Um they are

Well, both.

If the road were clear around me, I could easily hold 100+ off the highway. I’ve got huge streets near me with long curves. No problem for my relatively new tires and well-maintained vehicle.

Once we add cars to the mix, I can no longer go that fast. Too many other cars, if I just weave around them, I can go fast again. Who wants all this power sitting behind a Sentra?

Yay! I’m free! Fast fast fast until more cars again. A little bob and weave… Crash.

This road is literally as wide as the highway but the speed limit is 45mph.

The road always has traffic, always construction, always debris from poorly maintained cars or accidents which means you can’t go fast but the road itself was designed for the Daytona 500. The ‘speed limit’ is set for a pace that makes 18 wheelers look fast.

So, the obvious answer said by every Suburban with scrapes on the side and Altima with paper tags is “My car isn’t going to fail or crash and in ideal conditions should have no problem redlining all the way down this thing so I should try that in five o’clock traffic.”

It’s both. They make it so you want to speed so they can generate revenue. Wide lanes and low speed limits can yield a lot of tickets

It’s both because there is more than one kind of road.

America really likes stroads which give the impression that you can safely travel at speeds that are actually dangerous. We do that often in neighborhoods where we should be going 20-25 max but the design of the roads encourages us to drive faster. Since the speed limit is often actually at a safe speed, the issue of speeding is about the design of the road and not the speed limit.

Larger roads like highways, freeways, and expressways are designed for high-speed travel but often have speed limits that are low for the sake of revenue generation. If you’ve ever driven through a small town where the highway design doesn’t change but the speed suddenly drops from 65 to 35 you know what I mean. In those cases the problem is with the arbitrarily low speed limit as some states have raised the cap up to 80 and have not seen a substantial increase in accident-related injuries and deaths.

Connector roads often suffer from one or the other problem listed above. They are either designed to make you feel like you can go 60 when you should be going 40 or are set at 30 when you could safely go 40. The road design needs to match the safe speed by making drivers feel unsafe when they exceed that speed and not unnecessarily penalize them by not putting the limit lower than that speed.

Both of those result in speeding but have different causes.

fwiw, the roads are constantly littered with accidents and the US has the highest pedestrian fatality rate out of all “western” nations

They all have telematics in their trucks, and I know they all use the data in the case of accidents to prove fault. Amazon specifically monitors speed and will fire drivers if they do it too much. Wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if they started sharing that info.

The key that opens anything.

One wonders whether instance companies will incentivize these vehicles with lower rates.

I live in Estonia.

For one, car insurance depends on your basic demographics (car registration location, owner’s years of driving/insuring experience), the car’s power rating and make/model - and finally, accident history. For any type of insurance that covers your own vehicle as well, it also takes into account the age and value of the vehicle (for the mandatory liability insurance, that’s irrelevant).

For medical insurance, your prior medical history doesn’t matter, there are no premiums. Your options are (simplified, there are some others too):

1. Work and have social tax paid for you by the employer (they don’t get to weasel out of this with a regular work contract)

2. Be an entrepreneur and pay yourself at least the minimum monthly salary with social tax, the rest you can take out as dividends or invest into growing the company

3. Be a student, including university

4. Be underage (this also gives you dental! I do wish everyone got dental)

5. Be registered as unemployed and at least act like you’re trying to find a job

6. Have some sort of permanent disability that’s severely impacting your ability to work

7. Have a child under 3 years old

8. If nothing else applies to you, you can pay a certain sum which was either monthly or quarterly, to have the same health insurance (this is mostly for those entrepreneurs who don’t want to pay themselves even a minimum salary because they’re already loaded and would rather avoid paying payroll taxes on themselves and only pay income tax if/when taking out dividends). I suppose you could also do it if your income is entirely illegal and therefore untaxed.

If you hit any of these, you pay €5 per doctor’s appointment, with some exceptions. Private care is more expensive. If you don’t in any way qualify for the national medical insurance, you’ll have to pay for your procedures and stuff, but the prices are reasonable usually.

As for liability insurance for medical malpractice and the police - I’m not 100% sure, but I do believe that victims get compensated by either the hospital, or the government in the case of the police. In any case, it’s very rare for anything like this to happen luckily.

I do believe life insurance that pays out if you die prematurely or get a major injury or disease, will still depend on your medical history - or at least whether you smoke and drink alcohol.

You do realize insurance companies were recently proven to be purchasing data secretly created from our own vehicles so they could raise rates, right? Not sure it “works” here in the US…