why you should not speed.
hello all. this webpage is a lot more primitive than the other ones on my site. But that is for a reason. Every year, tons of young people speed and pay the price. I personally am not a fan of speeding. I think it is reckless and dangerous for several reasons.
- it directly slows the amount of time you have to react: if a car in front of you breaks, you have mere milliseconds to slam the breaks or you risk a collision.
- A car is a weapon if used incorrectly: it is heavy, fast, and made of durable material. p = mv. A car with great speeds that weighs hundreds of kgs has a huge momentum.
- It is against the law. You may kill yourself or kill someone else due to speeding. Causing death by dangerous driving can have a maximum penalty of life in prison.
why being a good driver is not enough.
but you may be thinking that you are a good driver, and none of the tragic consequences of speeding will happen to you.
even assuming you don't overestimate your driving prowess (80% of people believe they are better than the average driver which is mathematially impossible), physics does not discriminate. even if you slam the brakes the second the person in front of you stops, or even if you have laser sharp precision, you may not be able to escape a crash.
Even if you narrowly escape a crash, what was the point? there was no reason to speed.
let's do a simple thought experiment.
for short distances, speeding has a negligible impact on the time yuou will arrive.
for long distances, not only do the odds you'll get caught and in serious trouble skyrocket, fatigue will set in and you will be too tired to have sharp reflexes.
These things happen regardless of how good a driver you are.
momentum matters.
this means even if you slam the brakes, the huge mass of the car multiplied by the speed which cannot decrease enough is too much: the car is hurtling forward whether you like it or not.
it isn't just push brake and car freezes.
Travelling at 40mph rather than 30mph means it'll take an extra 13 metres (more than three car lengths) to come to a stop. this could directly kill a pedestrian all because you thought it was fun and thrilling to drive quick.
speed limits exist for a reason.