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Comment by everly | Hacker News Reader

One time (early 2000s) my dad was driving across a remote and desolate stretch of Utah, on a motorcycle, doing speeds well into the 3 digit miles per hour.

Approaching civilization, he had slowed to a reasonable speed of his own accord and was surprised to be pulled over by a highway patrolman, who proceeded to greet him by name and revealed that a helicopter had been trailing him and retrieved his registration detail from above. The officer was relatively friendly about the whole thing but he received a costly ticket.

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The ticket didn't even pay for the helicopter fuel and the cost of manpower, while zero people were non consensually endangered.

How could we rephrase speeding laws so they make sense, instead of this black and white stupidity ?

In a country where the first responders, hospitals, etc. are obligated to provide expensive services and care for victims of motor vehicle accidents - regardless of their ability to pay - there is the moral and public policy issue of "My high-speed fun, somebody else's high taxes and medical bills".

Yet, all the research seems to indicate that speeding reduces the occurrence of accidents, it just increases their severity when they do occur (more fatalities). The primary cause of accidents is inattentiveness (usually someone on their phone) and after that alcohol-related accidents. Speeding is not a primary cause, only a proximate cause of the accident, something else caused the accident, speed is only blamed because it exacerbates the result.

I'd guess that the research you mention was focused on fairly narrow ranges of speed, road conditions, speeds of the other motorists, etc.

Vs. user everly related that his father was doing well over 100MPH. Even ignoring all other factors, the duration of inattentiveness needed to cause an accident, at extreme speeds, is far lower than at legal speeds.

Apropos of anything else, in many parts of the US, doing that speed, particularly on a motorbike, is almost reckless even for the sole reason of ... have you seen our infrastructure budgets? We're not known for our high quality roads. A single pothole at those speeds is launching you over the handlebars.

There's no alternative here. You're asking for a law where a driver gets to interpret the situation and decide whether a traffic law should apply to them or not. That's just unenforceable, imagine trivial court cases hinging on whether a "reasonable person" would drive a certain speed. Plus, most drivers think they're a better and safer driver than they really are. Do you really trust them to correctly assess the risk, not just to themselves but to others? I certainly don't.

These rules have to be black and white! Do triple digit (mph) speeds on a highway? Get an expensive ticket, even if the highway wasn't busy.

All of that, plus discretionary enforcement is incredibly conducive to all of the bad -isms.

The current reality we live in where pretty much all traffic is technically speeding unless there's something preventing it (weather, congestion, whatever) has no less discretionary enforcement than ye olden days where there were no nominal speed limits on many stretches of rural highway.

It’s worse today because there is always a law you are violating. Cops often decide who to stop first, and then what the reason was.

At least in the olden days it was a subjective matter and acknowledged as such. Today we have objective laws that we all objectively break, and discretionary enforcement.

> imagine trivial court cases hinging on whether a "reasonable person" would drive a certain speed.

Why is this dystopian? It's literally the point of courts to apply judgment.

A bright line doesn't only make it clear what's illegal - it also makes it clear what's legal.

With a less clear law, how would you know if your speed was legal?

I think I'm a reasonable person and while sober, well-rested and attentive on an empty freeway at sunset on a road drying after 0.1 inch of rainfall in the preceding hour with no other cars in view driving eastbound at 70 mph would be reasonable.

But what if a cop is having a bad day, or has a quota to hit, or doesn't like my bumper sticker, and decides the legal limit is 65 mph because the setting sun might be dazzling in my rear view mirror?

And if I don't want the cost and inconvenience of going to court, should I go at 60 mph instead, just in case?

The reality is the courts are very slow and very expensive for decisions that are being made millions of times per day.

It's possible to break the law and not be penalized for it.

>But what if a cop is having a bad day, or has a quota to hit, or doesn't like my bumper sticker, and decides the legal limit is 65 mph because the setting sun might be dazzling in my rear view mirror?

You would take it to court like you do now and fight the assessment.

>And if I don't want the cost and inconvenience of going to court, should I go at 60 mph instead, just in case?

Yes, no different than today

> A bright line doesn't only make it clear what's illegal - it also makes it clear what's legal.

