Speeding

Soren Sugalski, 27

As a relatively new driver, I have recently heard the term “good driver” tossed around quite a bit. Parents, adults, and advisors will frequently tell new drivers to be safe on the road, and strive to be a “good driver”. But what is a good driver, really? Is it someone whose technical skills are above average or someone who maintains safe driving patterns? Is it someone who doesn’t let their emotions influence their decisions or some combination of all three? Unsurprisingly, the majority of people don’t give this question much thought. When forming their own opinion, they usually choose an defintion that supports their predetermined identity as a “good” driver and the air of validation that goes with it. Regardless of their actual skill, most people will always view themselves as “good” drivers”. This is a perfectly plausible thing, since all people have innate self-biases and feel the need to be successful in things they do. Furthermore, I wonder if this personal bias might have a potentially dangerous impact, since it might be blinding people to their dangerous habits or deficiencies. This idea prompted me to look further into the realm of driving habits. I discovered that I am not the first person to develop this theory.

 In 2021, an Australian automobile company conducted a survey to test participants' confidence on the road. While the surveyors probably expected an even distribution of confident and self-doubting drivers, a shocking 80% of participants reported that they believed their driving skills to be above average. Obviously, this is unrealistic, since an average has the same number values above and below. As I had speculated, this poll revealed nothing if not an overwhelming sense of overconfidence and strong underlying self-biases. Overconfidence is very different from basic confidence, which can help you make the right decision in tight situations and make driving much less stressful. It is the result of excessive or unrealistic levels of confidence, which create an illusion of safety. It causes people to feel more in control, making them more inclined to drive less carefully, take risks, and speed. Among other factors, overconfidence results in more dangerous driving habits and a wider distribution of bad drivers. However, overconfidence only plays one minor part in the development of speeding habits. While its impact should not be understated, almost all poor driving habits arise from social and emotional issues.

In general, speeding tends to occur as a manifestation of external pressures. Of course, there are some people who speed because they are thrill seekers, or because they simply enjoy going fast. These people usually speed for no other reason than to have fun and don’t think much of the behavior. However, the larger majority of people are influenced by emotional factors when they speed. People will usually speed when they are running late, or because they are trying to catch up to their predetermined “on time” schedule. Other people will speed because of stress and worry. It’s pretty hard to tell yourself not to speed in this situation, and I doubt that I would do much better. However, that doesn’t make speeding any more effective or any less dangerous. In the end, most of your commuting times are determined by external factors, such as traffic, distance, location, and the amount of stoplights. No matter how fast or well you drive, these factors will always have the biggest impact on your driving. It is certainly possible to plan your commutes at times where there is little traffic congestion, but these decisions must be made beforehand. Even if speeding feels faster, this small decrease in commute time comes at a big cost. The faster you go, the more dangerous driving becomes. This is probably something you have heard before, and with good reason. When participating in risky driving behaviors (speeding/tailgating/erratic driving) the odds of being in an accident increase by around 1200%. And all of that, just to arrive a little bit earlier to a destination.

There appears to be one obvious benefit to speeding. Faster driving allows you to eventually get to your destination faster, shortening your time on the road. At the very least, speeding should shorten your commute, and allow you to spend less time around the innate dangers of the road. While this explanation is intuitive, it is not really accurate. No matter how fast you go, your maximum speed is always limited to the slowest driver ahead of you. On most roads, you can only go about a minute before you reach the next car, and you’ll have to slow down again. You'll also probably hit a stoplight before you get very far ahead, allowing all the other cars behind you to catch up. For these reasons, speeding only takes about 2 minutes off an average commute time, while using much more gasoline than normal driving. Poor driving habits can consume 15-20% more fuel, while barely shortening the total travel time. By simply accelerating slowly and driving the speed limit, drivers can generally achieve big fuel savings. This is because speeding often takes you out of the optimal fuel consumption range (34-55 mph or 55-88 kph), causing a dramatic falloff in fuel efficiency. After 55mph, the wind resistance on your car starts to increase substantially, forcing you to use exponentially more gas. For this reason, driving at 90mph is usually about half as efficient as driving at 50mph, and it only gets worse the faster you go.

No matter what factor lies behind the choice to speed, there are ways to improve. For example, you can drastically improve your driving experience by allocating more time for a trip or commute. Even a small difference in time, like 5 minutes, can greatly reduce your chance of falling behind schedule. This will decrease your stress on the road, and also make driving much more enjoyable. It is also helpful to cultivate a calm and objective mindset, so that your driving patterns are not affected by outside issues. This can be accomplished by following a few key steps whenever you get into a stressful situation: stepping back, acknowledging the issue, and allowing it to pass. Sometimes, your mentality is often the only thing that you can change about a difficult set of circumstances. Following this, the most important thing is to only worry about the things you can control. There will always be traffic, always be pressures, and always be mistakes that other people make. However, that doesn’t mean that other people should decide how your drive goes. At the end of the day, you might always choose to drive. It is up to you to decide whether that responsibility will become a burden or a pleasure in your daily life.