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bArray

> To the inevitable dismay of U.K. street racers who

> primarily partake in their favorite illegal motorsport

> after hours, the TruCam II also features night mode

> whereas the first TruCam, which has already reportedly

> been in use for the past six years, only worked during the

> daytime.

I think this really comes down to the letter of the law vs the spirit of it. To the spirit of the law, i.e. saving third-party lives, on a non-busy road doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody? Is doing excessive speed on an empty well-lit motorway going to kill anybody?

Ultimately if you're only a danger to yourself then personally I think the responsibility is on the individual. For example, as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves.

As a free person I think you need to have the right to make bad decisions and accept their consequences, as long as those do not impact others. For a long time there has been an unwritten rule (at least where I live) where greater speed is generally more acceptable at night with fewer road users. It's not uncommon for the local police to overtake you at 90 mph for example.

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Sorry, you’re totally wrong.

The spirit of the law is not just to save third party lives.

When you cause an accident, you drain society’s emergency response resources (and increase the premiums of those in your insurance pool).

35mph vs 30mph is a terrible example - this is the scenario where pedestrians and cyclists are most likely to be around. 75mph vs 70mph would have been a better example.

Driving at night is more dangerous than at day because of the reduced visibility.

Driving when fewer other road users are around is safer than when it’s busy, but you don’t have perfect knowledge and there may be road users you haven’t seen, especially at night.

There’s no objective moral cliff edge between 70mph and 70mph+ε, but there is one between complying with the law and breaking it. Society collectively draws the line somewhere and you don’t get to unilaterally decide everybody else is wrong. I’ve heard people saying “I was only going a little over 30!” called speedo pedos, because it’s exactly like saying “she was only a little underage!”.

Check out the sibling comments for examples of people who thought they knew better but didn’t.

The thing about Scotland is completely wrong, I have no idea why you would think that.

> saying “I was only going a little over 30!” called speedo pedos, because it’s exactly like saying “she was only a little underage!”

I laughed at "speedo pedos", but is it though?

One of these crimes is clearly considerably more serious than the other, and legislators agree with me. That's why in UK law minor speeding offences attract a fine and points on your license[0], but no criminal record, whereas offences of pedophilia result in prison time, a criminal record, and addition on the sexual offenders register.

The line of thinking is superficially similar, the weight of the offence isn't, and we shouldn't trivialise serious offences by drawing false equivalences with those that are considerably less serious.

[0] This is generally the case, but if you accrue too many points you can of course lose your license. Similarly, more serious speeding offences attract more serious penalties, and may even result in jail time. There are plenty of other examples but, see, e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-34744.... The level of stupidity on display here is truly monumental.

Food for thought: social budgets shouldn't determine the extent of your personal freedoms ala ambulances.

A few points on this: society doesn’t make speed limits, municipal administrators (and sometimes small town police themselves) do. The speed limits are often set by observation, and they intentionally leave a large number of drivers over that limit (they say this is for safety, but it seems to also be for revenue generation). Look up 85th percentile speed.

So some politicians and engineers draw a line so that 15% of the population is in violation and will change the speed limit at any point that this isn’t true (if nobody is in violation, they lower the speed limit). You can’t then cast moral judgment on that 15%. It’s intentional criminalization of the citizenry, even though it’s generally with the intent of saving lives.

They are also set for other reasons, like "Bob complained a lot, because of the noise of cars", and the limit gets reduced.

Or "this road was quiet 20+ years ago", but the city has grown, and now it is a major throughfare, so "Local residents campaigned to get a low speed limit", so that alternate routes are preferable.

Both of the above have happened in my locale.

Keep in mind that how strict the speed limits are seems to vary significantly by local laws and driving culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta...

So what might be unacceptable "speedo pedo"ism where you live might be completely normal going 5 miles over the posted speed limit elsewhere. My personal experience is that people tend to drive at a speed they feel safe at, and don't pay that much attention to the signs.

Japanese law requires the police to prove that you were speeding beyond reasonable doubt, so posted speed limits are all 20km/h+ under the de facto speed limit. It leads to absurd situation like expressways with a posted 60km speed limit but a 100km/h real limit.