But doing the speed limit is not always legal. It depends on the conditions. If the sunset is dazzling, the speed limit might not be safe for conditions, so you could be ticketed for violating the basic speed law. Or if there's heavy rain or snow or what have you.

It's not dystopian, but it raises the standard of evidence beyond what is feasible to support. With simple limits, you can say "I clocked you at 80 on a 65mph road" and that's evidence enough. You'd need far more evidence and deliberation to enforce the rule "you went faster than a reasonable person should".

Black and white thought process is what leads to things like minimum/mandatory sentencing which having a lot of criticism

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/end-...

>imagine trivial court cases hinging on whether a "reasonable person" would drive a certain speed

That's exactly how they cite things like reckless driving

Simply remove speed limits on suitable roads, as in Germany.

In other countries there are fixed cameras, which can even be programmed to have some grey area (do they trip at x+2, 1.1x, ...?). These can probably pay for themselves and then some if placed correctly. They're conspicuously absent from the US.

There are still traffic ticket cameras in some parts of the US(Washington DC), but in many places they are challenged legally: e.g. https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/04/08/ask-2-wh...

Specifically, here's a list of areas that implement some form of automated traffic law enforcement. However, many of these may simply be red light cameras.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/speed/speed-camera-communities

They are like that here in New Zealand, though the grey zone is going away slowly but surely.

There is also a new evil on the horizon, average speed cameras. Snap a photo at point A on a long road and see how long it takes to get to point B. If too quick, it generates a ticket. The UK ha them.

We now have avg speed cameras in Australia on most long distance freeways.

Quite a few other European countries as well.

It's popular in Italy and the difference in speeds on highways that have it compared to those that don't is significant.

Personally I like average speed cameras. Everyone is going roughly the same speed, so there's much less tailgating.

You definitely don't have people zipping past you going 200km/h+ when you're trying to overtake a truck limited to 80km/h.

I heard there's often a group of people stopped right before the second camera having a smoke break and watching their phones, waiting for their average speed to drop to the legal limit. Or was someone pulling my leg?

That sounds like someone pulling your leg. If you have to stop and wait, you may as well just go slower and smoke in the car.

Maybe some kind of street racing club would do that, sure. Or if there's a nice rest stop before the second camera, I guess you can speed to get there. But I can't imagine significant numbers of regular people doing it; too much hassle.

Definitely. AFAIK There are few opportunities to stop between sections, unless for emergencies.

I've seen people stop under viaducts because sometimes there's some additional space there, but it's a rare occurrence considering that it will land you a ticket as well.

Can’t speak for all euro countries, but I like their approach in trying to actually identify to fine the actual driver and penalize their license. Because it’s about safety, not revenue.

US and Canada… it’s just a ticket in the mail and as long as it’s paid, it effectively disappears.

Lots of blah blah about why they can’t do things the euro way. I love “privacy” as the excuse. You’re driving on a road with windows and how is it an issue if the car owner gets a picture of who was driving their car?

There are speed cameras and cameras at traffic lights and stop signs in the US. I've received at least one camera ticket, and my wife has received one.

Douglas Maurer, at the time a computer science professor at George Washington University, once set the text of the Montgomery County, Maryland, standard camera ticket to music. The song was called "Forty Bucks", after the then cost.

That's fine in cities, but in the US we have countless roads that stretch for hundreds of miles through remote locations far from developed areas. The cost to install, maintain, and power these hypothetical cameras along just one of these roads could easily stretch into the tens of millions with expensive upkeep as well. It's just not tenable.

These kinds of automated enforcement are absolutely dystopian.

Imagine describing almost anything other than speed limits and suggesting automated camera based enforcement.

Drop a food wrapper on the ground? instant fine. Jaywalk? Instant fine.

If we can't be bothered to enforce our rules in person, the problem is with the rules not the methods of enforcement.

You could instead drive at or below posted speed limits, and stop at traffic signals. Then you wouldn't have to worry about this "dystopia"! And the result is that you'd be a safer driver too.

This is ridiculous whataboutism. We're not discussing robocop sending you to jail for dropping a banana peel. It's simply automatic enforcement of safety rules for operating your licensed, registered, private machinery in public spaces.

> The ticket didn't even pay for the helicopter fuel and the cost of manpower, while zero people were non consensually endangered.

