> I'm alone on a motorway in the early hours who am i hurting or endangering?
- your loved ones
- the emergency services that have to clean your body off the road
- subsequent road users -- when the road is closed -- to clean your body off the road
- your loved ones
- the emergency services that have to clean your body off the road
- subsequent road users -- when the road is closed -- to clean your body off the road
There’s standard etiquette there to slow down when there are vehicles in the distance ahead or curves or imperfect visibility. You don’t have to drive like a mindless drone holding a one-size-fits-all-situations speed limit. You and other drivers are generally safer going 160 km/h on a mostly empty highway than 50 km/h through an urban where there’s a much higher risk of encountering other people/vehicles/obstructions.
A bigger danger than speeding on clear highways is things like tailgating, weaving between lanes, aggressive passing, and distracted driving. This often happens below speed limits, and is not the focus of automated speed enforcement systems.
In Ontario, Canada, we have wide, well maintained, and well engineered highways that have unreasonably low speed limits of 90 or 100 km/h. While there are times when it’s necessary to drive more slowly (bad weather, traffic ahead), strictly enforcing such limits on wide clear highways in good weather would be silly. People here generally drive 120-130 km/h because cars are designed to operate safely and efficiently at these speeds. Strictly enforcing unreasonably low speed limits would just breed contempt from drivers, so currently the police are lenient with the speeds people actually drive. Strict enforcement of speed limits could be more reasonable if they set realistic speed limits, perhaps variable ones depending on the weather and traffic conditions.
Germany has quite a high rate of road traffic deaths compared to other European countries.
Sure, but do you really think the risk of having an accident, and if so, the risk of it resulting in a fatality, has no relationship to the speed involved?
We accept that virtually every activity carries some risk, but we also choose (as a society, whether you as an individual agree or not) to set some rules to help limit the level of that risk.