"The 210 international speedway is open this morning. I find myself doing 70 to try and keep up with the flow and I’m still being passed and left behind. It’s no wonder why most of these accidents on here are fatal." Ronnie Coble on 'Nightmare on 210, Feb. 21, 2019
(Click on the image for engineer Foone Turing's essay on how tiny mistakes cause huge disasters.)
"Like, think about a road: You know it's going to be a 50 MPH road, so you design it as such. You don't put sharp turns in a road where people are going 50MPH, because you know if people try to take them at 70 MPH they'll crash. And people always push the limits.
So you build your "50 MPH" road knowing people might be going 70 MPH. You design your turns & signage for that range.
And the road opens and it works perfectly at 50MPH.
But some people go 70MPH, which is fine, you planned for that.
The police stop a few of them.
But as people go on the road and get used to it, they start going 60 MPH, just cause they can and nothing bad seems to happen. The normal becomes 60 MPH
So now the averages have shifted. You designed for 50 (with a +20MPH safety range) and now most people are doing 60 MPH, and the ones going a little fast do 70 MPH, and the ones going Extra Fast do 80 MPH.
And maybe that seems fine. The people going fast know the risks they're taking so they pay extra attention (for police cars, if nothing else).
And it's fine, for a while.
Then it rains, and what was safe at 50 MPH, borderline at 70MPH, and risky at 80 MPH is now borderline at 50MPH and risky at 60MPH and deadly at 80MPH.
And a bunch of people crash.
And they crash because they normalized the "rules-in-practice", of "go 60, go 70 if in a hurry, go 80 if an emergency".
My point with this is not to say "HEY PEOPLE STOP BENDING THE RULES", exactly."