Indeed - this is the 70mph is slower than 50mph thing I mention.
If not, then you already recognize the probability is less than 100%, so that has to be baked into your statement.
The only comments saying that are...yours. If your argument is so lacking that you need to argue in bad faith, perhaps it is best to not bother at all.
Or perhaps you are not aware of the proper following distance (and therefore, part of the problem about which you complain). Two car lengths (EDIT: seconds, not car lengths; oops) is the general advice.
>Two car lengths is the general advice.
No. It's speed, roadway, and car dependent. Two car lengths isn't even sufficient at 25mph let alone at 70mph.[1] Which all goes to show how poorly people tend to think about these things and quickly resort to overly simplified mental models.
[1] https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/Safety1nNum3ers/august2015/S1N_A...
Moreso that my post has a mistake: two second following distance, not car lengths. Brain fart on my part; apologies for causing you to have to find a URL. But as general rules go, that increases the distance as speed goes up. No, it doesn’t account for everything, but good enough for most circumstances.
Like most real-world engineering, there is a cost-benefit balance. Could we design an interstate highway system that allows everyone a 10 car buffer? Sure. Would we like how much it costs, the effects on the environment, etc.? Probably not.
As an aside, your comment seems to go against HN guidelines by taking the least charitable interpretation of the comment.
You might have forgotten the ultimate rule of road safety: Everything is a tradeoff. Safer is only sometimes better. Otherwise the speed limit would be 10mph, because it's quite a safe speed.
Roads like that are currently operating at bursting point. There are incidents and accidents every single day and constant police presence is required to unblock them. If you alleviate congestion, more people use the road. They just go back to bursting point. In other words, it's utterly insane.
Can you imagine if there were accidents on railways or in the air every day? Imagine the scandal if train operators were found to be unsafely squeezing more trains on to the line that it could handle. Roads are stressful, inefficient and shit. Enforcing a safe stopping distance and pricing journeys accordingly, like trains, is where we want to be.
I don't disagree about "pricing journeys accordingly," but there are many reasons why this is difficult in practice in the US. Going through those points is a bit of a digression from my main point. Namely, that there are pragmatic tradeoffs that have to be considered. I'm consistently taken aback by the amount of "simple" solutions people advocate on HN and sometimes I wonder if it's due to software developers constantly working with the abstract rather than the concrete.
You do not have to raise the average speed of travel very much to make up the theoretical loss due to increased spacing
Moral: support public transit.
So while your statement isn't wrong, it's also not always pragmatic in the real world.