Have you considered not speeding? It also helps avoid the fines.
Instead I kindly ask you to elaborate on just one situation, where exceeding the speed limit avoids danger.
Edited to add : To be clear: Speeding up upon overtaking doesn't count. If you need to do that you should not have overtaken in the first place, since it was obviously dangerous.
[Of course, you'd never get a ticket in this situation, and I think there are even legal provisions regarding respecting the "flow of traffic" in some US states.]
This is exactly how I got my first ticket. I was moving with the flow of traffic, which was going about 15mph over the 55mph speed limit on a busy four lane divided highway. Highway Patrol flew up out of nowhere, angrily berated me for five minutes, and gave me a speeding ticket.
Now I just go the speed limit. People cuss me out and flip me off, but that's preferable to paying several hundred dollars. (And for me, it turns out not to really be worth it anyway. Most places I go speeding saves me < 5 minutes, and I get much better gas mileage, up to 48mpg, accelerating slowly and not driving faster than 65mph.)
Can you, by the way, cite any state laws explicitly saying it is OK to exceed the posted speed limit if doing so is required to move with the flow of traffic? I have heard this claim a lot but I have never been able to find real proof of it. There are sometimes "flow of traffic" laws applicable if you're driving too far below the posted speed limit, which is assumed (wrongly) to be the maximum "normal and reasonable" speed of normal traffic, and there are laws against driving slowly in the left lanes, and sometimes laws that allow you to speed while passing on a two-lane road, but I have never seen one that was applicable to someone driving at or above the speed limit and would have allowed them to legally speed.
With this in mind, think about scenarios where the average speed is above the legal limit: highways, rural roads with no known speed cams, etc. Now imagine heavy traffic and only one participant slowing down to the legal limit.
Here's one US citizen's experience driving on highways in Italy, where I live, describing what safe driving looks like here: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-drive-above-the-speed-li...
No matter how fast a truck is driving, I don't want to be anywhere near it while driving my motorcycle. Those tires randomly explode (I've seen it happen multiple times) and when a piece hits you, you're dead. I pass them ASAP, no matter how fast I have to go to do it.
I have only ever seen Americans and Canadians talking about the necessity to speed to keep up with the flow of traffic (and they have a higher rate of fatal RTAs per 100,000 than most Western European countries – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... – Canada is close to Italy, a country that is well known in Western Europe for terrifying traffic, while America is closer to South American countries)
While driving too slow is as dangerous as driving too fast, it's not as dangerous as the Solomon curve suggests, according to the article you linked:
> Reporting on these results in 1971, academics West and Dunn confirmed the findings of Solomon and Cirillo,[11] but found that crashes involving turning vehicles accounted for 44 percent of all crashes observed in the study and that excluding these crashes from the analysis greatly attenuated the factors that created the U-shape of the Solomon curve.
The topic of this conversation also seems to oddly mirror the course of the story from the original article. Minor acts of breaking a just law, justified on an individual basis, lead to a society in which regularly breaking that law is accepted – and indeed enforced – by the state.
That is probably why people are downvoting your parent comment.
For the record I don't have the ability or the desire to have the ability to downvote.
Is it? The death toll is average to low compared to the rest of Europe: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/pdf/gis/mapcare_fa...
And it's low compared to the rest of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
The main reason for how people in the West of Europe seem to perceive Italian driving has traditionally been Rome: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/31986...
My personal experience travelling in both Sicily and Rome was that people don't pay attention to lanes and don't care about traffic lights at all, and they're not afraid to drive quickly around tight corners and down narrow streets – this is not unique and is similar to how some areas of the UK drive, for example rural Essex and rural Wales have a lot of this.
Italy may have an unfair reputation as being a dangerous place to drive, but it does have that reputation in Western European countries.