Yes, I agree. The flow of traffic for most commuters, like myself, seem to around 75 mph.
"The speed limit is commonly set at or below the 85th percentile operating speed (being the speed which no more than 15% of traffic is exceeding)[41][42][43] and in the US is typically set 8 to 12 mph (13 to 19 km/h) below that speed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit
On the other hand, if the speed limit was set at 75mph, would that remain the common speed of traffic, or would the common speed increase with the limit?
Speed limits are 70MPH, 75MPH even 80MPH in some places in the US, apparently.[0] One could probably look at percentages of speeding tickets and reckless driving violations compared to states with lower limits and get some interesting results.
It would increase up to the point where people wouldn't feel comfortable driving faster.
There's a huge benefit to this: there would be less inconsistency between driving speeds. It is more dangerous when someone is going 85 and someone else is going 65 compared to 85 and 75.
The most dangerous is when one car is much faster than the others. There is little difference in terms of the chance of a crash if everyone is going 65 or everyone is going 75. The crash is more likely to be serious, but at least the people who are speeding are less likely to plow into someone when they're distracted.
car technology was 50 years less mature, but are our brains any better? There's a lot of studies showing the strong correlation between speed limits and car accident fatalities, even recently
I became much more skeptical about correlations after I read somewhere that cholesterol might be not a cause of heart disease, but rather a part of the body's reaction to heart disease. For some reason, that example just hit me really hard. People think that they can make causal conclusions from observed correlations, but they are wrong.
As a rule of thumb, any correlation observed in the wild has at least three equally plausible explanations, two of which are tailored to the narratives of the two main political parties.
It's another way that the state can selectively punish most any citizen at will, within the bounds of law.