This is the most annoying thing, they risk the lives of themselves and everyone around them and gain at most 1-2 minutes on 30 minute drive.

It ridiculous how often someone speeds by, breaking the speed limit and often various other traffic laws and 30 seconds later we're side by side in traffic because their wreckless driving didn't actually but them any time.

My favorite pastime in traffic is to pull next to the person who was speeding and doing aggressive lane changes at the next red light by driving completely calm and under speed limit, and even without changing lanes.

> KE = ½mv² shows that kinetic energy is directly proportional to the mass of an object and proportional to the square of its velocity. This means that doubling the mass doubles the kinetic energy, but doubling the velocity quadruples the kinetic energy.

You're wrong there, that assumption fundamentally only makes sense on a full-on hard crash to 0 km/h - and about the only cases where that happens on a German road are suicides or someone not recognizing a traffic jam. Most crashes on highways are at relatively close speeds so the energy delta is way, way smaller.

I don't think anyone was looking at the kJ numbers and going "ah that makes sense". I put 3 examples to show the relativity, it's still squared to the relative crash speed.

What matters is keeping speeds especially low where humans without cars/trucks can be involved.

But people are also scrolling their phones and might miss a panic brake, and while that's an issue in itself it would also be safer at lower speeds.

Considering the time gained is going to be relatively low unless you're traveling extremely far at consistent speed it makes little sense to increase speeds, it also makes for more brake dust and emissions both being at speed and getting up to speed.

Funnily enough the air resistance also increases by the square, so think about that if you think that petrol is expensive.

Consider how none of this matters if the vehicle never touches another object. If motorists reach their destinations sooner, then there are fewer cars on the road. This naturally increases the average distance between vehicles. Bad things only happen when those distances reach 0, so higher average distances inhibit collisions.