We don't decide to prosecute people based on profitability, thankfully.

I think the more objectionable part of the comment is the assessment that nobody was endangered because the accident didn't materialize. "Empty road" is a mitigating circumstance, which is probably why the officer was nice. But it's certainly not a guarantee, the potential danger was there and the law was applied.

The law aims to discourage the behavior because someone who's riding a motorcycle at well over 100mph on a "remote and desolate" public road is likely to start riding too fast on less desolate roads too.

> The law aims to discourage the behavior because someone who's riding a motorcycle at well over 100mph on a "remote and desolate" public road is likely to start riding too fast on less desolate roads too

This doesn't track at all.

Everyone speeds up on empty roads. Not everyone speeds and weaves in traffic.

Driving very fast in a more or less straight line is not very dangerous, especially when no other cars are around.

> Everyone speeds up on empty roads. Not everyone speeds and weaves in traffic.

Don't defend a point by plucking figures out of thin air and applying your subjective interpretation as a conclusion. Here we're not talking "everyone goes 5 over the limit" but rather double the limit. I've also heard "everyone drinks and drives" being used to justify the same kind of recklessness. But "everyone" might have half a watered down beer. Some will have a whole bottle of hard liquor. "But it's fine, at this hour the roads are empty".

> especially when no other cars are around.

Until there are. This is quite literally how accidents happen, people get used to following their own rules, based on assumed numbers and their safety, and it works a lot of times until it doesn't. Nobody goes out and says "today I want to speed until I kill a family of 5". They just go out and do what they always do, go past any limit, because it worked so far.

But this is not Schrodinger's cat, to assume that all behavior is the same until someone gets hurt and only then can we classify it as dangerous.

And finally remember that ideally a government would also try to protect you from your own recklessness because otherwise they either lose a member of society (you die) or they gain a weight around its neck (you live to be a burden).

People mostly drive based on their comfort on the road. Have you ever been behind someone on a single lane road who is going slow but when the road widens to two lanes and you try to pass, they suddenly speed up?

It's (usually) not because they are trying to race you or they're being an asshole. It's because the wider two lane road is usually more comfortable to speed up on so they do. And chances are they don't realize they are doing it. It's very easy to adjust 10 km/h without even realizing.

Look at it this way. A drivers comfort is based on their own skill level, their vehicles capabilities, the road conditions, the weather, and the traffic around them.

It takes actual effort to go slower than you are comfortable driving. It makes you more likely to make mistakes when you are having to force yourself to drive slower than you are comfortable with, just to be under a speed limit.

The problem drivers are the ones who overestimate parts of their comfort. They overestimate their skill (maybe they're drunk or just stupid), maybe they think their car should handle like a sports car when it isn't one, maybe they think the road isn't as slippery as it is.

Those people wind up feeling more comfortable than they should and therefore drive much faster or more recklessly than they should.

Anyways, feel free to disregard everything I am saying as being plucked from thin air. Have a great day!

> The problem drivers are the ones who overestimate parts of their comfort.

This. The problem with justifying excessive speed on an empty road is the fact that a road can be empty, until it isn't. The speeding driver has now given away all of their buffer that might allow them to avoid a collision. In most cases the collision still won't occur but when it does it will almost certainly be fatal to someone.

> The problem with justifying excessive speed on an empty road

The problem is that automated enforcement catches everyone regardless if it's 5 km/h over or 100.

I'm not ok getting fines for going 5 over so you can prevent one guy a year going 100 over.

The fine will almost certainly be different for the guy going 100.

If they catch everyone going even 5 km/h over, I suspect people will fairly rapidly adjust their driving speeds.

> Everyone speeds up on empty roads.

No? That is just not true. My mother for example would _never_ speed up. Thats just an argument you made out of your mind.

> Driving very fast in a more or less straight line is not very dangerous

This is also not true at all. Especially on a bike going to fast with no experience could end up very badly.

I think having fines be a major funding source distracts from the purpose of the enforcement. They’re supposed to be there for public safety, not for making sure there’s a Christmas bonus.

There are countries where traffic fines are based as a percent of salary rather than flat rates. That way the rich are equally incentivized to obey the laws.

