Featured Image Credit: YouTube/STEMbite
Topics: Community, Social Media, Cars, YouTube
Gerrard Kaonga
A YouTuber explained just how much time you are really saving when you go above the speed limit - and it might not be as much as you are thinking.
No matter how long you've been driving or how good of a driver you think you are, you'd be telling little white lies if you argued that you have never gone above the speed limit.
As much as you might think it's not big deal - if you haven't been caught for it that is - YouTube page STEMbite released a video way back in 2013, explaining that doing so intentionally really isn’t worth it for the risks you can incur.
In one clip, he insisted that while increasing your risk of being stopped by the police and causing an accident, you actually aren’t arriving at your destination all that sooner.
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Speaking while they were driving a car, the YouTuber said: “When I am driving down the road, especially down the highway, I tend to want to go a little bit faster than what the speed limit says.
“If the speed limit is 25, I like to go 30 because I figure, what cop is going to pull me over for going 5 miles over the speed limit.
“But the more I learnt about math, the more I realized that speeding really doesn’t make sense. The difference between going 70 and 75 makes such a small difference in the time you actually arrive then it really doesn’t justify the risk.”
This is where he broke down his understanding, and to his credit, it does make sense.
The biggest issue, according to the YouTuber, is that people think about how many miles they are going per hour, rather than how much sooner they’ll arrive at their destination by going slightly faster.
So, he broke it down and explained that if you ended up going 5 miles per hour faster, just how much time do you actually save? And there comes the point that it really isn’t a lot.
He continued: “We can see that the difference between going 40mph and 60 mph means you save 30 whole seconds.
“But going up to 80 mph only saves you 15 seconds. In fact, the difference between 70 and 75mph only saves you 3 seconds over an entire minute.
“For most of our driving, and we are only driving 10 or 15 minutes, the gain we get from speeding is so small that it really doesn’t justify the risk.
“The relationship between the speed you go and the time it takes you to get somewhere is what we call an inverse relationship, it is just another way to show that the faster you go, the less that speeding helps you.”