That's the reason we need to enforce speed limit. People are terrible at assessing what's safe. Even if they can somehow manage to assess their personal safety they have terrible judgement when it comes to other road users. You may feel very safe going over speed limit in a residential area but pedestrians, cyclists etc. won't.

The "when you do $x, you drain society's emergency resources" is, IMO, an absurd argument.

If this is true, then you need to point the finger at so many things. Rock-climbing. Mountain biking. And it progresses, to "anything even remotely risky", where "risky is now the absolute lowest common denominator".

And of course, so many sports? Banned.

This sort of "walking on eggshells" view of life is quite disturbing to me.

You've just described the world's attitude to Coronavirus.

Not even remotely true. The world has responded with "lockdowns", "masks", and more, which is the result of an unprecedented, 100 year class event, that being a pandemic.

Your comment isn't really about normality, but instead about an extreme edge case scenario. The only thing worse than a pandemic, might be nuclear war, a massive nuclear accident, or large-scale disaster.

Normality need not be conflated with actions during emergency scenarios.

Lastly -- imagine if people DID engage in more, "only affected themselves' risky behaviour. It would mean more hospital visits, therefore more hospital capacity, more doctors/nurses/etc etc, which would mean more ability to absorb and deal with large scale emergency issues.

Perhaps not the greatest example given that it’s killed one-point-six million people to date.

That’s an awful lot of people, and if you don’t think that’s a terrible thing then I don’t know how you sleep at night.

It's terrible but similar number of people die every year in car accidents yet there is no moral panic. We can't even agree on finally enforcing speed limits but with the virus we closed the whole world. I mean pollution in major cities is a bigger health problem objectively than the virus and yet we still allow old diesels to drive in most of them.

What I am saying is not that we shouldn't treat the virus seriously but that we really need a lot not urgency when dealing with topics like speeding and pollution.

That “similar number of people” still die despite the enormous amount of work that goes in to road death reduction! We are doing things, and we are affecting the road toll. A quick look at Australia shows that from the worst years, 1970s, where ~3,500 died a year, we’re now down to ~1,200. That’s a 3x reduction because we did something. (Airbags, improved car design, improved road design, improved compliance, etc.)

If only we had some sort of analogue for doing something vs. not doing something re: COVID. Oh wait, we do.

- Number of Australians dead: 908.

- Population adjusted, 13.1x: 12,000.

- Number of Americans dead: 298,000.

That’s 25x as many. We did something, America didn’t.

Spotting a pattern?

The key difference is that all of the things you’ve listed are legal. Society allows them because the risk comes with some reward, and we find it tolerable to accept or mitigate that risk.

There are plenty of other activities like speeding where the rewards do not justify the risks, and the government has made laws to prevent that risk being taken. Unlicensed aviation, amateur gas boiler repair, knife-fighting...

Legality is not relevant. Morality is. Do not conflate the two, for they are not the same.

Example: society, and yes democratic ones, once told black people that they had no rights ; that they were animals; livestock. They also told Jews that they could not vote.

Was society spot on there?

What about the 1000s upon 1000s of examples of immoral laws which can be found, over time, and yes even now, which serves to invalidate the claim that following them is moral? From where I sit, each law must be measured against ones own morality. Failure to do so, is to cast the responsibility each human has aside, to instead wrap yourself in a shell of false righteousness!

I am not claiming "ignore the law", but merely that you may not determine what is 'right or wrong', merely due to the opinions of others around you, nor due to a societal system which attempts to balance thousands of pressures, and then pass laws.

Firstly, courts have repeated struck down sections of laws, or laws in their entirety, for this very reason. And often after those laws have stood for decades. By your logic, by your reasoning, to follow those laws is a moral requirement, yet one minute you are moral, the next immoral?

The stroke of a judge's pen, an argument in Parliament/Congress, and your morals are now right, or wrong?

No.

Your morals must be crafted on your own, examined, re-examined, see battle against your own interpretation of the universe, and grow with time. Laws are not this.

Laws are not morals.

Laws are not to be followed blindly.

To that end, I find your argument to be lacking. You assume that society is "better than the person" at determining "right or wrong". This is not so.

