What’s A Safe Highway Speed?

The human factor never ceases to amaze me. The one thing that can never truly be accounted for, Especially on the highway.

 

There must be people out there who have categorized and quantified the distribution of different driving behavior types, perhaps even how they vary geographically. I'd love to see that sort of data.

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ar...ntifies five kinds,, turning, and lane change.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10041146

It's all driving us (no pun intended) towards automated cars.

 

I always tell my wife "they can't do the math" when she says something about aggressive drivers when we are in the car together. I'm not talking about someone who sets the cruise control at 5mph/10mph over the speed limit on long interstate hwy trips - I sometimes do that - on long trips you can shave hours off your driving time if you are willing to trade that for less mpg. I'm talking about drivers that aggressively weave in/out of traffic so they can go 5 mph faster than everyone else. See them every morning. Thankfully, I don't have a long commute to work and I don't have to drive in bumper to bumper traffic. I did at one point in my life when I lived in a large metro area - but I live in a smaller town now. My commute to work is about 7 miles on streets where the speed limit varies from 35-50 mph and I go through ~10 or 12 stop lights. My average time to get to work is ~20 mins. Which means, with stoplight stops, my average speed is ~21 mph. Someone who constantly weaves in/out of traffic, blows through yellow/red lights, cuts people off, etc... in order to raise their average speed for the same 7 mile trip to ~26 mph - would get there ~3 mins and 51 seconds before me. Now, to do this they would have to drive aggressive enough to go more than 5mph faster than everyone else when moving - they'll have to stop at the red lights too - so to get their average speed up 5 mph they have to be going more than 5 mph than everyone else when moving. For 3:51 mins they risk themselves, everyone else around them, damage to their vehicle, damage to other people's vehicles, traffic tickets, etc... "The human factor never ceases to amaze me". I will say this though, over time (I've been driving over 40 years) you tend to get less mad at these people and tend to feel more sorry for them. Whatever it is that causes them to act this way while driving will likely cause problems in other parts of their lives as well. At this point in my life, I tend to think about that, rather than engage in any tit for tat road rage exchanges with them.

 

Those were interesting, even though they didn't have the whole answer I was looking for. The one from IEEE at least showed the relative proportion of each category among bad drivers, but unless I missed it, didn't quantify them among drivers as a whole. The methodology section was strong.

My biggest takeaway, along the lines of your observation, is that the forms of bad driving defined in both studies are easily detectable by automation with considerable accuracy.

 

I go the speed limit or no more than 4 mph over. Haven’t had an accident or ticket in over 30 years. I know, how boring and safe.

 

"Traffic" by Tom Vanderbilt is an interesting and informative book on the subject of driving and human nature.

 

Just drove cross country NM to Pa pulling a 5x8 enclosed trailer. Most of the time we were doing about 72-75mph in the slow lane and the big rigs were blowing us off the road.