spinouts and collisions' are fully making up the difference, as people refuse to go slower.

 

WRONG statistics and countless studies have proven that driving slower than the speed limit is the most dangerous thing.
Slow drivers in the front cause frustration, bad driving, and multi car pileups.
http://www.donerdesigns.org/_/rsrc/1376695568003/other-causes/variance%20chart.bmp?height=292&width=446

 

Do you even recall, that the letter of the law is that a speed limit is the maximum speed you're supposed to be going, in good condtions?

You're not alone, sadly.

 

WRONG yourself!

That Solomon/Cirrilo graph is just a generic illustration of a concept, not an expression of actual real-world data. And it is very old, pre-dating the seat belt era.

And it isn't even a representation of overall traffic deaths vs speed (or differences) at all, but only of collision rates in a narrow set of circumstances that exclude a large majority of our traffic fatalities. It covers only multi-vehicle contacts of vehicles going the same direction. I.e. the three deadliest scenarios in the first sentence of my previous reply -- head-ons, cross traffic, and single vehicles into grounded objects -- are intentionally excluded. So are all pedestrians deaths.

Wikipedia: Solomon curve - Wikipedia
"The Solomon curve is a graphical representation of the collision rate of automobiles as a function of their speed compared to the average vehicle speed on the same road. The curve was based on research conducted by David Solomon in the late 1950s and published in 1964.[1] Subsequent research suggests significant biases in the Solomon study, which may cast doubt on its findings.[2]"

Please continue with more references ...

The large multi-car pileups I hear about are mostly from tailgaters speeding lemming-like into poor visibility or poor traction situations. People 'going with the flow' too fast for conditions, and not leaving adequate following distances, are hitting previously crashed vehicles.

 

In the couple places I've driven in Europe (haven't driven in Germany), speed differentials were much larger than in the U.S. Trucks were limited to one speed limit and actually obeying it (electronically recorded and readily available to law enforcement during traffic stops), while cars could legally go 40 km/hr faster, and many were doing faster than that. But a not insignificant number of cars were staying back with the trucks, or going at inbetween speeds.

By the chart you posted, those European trucks and slower cars in the right lanes should have been having a 1000X greater crash risk than if everyone went at the same speed. But they very clearly were not.

Unless there is something unique about America that doesn't apply to those European hiways, the problem isn't speed differential, but driving styles, attitudes, lack of lane and other discipline, and combat driving culture.

 

i speed every morning on be beltway and have gotten lucky with police. i know exactly where they hide and slow down till they’re out of my view

 

That reminds me of a long ago instructor at college. Part of one of his war stories (unrelated to the class topic) was of using this method. It normally worked fine, until the regular cop on that route went on vacation. The substitute worked a different schedule with different hiding places. Busted, for a very serious overage.

 

I haven't gotten a ticket in my Prius, nor do I want to get one. I got one in my Scion going 92 down from Victorville. I hate tickets, traffic school, interactions with law enforcement in general. Its been 10 years since my last ticket and I hope its my last ticket period!

 

My only true speeding stop was while pedaling a bicycle, 5 mph over the (non-conforming, and subsequently removed) signage. On a level route, not downhill.

Other stops include license plate partially obscured by bicycle rack (unofficial reason, but clear from ensuing discussion: marijuana state plate transiting a non-marijuana state), and headlight out -- at noon! (unofficially, tribal police advertising their lower cost tribal gas station).