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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

Say you are driving 10 mph over the speed limit on a 60 mph highway for an hour, the maximum time savings is less than 10 minutes out of an hour. If the trip is shorter or you have stop, turns, traffic, the savings are even less. So in most cases except long distance drives, the savings are minimal. It is just that we are all impatient.

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Riding my motorcycle to work, I might bend a few laws - especially as London increasingly becomes 20mph throughout. But it reduces my commute from ~35 minutes (flow of traffic) to ~17 (filtering and exercising discretion when there's good visibility on an clear road, as is frequently the case since that's what traffic lights do - clear the road).

The twenty minutes or so morning and evening, 35-40 minutes overall is not to be sniffed at. The round trip on public transport would be well over 90 minutes.

10 minutes seems like a pretty substantial amount of time to me.

Actually you are wasting 50 minutes in this scenario as you could have used the time not driving yourself to do something productive/enjoyable.

Kind of. I mean theoretically you could say the same about a train, but I still see most of the time I spend on a train as wasted even though I don't have to drive the thing.

Sure but it that is the best case. In my own experience, traffic can impact those numbers substantially. And just some bad luck with traffic signals can eliminate most of those savings as the slow/fast cars tend to get synchronized.

Just the other day I was driving down the narrow roads of a nearby hill and there is a section with single lanes with lots of traffic moving at 35 mph. One lady comes weaving down the traffic on both sides to get in front of the crowd with a net savings until when the lanes opened up of 30 seconds. So much risk to everyone for what little benefit.

Unless I was under some big time crunch, I would gladly trade that amount of time for the luxury of being driven on a long roadtrip.

Not speeding, but breaking a similarly stupid law to split lanes on my motorcycle can save 50%+ of my commuting time.

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