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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I've made the unpopular argument in the past that when figuring the calculus on plans of lowering speed limits, you should consider added commute time as time subtracted from the individual driver's lives. Thus if the net time subtracted is greater than the loss of life from accidents, lowering the speed limit is the greater loss of life.

It's surely a slightly flippant argument, but I certainly think there's at least a little nugget of truth to it.

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Do you think it is reasonable to compare the loss of a life, of future achievements, opportunities, possibly leaving others unattended (that needed this person now dead) against sporadic minutes collectively gathered from many people?

In my opinion, those were likely going to be wasted either way.

I can see a literal point of view where if you add all sporadic minutes there also were opportunities, achievements, etc, but it just seems so far fetched for me.

> In my opinion, those were likely going to be wasted either way.

Try telling that to all the parents who would love to be able to spend more time with their kids. Or all the people who have hobbies or side projects who would love to have more time to work on them.

The better argument is that cars are more fuel efficient at lower speeds. The 55 speed limit nation-wide was brought in during the oil crisis in the 70s. [1] Cars are more economical to operate at lower speeds because of the exponential increase in drag forces with respect to speed. Car fuel consumption is big-O(n^2) where n is measured in mph.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/editorial-cap-us-speed-limit-at...

I am not sure. Usually when you add things that make commute faster (highways, more and faster trains, etc) people don't shorten their commute, they move farther away (for less crowded neighbourhoods, cheaper housing costs, etc). I wouldn't be surprised if commute time hasn't changed much since horse and buggy days and all technological advancement has done is increase the distance while keeping the time constant.

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