Comment Re:You learn through mistakes (Score 1) 727
Having just driven Toronto-San Francisco and back, almost the entire time at speed limit or speed limit +5, I must say that, having encountered limits from 45-75 mph on the highway, people were exceeding all of them by the same margins. The biggest danger I regularly faced on those roads were people who thought it was somehow either okay or safe to tailgate someone going highway speeds, just because they did not want to go 100 (kph) in a 70 (kph) zone. Luckily, I never had an animal walk in front of me while tailgated, but that was amazing, given the number of animals that I had to dodge on that trip (and the racoon and the ssquirrel that I was too slow on).
Speed limits are hardly uiversally too slow--they are a speed which everyone should be able to drive safely, not just young, cocky, caffeinated jerks in late model-year cars. While some of the speed limits I encountered (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and mmuch of Ontario come to mind), there were some that were also set much too high (any rural highway in Manitoba comes to mind--an the speed limits are not even particularly high, the roads are just dangerously laid out).
Having had a fundamental realization that 1. traffic tickets are expensive and 2. I really didn't want to get in another accident (not related to speeding, but going slower would have helped), I keep to the speed limit, and I will say that neither my schedule nor my sanity suffer from it. I mean, how often is it deadly important that one gets home 2-3 minutes earlier on a 40-minute commute? Even cross-country, I might have saved a day in eleven, which I could easily have mad up by choosing a more direct route. The savings most people make are chump-change compared to the additional risk, and a device like this (if it can actaully change based upon the local speed limit) is a good start in reigning in notoriously dangerous teen drivers (I know I used to regularly do 80-85 in a 65 zone travelling to and from my undergraduate university, and it had nothing to do with whether my parents trusted me, as I was in all other ways a model youth.
Speed limits are hardly uiversally too slow--they are a speed which everyone should be able to drive safely, not just young, cocky, caffeinated jerks in late model-year cars. While some of the speed limits I encountered (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and mmuch of Ontario come to mind), there were some that were also set much too high (any rural highway in Manitoba comes to mind--an the speed limits are not even particularly high, the roads are just dangerously laid out).
Having had a fundamental realization that 1. traffic tickets are expensive and 2. I really didn't want to get in another accident (not related to speeding, but going slower would have helped), I keep to the speed limit, and I will say that neither my schedule nor my sanity suffer from it. I mean, how often is it deadly important that one gets home 2-3 minutes earlier on a 40-minute commute? Even cross-country, I might have saved a day in eleven, which I could easily have mad up by choosing a more direct route. The savings most people make are chump-change compared to the additional risk, and a device like this (if it can actaully change based upon the local speed limit) is a good start in reigning in notoriously dangerous teen drivers (I know I used to regularly do 80-85 in a 65 zone travelling to and from my undergraduate university, and it had nothing to do with whether my parents trusted me, as I was in all other ways a model youth.
