Key point of the whole article and you fail to even mention it. In Germany, getting your licence is a costly and difficult procedure where you must actually know how to drive (?!) to obtain a licence. therefor getting your licence is a serious privilege. here it is all too easy to get your licence and is seen as a ‘right’.

LOL, LOL, and LOL again.

1. Australian motorways vs german. Yes you are right to some extent but it is a chicken and egg problem. If the original design spec of the highway is always 110k/h then that’s all they will build it to. Australia needs to get out of the stone age and start building mega highways spec’d to 250k/h. This is what Germany did with the Autobahn network 70 years ago, and look what it has done for their car industry

2. Cars are not built for that speed? Are you an automotive engineer? Modern cars are more than capable of cruising at 130k/hr (if they weren’t they would fall apart just from normal everyday slow driving!) The point people are trying to make here is driver maturity and knowing your car. If you were to drive at an obviously excessive speed for your car and conditions on an unrestricted highway, cops would have every right to pull you over and fine you massively. This is the difference in paradigms. People think it is just about the car, but it is more about the driver than the car. As technology improves, the safety, speed, power and reliability of cars increases. Cars today are so much more powerful, more safe, stop and turn incredibly well compared to 50 years ago yet people still manage to crash them at the same rate even though the speed limits have not changed in those 50 years!

3. Speeding is never justified? In a place like Australia where there are massive massive distances to cover, high speeds are justified. Taking twice as long to cover a distance at a crawling pace causes driver fatigue, which can have fatal consequences. Australia needs an interstate unrestricted megahighway system (the Australian autobahn!) We need to push the limits of road and car design for technology to continuously improve, currently we are nearly going backwards. Northern Territory was a good example of unrestricted highways working effectively in Australia. Despite being a less than ideal network, two lane highways with huge road trains everywhere, it worked. Drivers maintained their own speed, were curteous to others and covered the massive distances in an efficient time. Recently NT caved in to the beurocracy and implemented a 130k/h limit

4. You should catch the train, your thinking disqualifies you from driving a car.

There is such a thing as safe speeding, Germany is proof of this, we just need to be more sensible on the road, more courteous and have some roads designated higher speed limits.

Great Article.

As i said, i couldnt imagine living in a country without deristricted highways, but i couldnt imagine to live in a country with people who did not learn proper driving allowed driving on highways, either.

So i think proper driving is the main assumption.

Greeting from Germany,

Hans