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Comment by qup | Hacker News Reader

Total tangent, but a street a couple of blocks away has been getting resurfaced, and man! Some piece of heavy equipment sounds like a diesel truck idling a few meters away.

I can't believe how much the noise transfers.

> speed limit

I'd probably have to quit that job. I at least need the autonomy to drive the vehicle if I'm the one risking my life in it

This seems like the future, though. I'm sure some tech will be developed to do this to everyone, probably with a punitive system attached, per usual.

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>I'd probably have to quit that job. I at least need the autonomy to drive the vehicle if I'm the one risking my life in it

Speed limits are less about you and more about everyone else around you. Your autonomy means nothing to the mother and child driving the limit when you smash and kill them.

Let's be real here for a moment. Amazon didn't implement a system like that 'For The Children', they did it to limit their liability and produce goodwill/leniency/court-appeal for when, if ever, they need it.

It produces a very nice after-effect of additional safety, but it's not the raison d'etre.

Yeah, but that's a little beside the point: the liability and social pressure exists (in part) for that reason, especially since without it we all kind of understand what companies like Amazon would do.

I don't think the comment implied that it was the "raison d'etre". A company who has employees on the road should strive to make them follow the law. If the vehicles are owned by corporation XYZ, the drivers are employed by corporation XYZ -- it stands to reason that they should ensure that laws are followed. e.g. that the drivers have valid licenses, they are authorized for employment in the region they are employed, etc. Why should following speed limits trigger this train of thought?

Yeah, everyone knows that these hourly workers get impossible schedules that have every moment allocated and they can't recover when something slows them down, speeding is one way to get there.

That's just companies externalizing their costs. Instead of paying for more staff + vehicles to get the job done quicker, they're externalizing the cost to the people they hit. At amazon or doordash scale, it's not a matter of if they injury or kill someone, it's a matter of how many people they will injury and kill by causing their drivers to speed.

In america, speed limits are about municipal police funding.

For the downvoters, “The speed limit is alternately too low on interstate highways, giving police discretion to make stops at will”

https://slate.com/business/2021/12/speed-limit-americas-most...

The speed limit on interstate highways is too low. There are no Amazon packages being delivered to homes whose driveways go directly on to the interstate.

Correct. It’s not a great citation because I assumed that the average HN reader knows the games municipal police play with speed limits but I got downvotes and (at the time) no replies.

If you're driving a delivery truck in a residential neighborhood, most of the people around you are at FAR more risk than you are. If I'm operating (and liable for) a fleet of such vehicles, I'm going to do everything I can to ensure the operators are doing so safely (especially in the face of incentivizing them to also operate efficiently).

Yeah but seeing these delivery trucks and ride share based delivery cars accelerating as fast as possible and stopping as fast as possible over and over again in your neighborhood where your kids play outside is not so great.

You need the autonomy to break the law while on the clock and endanger yourself and those around you without it being reported? Why?

Because Amazon also fires drivers if they don't manage an insane pace of deliveries-per-hour. Speeding is basically the only way you can meet the target they set. So it's pretty shitty of Amazon to put drivers in this Catch-22.

Maybe that would actually help you to prove if you are being asked to do something unreasonable

sounds more fair to drivers if everyone is policed equally. otherwise like you say, they are forced to speed. if you want to drive safely you can't and also keep your job. whereas now the metrics will show what is reasonable.

Is your behavioural model of Amazon that they are trying to maximise firings?

Maximizing profit.

It's a large chunk of logistics. When EDL (electronic data logging) became mandatory a crapton of drivers left the industry because they could no longer fudge records.

The labor churn is an unintended, and ignored side effect.

I think they're definitely trying to maximize _cause_ for firings, such that if and when they do firings, they can't (as easily) be accused of firing for wrongful cause.

In real world practical tests, speeding does not reduce the overall travel times proportionally with the speed. This is ESPECIALLY true for city driving and for a job with a ton of stops like a delivery driver.

Going 45 in a 40 is a 12.5% increase on paper but maybe 3% more deliveries in a day at best. I'd be shocked if that much honestly.

Speeding does not help anyone.

> 3% more deliveries

With stack ranking, this can easily get you from the bottom half to the top half pf performers.

What is the resolution of the speed detection? When was the map last updated?

Or to put this another way:

We have a system for perfectly knowing what the drivers speed is. We also perfectly know what the legal street speed is.

Instead of limiting the drivers maximum speed to the legal street speed, we instead just tell their boss?

Looks to me like Amazon wants their drivers to violate the speed limit but then also want to have a record of when they do so they can fire them for cause.

Both resolution and updates are imperfect, therefore, the reporting system makes more sense. The appeal process for an on-vehicle limit is instant, real-time interaction with the hardware, while for the latter you can talk to a human.

If you were cited for going 68 in a 25 you can point out that you were on the highway 10 seconds before and 10 seconds after the incident, and had no way to get to the access road under the highway. If your vehicle decided you were speeding and slammed on the brakes in the middle of the interstate, you'd need a much more reliable system.

If your relationship with your employer is dehumanized to the point where these reports, reviews, and penalties are interactions with an uncaring piece of software, that's a different problem.

Right. That is my point, so now you are expecting the Amazon delivery manager to take time to go through all the reports with each employee. The employee to remember what was going on at the time and the system to be fair.

Or:

The Amazon manager is either going to fire the employee after a number of reports or keep the reports in their back pocket to use when they need an excuse to fire the employee.

Do speed limiters that engage the brakes actually exist, or is this a nonsense scenario?

> Instead of limiting the drivers maximum speed to the legal street speed, we instead just tell their boss?

I don't know about the Rivian, but many driver monitoring systems are aftermarket retrofits, not vehicle manufacturer parts. The driver monitoring system is just a fancy dashcam with cloud uploading features, and a bunch of people in a low-income country manually labelling video clips.

If you drive the 55mph speed limit on "the bypass" in pretty much any metro area in the united states, you are risking your own life to be going so slow relative to traffic.

I'm generally the slowest driver on my commute, judging from the fact that I rarely pass anyone; however, I go faster than the speed limit, at some point during the trip, nearly every time I get in the car.

I do not endanger those around me, in my opinion.

I think this is extremely regional - it's not true in the Grand Rapids, MI metro area (here we have to fight to get people to zipper merge at the lane closure instead of backing up 5 miles down the expressway in one lane because they heard it was closed...)

But having driven in Chicago and San Francisco, it's quite different in some places. Probably needs local differences in policy and application.

On the Dan Ryan, driving the speed limit would be very unsafe considering most people are going at least 15 over!

>This seems like the future, though

Seems like that is in a race with outlawing human operated drivers once autonomous vehicles become the norm.

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