Hacker News Reader

Comment by wand3r | Hacker News Reader

Traffic fatalities would fall nearly to 0 if we made all speed limits 25mph. Obviously, as it has been for decades, child safety is the cloak that tyranny is dressed in. Not to mention CP is a common thing to pin on inconvenient people in society. The EU has been doing a lot of rent seeking off Google & big tech. They hit them with fines all the time. If I actually believed they gave a fuck about people or privacy it wouldn't be as offensive to me, but they don't. They want big tech doing what they want, they want "protection money" or at least a slice of the pie, and they want more government control of citizenry. I always admired Europe as an American, but its clearly in the same (or worse) state of decay as the US.

View on HN

> Traffic fatalities would fall nearly to 0 if we made all speed limits 25mph.

Wales is giving it a go:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-62134399

Looks like they're just limiting speed in built-up areas. That's pretty common around the world, including in the US.

> I always admired Europe as an American, but its clearly in the same (or worse) state of decay as the US.

Don’t passively let these systems develop, you can lobby them too.

World construction isn’t just a gradient of people’s mores, it is catalyzed by a couple individuals just like the ones pushing this CSAM scanning

From my experience, everyone feels like they’re doing the most good thing when they are pulling the controls of the state, even though they are all subverting the popular vote with access and money, or vice versa.

Off topic but i just want to share that yesterday I was traveling, and in a residential area (a village) that nobody has stepped a foot in in 30 years, I was caught "speeding". I was going 75 in a 40kph zone.

I don't get why it's 40kms. The traffic sign wasn't even visible, although that's not an excuse that would or should work. It's not like anyone lives there.

Anywho, I paid 150 euros and now I have to go to court, where they will 99.9% take my drivers license away for 3 months. Fucking bullshit.

I study law in uni. I don't get why these archaic villages that nobody has stepped a foot in for a long time are still considered residential areas, limiting how fast you can legally go. I thought the whole point of the law was to serve society and it's interests, and not to fill the state budget by being caught "speeding" in an area where the speed limit shouldn't realistically be that low, but alas it doesn't seem so

Like, I live in a village too, but it's got a population of over 1k as opposed to 0.

> Traffic fatalities would fall nearly to 0 if we made all speed limits 25mph.

You're saying it as if it's a bad thing. Nah, it would be great (with some exceptions that can be addressed). It would encourage ubiquitous and efficient public transport.

Consider moving to Switzerland then. Not only they're discussing an universal 30km/h (18mph) limit in urban areas, but some cities are also tweaking traffic lights to maximise stopped time on top of that.

And we have ubiquitous and efficient public transport.

Switzerland has 1/2 the population of New Jersey. Are the accomplishments in public transportation because the Swiss have solved some fundamental issues that no one else possibility could, a truly amazing feat that the world should look to? Or do certain things work better under certain conditions, and it's pretty much the exact same thing everyone does that doesn't scale?

> Are the accomplishments in public transportation because the Swiss have solved some fundamental issues that no one else possibility could, a truly amazing feat that the world should look to?

Loads of other countries also have great public transportation, especially when the current state of the USA is what’s being compared against. Possibly including the USA itself before cars got going.

> Or do certain things work better under certain conditions, and it's pretty much the exact same thing everything that probably doesn't scale?

The thing which public transport needs to be good at scaling is passengers per hour per land area.

In this regard, approximately all public transport — bus, light rail, heavy rail, tram, ferry, underground — scales better than cars.

This is why the Swiss built them, as all those steep hillsides and valleys already have houses in them, and tunnels (regardless of if they’re road or rail) are expensive.

Seriously, why does this trope of saying “oh America can’t possibly, it’s such a big country” even exist, when the USA also has a road network despite being big and those roads are themselves generally much wider than Europe’s roads? It’s not like public transport is some special magic category that’s different from all the civil infrastructure the USA already makes, the only difference seems to be that “public” is a dirty word.

The real answer is that the US doesn't want public transit. I visited a rustbelt town several years ago, and a new mall had been sited specifically so that it would not be on the bus network: being accessible to the people who ride the bus was considered a liability for the businesses that would rent space in the mall.

More recently I visited a much nicer midwestern town which is planning an expansion of its bus network amd optimizing traffic lights for better bus flow. There is a new mall on the bus line. The difference is that 95% of bus riders in this second town are upper middle class college students.

To flip the argument: ok-to-good public transport is an Europe-wide thing. US is what, 2/3 of the population? Why don’t we ask if US needs to grow for public transport to scale?

Ah yes, because that’s the wrong dimension in the first place. Population density is the one that matters.

At the same time our government wants to increase the cost of public transportation [1] with the age old argument that it is too expensive compared to the cost of individual transportation.

While I don't have the numbers to analyze the costs it just doesn't make sense to me that a car with a single driver can be more cost effective than a bus, tram or train I guess the automobile lobby has convinced loads of my colleagues that individual transportation is price-comparable to public transport, even in Switzerland...

[1] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/hoehere-billettpreise-bund-s... (german)

> doesn't make sense to me that a car with a single driver can be more cost effective than a bus, tram or train

This is a fascinating area to research. Of course there are trade-offs to model including a few such as: price of person's time waiting for next bus, time to go all around the mulberry bush instead of point to point, and hassles and personal safety in public places.

I live in a 30kmph zone in Switzerland and it works fine. I'm not sure what the problem is.

It's a really common speed limit in Europe/UK and is suitable for residential city streets. On Geoguesser I have seen similar US streets that are 40mph which looks completely unsafe.

> some cities are also tweaking traffic lights to maximise stopped time on top of that

Are you sure about that? It would greatly increase unnecessary emissions.

It would also make it take twice as long to drive from a ranch in Summer Lake, Oregon to the local grocery store in Lakeview to get groceries.

Some large swaths of the United States don't have public transit because of the expanse and also because of the use cases. People in the cities rely on people in these rural areas to grow food, so its not like you could wish everyone into the cities and solve the problem.

Lowering speed limit to 25 mph isn't a magic wand. People will speed what they feel safe to speed.

If we want to reduce pedestrian fatalities, there are a raft of social policies and urban planning decisions we can make that reduces fatalities to a potentially very low level if we decided that's a priority. We don't need to rigorously enforce the speed limit to make that happen.

Make it illegal to own a car that does not have a governor which limits it to 25 mph. There are ways around that. Then the only people speeding are those with illegally modified cars. Then you just have to suggest the only reason someone would want to drive faster than 25 is to specifically run over children.

This sounds vaguely familiar. I've seen almost this exact chain of reasoning somewhere and I can't quite put my finger on it.

> Make it illegal to own a car that does not have a governor which limits it to 25 mph.

„Intelligent” speed assistant becomes mandatory for any new model homologated in the EU from next year.

But as we are are onto banning random things that piss us off: can we ban bicycles moving faster than 25mph and also being an idiot? Or even better, make it illegal to procreate with an idtiot. Like mosquitoes, idiots will surely die out if they cannot procreate. Now someone has to come up with a legalese for an idiot.

One day I'd like to create a taxonomy of hacker news responses. This is a good example of the one where someone gets pedantic about the details of an analogy employed for rhetorical purposes, objects to those details, and in so doing completely misses the point.

That's not exclusive to hacker news in the least, I've seen it happen at about the same rate throughout communities regardless of how technology-centric they are. It seems that the inability (or unwillingness) to put away the reality of the analogy and only take it as a bridge towards the point the person is trying to make, is universal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com