The government is not papa, mama, to be looked to for advice.

If you wish to discuss further, I am happy to, but I will not accept an argument that places legality on some sort of even keel, even subsuming morality.

No. Never.

"as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves."

As a person who grew up in the Scottish countryside I can assure you that is absolutely not the case, and drunk driving is _extremely_ frowned upon. In fact Scotland has generally had tougher drink driving regulations than England. (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-30329743).

This kind of comment could be interpreted as casual racism (casting Scots as child-like alcoholics living in a semi-regulated playground), but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, since its a Sunday morning and nearly Christmas.

> This kind of comment could be interpreted as casual racism (casting Scots as child-like alcoholics living in a semi-regulated playground)

Really?

Scots aren’t a race?

IDK about the UK, but in Germany street racers have killed many innocent bystanders, just for the crime of crossing the street at night. So yes please, enforce rules more strongly.

In fact, even ambulances crash into each other every now and then at night, because they usually drive without their horns (technically then they aren't allowed to run red lights, only if it's been sounding for at least 15 seconds, but people want to sleep).

America, as well, even in broad daylight: https://www.fox13news.com/news/suspected-bayshore-street-rac...

I'd have no hesitation as a juror sending these scumbags to life without parole.

But you don't even know any of the facts of the case? How would you have no hesitation when you have no idea what happened and haven't even listened to the defenses argument?

* raced a car

* killed someone

That's enough for me. Don't care what the arguments are, how much they were peer pressured or what their home lives were like. Obviously if the argument is "the cops got the wrong guy" then I'll listen to it.

What if there was a bomb in the car that exploded if the car dropped below a certain speed (ala Speed, the movie)?

If it was unclear, the point I'm making is that you are awfully quick to judge someone's guilt based on a web page you read.

Also, you don't get to decide sentences as a juror, so your statement doesn't really make sense.

I know all of these things, and furthermore, I'm not in the jurisdiction so it's all a hypothetical. I'm saying that in the hypothetical where I am asked to pass judgment on, and sentence, someone who street raced (for any reason) and killed a person, I would with no hesitations sentence that person to life without parole, and would probably only hesitate about an hour before sentencing them to death.

What if there was a shark in the passenger seat with a laser on it's head?

As far as I can find the lawyers are trying to get the only objective piece of evidence - the cars own logs - thrown out. Claim the witnesses are unreliable at judging speed and are clinging to an early statement that it might have been "low speed collision".

If we give them the benefit of the doubt why would they try to get rid of evidence that they were driving within legal limits? Especially when they have to deal with several "unreliable" witnesses claiming that they were driving too fast?

Police killings are a bigger problem here.

Really? American police kill about 1000 people a year and the vast, vast majority of these killings are totally justified cases where deadly force was used to stop an imminent deadly threat. On the other hand about 36,000 people died on American roads last year and it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where any of them could have been necessary.

The real difference is that road deaths are far less likely to trigger a media circus.

I mean, structurally, you're right that police violence is a bigger problem, but I don't really understand the relevance to my comment when this entire thread was talking about cars.

> street racers have killed many innocent bystanders,

You're not responding to the point. The parent was talking about solitary drivers, and used remote parts of scotland as an example.

The reality is you never know if you’re really alone. Plenty of people are killed on “empty” country roads because the driver didn’t see them due to inappropriate speed, distractions or a combination.

Unless you know the area.

The parent has a couple of counter examples to that. Seems like the caveats, that sometimes you do actually know you're alone, are exactly the scenarios we're talking about.

Unless you have constant surveillance on the km in front of you, you cannot know you're alone. Things happen. They may not be likely at all, but as a whole we're not good judges of probability.

Also, even if you crash with nobody around at the time, someone else may crash into the rescue team just arriving to help you.

If you know you are truly alone, then you know there's no police. Plus there's animals. I see dead foxes, dogs and cats all the time on the road.

At least in the more remote parts of Canada, hitting a moose at high speed has a very good probability of taking you out along with the moose. So driving respectfully at night is a really good idea.

IDK to me that sounds like downplaying the issue. Drunk driving is not ok, not even in remote parts of Scotland.

