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Comment by Mr_N | Hacker News Reader

This does two things that I don't agree with though. One, assumes that people can accurately judge -anything- appropriately about what is safe in their surroundings. I'll trust someone so far as to not be too afraid to go outside lest someone decide to run me over with a crop thresher, but I've seen enough "No officer I'm not too drunk to drive" (with car wedged in a tree) to trust that judgement carte-blanche.

Secondly, it seems to ignore two things, first, you say that with limits, people game the system. I don't disagree. But without limits, I expect the exact same gaming, "I feel comfortable driving at 100mph on this road", but far more unbounded. Combined with some pretty reasonable evidence towards higher speeds increasing the risk of accidents (http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/97.835.PDF), one can see the outcome this would lead to.

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One, assumes that people can accurately judge -anything- appropriately about what is safe in their surroundings.

I didn't assume that; I only assumed that the people actually on the spot can judge what is safe better than legislators and bureaucrats who aren't even there, and who have plenty of incentives to distort the judgment anyway.

you say that with limits, people game the system

When I talked about gaming, I wasn't talking about people trying to avoid being caught speeding. I was talking about legislators and bureaucrats distorting the data about risk to justify lower speed limits and higher fines, when the real reason for them is just that they need a revenue source.

As far as drivers themselves taking more risk in the absence of speeding laws, evidently you missed the part of my post where I said that people should suffer appropriate punishment if they cause actual harm. That gives people a strong incentive to avoid causing actual harm, i.e., to get better at assessing the risks of the things they do, including driving.

To the extent that we actually allow this incentive to operate in our society, I think it works reasonably well, certainly better than trusting governments to get things like this right. shpxnvz provided some evidence for that. Another piece of evidence is the fact that states with no-fault auto insurance have higher accident rates, indicating that uncoupling people's decisions from unpleasant consequences, even partially, causes them to make worse decisions.

Is it also possible that states with no-fault insurance have people more willing to report accidents?

I wouldn't think so; in fact, if anything, I would expect the opposite. If there is an accident in a state with ordinary (i.e., not no-fault) insurance, one party (the one not at fault) is always going to have an incentive to report it. If there is an accident in a no-fault state, it's possible that neither party will want to report it (because it might cause both of their premiums to go up).

I think that your interpretation of the report is incorrect. What that report shows is that fatal accidents are more likely on roads that have higher speed limits, which is quite a different thing from saying higher speeds caused the accidents.

And, in fact, there is evidence that people do in fact judge safe speeds appropriately. Look at report FHWA-RD-92-084 [1], which was sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration and concludes that raising speed limits did not have a significant effect on speeds of motorists. Lowering the speed also did not have a significant effect on speeds, with the result that people simply ignored the speed limit and drove what they thought was appropriate in both cases.

There was also evidence that lowering the speed limit did not, in fact, decrease accidents.

1. http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel/index.html

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