this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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According to Der Spiegel, German motorways that don't have speed limits feature 17% more crashes leading to severe injury and 76% more crashes leading to death.
That's despite the fact those sections have a lot of measures undertaken to additionally improve road safety.
According to the European Traffic safety Council, German roadways have a fatality rate of only 4.2 people per billion kilometers.
This is roughly half the rate of the US, which is 8.3
German motorways are much safer than the US, despite their high speeds. The reason a higher rate of accidents are caused by speeding in Germany compared to the U.S. is because their standards for driver training and licensure are much stricter than in the U.S. You actually have to attend a driving school and pass exams to become a licensed driver in Germany, unlike the almost total absence of driver education required in the US. They simply don’t have the issue of unpredictable ignorant drivers, or slow lane campers in Germany the way we do here. They successfully mitigated the risk of dangerous traffic flow impeding drivers like yourself, leaving high speeds as one of the only factors left when it comes to accidents. The high speed driver looks like “the problem” in Germany because the much bigger problem driver, including the lane campers, simply don’t qualify for drivers licenses there and are kept off the road entirely. A good problem to have, and one we should implement here in order to save lives.
It is true that Germany has lower fatality rate on the roads, and it is true that it is due to the various policies they implement, including stricter licensing. Speeding is also severely punished, by the way, which is why the definition of a "slow driver" will change a lot compared to the "I don't give a damn about rules" America. A driver following speed limits is not "slow" by any German standards.
But in no way stricter licensing and control negates the fact that fatality rates on German motorways that don't have a speed limit are 76% higher compared to the ones that do, in the absolute very same Germany, not compared to any other country.
The safest motorways of Germany, with a great margin, are speed limited.
Speeding is not the only factor for road safety, and it's important to address this multifaceted issue in many ways. But speed is a very, very big part of it.
A very clever misrepresentation of the data, I’ll give you that. While it’s true that if you get into an accident on a non-limited section of the autobahn , your odds of the accident being more severe or even fatal are relatively higher than it being a minor accident. However what you’re very strategically leaving out is that your odds of getting into an accident in the first place are lower on non-limited sections of the Autobahn.l, with some outliers based on rarity of the various speed limits. The most common speed limit on the autobahn being 120 (substantially higher than the average speeder in the U.S.). Here’s some data from a 2022 study on the effects of speed limits and their effect on accident frequency on Autobahn. It lists several different speed limits and crash results, with the primary comparison being between 120 and none. With the other speed limits being rarer outliers.
TL;DR It’s not that severe accidents happen more often on non-limited sections of the autobahn, it’s just that the smaller amount of accidents that do happen are more likely to be severe. It’s hard to compare these results to accidents caused by traffic impedes, because as previously mentioned that’s a particular problem that Germany seems to have eliminated. An argument could be made that it’s be a prudent decision to add a 120 speed limit to the rest of the autobahn, and trade a higher accident rate for fewer fatalities, but that’s a luxury that Germany has because they’re not dealing with more dangerous behavior like in the U.S, such as uneducated, unpredictable, and slow drivers impeding the flow of traffic.
I know you want what you’re saying to be true, but you’re wasting a lot of energy that you could spend on becoming a safer driver instead. Take all this effort you’re making to find numbers that almost look like they’re supporting what you’re saying, and put it into learning about your states driving laws instead. I’ve at this point put a lot of good faith effort in educating you, but I’m not going to continue poking holes in the logic of your responses.
Did I ever say high-speed autobahns feature more accidents overall? No, I said they have more accidents that are lethal or lead to severe injury, and that's what we should care about the most.
It's pretty weird to compare scratched bumper to death in this case.
And your very statistics shows exactly what I say - removing speed limits does indeed increase both lethality and a chance of severe injury.
They say offence is the best defense. You've done just that - went personal instead of admitting being wrong. I'll leave you at that with sincere hopes you would understand that speed limits, even on motorways, exist for a reason and not because regulators are dumb.
You can try and try to twist the facts all you want, and yet the facts remain. Despite having no speed limit, unlimited sections of the Autobahn are safer than speed limited segments, and both are much safer than American highways, all of which have speed limits, and all of which are slower.
You tried your best to spread your misinformation, but in the end you were proven wrong. You may never learn, but at least you’ve given others the chance to see your assertions proven wrong by cold hard data. So at least it wasn’t all for nothing. Thanks for playing.