Why do drivers speed down the highway?

Almost everyone knows that drivers generally speed, ignoring the law because it’s so easy to get away with it in this case. So the answer(s) sought is not “because it’s easy to get away with it,” but why the large majority of drivers wish to speed. Romans 13 also does not have anything directly to do with this, but in a discussion it may figure in among believers.

 

How do you arbitrarily determine that? Are you not saying it's too slow just because a vast majority want to go faster?

 

The speed limit for a left lane should be higher than for others? I thought in most states now it is illegal to 'cruise' in the left lane; that lane is for passing. One problem I've seen is a car gets into the left lane to pass, then the vehicle it was passing speeds up, so the passing car would have to increase speed more than is desired, or fall back to get into the right lane again, which may be difficult. That's one of my long-time observations: if a car is going say, 59, in the right lane and the car behind wants to go 60, that car will try to pass. But in a majority of cases, something like the power of suggestion seems to tell the slightly slower car to pick up. The driver may not even know it, but he/she does speed up very slightly, creating the sitation I described.

Then it's tailgating for the car trapped for a moment in the left lane, which sometimes will not speed up enough to overtake the car it meant to pass. But "stict enforcement of too slow vehicles"... do you want to ticket those old drivers who don't react quickly or trust themselves to drive as fast as the average driver, or do you want to make licensing tests more rigid, thereby making many septagenerians (or older) more dependent?

That's part of the purpose of this poll & thread: driving is made challenging, sometimes perilous, for those who, for whatever reason, don't keep up with the flow. And the flow is faster than it has to be... so why have we made it thus?

 

Neither the poll nor the discussion has gone as I had thought. I remain the lone answer to the "...ancient instinct..." idea, which I have gradually developed over the years. Of course we know we can almost always get away with speeding 5-10 mph over the posted limit, because one usually has to be going faster than that before any l.e. officers will even consider pulling one over. But what's really behind this?

I remember years ago, when the highway speed limit was 55 (a federal requirement for states to implement if they are going to get federal $$ to build highways), and a guy a year or 2 younger than I wore a T-shirt to work with the 55 in a square and above it "Can't drive..." Since I started driving when that was the limit, obviously he did, too. So he had never legally driven above 55. Why was that law unreasonable to someone who had always driven under it (unless he drove as an unlicensed 13 or 14 year old)? Because the consensus told him so? Yes-- but what would he be, or how would he feel, driving 'that slow' if everybody he knew, and almost every other driver on the highway, drove faster? A wimp? a sissy? a goody-goody? Like the slower of the 2 men being chased by a bear, who said, "We can't outrun that bear!" and the faster man said, "I don't have to outrun that bear-- I just have to outrun YOU!"

What makes cattle stampede? Not all of them are afrighted by the boulder that came rolling down or the howl of a wolf from a mile away. But when a few got spooked, they took off in the direction away from it, the rest joined in, and they keep running for miles. I doubt if they process any such thought as "Uh, what are a-runnin' for? Moo-ooh!" They just take off and try to run as fast as the others around them. Humans may not qualify (exactly) as herd animals, but we have the same instincts to stay around our "own kind" doing what they do, hopefully better. That explains the big interest in athletic competition, for example. So why wouldn't it apply to extensions of our technology into what we think are necessities, like going to work, getting back to those important to us, accomplishing whatever 'missions' we have to do?

Okay, this may have brought laughs already. But that's what I think of when I drive about 16 miles on the highway to work and 16 miles back at 60 mph, because I have experimented and determined that that I get 1.8 extra miles per gallon of fuel compared to when I drive 70, like most other drivers (with 'local' driving the same). On that 18-mile stretch, the difference in time is only 2 minutes, which is much less than my self-required 12 minutes 'of play' to avoid being late by occasional slowdowns.