The dangers of reckless driving and the misconceptions about time saved.

On a local forum for car enthusiasts, someone posted a video a while back showing a continuous stream of cars (within sight) on a Saturday morning, a procession of city dwellers leaving for their dachas. And one jerk in a Renault Logan kept overtaking at every opportunity and cutting back in. He overtook badly, a couple of times not making it back into his lane and forcing oncoming traffic to swerve onto the shoulder. Most of the sensible drivers laughed it off, like "what an idiot, he's still going at the same speed as everyone else."

But a few morons chimed in, and the discussion predictably degenerated from that specific clip to the general topic of overtaking. And one guy was dead serious: "If I'm driving 50 km and the speed difference between 120 km/h and 90 km/h is 30 km/h, that means I save 50/30=1.7 hours when I get to my destination." And several people supported him, like "yeah, an hour and a half saved." So here's the calculation for some of them:

To travel 50 kilometers at 120 km/h, it will take: 50/120=0.417 hours, which is 0.417*60=25 minutes.

To travel 50 kilometers at 90 km/h, it will take: 50/90=0.555 hours, which is 0.555*60=33.333 minutes.

The difference for 50 kilometers is 8.333 minutes.

Just eight damn minutes.

And some people still weren't convinced, it seems that many reckless drivers sincerely believe that they're saving a lot of time. They need to go back to driver's ed and do some train problems.

P.S. This is a story my uncle told me. He retired from his job as deputy commander of a separate traffic police battalion and became an instructor at a driving school. This was in the early 2000s. They had an argument with another instructor about whether it was worth driving fast in the city. The argument went like this: an experienced driver (the other instructor) and a novice student drive the same route, from the northernmost to the southernmost point of the city, about 27 km, on city streets. My uncle claimed that the time difference would be less than 10 minutes. The other instructor claimed that it would be more than 10 minutes (and in fact, more than half an hour). Another former traffic cop sat in the car as an independent arbitrator in the dispute (they took turns driving the same car). The bet was two bottles of vodka. Long story short, the car with the instructor at the wheel completed the route faster than the student's car... by 11 minutes! My uncle, of course, lost and honestly gave up two bottles of vodka. But think about it - an experienced driver (who even broke a few rules, ran a couple of yellows, and exceeded the speed limit) won by 11 minutes over a student who barely made it, and was also stalling at traffic lights.