Basically, once you hit a comfortable 65 or 70 on the road, don’t bother. That’s enough. It’s a waste of time because the risk you encounter—the risk you incur on yourself, the risk you effectively impose on other people by going any faster—is utterly pointless in terms of time saved.

In the last decade or so, a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous—narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.

The right metaphor here is not “Let’s stick with horses, even though automobiles get around,” because automobiles were clearly a more energy- and monetarily efficient way of moving things from A to B, just like email is clearly a more efficient way for me to deliver a memo to you than a fax machine. The metaphor is that it took a while before we

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