You mentioned it, but to clarify: cars are much safer for their occupants. As a pedestrian or cyclist, I'm pink mist whether the speeding car has lane assist or not.

He's talking about highway speeds. There shouldn't be pedestrians or cyclists there.

> Cars are now much much safer, and yet speed limits outside of cities have not changed to reflect this.

They're largely much bigger now and carry more kinetic energy and they're more of a danger to everyone around them.

And braking technology really hasn't advanced significantly compared to velocity squared.

Human reaction time also hasn't improved one bit and has largely gotten more and more distracted and worse.

With fatal accidents rising, I don't understand how the conclusion is that everything is so much safer than ever and that we need to be raising speed limits. I must not be blessed with good enough counterintuitive thinking skills.

I can drive stupid fast on the Autobahn and still be fairly safe, but it burns fuel at an alarming rate.

A few years ago, they considered a speed limit not for safety, but for the environment.

Another thing is that a modern car is not much safer in adverse conditions. When it snows or rains, things get dicey.

I'd say the majority of the country doesn't have predictive braking, lane assist, lane departure detection, adaptive cruise control.

Doesn't Australia have "follow the traffic" rules?

No, they will set up cameras and fine anybody going more than a few km/h or so over the speed limit (theoretically they can fine you for going 1 km/h over the limit but there is some kind of tolerance, people usually assume 10% but the police and road agencies don't disclose what it is (apparently it's not always the same for every road or for the conditions at the time either). I believe it's generally less than 10%).