Hot, Bad & Unpopular Takes

[SingingAnalyst]

Speed kills.

Or, to expand just a bit, high speeds are a major factor, I believe, in the frequency and especially the severity of accidents.

Certainly slow drivers (under 60 MPH) on freeways are a danger, but even here one has a better chance of avoiding a crash with such a driver if one is doing 65, rather than 75.

As I am fond of telling my Calculus students, the marginal time benefit from increasing your speed by 1 MPH obeys an inverse-square law: for example, increasing your speed from 70 to 71 MPH saves only one-quarter as much time as increasing one's speed from 35 to 36 MPH.

More to the point, even with today's car designs (and especially for pedestrians and cyclists), accidents are more severe at higher speeds. I feel our tendency to drive fast-- perhaps driven in part by our busy schedules, as well as suburban sprawl, is the main thing working against the great improvements we have seen in the auto accident fatality rate over the last 20 years.

[SingingAnalyst]

Restaurants with different hours for dine-in and drive-thru should be required to advertise the dining room hours at least as prominently as the drive-through hours.

When I order food, I expect to be able to sit down and enjoy it there.

If a place is advertised as being open, and it turns out the drive-thru is open but the dining room isn't, I will leave and go someplace else (or do without) rather than use the drive-thru.