Dangerous Roads newsletter: How much time does speeding actually save?

If you drive regularly on Long Island, it probably happens to you every few weeks: You’re moving along with the flow of traffic when some speedster, recklessly weaving between lanes, roars by you at top speed. Then you reunite with them — at the next light. (If that hasn’t happened to you, maybe you’re the one doing the roaring.)

Last week I mused about how driving excessively fast is ingrained in Long Island’s culture, like bagels and shopping malls. Days later, my Newsday colleagues Robert Brodsky and Michael O'Keeffe backed up my assertion with an alarming report on the problem of speeding, including a sharp increase in serious speed-related crashes.

"Senseless" is a term often used to describe crashes, but it’s especially accurate when you dig into how ineffective speeding usually is. A number of studies have addressed the reality that, in most cases, the amount of time saved by driving over the speed limit is pretty negligible. There's even a handy online calculator to help you figure out how much time you are — or are not — saving, shouldispeed.com.

Sticking to the speed limit of 55 mph, it takes 10 minutes and 55 seconds to traverse a 10-mile stretch — roughly the distance between the Long Island Expressway's Exit 49 in Melville and Exit 56 in Hauppauge.

Driving 10 miles over the speed limit, you’d cover the same distance in nine minutes and 14 seconds, a savings of one minute and 41 seconds.

Going 75 mph, you’d get there in eight minutes flat — two minutes and 55 seconds faster than the guy following the speed limit.

In exchange for saving less than three minutes, not only would you run the risk of getting a speeding ticket, you’d also significantly increase your likelihood of being involved in a dangerous wreck. And the time savings could be even less on streets with stop lights or heavy traffic.

I’ll put it another way. In my 10-mile LIE commute scenario, if, upon reaching his exit, the guy driving 20 miles over the speed limit immediately pulled over and pressed play on Sammy Hagar’s four-minute, 13-second-long classic, "I Can’t Drive 55," the guitar solo would barely be over by the time the guy who could drive 55 caught up.

Readers speak up

An email sent to me last month helped inspire this column. 

As an experiment I drove a certain length of road doing the speed limit, checking the time it took. I then repeated the exercise going as fast as I could — I saved one second off of my trip.

You may want to do a study on this and advertise it.

Thanks,

Dennis Donoghue

And thank you for planting the seed for this week’s newsletter. If you’ve got an idea for a future topic, send it to roads@newsday.com.

By Alfonso A. Castillo

alfonso.castillo@newsday.com@alfonsoreports

Alfonso Castillo has been reporting for Newsday since 1999 and covering the transportation beat since 2008. He grew up in the Bronx and Queens and now lives in Valley Stream with his wife and two sons.