xenigo

I agree with this statement. It's all too common that grandma is well past her prime behind the wheel and is well beyond needing her driving privileges revoked, foreign drivers that shouldn't be on the road, or soccer mom drives with their heads up their ass while sipping a Slurpee and swatting at their unbuckled kids in the back of their Suburban or Excursion. So many people don't look to check for vehicles approaching intersections prior to turning right, and a lot of those people don't look prior to changing lanes.

But all of these things aside, a Porsche GT3 driving alone on a smooth, wide, well lit thoroughfare at 130mph isn't unsafe at all. What I find disheartening is that so many people treat the speed limit as if their car will burst into flames by exceeding it. The "Speed Kills" campaign comes to mind. Speed doesn't kill... impacts kill. Driving 130mph in the rain kills. Driving 130mph in a car that can't safely exceed 70mph kills. Driving 130mph down a gravel road at night through the forest kills. Don't drive like a moron and you can drive safely at speeds vastly exceeding the speed limit.

I guess the root of the problem is the lack of enforcement when it comes to laws like lane courtesy. The problem also revolves around the fact that there's virtually zero qualifications to get your license. I think people should be required to pass a strict regiment of high-speed training courses, being required to intimately understand the capabilities of not only their vehicles but other vehicles with performance vastly exceeding their own. If there was a massive campaign similar to "Speed Kills" or "This is your brain on drugs..." titled Move Right then I can almost guarantee a lot of high speed accidents wouldn't happen and our well-engineered freeway infrastructure would then be allowed to move with the high-degree of efficiency it was designed for. But instead our highway patrol officers would rather ignore those laws, and instead focus on their own personal enforcement agenda... leaving us with a traffic snarled cluster fuck of a freeway system.