As for driving 35 in a 30 zone... I can agree that it's not much of an issue if it's next to a school and you drive in the middle of the night: there won't be any children entering or leaving the school at that time. But generally, these racers drive way faster, and don't give a fuck about any of these rules, red lights, etc. They see the roads as a racetrack. On the computer or console, they can play GTA V or whatever, I don't care. Just if they do it in the real world they deserve harsh punishments, as the risk of killing people is so extremely high.

The thing is expectations and boundaries. As a participant of traffic you need to be able to feel secure, regardless of day or night. So in your example (and I live near a school and 30 km/hour street near it), if there is hardly any traffic at night you don't expect anyone either. Which might make someone driving 50 km/hour even more dangerous than when everyone is driving too hard constantly during day.

Hmmm that's a good point indeed. I never said that you should drive 35 in a 30 zone, just that it's less of an issue than say drunk driving or road racing. Accidents can still happen though.

30 v 35mph is not a trivial increase. It's nearly 20% faster. And kinetic energy scales quadratically with velocity.

According to a popular UK road safety campaign, if you hit a pedestrian at 35mph you're 2.5x more likely to kill them than if you hit them at 30mph (50% chance vs 20% chance)

https://www.roadwise.co.uk/using-the-road/speeding/the-chanc...

Surely there are animals frolicking around in these remote parts of Scotland. Think of deer. Traffic rules generally make sense, you should follow them. I live near a school. Its 30 km/hour around the school. People drive 50-60. Its dangerous, even for me. This selfish behavior has to stop.

I'm in the UK, and by the time you've reached a certain age, we've all heard of families torn about by bad driving. The couple who we bought our house from, the mother pulled out in front of two racers just down the road from us and ended up with life changing injuries, unable to walk and with brain damage. A little boy at our local nursery died along with his father hitting a van head on who'd crossed the road taking a corner too fast.

It's not just boy racers, but plenty of older men and women who are reckless and inpatient in their usual driving. There are people who think that their luxury cars are an excuse to break the road rules as well as the rules of common courtesy.

Despite the UK having one of the safest road networks in the world, still around 75 people die or are seriously injured per week in car accidents. For a preventable injury that is still far too high.

Purely anecdotal, I noticed there were far more people in fancy cars going at ridiculous speeds in ridiculous stretches of roads with loads of pedestrians and cyclists around when I lived in Bristol compared to the Netherlands. I called them CICs: "Cunts In Cars".

Road design probably plays part in this; a comparatively wide fully asphalted road probably isn't the best design for 20mph. Traffic calming and all that.

It's a prevalent attitude of successful people who are used to lower ethical standards applied to them and being given priority in their day-to-day life. An extra factor is that premium cars (irrespective of wealth) are sought after by people with negative personality traits [1].

I don't know why the difference between UK and Netherlands, maybe due to differences in income equity and judicial fairness? I imagine the behaviour is worse in countries with worse social fairness (Russia, even US?).

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ijop.12642

In my observation, in the Netherlands someone with a flashy car is quicker seen as a show-off. Generally speaking, it has a somewhat more grounded and egalitarian culture. Someone calling themselves a "Baron such and such" or "Sir so and so" like they do in the UK? The entire country will roll their eyes.

In the UK, it's somewhere in-between the mainland European and American attitudes, where someone with a flashy car is seen as deserving of it through their hard work.

And not everyone who drives like an idiot has a flashy car by the way; lots of those pumped VW things and whatnot as well (in both countries).

> doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?

Quick check says yes: https://www.tac.vic.gov.au/road-safety/statistics/summaries/...

Or specifically, not "speeding will kill someone" because we'll always have some level of accidents. But increased speed translates to increased accidents and increased accidents translate to more deaths.

Except if you do get hurt, and even if it is just you, the rest of us are, via social contract, obligated to spend common resources to come rescue you and pay for your medical bills. I know you could make this argument against any activity like rock climbing, but then lobby your government. Even if I grant the response I’m expecting, I dont want to be saved or helped if I injure myself, one, bullshit. Two, even if that’s true, we still have to pay someone to come hose blood off the pavement and dispose of the wreck.

In the US, you are responsible for your own medical bills and ambulance costs if you are in an accident that wasn't someone else's fault.

