Having lived next to the Great Lakes and in California: That is not how water shortages are created.

I’d also throw in: dying while traveling. Whether by car (which yes, is quite risky relative to other things we do but extremely safe compared to every other form of ground transportation we’ve ever adopted at a mass scale), by train (except that one in Florida), or especially by air, dying in transit is just not…

And for anyone who complains: I-5 is almost intolerably boring with the speedometer in double digits.

Not true. Management/shareholder capitalism is structured to avoid long-term thinking. If you can make a profit today at the expense of tomorrow, you do it unless you have a really unique corporate governance structure.

No, but they do lower prices to stimulate demand or drive competitors out of business. 

Or because high gas prices are regressive. Or because a regulator forces them to.

Um...

WTF is a free market? There is no such thing, a market is just a mechanism created by a series of rules.

Speeds aren’t set to an equivalent level of safety. If your faulty syllogism were correct, there would be no difference in safety between going quickly on a “safe” road and going slowly on another one.

Which Buffy scene to post?

Came here to post exactly this.

That’s not accurate. There is no simple relationship between driving speed and risk, and the fastest roads are statistically the safest.

How about everybody just stays in the right lane except to pass?

Yes. Despite everything, only about 7,000 Americans per year die in car crashes which don’t involve either alcohol (nothing to do with speed) or not wearing a seatbelt (which should just be considered vehicular suicide). That’s over billions of vehicle miles traveled. Turns out that while driving is the riskiest thing…

Except it’s true, as has been proven by virtually every study ever conducted on freeway speeds. They show universally that speed differential, not raw speed, is inversely correlated with safety.

“Speeding-related” is itself a very vague term which doesn’t really mean much, if you look into how the classifications work. Essentially, imagine that every driver on a given stretch of road is going 10 over the speed limit. If one of them gets distracted by a cell phone and veers off the road, it could very well be…

20 over is nothing on a freeway, especially those that still have the double-nickel. 20 over on a side street, on the other hand...

I mean, it’d be no worse than Taste of Chicago. Check out how Long Beach sets up for their race, they keep most streets open until the last second and Shoreline is reopened by Monday morning.

Battery tender!

How about John Mulaney?