Fascinating. I wonder if it's possible to control for improved car safety when looking at the decreasing risk of driving over time; did speed limits make highways/motorways safer or more dangerous? I recall reading that (counter-intuitively), removing stop signs from a residential area made it safer, and I wonder if the same is true for speed limits. Maybe if people weren't given a suggestion of how fast to drive, they would be more likely to drive within their personal safety limit (whether that be faster or slower).
> Maybe if people weren't given a suggestion of how fast to drive, they would be more likely to drive within their personal safety limit (whether that be faster or slower).
I have the impression that this is very different in most of Europe compared with most of the places in the US I've driven: in the US, most roads have a speed limit ultimately set to the lower of what's politically acceptable and what an engineering is willing to sign off on as safe, AFAIK; in most parts of Europe, there are two or three standard speed limits (urban, rural, highway) that apply everywhere and speed limits are only altered downwards if there's a stretch that's a particular crash hotspot.
For example, I've been down plenty of narrow roads around the UK where the speed limit was the standard 60mph, but good luck going more than 20mph even if you know the road well. As such, you're already expected to use personal judgement. By comparison, all of the rural roads in the US I've driven down that were at all tight had speed limits like 20 or 30mph, and if anything they were set lower than I would've driven down them had they been higher.
