From May 27 to 31, Road Safety is organizing a major awareness campaign on the road risk for employers. An approach that is all the more laudable given that, according to the organization, nearly 500 people died in 2022 during work-related journeys. Except that a post published in this context on social networks caused a lot of reaction from Internet users, the nicest ones accusing the Road Safety intern of not knowing how to count.
“By increasing your speed by 10 km/h over a 30 kilometer journey, you only save 30 seconds. Is it really worth taking the risk? », asks Road Safety in a tweet taken up by the Ministry of the Interior. And, looking at it like that, the logical answer is simply “no”. Except that the title of the problem still raised eyebrows among some internet users who are good at math.
“The calculations are not good”
“Who is the intern writing your tweets?” It’s completely false,” Henri rages. “The calculations are not correct. Unless we’re talking about… 6 kilometers! », assures Antoine. “Waze does not agree with this tweet,” quips Beaujak. And some refer to Chat GPT to prove that Road Safety is failing. As a result, 20 minutes asked the AI to do the math for us again: “On a road limited to 80 km/h during a 30 km trip, how much time will I save if I drive at 90 km/h? “. The operation was repeated for speed limits of 110, 70 and 130 km/h.
According to Chat GPT results, the time saved ranges from 59.4 seconds to 192.6 seconds. And as the title of Road Safety talks about saving “on average” 30 seconds, we took an average of these times, established at 120.9 seconds, or a little more than 2 minutes. Indeed, therefore, the calculation is not good. In fact, to obtain the result put forward by the organization, it would be necessary to drive at 194.8 km/h on a road limited to 184.8 km/h, which is possibly possible in Germany and not in France.
Some Internet users nevertheless put the possible blunder into perspective. “We are talking about a journey, not a portion of a journey. So you have to count the initial start and final stop, and all the gear changes during the journey,” says Adrien. “We laugh, but I am studying this problem with my students: if we estimate that over 30 km, we can only ride at maximum 50% of the time, that changes the situation,” adds Phil. Except that in this case, unless you know the famous route, the calculation is impossible.