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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

I mean if freeways adjust to have minimum speeds of e.g 55mph instead of the current 45 (and even that's only in some states), it would solve this by constraining such a car to cities and backroads.

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In my state it's illegal to drive any vehicle on a highway where it can't exceed the speed limit by 5 mph.

I assume there's some exception (probably involving the orange slow vehicle warning triangles) for things like tractors.

You can’t really get anywhere in most of America if you stick to the backroads.

80% of the US lives in urban areas, in urban areas you can practically by definition.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...

Urban areas in the US by definition means not just the downtown but all the surrounding suburbs and rural buffers. You definitely need the freeway to get downtown in most cases.

Dude, you absolutely don't. There are plenty of places in the US where you can take public transit, walk, and bike to get everywhere that you need to.

Just because you live in a miserable, car-bound, suburban hellscape doesn't mean that everyone else has to.

I could totally do this in Seattle. Heck, most of the time my routing software avoids the freeway anyways, in favor of 25-40 mph roads. It’s a sore point though: we just have a couple of north south freeways and one east west one. Well, it’s better than nearby Vancouver BC at least.

What? I think I might be defining back roads differently than you are.

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