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| quote: | Originally posted by Final GTS
OK, so you prove my point. a few people who ruin it for EVERYONE ELSE. I knoew a few people who think they are gods gift to driving- they shouldnt even have a lisence, let alone the speed factor. Will any of this ultimately change anything? no, it wont. bad drivers are bad drivers- they will pile up regardless. 10 or 20K on top of 140 isnt going to change the outcome all that much at all!
Judging from a few of your posts, you sound VERY much like a democrat, loving to tell other people how they should run their lives based on YOURS. Dont get me wrong, I love Canada for a few reasons, but You belong in Canada... where the government presides and the people SUBSIDE regularly. |
Where did I tell you how to live your life? I said that based on my experience, the law is definitely making our roads safer. That is a fact. If even just ONE driver slows down, and at least ONE has, then the law is achieving it's stated purpose. Anyone who believes they have as much control over their car doing 160 as they do driving 120 doesn't have any understanding of the physics involved. As you speed up, your kinetic energy increases exponentially.
From Wikipedia:
Note that the kinetic energy increases with the square of the speed. This means, for example, that if you are traveling twice as fast, you will have four times as much kinetic energy. As a result of this, a car traveling twice as fast requires four times as much distance to stop (assuming a constant braking force. See mechanical work).
Have you ever been in an accident where you hit a stopped object while doing 20, or been hit while stopped by a person doing 20? Going as slow as 20km/h can ruin the front end of a car, and your body gets jarred during the impact. Now imagine that same impact occurring, except at 8x the speed, or 160km/h. The impact would be 64 TIMES more powerful. So that slight jerk that occured going at 20km/h is now you flying through your windshield, or the side of your car being smashed through your body. One of the guys here posted a picture of a car that bashed a bunch of 3-5inch thick trees. Had that driver been going the speed limit, or even just 20 over, the car would not have recieved much of the damage it did, and all 4 people in the car might still be alive. In fact, that accident wouldn't have occurred at all, because the driver would have been able to control the vehicle, rather than flying off the road at a group of trees. "But Spam, the car I hit is going 100, so it's only like hitting a stopped object while going 60, or 6 times more powerful." Yes, but how hard are you hitting the wall to your left? Or the tree to your right after you lose control? Or the car that had to make an emergency pull-over in the wrong place at the wrong time? What about the possibility of the accident being entirely avoided because you drove 120 instead of 160 and were able to avoid the car going 100?
To illustrate my point a little bit. Did you know that out of a collection of accidents involving pedestrians, of the accidents that occurred with the car traveling at 20mph resulted in 5% of fatal injury. Of the accidents that involved a car doing 30mph, 40% of the accidents resulted in death. And finally of the accidents where the car was going 40mph, 90% of the accidents involved death. Yes, those stats involve pedestrians, and not other cars, but it perfectly illustrates how small increases in velocity can cause an exponential amount of additional damage. In this case, going twice the speed, resulted in around 18x or 1800% more deaths.
To put it another way, a car traveling at 40mph when a pedestrian steps out onto the road 100 feet in front of them will still be going 38mph upon impact. Had that driver been going 25mph, the car would stop before hitting the pedestrian.
SOURCE
The math and physics involved don't change just because you're on the highway and not a busy downtown street. While there may be less obstacles, collisions can still occur, and you're much more likely to survive that collision if you're driving the speed limit, rather than driving 60 over. Whether you are speeding or not, it is a FACT that lower speeds cause less deaths. You can ignore that if you want and maintain that you're driving just as safe as anybody else while you boot along at 160, but the laws of physics work against your opinion.
Justifying dangerously high speeds because other people don't know how to drive properly while going the speed limit is an empty justification. You don't get to drive dangerously fast just because another person drives dangerously slow. Both groups lack common sense and are dangerous on the road, and both groups should lose their licenses.
I'm not telling you how to run your life. In fact I clearly state that if you want to speed, then go right ahead. I speed all the time. But unlike most of the people arguing in favour of higher speeds, I recognize that I'm putting my, and others, safety at risk while I do so. You know the consequences, so it's nothing but stupidity if you start complaining after you break the law and get caught, or kill someone when you get in an accident one day. It's like the drunk driver who blames the car that hit him for his shiny new jail-term... if he hadn't been driving drunk to begin with, he wouldn't be in jail.
You know the laws, you know the consequences, if you don't want to deal with said consequences, then obey the law. If you don't want to obey the law, then whatever, that's your choice, but the consequences are there for if and when you're caught. So when I hear someone bitching because they got their car impounded for driving 160 on the 401, I have no respect for their argument. But I have a heap of respect for the guy who shakes his head while his car gets towed away and says "Damn, I fucked up."
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Captain Planet is gey.
Water, Fire, Earth, Wind, Heart???
These forces are supposed to combine to create Captain Planet?
Bullshit.
Those forces combine to create a soaking, boiling mudstorm on Valentine's Day.
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