That being said I’ve always felt frustrated by speeding tickets. Everyone goes 5-10 over the limit at all times so it makes a system where cops can basically pull over everyone and give them a ticket at will.

It seems like if it’s a limit, it should be an actual sensible number and be an actual limit. Instead of this kafkaesque system where everyone can be deemed guilty at will.

Likewise I feel other behaviors like tailgating and aggressive driving aren’t enforced and (imho) cause more accidents.

Speed limits are 100% political. They aren’t based on engineering. You always have cops saying “speed was a factor in this collision” and “everyone just needs to slow down to be safe.” But the reality is that accidents don’t happen from high speed, they happen from a high standard deviation among speed of individual cars on the road. Having a speed limit well below what the road can safely be driven at creates that high standard deviation as some people drive to the road while others drive to the limit.

The collective insanity that we as a society have around setting sensible maximum speeds for roads is one of my bigggest pet peeves.

> a high standard deviation among speed of individual cars on the road

so in a world without speed limits, people can individually decide what speed a road "feels like". in a world with speed limits, people can still do that but there's a sign stating a preferred speed for the road and an (admittedly flawed) enforcement mechanism.

I really can't fathom how the former leads to less "deviation" than the latter.

not agreeing with post you responded to, but you're misrepresenting them.

my understanding of the post is that he proposes speed limits should not be set so low as to increase the deviation between people following the speed limit and following their intuition i.e. they should approach average intuitive speed of the drivers using the road.

We do seem to end up with a ratchet effect though. My town sets speed limits at the 85th percentile of speeds based on traffic surveys. Say the limit starts at 30. Most drivers assume a buffer before there will be enforcement, so they start driving 35. Next time the city studies that road, they raise the limit to 35 and drivers start going 40. Rinse. repeat.

Eventually, you end up like our main road through town where the limit is 45, the state limit for that type of surface street. Many drivers are happy to go 50 but the area has built up and also gets a lot of drivers unfamiliar with the area and those drivers go 30. It's a real mess and there are multiple crashes daily but I don't think the speed limit will ever be lowered. I think I've only seen the speed limit lowered on one road in the almost 20 years I've lived here. They only change in one direction.

Leaving aside the simple physics of more kinetic energy making those 'standard deviations' clearly more serious for all involved, we clearly don't want high speed traffic in environments with pedestrians and cyclists. So while the Autobahn may not be a nonstop catastrophe, I would think it's clear that speed limits on non-freeways are far from "100% political".

>I would think it's clear that speed limits on non-freeways are far from "100% political".

This depends on the locale, and what you consider "political". For example, in NYC it is entirely "political/financial. For some time now the city-wide speed limit has been set at 25 mph, with thousands of speed cameras that automatically ticket people. While on some streets this may be reasonable, it is certainly not reasonable city-wide (which includes all the outer boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx). In her annual address this month, Governor Hochul announced that the city-wide speed limit will be lowered even further, below 25 mph! This means that at the maximum legal speed, your car will be passed by bikes, mopeds and even fast runners. This is clearly not a safety issue, thought some will argue it is "safer" (and it would be safer still if the speed limit was 0, nobody would ever die from an auto accident!). It a combination of a money-making scam and a political ploy to curry favor from the small (but politically powerful) group of New Yorkers who want to eliminate cars all together.

To be clear, a huge majority of crashes happen at the interface points between multiple traffic streams. Higher speeds in that situation is absolutely both an exacerbating factor in the likelihood of a crash (by increasing the stopping distance) and the severity of the crash when it happens.

The ticket is to design roads such that people naturally drive at safer speeds. The collective insanity is that we as a society allow engineers to pretend that features intended to speed up traffic are a safety mechanism.

> That being said I’ve always felt frustrated by speeding tickets. Everyone goes 5-10 over the limit at all times so it makes a system where cops can basically pull over everyone and give them a ticket at will.

In some countries such deviations aren't punished. Either they simply don't have a fine/points for going 5-10kmph above the speed limit, or have a relative window depending on the speed. The error of the measuring device might also be considered. And until recently most cars had a builtin "error" in the speed reading of up to 10% mainly to account for slight differences in tire wear and to remove any legal liability from the manufacturer in case of false readings. These days I've seen plenty of cars being spot on because they use GPS to measure so that changes that "buffer". So going 5 over limit usually means a bit more.

