10 minutes a day on a commute to work and back is significant and, if you drop down a couple mph, is low risk. That’s almost an extra hour a week without giving up any valuable activity.
I could only see the cost/benefit looking not worthwhile if you already have a lot of free time. An adult commuting 90 minutes a day might only have 2-4 hours of free time per day during the workweek.
Yes, this should also be considered although the rarity of a crash where the consequences will take longer to deal with means it isn’t meaningfully part of the time benefit calculation. Sorry to speak morbidly.
The effect also depends on the natural speed at which traffic flows and how the extra time is spent, as fatigue also increases crash risk.
There are exceptions to this though. If you're driving through Europe at night you can easily spend most of your trip on highways safely going 180kmh or faster, saving you many hours on longer trips.
You will most likely be partially liable for any accidents over 130kph because it is difficult for people to judge speeds over that amount.
This is why if you spend much time over that line, you will find that people will seemingly jump out from behind an LKW and cut you off. It's not because they're idiots or trying to intentionally crash, but rather they most likely completely misjudged your speed due to the innate human capacity for judging speed.
Therefore I've been told that while it's not against the StVO to drive over 130, doing so is a liability risk.
Just because you're driving fast doesn't mean you have to be driving dangerously, but of course there's going to be a significant correlation as idiots also like to drive fast.
I have no problem slowing down from 200 to 130 whenever I approach an entry ramp or pass a big truck, and I certainly aggressively avoid situations where I'd have to do so frequently.
Also, while going over 130 might strictly be a liability risk it does not mean that you're going to automatically be liable. See this case of a guy going 150, he didn't do anything wrong and wasn't held liable https://www.verkehrsrundschau.de/nachrichten/urteil-schnelle...
By Europe you are meaning Germany only, I believe, in most other European countries there is a speed limit of 130 km/h or 140 km/h, day or night doesn't matter:
Yep, but it doesn't change the "base" point, which is, you cannot legally drive faster than 120/130/140 kmh (depending on the country) and certainly NOT 180 kmh in any European country BUT in Germany (and only on some - many - strerches of the Autobahn, in some other there is anyway a speed limit of 120/130/140 kmh):
180kmh at night is definitely not safe on a highway. Even with perfect visibility during daytime, anything above 150-160kmh is pushing it for most of the highways I've traveled in Europe.
How come? The roads themselves certainly aren't the limiting factor, often you could go even faster.
> anything above 150-160kmh is pushing it for most of the highways I've traveled in Europe
Anything above 150-160kmh is certainly pushing it for most cars, the highways themselves tend to be fine for even faster speeds. There's a vast difference between speeding in a WV Polo and a BMW 7series, it's downright terrifying to go 160 in the Polo but the BMW won't start shaking like that even at 260.
I drive between Barcelona and Berlin pretty regularly, sometimes I go all the way to Bucharest. There are definitely stretches of road on those routes where you can't go fast in low traffic conditions, but they're in the minority.
Eg if you have a 100 mile drive on a 70mph road and you drive the entire way at 85mph your reward is saving about 10 minutes on a 1.5 hour trip.
The downside risk is getting charged for speeding and being delayed for much more than 10 minutes.
I've never though the cost/benefit shows it to be particularly worthwhile.