Indeed. Much as buying a smaller car makes you a hazard to everyone nearby because they cannot see you as easily. The most sensible thing for everyone is ever larger and more heavily armored vehicles. Won't someone think of the children. `/s`

All that said. If you cannot maneuver safely around drivers going the speed limit then they are not the problem.

The mental hoops drivers go through to justify their unsafe behaviour...

Oh please.

Let's assume people are going at a speed that the road is designed to handle, since that's usually the case. In that situation, the behavior you're calling out as unsafe is simply "going faster". Now, in a technical sense that's true, but it's always true. Going faster reduces safety when you're above the speed limit. Going faster reduces safety when you're at the speed limit. Going faster reduces safety when you're below the speed limit.

If you reduce safety to black and white, then you should always go slower, until you're barely moving. If the speed limit is 40, that doesn't magically make it safe to go 40.

Black and white thinking leads to a bad conclusion, so let's add nuance back in. Speed is dangerous but roads are designed to let you go a certain speed while minimizing the danger. You're not being dangerous until you go over that speed. And that speed is almost always higher than the speed limit, especially in good weather.

Going over the speed limit is not itself a problem. It's going over the design speed of the road that's a problem.

> Let's assume people are going at a speed that the road is designed to handle

Let's not, because most of the speeding I see is from people who very mistakenly think they know what speed the road's designed to handle, because they don't give a crap about pedestrians, bicyclists, visibility, other vehicles, or really, anything but getting to the next red light faster.

Perhaps you drive in a utopia that's solely populated by traffic architects, but here in the real world, it's populated by normal people, many of whom are bad drivers, and bad judges of road safety, but are really good at hitting the gas.

Our high death rates reflect this.

> Perhaps you drive in a utopia that's solely populated by traffic architects

I drive in an area that has a lot of overbuilt roads, and I don't think that's a very uncommon situation.

> they don't give a crap about pedestrians, bicyclists, visibility, other vehicles, or really, anything but getting to the next red light faster

That's very dangerous even if you strictly follow the speed limit. It's a separate problem.

Overbuilt roads aka “strodes”are real common in North America and as people tend to drive the speed they feel is correct not the limit it leads people to going faster and create unsafe situation. There’s a great not just bikes video on this iirc

A sign doesn’t really change behaviour but narrowing roads , separated bike lanes, pedestrian controlled crossings, roundabouts, and generally making the road “feel slower” does

I'm aware of this phenomenon.

My point is that until the road is narrowed, the safe speed on it may be lower than the average backseat traffic architect might think.

Kinetic energy is proportional to square of velocity. It doesn't take large speed reduction to halve energies involved and thus the danger. Even not taking into account how crappy human perception and reflexes are.

I'm quite confused why I keep seeing posts like this downvoted in this thread. This post is nuanced and probably novel to most readers. Even seems correct to me.

Probably because there really isn’t any nuance in it, hand waves the physics and human factor, and it uses vague language.

Want to know what any arbitrary driver on a road has as a reference for “the design speed of the road”? The posted speed limit.

I’m not saying their argument is right or wrong, but just that this post isn’t nuanced or convincing.

> Probably because there really isn’t any nuance in it, hand waves the physics and human factor, and it uses vague language.

There is a link there, that refers to lots of scientific research. From almost a century ago to almost today, and in a huge amount of agreement.

Do you have more nuance than that?

There's a correlation between the speed limit and the design speed, but there's also a lot of mismatch and the bias usually goes in a specific direction.

A few mph over the speed limit in dry weather is rarely outside the design.

And I think I have a reasonable amount of nuance. If you don't have nuance you get "the sign can't be wrong" or "always go slower". The former is objectively not true, and I've never seen anyone seriously advocate for the latter.

Fallacious arguments have the effect of sounding correct. In this case it's the https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy.

I am not saying that. You must have misunderstood. There is definitely an inflection point for safety in any given road.

You can take that logic and apply it to any traffic law. Blowing red lights? Fine as long as you can tell there's no cross traffic, right?

Laws were put in place because people are not in fact qualified to make these assessments.

The only nuance here is that you are not required to go the speed limit at all, you can and should go only as fast as the conditions allow.

Regardless, Waymo is under the spotlight and they can't risk the regulatory hit of openly breaking laws, even if it's a perfectly normal thing for a human to do.

Rear-ending someone going slower than you is not their fault.

>Rear-ending someone going slower than you is not their fault.

who gives a shit who is at fault when they're in an accident?

the goal is to avoid the event all together, not to have a scapegoat.

The type of people who see a "lane ends ahead" and immediately merge, blocking up traffic and wasting a half mile of empty lane. "I'm in my assigned place and I did what I was supposed to!!"

The thing that blocks up traffic at a merge is when people can't get over smoothly.

If everyone gets over at the first opportunity, then things go fine. The empty lane isn't wasted, it absorbs brief bursts in traffic that need more time to get over. But even if it was wasted, that wouldn't be a big deal. A 5-mile long section with fewer lanes and a 5.5-mile long section with fewer lanes will have almost the same throughput.

Everyone staying split across two lanes until the end and aligning themselves to do a clean zipper merge also goes fine.

What makes everything go wrong is when people drive down the nice empty lane that's ending and intend to do a normal merge at the end, but they don't start it early enough. Then everything slows down as they squeeze over.

In my experience what causes the slowdown are the people who merged too early who then resentfully close the gap in front of them when people try to merge later than them, simultaneously increasing the likelihood that they’ll rear end the car in front of them and making it harder for the people trying to merge properly to do so.

'...when people try to merge later than them,'

You mean the people who must get past every single car and merge at the last possible second?

Just use the lane normally and zipper merge when the lane ends. Don't waste space. Don't block people. You don't get brownie points for being in the "correct" lane as soon as possible, and it doesn't help to police others who are using the existing lane. It really isn't that hard.

A zipper merge is fine, both lanes tend to fill up.

What I often see if a lane that intended to go through and a turning lane that is backed up; people pretend to be on through lane, then stop to merge at last minute into long turning lane and void the line.

Doesn't that just move the gap slightly? If anything, a tight squeeze should mean the gap behind them is even bigger than the gap that existed before.

The wiki you link finds the theory to be biased and without solid backing data.

Not sure why did you link it.