Too much flexibility for the police officer isn't great, I agree. It incentivizes abuse of power. The case above isn't one of those though.

California has a requirement that speed limits be set based on a speed survey, except for like school zones and highways posted at 65 or more.

That doesn't help much if you get a ticket for 70 in a 65 when prevailing traffic was doing 75, but at least it prevents some abuses.

But speeding probably get attention because it's objective. Harder to testify about tailgating distance, because there's no printout from the speedgun.

Some EU countries have speed-controlled lights. So if one person goes over the limit it holds everyone up for a couple of minutes.

There are no tickets or fines, just chagrin. It works surprisingly well.

I'm not aware of lights like that in the US but we do have places where the stoplights are timed to a few mph below the speed limit. If you drive 38, you'll hit every green light. If you drive 45, you get to stop at red lights while the car going 38 catches up.

Some people insist on going 50 anyway and I swear some people think that if they go 80 they'll also get the green lights. :)

If there are multiple red-green cycles per 38mph interval, the 80-goers would be right! ;) (eg. you launch from the first light, the next light ahead goes green, red, green before you get through)

Yesterday I was driving and noticed that Google Maps shows user-reported speed traps nowadays. It was fairly accurate and warned me of 2-3 speed traps during my trip. It triggered a thought for me of "wouldn't police departments fight to keep this information out of our hands?" and then I thought of the compelling reason "if the goal of enforcement is to get people to make the roads safer, then this little speed trap warning is actually much more effective at getting that behavior out of me, since I started slowing down a few miles before the trap."

I guess they were spending the fuel cost and heli from a different budget?

> while zero people were non consensually endangered.

because someone is still going to have to scrape your remains off the road after the guardrail you hit decapitated you and degloved your face.

It’s possible this expensive operation ensnares not just the ”innocent” risky drivers but a number of even more dangerous criminals who are driving like they stole it because they actually did steal it or worse.

Affirmative consent from other drivers using the road, pedestrians/cyclists in the roadway, and passengers and children in the car isn’t always practical for each episode of risky driving behavior.

It’s probably enjoyable for some folks, but driving like Vin Diesel (even in the desert) makes me feel selfish and negligent which harshes on my buzz. Therefore it’s not a wise use of my resources.

It cost a lot to make that air/land traffic stop, so I think the fine is probably a bargain!

> How could we rephrase speeding laws so they make sense, instead of this black and white stupidity ?

Ironic considering the lack of nuance in your first sentence. You seem to think that if the guy had wrecked his bike because he was speeding that he would just blink out of existence with no cost to society at all. Do you really think that the only negative externality from speeding is a risk of physically harming somebody? Or are you saying that preventing physical harm to others is the only reason for laws to exist?

Always gotta remember the people who have to scrape your body off the ground don't work for free

So we should stop doing any activity that puts us in harm's way ?

Hiking ? Hiking rescue costs are crazy. Not allowed to go in nature, you get a fine. Any high intensity physical activity where you could hurt yourself ? Basketball, martial arts, all banned ?

What is this, the tyranny of the overcautious couch potato ? :)

Mostly abolish them and make the guilty party in an accident cover everyone's expenses. In severe cases suspend their DL for a decade. People have those things called common sense, tradition, individual responsibility, and experience. We should rely on them much more.

We all know that in CA you drive at the speed limit +5. +10 is actually fine too frequently outside HWY 1 so to speak. Once in a while I see people doing what looks like 85 mph and I question their judgement. But if they stay in the same lane I'm OK with it.

The really dangerous things to be punished for are suddenly crossing 4 lanes for an exit and driving in the left lane slower than the car right behind you.

I have also received a speeding ticket clocked by aircraft, driving across a long empty stretch of highway in the daytime with perfect weather and visibility. I was going 20 mph over the posted limit, nothing outrageous or daredevil-ish about it, simply trying to make better time on a very long road trip. I understand this is primarily a revenue stream for law enforcement, but as far as my situation may have affected public safety (the spirit of the law, not the letter), I call BS.

No chance the ticket revenue from that operation covered its costs.

It’s an excuse to air out the toys, not a revenue stream.

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