Controversial California bill would physically stop new cars from speeding | Hacker News Reader

Controversial California bill would physically stop new cars from speeding

sfgate.com

23 pointsgnicholas49 comments

> The technology would use GPS and a database of roadway speeds to prevent cars from going 10 miles per hour over the speed limit wherever they are.

Sometimes my GPS thinks I'm on an adjacent road, especially when I'm on the freeway. Seems like that kind of error would be catastrophic in combination with a system like this. Also, what's the rationale for letting people go 10 over the limit? That's effectively admitting that people go 10 over the limit, and it's OK.

> what's the rationale for letting people go 10 over the limit

One reason among many: for passing, especially semis, without spending forever in their blind-spot

Is it technically legal to exceed the speed limit when passing? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying no one ever speeds. I’m just wondering what the reasoning would be in this case. Seems to reify speeding, if anything.

No, it's definitely illegal, at least by the letter of the law.

But as long as you're only going a few miles over the speed limit for a few moments, nobody's going to write you a ticket for it.

One of many situations where the law in theory and practical application differ, since officers are given discretion (read: ability to apply common sense) in their duties.

It's not a perfect system, but it's what we've got.

Not in my state. And probably few, if any others. But it is a safety thing. The longer you spend in the oncoming lane completing a pass, the higher the risk of a collision (cars pulling out of driveways into the lane, people misjudging distances, etc.).

There's also what I've observed (not sure if there's an official name for it), that if you pass someone slowly, they will "lock tractor beams" onto you and start to match your speed. So you want to have a noticeable speed difference between your vehicles to prevent this.

Some good anecdotes here: https://www.quora.com/Have-you-ever-been-pulled-over-for-goi...

Oof, that one about the misidentified blue Camry sounds maddening.

Are blind spot mirrors not mandatory there?

Mirrors or not, hanging out in the blind spot is a dangerous place to be. You don't want to be there for any length of time longer than absolutely necessary.

Also, safety. Being able to floor it during an emergency can sometimes get you out of an impending crash - if the situation is right, and your reaction time is quick enough.

Oh for sure, but that could require going more than 10 over the limit. I can't imagine needing to go 25 over the limit under pretty much any (non-apocalyptic) circumstance, but 10 doesn't seem like sufficient for this type of situation.

Re 10 over: As-written and as-lived are quite different. You'd see the governor turned out in the next election if he signed that bill.

Michael Dukakis lost his home state of Massachusetts in the presidential race after he sicced the state police on drivers for exactly this during his campaign.

The law says to stay stopped at a stop sign for 3 seconds, and signal turns 800 feet in advance on the highway too, 600 feet on streets. (According to family who had their driving tests recently.)

Those distances vary per state in case you didn't know

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_United_States_presidentia...

Michael Dukakis did not have a great election night, but he did win his home state.

Measurement error of tools used to catch you speeding?

I understand why cops would have give leeway, but here the measurement tool would be your speedometer. Although I’ve heard some manufacturers make theirs a little on the slow side, I’d think they’d be pretty accurate in general.

Changes in tire size will impair speedometer accuracy.

And your tire gets smaller over time with wear.

Text of the proposed law [1]:

"28171. (a) Commencing with the 2027 model year, every passenger vehicle... be equipped with an intelligent speed limiter system." and (b) "be capable of being temporarily disabled by the driver of the vehicle."

Also: (c) "shall be capable of being fully disabled by the manufacturer or a franchisee, but only as provided in Section 28172." (28172 is about EMS etc.).

I smell loopholes for me (politicians, and likely techies ;-), but not for thee.

Also interesting how GPS jammers haven't entered the chat yet?

[1] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB961/2023

The car speedometer will estimates the vehicle's speed by measuring the number of revolutions per minute of one of the wheel or its transmission.

If the car has different-sized tires than the ones it was originally designed for, there may be some discrepancies between the actual speed vs the speedometer readings, which is why there is some leeway in the speed limit to account for that margin of error.

This is like how CI forces developers to write better code by nudging us towards good behaviors. Is it annoying sometimes to write well-formatted code with high test coverage? Sure. Is it annoying to drive at the speed limit? Sure. Ultimately, it leads to a better outcome.

If this gets adopted, within 10 years people won’t be able to imagine how we lived without it

It seems like most Americans genuinely believe they have not only a right to break the law when it comes to speed limits, but an obligation to speed. Or at least they drive like it. "I'm following the flow of traffic" as if other people breaking the law makes it OK? They feel like they have to race other cars on the road.

I had several completely "straight edge" friends who were obsessed with morality and would never break any law. Except get in a car with them and they go 10-15 mph over, but obsessively look for cops. If they see one, they go 5-10 mph under the limit. If they get a ticket, to them it wasn't like they did something wrong, they just had bad luck. I like to go the speed limit in the second from the right hand lane, often behind a large 18 wheel truck, put it in cruise control, and mostly watch the cars fly by me. This idea was unthinkable to them, even when they were not in a rush.

>It seems like most Americans genuinely believe they have not only a right to break the law when it comes to speed limits, but an obligation to speed. Or at least they drive like it. "I'm following the flow of traffic" as if other people breaking the law makes it OK?

That seems to be a true sentiment, though[0][1][2]. Deviating significantly from the speed of actual traffic will likely lead to more accidents. Insisting stubbornly on following the letter of the law when it is actually detrimental to safety is not moral; it is merely pedantic. Fiat justitia ruat caelum is not a particularly healthy view of the relationship between the legal system and society.

