The police (and everyone else) ignoring the rules does not change the fact that you would save a lot of money on fuel if you obeyed the speed limit, nor the fact that you could be fined for speeding.

I’ve never understood the drive to go so fast.

I knew a guy in the UK who, when I asked him why he was doing 98 mph (speed limit was 70, we were one of two cars going to a stag do, the other car was obeying the speed limit and therefore arrived 25 minutes later), gave me the answer of “If I was going faster and was caught, I would have to waste time going to court to prove I wasn’t driving dangerously” rather than slowing down.

(He got a lot of speeding tickets and penalty points before this; penalty points are a UK road law thing, get enough and you lose you licence).

The odds of getting pulled over in the western US for going less than 10 MPH over the speed limit are minute.

As is the extra fuel cost to driving 10 over.

And when it’s 500 miles to the next national park, that’s another hour of hiking. Let me know when you have to drive from London to the northern tip of Scotland for an event, that’s just an average day on our summer vacation trips.

What you wrote does nothing to contradict the ordinal claim that “So much of what is toxic about cars and car culture could be fixed by downsizing and slowing them. Primarily, less injuries and deaths - but also lower overall energy consumption”.

It also does not really deal with you being one change of enforcement policy from having a problem: if you go 10 mph over the limit continually for 3 hours, is that one speeding offence total, one offence per road you are on, one offence per state (city?) you pass through, or something else?

What you have is the capacity and the habit of doing something. That’s different from it being good that we live in a world where it is normal for most people. I have the capacity to take ten international flights in one year, and I visited the UK from Germany 8 times last year to make sure I didn’t lose contact with any friends when Brexit happened, but everyone doing that every year would be bad for the environment, and I have no internetion of repeating that year of travel.

> Let me know when you have to drive from London to the northern tip of Scotland for an event

I don’t own a car; I’d either fly or take the train. That trip would be CO2 intensive no matter what option I take, but the rest of the year I still don’t have a car.

(Right now I’m spending an hour each way walking to the office rather than taking public transport on the few occasions I can’t work from home, but normally I prefer trains. That said, I have done a 1080 km cycle holiday once).