very few crashes, no speed limit on most of it. The biggest issue with speeds higher then 55 is loss of mileage. At speeds over 55 your gas mileage goes down drastically.

It's clean and properly maintained!

No debris, no potholes, ho broken expansion joints, no grade over 4-degrees (up or down), in addition to drivers that understand how to move over when "asked" by the car flashing their brights behind them.

High speed is okay, so long as the road surface is ready for that kind of speed. One major thing that happens to roadways is that the higher the speed limit goes, the more stresses the surface.

And since we don't pay much right now for road maintenance, I don't see this trend spreading far at all.

I've driven it between Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, and what there is of it between Frankfurt and Koln. It's often like riding on a pool table. The concrete bed must be the thickness of an airport runway.

One quasi-humorous note though: Our German hosts told us that the reason why you never see a crash on the Autobahn is that when one is going 150, if you crash you end up nowhere near the Autobahn!

The closest I've gotten to that is watching Top Gear

I remember seeing a great show on it on the Discovery channel (back when they showed informative stuff) and, as I recall, the thickness of the roadway is indeed like a runway. Poured concrete thickness was either 16" or maybe 18" (40-46 cm.) That's where I learned about the grade being no more than four degrees. They really have to stretch out the fill when going over a mountain (in addition to lengthy tunnels or cuts.)

One thing they also had were dedicated crews whose only job was to clean and maintain the road and warning/reflector signs. They had specialized robot-arm rotary brushes on their trucks to clean the signs top to bottom.

To compare, I regularly see speed limit signs in neighborhoods around here there have been "greened" by nearby pine trees, and they've been that way for at least fifteen years. The 'rule' here seems to be "If it's still legible, don't clean it."

people obey the slower traffic keep right rule. It makes a huge difference in safety and it makes driving far more pleasant.

There is less lane changing and the traffic doesn't accumulate into clumps, stuck behind slower vehicles in the left lane.

or punishment is more severe (not including the inadvertent kind, i.e., crashes.)

Road debris is still a major issue/road hazard in this country. I have to wonder what people visiting from Europe think about that. I know from the last time my girlfriend visited, she thought the litter and trash along the roads was disgusting (she's from NZ.)

Most of the West (except some of Arizona) and the Northeast is relatively clean, but not the South. I very much noticed that when I moved from San Diego to Florida, though where I grew up very near the Mexican boarder in San Diego is becoming more and more littered.

I live in a relatively nice neighborhood in central Florida and I'm constantly picking up cans and cups in front of my house that people throw out their cars.

But I lived in St. Pete for several years. Directions in Pinellas Park go something like this (and it's a middle class neighborhood):

Take a left at the next street when you pass the bathtub planter on a yard. Go forward until you see the toilet sitting next to the stop sign, then take a right. Pass the house that has the garage door open and looks like it always has a yard sale going on, and you should see our place. If you pass the palm tree that is broken in half, you've gone too far.

it is more "Keep right EXCEPT to pass"

Which is posted in several states in this country, but is largely ignored.

Americans have deplorable "lane discipline". The English and the rest of the EU know how to properly use a multi lane, limited access throughway.

Americans, for as advanced as we are, are terribe drivers on the interstate.

In England and Germany, from what I understand, getting a drivers license is tantamount to getting a private pilots license in this country.

All this coming from a 35 year holder of a professional drivers license with now over 2 million miles accident free driving, though I have never driven a meter on the Autobahn. Driven a few miles in Australia and England, but not too much.

In west Texas you'll get pulled over if you drive in the left lane, even if nobody else is even close to you.

I'll stay out of the left lane, when possible, if there is any chance that the person behind me may want to go by.

It varies by region, but many people in much of the US have no clue about driving in the left lane. I don't get it. South Florida and El Paso, among other places, I find particularly stressful to drive in, due to no lane discipline.

Is not the most populous state

Texas has had some pretty horrendous acciedents. Not sure if speed was a factor or not

rather than say some traffic doing 55 and the rest doing 80.

It's not the speed but difference is speed that is key to reducing accidents.

.... than a person going 85mph

(I was admonished for saying it was the 75th percentile rule" in the past)

That is to say that the safest speed to travel a given stretch of roadway, REGARDLESS of the posted speed limit and conditions, is that which 75% of the traffic is flowing.

In other words, if the speed limit is posted at 35 MPH, but 75% of the traffic is flowing at 45 MPH, the safest speed is 45.

Conversely, if the speed limit is 70 and 75% of the traffic is flowing 40 MPH, the safest speed is 40.