[0]: https://trid.trb.org/view/306976 (From the abstract: "A major influence on speed variance is the difference between the design speed and the posted speed limit. It was determined that speed variance will approach minimum values if the posted speed limit is between 5 and 10 mph lower than the design speed. Outside this range, speed variance increases with an increasing difference between the design speed and the posted speed limit. It was also found that drivers tend to drive at increasing speeds as the roadway geometric characteristics improve, regardless of the posted speed limit, and that accident rates do not necessarily increase with an increase in average speed but do increase with an increase in speed variance.")

[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1904038 ("A model of the optimal speed limit is developed which explicitly recognizes the role of average speed, speed variance, and the level of enforcement. An unusual result emerges, namely that a higher speed limit may be optimal when reducing the variance in highway speeds reduces accident externalities.")

[2]: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/17098/... ("Separate studies by Solomon (1964) and Cirillo (1968) concluded that, as vehicle speeds deviated from the average speed of the traffic stream, crash involvement rates increased... Studies throughout the 1970s produced findings consistent with the research... For crash severity, higher vehicle operating speeds are associated with more severe crash outcomes. However, the relationship between crash frequency and speed is not as clear. There is some indication that increasing posted speed limits is associated with an increase in expected crash frequency; however, the relationship between operating speed and crash frequency has yet to be well established.")

An aside but I’ve always found it fascinating that Google Maps etc have built in alerts when you’re about to pass a speed camera. The only use I can think of for this functionality is to make it easier for you to speed without getting a ticket. I find it interesting that we’re so permissive of something like that when we’re draconian about so much else.

Legally speaking, I feel like it'd be a lot harder to limit information

Also, if they did legislate it out of Google maps, I bet you can recreate it using a background service and an overlay

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. While this is based on good intentions to try to reduce traffic fatalities, I personally feel it's an overstep to try and mandate devices to track to limit a car's top speed. This isn't even considering the edge cases and ensuring this works properly.

The only close thing I can relate this to is an Ignition Interlock Device to limit DUIs, but that seems more acceptable to me since it limits the starting of the car instead of interfering while the car is running and it's required after someone loses the community's trust by having DUIs.

He would have more success, and I bet he plans to negotiate back down to, simply setting a governor limit of 85 miles per hour for all cars sold in the state. It won’t stop residential harm, but it’ll stop the people weaving highway traffic at 90+ mph, and that’s a useful step to take.

How do we tweak our political system to minimize the impact of control freaks?

The freaks would reply, “how do we tweak our traffic infrastructure to minimize the effect of deadly irresponsibility?”

Do you think that California could shut the fuck up until the first Wednesday in November? Independents are poised to deliver the election results California wants, however these are the type of stories and issues that are just enough to stick in a voters head during a decision point.

There it is. The line.

Physically forcing anything is a failure of governance. If you have to force it, you had no authority in the first place and you're just covering up that fact.

America is absolutely committed to creating hell on earth.

I was half expecting this to be about speed bumps. I'm being pedantic, but I would use "automatically stop" instead of "physically stop" when we are talking about software control systems.

Here is an even worse idea: display the bank saldo on the dash. When you go over the speed limit the dollars start counting down exponentially.

Will they register Lambos and Maseratis purchased out of state? If not, it'll nudge other behaviors.

In the future only money will have freedom of movement, never humans.

What if someone has to go to hospital or run from the police?

Individual circumstances are never considered in a socialist state

Or, any state with power. Look at Indiana and pregnant preteens.

Except that in case of California they are willing to give up even money from speeding fines for a perceived public safery, might be short sighted a bit too much but at least the heart is in the right place, in the other case is just a way to limit people freedom, destruction of careers and potential appeasement of some imaginary friend in the sky

I referenced Michaal Dukakis elsewhere, but what REALLY ground everyone's geara was that the speed enforcement was to raise fines issued. He was campaigning on the Massachusetts Miracle, with a healthy budget, and shortfalls were appearing that needed to be filled.

The effect that everyone hated was the enforcement. That it was to harvest their money for his ambition definitely increased the hate.

Tough.

I think this has a snowball's chance but it could move the Overton window.

Look for CA population decline if it passes.

Seems like one of those circumstances could justify an exception. The other, not as much. OJ wouldn’t mind though, given the speed at which he preferred to flee the LAPD.

I don't think many people will argue that running from the police is something we want to legitimize. It is also is never going to end well. The police have orders of magnitude more resources and will eventually catch you. (And meanwhile, you've probably put hundreds of innocent lives at risk while speeding through traffic.) The correct venue there is to argue your case in court.

As for the hospital... that's a nuanced one. There's certainly an argument for that, especially in rural areas where ambulances are not readily available. There's also the argument that without lights and sirens, you're putting everyone else around you at risk. There's a reason the law doesn't carve out an exception for private individuals speeding in medical emergencies.

If this law/tech had been in place in the 1940s and 50s NASCAR would have never been created. By imposing it, who knows what possibilities of creative expression we're artificially pruning from our cultural trajectory.

We make tradeoffs like this all the time. Who knows how many amazing adventurous frontier literature we're missing out on, as we've moved on from gun slingers regularly robbing banks and having duels with bounty hunters at high noon.

(I'm not arguing for / against the auto-enforced speed limit)

What about all the entertainment we gave up since gladiators fights were outlawed? ;o

Driving vehicles will never be creative expression.

I didn't like the Mad Max movie either, but isn't that a bit much?

> I don't think many people will argue that running from the police is something we want to legitimize. It is also is never going to end well.

In some jurisdictions, the official policy is to not chase fleeing offenders, which both validates your point that this is dangerous, and also makes it somewhat more likely that it could actually end well for a fleeing criminal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com