On various car blogs and forums, you'll sometimes hear complaining about America's relatively low speed limits. "After all, the German Autobahn has unrestricted sections!"
Yes, they do. I've been a passenger in a car on an unrestricted section, the occasion being the fastest I've ever traveled in a car. (If I recall correctly, it was about 200 kilometers per hour, or about 124 mph. In a Citroen. Oy vey.) But always during discussions of this sort, Americans forget two very important things.
The first is driver training. It's an awful lot harder - and much more expensive - to get your driver's license in most of Europe than it is here in the United States. Europeans get taught things like don't pass on the right, move over for faster traffic, and oh, heavens, how to parallel park.
And the second thing is vehicle inspections. Most states in the US don't have them, and where we do have them, they are nowhere near as rigorous as what the poor Germans have to deal with. Every two years. According to this, one in five cars fail on the first attempt. You get one additional attempt; fail again, and you're going car shopping for a new car.
It's not entirely a bad thing, honestly. It prevents things like using expanding builder's foam to fill rust holes, driving permanently on a space-saver spare, car so badly out of alignment the car is driving sideways down the road, tires so bad the wheels are wobbling back and forth, all things I've seen on the highway. Then again, with that strict of a standard, I doubt my own family would be able to own a car, period. Our beloved old Mercedes would have long ago gone to the big metal crusher in the sky. *sniff*
So yes, fellow American car enthusiasts, the Europeans get to go fast. But they pay for it. In money and in hassle.
Still, I could tear my hair out driving through Milwaukee, WI. Thirty-five miles per hour on a controlled-access, divided, four-lane parkway? Are you nuts, people? A happy medium would sure be nice.
