ebikes already have this, why not cars?
The problem with dynamic speed caps is that they fail in very dangerous ways. If you’re on a freeway but your GPS thinks you’re on a residential street, you’re suddenly going much slower than surrounding traffic.
A simpler solution would be to actually enforce traffic laws. It’s only a tiny fraction of drivers who endanger the public. The sooner we identify them and get them off the road, the safer we’ll be.
I don’t know where you live but in every city I’ve visited that fraction is close to half, and for certain behaviors like not stopping for a stop sign or turn on red it’s like 95%.
With regards to speed, I think a lot of this could be addressed by having the vehicle do something like turn off the sound system and play a warning that you’re exceeding the limit when you do more than a certain percentage over for more than a short time. That’d take the fun out of it and interfere with someone’s Zoom call while still allowing them to ignore it if there’s some GPS bounce or something while leaving the freeway.
https://www.progressive.com/lifelanes/on-the-road/speeding-i...
What you’re hoping is that a police officer would agree with your decision and choose not to write you a ticket. That might work, but if you try this you are gambling on that and almost certainly not saving any meaningful amount of time.
It is dogmatic and antiscientific.
You simply imagine a scenario, make up some predictions, and call it a universal truth.
Speeding on the way to the hospital is a very small subset of speeding, and you claimed that speeding on the way to the hospital caused more deaths than delay, and seemingly implied that it was impossible for delay to be more deadly, even on a case by case basis.
> you claimed that speeding on the way to the hospital caused more deaths than delay
Here’s what I actually wrote:
> Your dying patient is going to be worse off when you get t-boned driving that aggressively or simply shaking them around. The primary limiting factor in a city are other vehicles, not speed, and not having a siren matters more there.
The point was simply that even in a time-critical emergency, a driver who doesn’t have training driving like that or things like ambulance lights & sirens is going to make things worse. Driving as fast as you can is a recipe for losing control or hitting someone you didn’t see in time. It’s also unlikely to be good for the patient in most scenarios: if they have an injury that serious, whiplash probably isn’t a good addition.
Additionally, it’s usually pointless: in the city scenario in question, you’re most likely to simply be dangerously getting to the next backup without significant reduction in door to door travel. Even an ambulance with its lights and sirens on will be slowed significantly by people who aren’t paying attention or won’t/can’t get out of the way, and an ordinary driver is going to have a worse time than that. That’s even more pronounced for the moves which potentially save more time like running red lights or using the opposite lanes to pass, which I’ve only seen ambulance drivers do when they had a police officer running cover for them.
To summarize: this kind of situation is rare - maybe once or twice in your life, if ever – and even in such cases it’s a very high risk scenario which is unlikely to save enough time to be worth it. That’s why it’s not legal - nobody wants the inevitable deaths which would come from giving carte blanche to anyone who panics over indigestion and decides they should drive to the ER at 90mph - and also why I don’t think it’s a serious argument against safety technologies.
And know that whoever malefactors will not have that speed governor
Regardless, I think those situations are relatively rare and the potential lives saved would pale in comparison to daily traffic deaths
I saw a post here recently about how even ambulance companies are considering revising their policies for speeding and disrupting traffic because there's data showing it leads to worse mortality outcomes. And that's WITH a professional ambulance driver using their lights and sirens
Edit: here's the link https://www.ems1.com/ambulance-safety/articles/14-groups-iss...
Why invade the cars of every single person. Absurdly heavy-handed, and not necessary nor likely as effective at stopping people speeding on your street.
Narrow, targeted enforcement against violators of existing laws would suffice. Keep incrementally increasing the penalty until it works.
If it didn't work the first time, it's not going to work the second time.
If nobody thinks they will get caught, penalties dont matter. If the majority decides not to follow the rules, the police cant enforce them meaningfully, there simply not enough police to enforce all the rules against all the people, all the time
You could have cars not permit going above the speed limit on highways for more than X minutes [to facilitate overtaking]. You could dynamically lower the speed limit during inclement weather. You could lower the speed limit when approaching an emergency vehicle by the side of the road. I'm not sure we have accurate enough position info to somehow force people out of the passing lane after a certain amount of time.
Hell, you don't even have to make it outright impossible to drive a car fast -- add a manual override switch, that removes the governor while logging your location and speed with the appropriate authorities. Audit after the fact to distinguish between "automatic speed limits were incorrect", "someone in the car was bleeding out on the way to the hospital" and "I wanted to go real fast".
Edit: I'm curious (not complaining) as to why this comment is being downvoted. Is it because people disagree with me about not objecting to the idea of speed-limiting in cities, or because people disagree with me about not wanting to talk to servers?