"I have nothing to hide"
"Have you ever sped on the highway?"
"Well, yes"
"Imagine if the government reveals it's been tracking everyone's speed, and has decided to write everyone tickets for speeding."
"That's insane, the government can't do that!"
"Exactly"
It is maybe unfair because of a sudden burden and no ability to change your behavior before it added up to a huge sum, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with privacy.
Gone are the days during the Cold War where you could say, "What is this, Soviet Russia?" and have anyone squirm at the comparison.
The numbers tattooed on Holocaust prisoners' arms were IBM data identifiers.
A road that meets MUTCD standards is usually guaranteed to have at least 15% of drivers speeding on it by design.
For most accidents there is more than one factor that contributed to the accident. While speed is a measurable and oft-cited factor in a crash, it is not necessarily the reason that the crash occurred. Example: Someone drives 75 in a 70 zone, stops paying attention, and drives off the road into a wall. Speed and inattention could likely both be cited by forensic examiners as a factor, but the crash may have had the same outcome regardless of the speeding and entirely determined by the inattention.
And to the other opposite, there are plenty of scenarios where someone could follow the legal speed limit of a road while operating their car at an unsafe speed. Someone could drive 65 in a 70 zone on an icy road, or past stopped traffic, etc. While they are following the legal speed limit, they are operating at a speed that puts others at risk.
Basically, speed limits are an easy to understand approximation of what is usually a good idea for most drivers in most cars under reasonable conditions. Given that, sometimes they are too high and sometimes they are too low.
You might find this page interesting:
https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/topics/speed-managem...
Australia doesn't have the same cultural views as America with regard to freedom. We have high taxes, virtually no guns, heavily enforced traffic policing, etc. On the Wikipedia page for road death per 100000 population Australia is about 5 compared to the US at 12. A large number of Americans seem to be culturally ok with this as long as the government doesn't interfere with their life. Hacker News has an international audience and you often see the different value systems at play in the comments.
I'm making an engineering argument about risk and blame, not a political argument about freedom. I am not arguing that we shouldn't have speed limits. Speed limits are like democracy. It's a terrible system... except for all of the others.
Ideally we'd have a better measure of unsafe movement -- We could much better measure risk if the speed limit was set to an equation based on the difference in momentum vectors between vehicles, the capabilities of the drivers and vehicles involved, the weather conditions, etc... but that has a much larger weakness in that we don't have a way to effectively measure/calculate/communicate those expectations to drivers.
I am all in favor of a utilitarian solution to the problem, but I'm under no illusion that it is a rigorous benchmark of risk.
The libertarian argument is that we shouldn't penalize risk at all. I am saying we should penalize risk, but that speed limits do a mediocre job of measuring it.
That said, to get back to one of your original examples: at least where I live, even if there is a general speed limit of, say, 80km/h, you could still get in trouble for driving that speed under adverse condition, like ice, heavy rain, heavy fog or darkness. I think the rule is that you have to guarantee to be able to stop within half of the visible distance So it's not like the law is completely static either.
I’m arguing that they’re approximations of safe behavior. Prevailing traffic science suggests safe traveling speeds are heavily dependent on conditions, yet most speed limits are static.
I’m okay with the idea that people should not exceed the speed limit because we’ve chosen it as a reasonable compromise. I’m less okay with saying that those who break the speed limit are unsafe by default, or that those who follow the speed limit are driving at a safe speed.
If you drive at all you are theoretically putting other people's lives at risk. Everyone always has to exercise prudence when they drive in order to mitigate that risk. If their judgment is bad and they cause an accident, they are held legally liable for the harm they cause, and that gives people a strong incentive to not cause an accident. That, in a sane society, would be considered sufficient as a matter of public policy, and the government could just stop worrying about it and move on to more important things.
