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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Drivers are one of the top killers of young people and a very significant cause of lost years of life, and speed is a factor in IIRC 73% of collisions. People do not generally drive at a safe speed in the US, rather they drive at a speed that seems safe because they've done it a bunch of times - the same kind of normalization of deviance as launching your space shuttle because it never burned through both O-rings the last 20 times.

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But would that change if the speed limits were removed? I doubt it.

Maybe speed limits aren't achieving much at the moment, but it must be possible to start enforcing them and gradually change that culture - after all, drunk driving used to be just as routine as speeding is now.

What does “speed was a factor in 73% of collisions” mean?

Most collisions are caused by a confluence of multiple factors, and reducing them to a single "cause" is misleading.

That doesn’t answer my question.

To be more direct, I’m suspicious that this is just a misleading / question begging way of saying “in 73% of accidents, someone was speeding.” Which doesn’t really tell me anything unless I have already accepted the premise that speeding is usually a problem.

Ah I see. It means investigators assessed speed as being a causal factor. But they can and do consider multiple things to be causal factors. I don't remember more precise details.

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