I have appreciated this thread as I stumbled upon it in the past couple of days. I've been in Scotland this past week and rented a car to drive to Inverness. I searched the internet to understand why the car would have an alarm that beeps the second you get over the speed limit, and the fact that I have to turn it off every single time I turn the car on.
I respect that Europeans and people living in the UK weight their priorities differently than in the US. I'm left-leaning and am engaged in public health efforts in the US, but I find both the low speed limits (20 mph throughout a town), people's insistance on driving those low speed limits, and the alarms quite perplexing. It's truly a cultural divide.
While I acknowledge faster impact means more damage and injuries, I don't perceive the frequency of these events to warrant this degree of restraint. There were a total of 7,522 pedestrian deaths in the US in 2022. Meanwhile, there are 284 Million cars registered in the USA that are driven an average of 13,500 miles. Thats just such a low rate when there are other things that have a significant higher risk. In contrast, there were 46,728 firearms deaths in the US in 2023. There are close to 400 million guns in the US. So on a per-object basis, firearms are much more dangerous than cars, especially since our cars are used almost daily and I have friends who only pull out their guns when hunting or heading to the range. To add to this, people in Georgia (Atlanta) view speed limits as a suggestion; people routinely drive 80+ MPH on our roads that are marked for 65 MPH. Any attempt to slow this down is met with backlash.
I'm not intending to change anyone's minds with this... I've appreaciated this thread more from the perspective of learning about cultural differences. Clearly people in the UK feel their way is right for them, and that's cool... and I did my best during my time to comply with local laws and regulations.
