A stretch of empty interstate at 2 a.m. A lone truck driver rolls down the highway at exactly 65, all because a small white sign with black lettering tells him that’s the speed. No exceptions. Even though he can see three miles ahead, not a car in sight. He knows his rig. And this specific stretch of highway. But the sign? It doesn’t.

Scrapping speed limits means we trust every driver on the road to travel at whatever speed they feel is safe. Trust the driver. Not the reflective lettering on the sign.

Speed limits treat every driver the same. The sign doesn’t care if you’ve logged 500,000 miles of drive time or fifty-three miles. Mile-per-hour signs ignore weather, traffic, visibility, and each driver’s own judgment. A blanket number doesn’t account for a dry, empty highway on a clear afternoon versus that same stretch in a downpour. Drivers already do this, adjusting their speed to road conditions—the limits just add a legal tripwire on top of decisions their state trusts them to make.

Remove the limits. Let drivers take full ownership of the outcome. No more gaming a radar gun. No more budgeting five extra minutes for the possibility of a ticket. Drivers would start to watch the road, instead of the rearview mirror for a police officer. Insurance companies could step into the gap left by regulation—reckless drivers pay more. Careful drivers pay less. And the market prices their liability rather than a statute.

Germany’s autobahn is cited as proof of concept. Long stretches carry no fixed limit. And Germany’s fatality rate per mile driven? It’s lower than many limited highways in the U.S.

Law enforcement resources would also shift. Officers would spend less time running speed traps on empty roads and more time on drunk driving, distracted driving, and reckless maneuvers—the behaviors causing the deadliest crashes. Speed alone rarely kills. It’s when you combine speed with impairment, distraction, or bad last-second decisions.

The case against no limits runs strong. But it does deserve a fair hearing.

Traffic engineers point out that speed differentials—not raw speed—cause many crashes. A road with no limit invites wildly different personal choices about what a “safe” speed is, and the gap between the cautious driver at 55 and the confident driver at 100 does create potentially dangerous merging and passing. Crash energy also scales with the square of velocity, so even a modest increase in average speed raises the severity of the crashes that do happen, especially for pedestrians and cyclists sharing the road.

Insurance-based accountability sounds efficient in theory. But that operates after the fact, because it prices the risk. Insurance doesn’t prevent a crash from happening. And regarding Germany’s autobahn success, it leans heavily on factors the U.S. interstate system doesn’t share: rigorous driver licensing, no right-lane passing, heavy enforcement of lane discipline, and roads engineered specifically for high-speed travel.

Critics also note that “drive at your own risk” doesn’t stay contained to the individual — a crash at 100 mph endangers everyone nearby, not just the driver who chose to travel at that speed.

The debate comes down to one question: does speed regulation exist to protect the driver from himself, or to protect everyone else from the driver?

The answer to the question shapes everything else.