Speeding

– Episode 2 –

– Speeding may cause fewer accidents than you think, and it may even be a non-factor –

– SOURCES –

– Maria-Ioanna M. Imprialou, Mohammed Quddus, David E. Pitfield, and Dominique Lord, “Re-visiting Crash–Speed Relationships: A New Perspective in Crash Modelling,” Accident Analysis & Prevention 86 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2015.10.001, 173–185 –

– Transport Canada, PACP Appearance on Report 5 - Follow-up Audit on Rail Safety - May 6, 2021, “Safety Stats,” modified May 30, 2025, https://tc.canada.ca/en/binder/13-safety-stats –

Chapters

• 0:00 intro
• 0:16 typical highway driving speeds
• 1:55 speed and accidents
• 3:23 stats and research
• 4:35 common sense about speeding
• 5:37 in summary
• 6:12 outro

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, the host of Different Shapes. My topic today is speeding.

It’s common to the point of being an indisputable fact that very few drivers don’t speed on the highway. I’m specifically talking about Canada, where I’ve done most of my highway driving, so it might be different in your country if you don’t live in the country which has turned down a marriage proposal from the United States (you know, THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN ALL OF WORLD HISTORY), though to tell the truth it was less a proposal than a threat, and not so much involving a shotgun but rather the cumulation of 500 million firearms that Americans have decided they need to protect themselves down there.

But I digress.

A typical highway speed limit in Canada is 100 km/h, and my experience has been that almost nobody drives that slowly. Again, this is personal experience and not peer-reviewed statistics, but I’d say that most people drive between 110 and 120. I discovered the beauty of cruise control when I had a bad knee and was driving a car with a standard transmission a couple of years ago, and I routinely set it to 115 km/h. I drove past speed traps at that speed and was never stopped. I’ve driven behind, in front of, and beside actual police vehicles at that speed, and have never been stopped. A police officer actually told me once that if you keep your speed below 120 km/h, you’ll never be stopped. I shave 5 km off that just to be extra safe.

And by safe I don’t mean that the slower you drive, the less likely you are to be involved in an accident. I really think that’s a myth. The two real culprits for accidents, in my view, are careless driving and people who just don’t know how to drive very well.

In the category of careless drivers, I would put the assholes who may or may not be driving over the speed limit (usually they’re men), and who weave from passing lane to outside lane without using their signal indicator, or, sometimes worse, stay in the passing lane no matter how fast they’re going. It’s a macho thing. The kind of macho thing that weak and insecure unmacho men do. Careless drivers also pass on a two-lane highway way later than they should, and manage to get back from the line of oncoming traffic just in time before they cause a head-on collision or force someone off the road.

Those in the category of just not knowing how to drive a car very well often drive too slowly. They’re not confident on the road and so they’re over-caution makes them dangerous. These are the drivers that lack good distance judgment, and so pull onto the highway from a sideroad without being able to assess whether they’re going to interfere with your trajectory. At worst, an accident; at best, you have to slow down in a hurry.

I’ve also looked at some statistics and scholarly articles about how much speeding “causes” or “contributes to” accidents on the highway. Transport Canada says that the three leading “contributing factors” in fatal accidents are speeding (24%), impairment (19%), and distraction (21%). An article in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, though, says that “Although speed is considered to be one of the main crash contributory factors, research findings are inconsistent.” The authors go on to describe “a new crash data aggregation approach that enables improved representation of the road conditions just before crash occurrences.” Their new model shows exactly the opposite: there is a negative relationship (not a positive correlation) between the speed a vehicle is being driven at whether it is involved in an accident.

There is something basically intuitive about this result, for me anyway. I find it embarrassing that police forces at all levels focus so much on speeders. And the news outlets compliantly report the horrors: a young driver was found to be driving 40 km/hour over the speed limit and so he was charged and his car was impounded. I find it embarrassing, too, the police vehicles wait under bridges or around hidden turns so that they can catch the drivers who are speeding when they have a perfect and smooth length of double-lane pavement ahead of them. There was (and may still be) one on the Trans-Canada highway between Kingston and Ottawa, Ontario, and if I happened to have the cruise control off and was crazily driving over 120, I would dutifully slow down until I got past the trap. Is this really a good way to spend the money of me and other taxpayers?

ChatGPT sums it up nicely: “Speeding is frequently associated with fatal collisions and often aggravates crashes, but it is not always the primary or necessary cause.” And just to translate that a bit … speeding is often one of the things going on when a fatal accident happens, and it often makes the results of an accident worse than it would have been, but it’s not always the main cause or the cause that, if removed, would have resulted in no accident in the first place.

And that’s all for today, episode 2 of the podcast. Thanks for listening and please join me again next Wednesday.