And I’m sure all the people I see racing are insured or have the $100k+ a serious accident, injury or property damage entails.

Generally, yes, you have to be insured to register a car.

No you aren't. EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act of 1986 specifically says everyone will be treated regardless of any ability to pay.

If someone doesn't have the ability to pay, guess who ends up paying? Everyone else.

Not having the ability to pay doesn't mean you aren't responsible. If you do have the ability to pay, and you are required to have insurance that gives you that ability to pay, then you are responsible.

> To the spirit of the law, i.e. saving third-party lives, on a non-busy road doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody

According to: https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowle...

That’s 48->56kmh which takes 38% to 66% chance of fatality for pedestrians (eyeballing the graph).

https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/18940314.three-donkeys-die-...

This driver was probably only doing a few MPH over the 40MPH limit which is quite fast enough for a rural road. There is an A-road alternative for those 'in a hurry' but such carnage is a regular occurance.

I actually used to live near there and have driven down that road numerous times.

* @7pm in the morning in the winter the whole area can be fogged up and it was dark. I've driven down and cycled down there when it wouldn't have been safe doing 15mph.

* Animals can be hard to see, even in good conditions. Especially the donkeys, they are grey, on a black road and the sky is normally grey in England. Many of the animals there have high-vis collars to make them more visible at night.

* It depends what section of the road. In one section of that road the visibility is excellent (when there isn't fog). In another stretch even in the summer, the visibility is weird due to much of the road being in partial shade due to the trees.

* Drivers go much faster than the 40mph limit in that area almost all the time, especially on the high visibility parts. It doesn't help that if you come off the M25/A31 you would have been going about 70mph and so doing 40mph makes it feels so slow that you can step out of the car.

* The three A-roads near are either blocked due to heavy traffic especially in the summer (infrastructure in general is a joke in Hampshire and Dorset) or they don't go where you want.

I agree visibility can be poor but is easilly mitigated by driving at a suitable speed. The only problem, of course, is other drivers behind getting frustrated and overtaking recklessly. The other day one person was so determined to pass me that he almost hit a car coming in the other direction. For all that he arrived in Fordingbridge (2 miles further on) literally 3 seconds before I did.

> I agree visibility can be poor but is easilly mitigated by driving at a suitable speed.

Not at all. I've been driving at what seems like a sensible speed for the conditions and suddenly there is a deer right in front of my car. You cannot see some of the animals until you are right on top of them.

The fact is that there is too much traffic, there is insufficient infrastructure (and you probably can't add a lot because you will spoil the place) and there are animals freely roaming around. It is recipe of animal deaths in that area.

I dunno what the answer is. Paying the police to put up another gatso van isn't going to solve it though.

Yes, I suppose there are extremes and I've had a similar experience although, regarding the original link, I find it difficult to believe it possible to kill 3 donkeys in one go by driving at a sensible speed in such circumstances?

I find it hard to believe as well. However without knowing specifics it would be impossible to judge fairly.

You're a danger to only yourself until suddenly you aren't as alone as you thought you were.

I've heard this argument before a lot, but I imagine it doesn't actually apply. Although the likelihood of harming another is reduced by the fact that it's night and there are fewer people around, the likelihood is increased by (1) reduced visibility for both drivers and pedestrians, (2) likely reduced mental clarity due to the fact that it's late, (3) both pedestrians and drivers behaving more carelessly because they think there is a reduced chance of risk as a result of sparsity (meta, eh?). My guess would be that accidents are equally likely if not more likely at night as a result, so folks should be prudent at night.

It’s habit. If you learn to flaunt the law half the time, you could inadvertently break it at a time of day when it could have dire consequences. Best to be vigilant and cautious at all times for everyone’s benefit. There’s lots of racetracks and race day Sundays to get your lead foot some action.

"persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves"

That might have been true 40 or 50 years ago - but drinking and driving is how regarded very harshly in Scotland both legally and socially.

> i.e. saving third-party lives, on a non-busy road doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?

Yes, the stats show quite clearly that 30mph is the point where pedestrian fatality rates really start climbing. [1]

At 30mph, if you have a collision with a pedestrian there’s a 20% chance the pedestrian dies.