But ticketing someone because of an arbitrary number posted on a sign, which might have little or no relationship to the speed a reasonable and prudent person under the actual conditions on the actual highway would choose to drive, is not protecting people's lives. It's the government tapping an alternate source of revenue because it doesn't want to just admit it needs more money and raise taxes. Not to mention decreasing everyone's respect for the law, since everyone knows that under current conditions speed limits are unenforceable (and what enforcement does exist is arbitrary), and doing what it would take to actually enforce speed limits completely would be a draconian violation of our rights that no citizen of a free society should accept.
> I think we probably should have a satellite tracking every car and issuing a ticket as soon as a car speeds.
I think the government should stop trying to micromanage every aspect of people's lives and focus on protecting our rights.
So much of our society has rules and penalties because people are not very good at "exercising prudence". Instead we ask experts to think carefully about problems and set limits around what we should do so that we can all get along in a safe and peaceful society.
We don't allow doctors to practice surgery without a license and training. We don't allow tall buildings to be built without approvals. We mandate that a restaurant kitchen must be reasonably clean.
We need to have faith in our societies ability to set and review these rules and limits. If we can't trust the experts and the public servants we employ to enforce the rules, then we need to ask why not?
What we should _not_ do, is just blow off expert advice because its inconvenient or because somebody on Fox News told us to.
Speak for yourself.
> Instead we ask experts to think carefully about problems and set limits around what we should do so that we can all get along in a safe and peaceful society.
That's a nice myth, but it's not the reality. The reality is that governments use this power for purposes that have nothing to do with a safe and peaceful society.
> We need to have faith in our societies ability to set and review these rules and limits.
Sorry, but the track record of governments and "experts" is way too poor to justify any such faith.
> If we can't trust the experts and the public servants we employ to enforce the rules, then we need to ask why not?
And what if the answer is that either there simply are no actual experts in the problem domain, or there is no way for any actual experts to credibly communicate their expertise, because of principal-agent problems, conflicts of interest, and other inconvenient realities?
Because that is in fact the answer in most problem domains that are relevant to public policy.
> What we should _not_ do, is just blow off expert advice because its inconvenient or because somebody on Fox News told us to.
What we should also not do is treat people as experts just because they say they are. We should demand a track record of accurate predictions. Most so-called "experts" don't have one. That's just as true of the talking heads on CNN or MSNBC as the ones on Fox News.
Agreed 100%. Experts should make decisions based on open data that anybody can review. Also there are a lot of grey areas, so often we look for "scientific consensus" where a community of experts can debate issues and attempt to decide whats best.
The rest of your comment is basically that government does a bad job at a lot of things, but my view is we should fix government rather than reject it.
I live in a much smaller country, and here, I feel a small group of individuals _can_ make enough noise to shape policy. Sort of. At least they have a say. A good corruption watchdog would help - we don't have it yet, but at least there is talk of one. No climate policy. The whole witness K thing. Massive expansion of Defense this week. Cuts to the ABC. Err, dark times for Australian politics, but it _could_ be all rolled back at the next election. It will be a close race. I'm rambling now.
[1] https://de.statista.com/infografik/16765/todesfaelle-auf-aut...
But my personal view is that sacrificing safety so people can get from A to B a little faster is not worth it, and perhaps it's not clear whether or not speed is a big factor, but why risk it? Whats the rush?
It's not that simple that less speed equals more safety. Even the posted link shows no correlation.
Some people argue that speed in Germany is not risk, but a safety measure. German highways are already mostly overloaded with traffic. Decreasing the speed by introducing the artificial limits would effective make driving more dangerous because highways would be more crowded with drivers with less distance between, there would be more lane changing during driving, drivers will be more tired because of spending more time on the road. Also, driving at the uniform speed at the speed limit reduces awareness of the road conditions.
Another topic is that limit also works as a framing. On the road where limit is 120, everyone will tend to drive around 120, regardless of conditions. For the road without speed limit, people will generally drive 100 if that's optimal speed according to the current traffic conditions. And if it's safe to drive 180, why not?
You would just kinda fly over it, unless it's huge. The faster you go, the less potholes are a problem. What's more dangerous is that braking distance is quadratic in velocity.
Somehow, it doesn't stop all these frickin' Audis from doing it. (It's always Audis.)