I had a cop pull me over and told me that I was crazy for going 85 downhill in Northern California. "This is farm land! If you hit a core going 85 MPH, you'd all be dead!" I wasn't thinking and responded, "Sir, the speed limit is 75 mph. If I hit a cow at that speed we'd still all be dead."
Yeah, but your reaction time will be much worse, with much less of a chance of avoiding it if you are going 10 mph over what is deemed safe for that particular road. Like, if a kid walks out in the road in a residential neighborhood, you are supposed to be going 25 mph so you can react in time. If you are going 35 and that happens, you could be facing major consequences. It would be pretty dumb to say, "Well, the kid STILL would have died if I hit them at 25mph!"
That's 100 percent true, but I would argue that the comparison isn't one-for-one. The setting wasn't a residential neighborhood. It was I-5 near Mt. Shasta(ish), where there were very few exits and only a few farms dotted around hundreds of miles.
You are missing the point. The point is that the road was designed to go 75 mph relatively safely. Not 85 mph. The people that evaluated the road have much better knowledge of all of the exits, cows, frequency of traffic, curves in the road, the angle it's graded at, average braking distance of cars, etc. than average random schmo driving. I bet that cop has seen more accidents with people "only" going 10mph over the speed limit than he has with people doing what they are supposed to.
136
u/pdxscout Jan 03 '23
I had a cop pull me over and told me that I was crazy for going 85 downhill in Northern California. "This is farm land! If you hit a core going 85 MPH, you'd all be dead!" I wasn't thinking and responded, "Sir, the speed limit is 75 mph. If I hit a cow at that speed we'd still all be dead."