The first week of winter... another rear bumper taken out by a sport-futility following too close. That it was on summer tires, too close, with a center of gravity high enough to impair braking on any surface, we'll put aside for now. But I could tell the overpaid dullard driving it had no idea that 50kmh (or 30mph) equates to 13.3 meters per second, or 43 feet. I don't think it was his tie cutting off the flow of blood to his brain, but he did threaten me with a lawsuit for braking too hard. Which I think inspired the nice policeman to write him a careless driving ticket.

Ask somebody what a mile, or a kilometer, looks like, or how long an hour takes. They are both measures that are without meaning to human perception. Would it be better that measures of speed were in meters (or feet) per second??

Or is this a matter of education??
-- sstvp, Dec 11 2009

Sorry, people would spend too much time staring at the sign trying to figure out how fast they were going and still hit you.
-- DIYMatt, Dec 11 2009


While the idea is not entirely without merit, the real problem is indeed the "dullards" who are spending so much of their cortical capacity on maintaining respiration that they have too little left to allocate to the task of driving.

Also, the "safe" speed for any given set o conditions can be a lot lower than the posted maximum speed - ice, snow, fog, rain can all drastically decrease visibility or increase stopping distances.

Better would be a head-up display like a reflector gunsight, which displays a colour-changing set of bars in the driver's vision, and integrates weather and road data to show the currant stopping distances given the speed of the vehicle.
-- 8th of 7, Dec 11 2009


...or is this a mater of pointless semantic quibbling. Even if the speed limit and your speedometer read in feet/second nobody is going to be able to accurately calculate their own stopping distance. Furthermore unless the car in front of you has a land anchor the question is pretty moot. What people should know is that following close behind another driver for no reason is rude.
-- WcW, Dec 11 2009


There is a game at wikispeedia.org which yells at you if you speed. Its called "Back Seat Driver".
-- carterson2, Dec 15 2009



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