At 35mph it’s 50%

At 40mph it’s 90%

The article mentioned the car was doing over 35mph. Additionally in the U.K. 30mph zones are normally residential areas and city centres, places where pedestrians are very common.

[1] https://www.roadwise.co.uk/using-the-road/speeding/the-chanc...

The point is that whilst the danger of a collision goes up as speed increases, you're not considering the context - the conditions. It is unquestionably more dangerous to drive past a school at 8:30am on a weekday at 30mph than it is to drive in that same area at 2am on a Monday morning at 35mph.

If we're talking about safety, then the speed limits should be to reflect conditions, but instead what happens is we cap the limit at the lowest value considering worst conditions.

Realistically the way we deal with this is through selective enforcement, the police probably aren't going to give you a ticket for 35 in a 30 at 2am on a monday morning, but it's silly to pretend that conditions don't matter.

I seriously recommend you follow Surrey Traffic Police, who give some gruelling details of the effects of what people think is “safe” speeding: https://twitter.com/surreyroadcops?s=21

There’s a number of police Twitter accounts that you can follow in this theme to learn more.

In the US, there are 38,000 persons killed each year in car accidents -- and yet there are still those who think we do too much enforcement.

Traffic stops in the US are a convenient bypass to the fourth amendment. Split traffic responsibilities from regular cops and people would be willing to be more acceptable of reasonable enforcement.

Whatever employee union that would represent those workers would inevitably start demanding they be issued firearms (at least in the US) due to the legitimate fear of an armed populace, leading to more guns on the streets and more opportunities for deadly violence to break out in a second's notice.

I would support steep fines for speeders and racers, with the proceeds going to a racetrack they would be free to use.

I would support permanently revoking their license to drive, impounding their car, and having them do a few hundred hours of community service.

They clearly do not possess the good judgement that it takes to safely operate a multi-tonne motor vehicle.

What proportion of those deaths were caused by something that could have been caught ahead of time by more enforcement?

It’s reasonable to believe the death rate is too high and there is too much enforcement if that enforcement focuses too heavily on a single aspect of the problem at the expense of focusing on other problem areas.

Speed enforcement seems to be the low hanging fruit. There’s (generally) no judgment call, readily accepted evidence, it’s politically palatable, and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel: there’s always someone you can tag.

It’s a lot harder to tag someone for driving onto the freeway at 30 mph and failing to merge properly. There’s no “merge trap” to witness it so the cop has to basically happen upon it. There’s not always clear evidence, there’s probably some judgment required too. People don’t like the idea of tickets for going “too slow”; everyone acts like it is absurd. You can’t even blame the LEO because he probably knows the ticket won’t stick. Yet this behavior is extremely dangerous and happens all the time.

Maybe more enforcement isn't the solution? Traffic stops are far more common in the US than the UK, but the US has far higher road deaths, even when you adjust for the fact that Americans spend more time travelling by road. Maybe the cause of America's excess road deaths is something else?

The US has terrible infrastructure (in many parts of the US you can find a 50mph multi-lane road in a plane 4-way intersection to another similar road, where a sleeping or drunk driver might just sped through a red light and T-bone someone!).

Infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians is often bad.

There is also no zero acceptance for drunk driving. You see people drive to restaurants, have a glass of wine or two, then drive home. Unimaginable.

It’s strange to see you advocate for 35mph. In many parts of Southern England I saw 20mph become the norm.

It makes a lot of sense in terms of road safety as well as noise, and makes little to no difference to journey times.

30mph changing to 20mph makes a huge difference to journey time... And london drivers hate it to the point most of them ignore it.

As if you can drive faster than 15mph in London without smashing into the car in front.

20/35 is 4/7 the speed, and therefore it makes every trip take 7/4 as long. So you spend an additional 15 minutes on every 20-minute journey. You're rapidly going to waste more human lifetimes sitting in cars than you would ever save from driving slower.

Much of the time on a typical London car journey is spent idling in traffic, so it’s not so easy to calculate.

