Speeding and Traffic - Safe or Death?

Depending on the road and conditions, if I’m not familiar with it, I’ll usually go 10mph over the yellow posted speed for a turn, figuring if I need to I can brake a little hard if the turn is feeling too sharp for that speed. If there are cars in front of me I’ll try to pace them usually.

If it’s snowing or heavy rain and I don’t know the road, I’ll go at or below the yellow speed, factoring in shoulder size and penalty for going off the road. There was a windy road next to a cliff in Colorado I got stuck on in the snow and I went well under the speed posted because the penalty for sliding off the road was death.

Well, it’s complicated:

here’s the nitty gritty:

Here’s an article that breaks it down into less math:

Note that this is the posted black-on-white speed limit sign. The yellow signs are just suggestions.

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Your exit plan is braking in the middle of a turn?

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brake IN, accelerate OUT

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I wouldn’t say the middle, much closer to entry. If the road is dry, it’s not an issue. Just comes down to how much speed you need to take off.

If I were driving a semi, I’d take every turn at 5mph to minimize the damage to whatever I inevitably hit.

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Between 16-24 I was a terrible driver. I drank and drove going 120+ plenty of times. I wrecked my car pretty bad in the rain hitting a corner to fast and rolled it and then slammed into a tree ended up in jail. I got in a high speed chase with the police and almost crashed and it scared me so much I slowed down and waited until they caught up to me and pulled over. They were pretty mad and roughed me up after that one. I chuckle to myself nowadays when my wife makes fun of me for being such a cautious slow driver. I drive 76 or so in a 70 and 55 in a 50, 45 in a 40 and then below that I just do the speed limit. . Doing 100+ on a straight open highway isn’t that dangerous. I’d be more worried about a blowout from cheap tires then driver error.

Having driven across the country a few times there is a ton of variance in road quality, so it’s possible the posters who are shocked by the people who think 80-100 can be safe are in the vast regions that have really shitty roads with potholes, roadkill, and retread littering the interstate.

I’ve driven over 100mph plenty of times, 90% of them were not significantly more dangerous to anyone, 8-9% were dangerous to me and other guilty parties and nobody else, and 1-2% were emergencies that justified it - like racing to shelter ahead of a tornado, as one example. Thankfully I was on the dry side of the storm. I got it up to at least 120 that time and got to shelter 3-5 minutes before the tornado hit us.

Yea I agree. Almost all of my driving is west coast and long road trips to Nevada. I mostly look back and think how dumb I was for driving those speeds. Driving those same roads years later I cringe at what could have happened.

I didn’t know there was highways in Manhattan. I just thought there was busy streets with yellow cabs. I was envisioning you guys smashing at 90mph through cross walks with people!

You would all hate driving behind me.

So, a spec* that like 1 in 10,000 people have read. I’m not surprised that you’re frustrated if everyone is expected to know and follow that spec rather than the dumbed down output of the process.

*Didn’t read

Like in Manhattan proper, there’s one going along the river on either side, but as somebody mentioned earlier, neither one is really set up to drive 90 on even when empty. I think CN clarified earlier that the Manhattan part of the fast driving was maybe just the little stretch of 95 past the George Washington Bridge that’s still technically in Manhattan (or at least that’s how I read it).