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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

How badly do you want it? There are 30,000 deaths per year from cars in the USA, and many many more injuries. It's not clear what the relationship between that number and the speed/size of cars is, but I'd be willing to bet we could cut that number in half by reducing cars to a max speed of 40mph. Is your desire to drive fast worth 15,000 lives every year? Over your lifetime that could be a million lives saved.

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European here. My desire to be able to get to places is definitely strong enough to accept the risks inherent in it.

Slithering around at 40 mph means almost doubling many trip lengths. That's a lot of lifetimes unnecessarily spent on roads.

Doing 130kph or even 150 on a motorway is fine. Those are safe roads. Dropping urban speed limits to 25kph makes sense.

It might make short trips a few minutes longer, but long trips shorter.

Sorry but that requires a big citations needed flag. And don't say "because 40 mph is half of 80 mph" because I submit you aren't travelling for 80mph long enough throughout the trip to justify it unless you go across statelines everyday.

My desire to drive fast (my sweet spot is 78mph on the highway) is based solely on how far I have to drive when I do drive. I travel off of the farm less than once a week. But when I do leave the farm I can easily put 150 miles on the truck getting everything done that needs doing. And the bulk of that is on the freeway, once I get to it.

Or travelling to see my sick mother once a month (1200+ mile round trip) or my daughter as often as possible (1600+ mile round trip). Add to that I am on the large side of the equation at over 6'3" tall and near 300 pounds, and getting my v8 powered truck (20+ mpg) away from me will be a challenge.

Thankfully we're trending downward, even though urban sprawl continues leading more people to drive {fast} on the interstate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

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