My car gets better gas mileage at about 10mph over on the non interstate highway I take to work daily because I don't have a gear that fits the suggested speed well.
The drive is almost an hour long so it is actually a little bit of a time saver two
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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United States | News & Politics
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Here's the thing, every time I hear about speeding I hear the same thing "it doesn't actually save you any time", "you'll just hit the next light", etc. No one who is speeding really cares about any of that.
going fast is fun, that's all there is to it
My commute is like 15 miles and sometimes I go 5 over and it saves me a couple minutes I find worth it.
5 over absolutely does not save you a couple minutes, more like a little more than a single minute.
You don't know that. Maybe their speed limit is only 5
no it doesn't. one of the few things that makes me super mad in city traffic is motherfuckers on cars cutting everyone off (and sometimes risking your life) to accelerate hard.
because i'll always find them stopped at the next stoplight like the stupid sitting ducks they are. the flow of traffic is dictated by the traffic engineering, not your willingness to hurt everyone else.
i thought this was c/fuckcars for a brief
Speeding in your car to work, to pick up your children from school, or go from one errand to the next not only wastes money in gas and sends harmful emissions into the air, it barely saves you time
Long distance it help.
When I take four hour road trips up north on the interstate, many drivers are doing ~80-85mph. Although fuel economy goes down, you can definitely shave off 20-30 minutes over the drive so I do understand why people do it. It never makes sense to speed around town or in short trips, however.
Exactly this, by driving 20% faster you're cutting off 20% of the total trip time, which can be massive on long drives.
No, that's not how the math works out. Doubling your speed only halves the time it takes.
If I'm driving 100km and I drive 120km/h
Im arriving 20% faster..
No, you should actually follow through with the math. I used a simple example in hopes it would be obvious.
At a distance of 100km it take 60 minutes at 100kph. Change that to 120kph and it takes 50 minutes. 20% quicker would be 48 minutes. 20% faster gets you there 16.666% quicker.
Uhh, yeah..
You might save a little time in those cases, but if you’re speeding all the time throughout a long distance trip… that’s just increasing the chances you’ll die in a car accident tbh
University of Minnesota researchers analyzed 120 million vehicle trips across the United States from four Wednesdays in 2021 using driving data on national road networks, speed limits and U.S. Geological Survey elevation data. The analysis included roads with speed limits of 45 mph (72 kph) and higher.
Where did they get the data? Did the drivers of all 120 million trips consent to being part of their study?
"Driving data on national road networks" sounds innocuous, but hides a lot of questions. Was it part of information gathered by the governments for toll roads, or for other reasons? Or was it telemetry gathered from the cars themselves? Do the drivers know that their data on their individual trips is being distributed to researchers?
This is a giant red flag to me. Our information is being distributed everywhere, and there's fuck-all we can do about it....
You are very confused. These kinds of studies have been common since at least the 1940s.
I could be. But where do they get the data?
If you really want to know, you’d need to get a copy of the paper.
University research on human subjects follow a number of elaborate privacy rules, including those of the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects. Researchers aren’t interested in our individual data; they’re interested in our data in aggregate for statistical analysis.
Researchers aren't interested in our individual data, but companies sure are interested in selling it....
Yes, of course. But that’s upstream from this research. The data would have existed regardless.
Speeding (driving faster) keeps one involved in driving. Poking along just dulls your senses especially on long trips. We've made driving too easy. It should be more difficult so that no one every thinks of multi-tasking (doing visual things on the phone) while driving.
I agree, driving should be more difficult, in the sense that cars should be taxed heavily directly to fund public transportation :)
make trains available to go to everywhere, roads will be empty and speeding will be safe 👍
Agree when I'm going slow I find my mind starts wandering and I'm looking around and not paying as much attention to the road, I admit that may be a fault of my own nervous system, but regardless it's an issue