>Yeah, better to be confused and drive in to a ditch at 20 mph than confident and t-bone a family at 50.
This shouldn't be subjective at all. It's very easy to calculate out minutes lost to traffic from minor accidents vs death causing accidents and compare the two and see where the crossover points are depending upon their relative rates and impacts.
To use an extreme hypothetical example, I don't even know how old you are but it's probably perfectly justifiable 10x over to just shoot you (or me or anyone short of the pope) and throw you in the Hudson if the alternative is "the George Washington is closed for 6hr" or something.
And on the other end of the spectrum roads get closed for months on whims for maintenance reasons in rural areas all the time and probably have less cumulative life lost than, idk, some mundane waste of time.
I'm not privy to the numbers for all the real world situations that exist in the middle ground but I'm sure they're out there and once you've got them it's simple math to decide what configuration results in less life lost. Obviously you can pro-rate the years, account for disability and injury, add money to the equation, etc. But that's all easy if you've got the numbers (which we generally do for auto accidents).
