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Comment by alephxyz | Hacker News Reader

But odds of rollover and braking distance are proportional to your absolute speed. So is crash severity when you're impacting a tree, animal or pedestrian.

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The problem is that there are more than two drivers involved:

There is you, and the slow driver blocking traffic in the passing lane next to you.

Then there are the 8 cars behind you, and at least one of those drivers is making everyone unsafe out of frustration.

You can't do anything to change that driver's behavior. The situation persists until the system is altered.

Unfortunately, unless the frustrated driver is allowed to drive unimpeded at 100mph+, they will continue to be unsafe and make others unsafe. If there is enough traffic for you to be the slow car on the road, then that unsafe driver will be causing safety problems for all of you. Bottling them up in a line of cars going the same speed may be the safest course of action you can take for everyone.

That's very often not the case. Usually they just want to go 80 or 90, but are stuck going 63 because 2 drivers are aggressively passive.

Bottling up traffic is not safer! Every driver in a line who has to slam on their brakes, for whatever reason, subtracts the amount of available reaction time left to the driver behind them.

Traffic engineers the world over would disagree that decreasing space between cars makes anyone safer.

What makes more sense is leaning on the raison d'etre of multi-lane highways: slower traffic keep right. Designed systems work best when used as designed.

Typically you're not at high speeds when those risks are there. And when those risks are there on high-speed highways, they're typically due to poor road design (sightlines, etc.) and not the instincts of otherwise good drivers.

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