And if the limit is 55 and everyone is running 85....well...you get the picture.

driving slower speed limits. When everyone is going to the same speed, nobody has to slam on their brakes or over-correct in an attempt to avoid a collision when coming up too fast on a slower driver.

around 65 mph.

Lock it in cruise and drive with the trucks, amazing how inefficient the car gets over 65 mph.

I wouldn't have any particular need for a speed limit over 70.

At eighty miles per hour they are burning almost twice as much gas as they would at fifty miles per hour, and that means putting twice as much pollutants in the air. Ain't Global Warming Grand?

You'll see big cars and SUV sales going up and conservation efforts going down.

When the shale boom is killed off, the Saudi's will reduce production and all those people will regret their purchases.

We drove 19 hours straight home this summer from vacation and average about 425 mile before a fill up. Using your logic, we should have gotten 800+ miles if I would have just drove home at 50 mph.

It is pretty basic science. The more you press on the accelerator the more gas you burn. If you believe you can drive at eighty miles an hour and use less or the same amount of gas as if you drove at fifty miles an hour then you might also believe Global Climate Change is all a hoax. The more gas you burn the more green house gases are put into our atmosphere. So enjoy your eighty miles an hour speed limits..

I challenged the double claim.

The faster you go, the harder the car has to work to against all those air molecules that are in the way.

There is a fair amount of research that supports the notion that a seemingly hazardous situation is actually safer than a situation that is more carefully controlled.
Fewer stop signs and traffic signals can result in lower accident rates.
While I agree that the difference in speed is the more important factor in highway accidents, I think that the 'unsafe is safe' proposition applies to this as well.
A driver forced to drive at moderate speed - more regulation - might not be as attentive to driving as a driver who is going faster and perhaps, more reliant on himself to be safe.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos-european-cities-do-away-with-traffic-signs-a-448747.html

miles in front of you. When the limit is 80 people there are doing 90 or better. That speed scares some people and I think some cars are not equipped to be driven that fast. They could be old and full of neglected repair conditions.

A low weight 4 cylinder economy car is really not aerodynamically designed to stay fully stable when the air rushing under the car exceeds 90mph. Lots of day to day cars could handle it, but certainly not all.

I have a quite old BMW i drive in the winter. (It's a 1998). That is really low to the ground, has a low profile spoiler on the trunk, and has diverter fins along the front bumper to push as much air around the car as possible instead of under it.

It's only a 2.3 liter engine but i have little doubt that when it was fairly new it could sustain 125 mph for a really long time and be very stable.

At the age it is now, with the engine and suspension so long in the tooth, the only way that thing would do 125 now is if i dropped it out of a plane.

Club of America addition Mustang. It was very hard to keep close to the speed limit. I was over 100 several times until my wife figured out how fast we were going.

the laws of physics have been repealed.

speed still caused 40% of the fatal accidents. Apparently 4 fewer speed deaths is an accomplishment...

http://publicsafety.utah.gov/highwaysafety/statistics.html

http://publicsafety.utah.gov/highwaysafety/documents/Section4Speed2013_000.pdf

it's a fatal. Bottom line is Driver Skill Sets. We travel those 80 mph areas,and the most dangerous things are the Tractor Trailers Cowboying at 80. It ain't pretty seeing 120k lb. rig blowing by you especially if your towing a R/V. Have to remember,fuel prices have come down,more people will be out there and these numbers will change dramatically as the various skill sets hit the road. Just a hoot to watch some of those clowns out there doing 80 plus on wet roads,usually you find them down the road in the ditch up against a fence line or out into the desert kissing the Sage Brush.

when my ex-husband and I were traveling by car to California, while going through desert areas there were no speeding limits. But there were crosses along the roads where people had been killed.

Much faster does not feel safe to me, even with a car with all the bells and whistles. Or as belly and whistlely as a ten year old car can have.

. . . and on the Tangenziale in northern Italy, i did 250kph for well over an hour. (BMW 5 series every time in Germany, and a Alfa T-Spark each time in Italy.)

The dotted white line becomes one continuous stripe and the light poles become a fence. There is no looking around. It's strictly "pay attention to what you're doing" driving.

I was driving a Ford Fairmont. Cruise control, an absolutely straight, flat, and unencumbered road that was hours and hours long, not far from the southern shores. the road was so straight and flat that I could steer with a finger.

(of course, the late 1980s fairmont (australian) was nothing like the rust buckets sold here. This was an 8 cylinder, turbo-charged, two seat sports car that could ((and did)) go much faster.)

I found that the higher speed made me more careful and more aware of my driving than I would have been at lower speeds.

It was like 400 miles of straight road. Did no less than 90mph and most cars were passing me.