It is measured though! City hall & TRL track this. In outer London the average traffic speed overall is about 20mph. In inner London it’s about 12 and 8 in the centre. I don’t think the 20mph limit makes a real difference to journey times, but it does make the streets safer especially for people not in cars.

Until you can donate someone your time, that's not how it works. This take is "my 5 min is so important, I'm willing to risk someone's 60 years" (scaled to thousands of people).

You can also make other choices that reduce your 15min to begin with. (If the small difference there makes important changes in your life)

I don't need to donate them my time, they are also saving the same 15 minutes per trip. Do I also have to invent time donation to propose other time-savers like dishwashers?

> "my 5 min is so important, I'm willing to risk someone's 60 years" (scaled to thousands of people).

The scaling matters! Boston has 1.8 million drivers losing 150 hours in traffic per year, according to https://inrix.com/press-releases/2019-traffic-scorecard-us/. Imagine that all of that traffic was caused by our desire to save a single human baby. 270 million hours lost to save 700,000. Would you agree that's not worth it? That probably those 270 million hours would produce enough economic output to save a different baby instead?

To me, a 75% increase in travel time is high enough and 35 mph is slow enough that I think everyone's 15 minutes is, in fact, worth risking someone's 60 years, once every couple of years. I could be proved wrong about the math, but it seems to me it's mostly an argument about risk tolerance.

The number of people who justify driving as fast as possible to "save time" and then waste lots of time on other pointless activities is quite incredible. It's almost as if they're not really concerned about time at all...

First, the existence of hypocrites and irrational people is not a counterargument to appeals for efficiency.

Second, those pointless activities are what we're saving time for. I want to get more work done, and retire sooner, just so that I have more time for my pointless activities. People who don't begrudge every minute they spend in a car, in my view, are failing to maximize the leisure time that should be their chief goal in life.

Correct, assuming a perfectly spherical car on a frictionless road with no other traffic, hazards, or traffic controls.

In the real world 20mph puts a cap on your top speed only in the few instances you could possibly go that fast. Factor in lights, queueing at rotaries, slowing for emerging traffic, slowing for and then going around cyclists... ad nauseam

I wonder what is the effect on climate change? Are we killing the planet by doing this? Should we instead up the speeds to closer of where cars are most efficient? Also need to remember that each fatality is good for environment...

Around 45 mph is the most efficient speed for a car engine last I checked -- they always tell you to slow down to save gas, but never to speed up. I feel that shows their real agenda is more about limiting speed than efficiency.

Yet surpising how infrequently you see the 20mph being adhered to. These people, already travelling very short distances, must be saving at least 30 seconds a year?

Around 80% of drivers admit to breaking speed limits. [1]

[1] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/80-of-drivers...

Street racers don't go down a 30 mph road at 35 mph.

They go down that road at 70 mph. They also tend to be very young and incredibly stupid, and incredibly poor at judging risk.

> For example, as I understand it, persons living in Scotland can drive back home drunk in rural areas as the only person they are ever likely to hurt its themselves.

What an absurd comment. Scotland has stricter drink-driving laws than England.

> As a free person I think you need to have the right to make bad decisions and accept their consequences, as long as those do not impact others.

Peak Libertarian fantasy to think this should apply here. Unfortunately, the real world is never so ordered and predictable that you can know for certain whether the country road you're about to speed on is completely empty. Just like you, the rest of us have the right to use that road as well whenever we please.

Even if you were the sole victim in such an accident, you're ignoring all the second order societal costs. Who will pay for the police time spent investigating the accident, delivering the news to your loved ones, and the cost of bereavement leave on their employers? Who's going to pay for removing the wreck and fixing whatever infrastructure (e.g. the road surface) you might have damaged? What about the mental health effects on the unfortunate neighbour who discovers your mangled corpse? And if you're only injured, how about the costs of an ambulance and medical treatment? We don't all live in the USA where that is (supposedly) borne by the individual.

Whether you like them or not, speed limits exist for good reasons.

> doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?

Demonstrably yes. Check out this study by the UK's Transport Research Laboratory. The chances of killing a pedestrian rise dramatically from around 10% at 30mph. The likelihood roughly doubles at 35mph. Remember that kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, not linearly, so even small increases in speed can have dramatic effects on accident outcomes: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

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