The typical makeup of a three-lane section of German Autobahn is:
- Right: trucks, very slow vehicles - Middle: people who go at reasonable speeds (~130 to 160 km/h depending on the terrain) - Left: people who disregard the physics of air resistance and blast without limits
This is the ideal, but not what you will encounter on the road. Whenever a truck overtakes another you have to beeak down or use the leftmost lane and make sure the cars that approach from behind with a potential delta of 100+ km/h don't crush you to death. Generally this leads to many stressful and dangerous situations.
Speed limits make sense because they make driving safer by deceeasing the possible speed delta between vehicles who share a road.
Left: some guy in a X5 driving steady 150km/h, not reacting to getting flashed and immediately accelerating if you try to pass on the right.
Somehow, as soon as you get out of Germany this stops happening. In France and Benelux you get to comfortably cruise at 250km/h and everyone just moves out of the way.
German autobahns are not exhausting because of the lack of speed limits, they're exhausting because of the Germans.
No?
> Where in France are you allowed to go 250km/h?
Nowhere, but like most EU countries there is nothing stopping you from going 250km/h. It's extremely unlikely that you'll encounter cops who'd bother to chase you, especially while using Waze and the likes.
Besides, how often do you see German registered cars driving the speed limit in France? Foreign registered cars are pretty much always speeding.
And "design speed" may be an interesting or useful thing to think about for roads that are far away from houses or business, like highways. But if you're near those things then it suddenly matters a lot less whether the speed is safe for the driver, and a lot more whether it's safe for the other important road users: pedestrians and bicyclists/other micro-mobility users. In those cases, speed limits absolutely make sense. And bizarrely, at least in the bay area, it seems like those are areas where speed enforcement (and other traffic enforcement) are practically non-existent.
So I have to disagree. I know you're talking about highways, but even there I'd rather have something closer to an objective standard being enforced, rather than the simple will of the police.
I (old white male) have not yet had problems. But certainly I know white people who have - best-guess because they were young, or female, or "looked too rich or too poor" for the area in which they were driving. And from second-hand accounts, a fair number of police officers have "law unto themselves" pet theories about what sorts of people they should target for tough enforcement, or let off with a warning.
You will notice that this wasn't solved by setting up enforcement cameras on every street that ticket all jaywalkers equally.
On the other hand, traffic rules protect public safety. Even and automated enforcement (provided that there's no entrapment for revenue, something that is dangerous and does happen with, e.g. red light cameras) causes people to have safer driving habits. After all, driving is not a right, it's a privilege to operate heavy, dangerous machinery in public. Drivers should be held to a high standard of safety.
The stats show that society is the safest it's ever been.
At some point we are going to realize that allowing more and more surveillance and automated enforcement into our lives in the interest of public safety is really giving diminishing returns on actual safety, but tons of returns on authoritarianism.
Yes, I'm aware that car crashes are still one of the leading causes of death, and therefore one of the least safe activities you can do.
Personally I think the solution is better public transit and such. Fewer cars on the road means fewer low skilled or wildly reckless drivers too.
somebody has to adjust. speed fans usually are not the ones to compromise, so everybody drives around 100.
people get used to 100, some groups starts pushing for 110, and this keeps up based on safety feeling of speed lovers.