California Senate Passes Bill Requiring Passive Speed Limiters
roadandtrack.com
roadandtrack.com
It’s the same thing with the new income-based adjustments to electricity rates, which “helps reduce the burden of utility payments” without doing anything to address the fact that California has the among the highest cost of electricity anywhere. I don’t think the legislators think about this or care, because look! they are “addressing the problems”.
Will adding a require speeding bell in cars reduce car-related fatalities? Or just cause people to learn how to shut off or ignore the government-mandated bell?
No mention of how much the manufacturer is allowed to charge you every month, for access to "your" car's proprietary GPS->Speed Limit database.
I can only imagine some future manufacturer’s database would be even more out of sync.
Or that the highway near my house that the car seems to think is 35.
Barring also adding some sort of managed database owned by the state I don't see this being remotely viable.
Well that will be illegal then.?
As much as I hate them, speed cameras seem like a solution that is easier to implement.
Nothing's easier than passing a law...which says that implementation is someone else's problem.
> GPS alone isn't accurate enough for this anyways.
Per article:
> If the system has conflicting speed limits in the same area, the higher speed limit is used.
Laws that are on the books but rarely enforced is a recipe for abuse. It is unjust that I, as an immigrant to this country who can be deported if I commit crimes, have to violate the posted law in order to keep up with the flow of traffic.
Edit: Actually, it looks like this just informs the driver that they are going over the speed limit. Not good. It needs to physically restrict the speed of the car.
If you want people to go slower, make the roads/lanes narrower.
I still get tailgated, honked at, and road raged. Often by a large pickup truck.
Ultimately, lawbreakers will break laws. Just like the trope of getting a gun illegally.
Stay in the second to right lane. Never go more than 7 miles over. After 10 miles over, the tickets get expensive, and the police have more of a reason to pull you over. 7 mph accounts for speedometer errors and makes you part of the pack but not the speediest.
Make your car look respectable; Like it's driven by a person who could contest a ticket.
If pulled over: Be polite but not obsequious. When asked, immediately admit to going 7 miles over as a matter of fact so you don't get tailgaters. You'll most likely get a warning.
And it moves from goofy to dangerous when the response of many drivers to people who don't respond that way is to behave super aggressively towards anyone going the speed limit, even if they're in the right-hand lane.
take california where this kind of speeding is rampant.
- it has very regressive speed laws compared to other western states with similar roads. it has 55mph maximum for trucks (and cars) pulling trailers and on two-lane. 65mph anywhere else maximum. most neighboring states have eliminated split speed limits and have 75 or 80 max.
- it has a comparatively large, very professional highway patrol (CHP). it certainly isn't for lack of enforcement capability.
- a very large population (39M) means state politics is a combination of huge bureaucracy and big money. there's a proposition system, but even that is essentially inaccessible without lots of money. even if something good did start organically, by the time it was mangled by the self-serving politicians it'd end up worse than where it started.
- california has roads and drivers. lots and lots of both. and lots of urban sprawl too. nearly everyone has to contend with it, like it or not.
so the reason "everyone" responds to this by exceeding the limit, is that it's easier than the alternatives. a majority of the drivers "realize" (to some extent) that they have approximately three options:
a) drive the speed limit and get punished by other drivers and sometimes law enforcement [1],
b) same as a, but make it one's life mission to change the laws effectively, or
c) put your foot in it and go with the flow of the herd. even if there were 10x the CHP presence, they can't stop everyone.
there are so many people who vote this way with their accelerator pedal, that if you go with the flow of traffic even if it's 20mph over the posted limit for 10 years you might not get a ticket. if you ever do, no harm, no foul: you were simply randomly selected for the "extra road tax".
this is a different kind of democracy. it's very "direct" and very real time. the rules aren't written down, but they aren't imaginary either. in short, it's the polar opposite of the dejure government system. it's actually extremely democratic: one car, one vote for the "correct" speed.
of course there are outliers and "criminals" in this society: the guy in the black mercedes who "doesn't give a shit" and wants to go as fast as he can. his concern for the other drivers is as slalom obstacles. AND ALSO the guy who sets his speed control to whatever the sign says and becomes an obstruction. they are both ignoring the other drivers and thumbing their nose at the rules of that society.
it's a lot worse than "goofy". when you've conditioned people that the "right" way to effect change in government, whether democracy or not, is defacto closed-off and inaccessible. and then there's a problem, people will organically find a way to fix the problem. if the cheapest easiest way is simply to ignore the dejure government rules en-mass, that's what will happen. it's hard to imagine how to "get back" from it, if that's what you want. it's a testament to the unprofessionalism, selfishness, and pure stupidity of our elected officials that they've ignored this possibility allowed it to cross that line.
as for speeding, if california would post really reasonable speed limits, a larger group of people might find it "not worth it" to go faster than posted. perhaps they didn't really want to go faster in the first place. you'd have to make this a solid majority in order to cause the pirate society to fail. it doesn't seem that likely. it's pretty cheap to just ignore something.
[1] if you drive substantially slower than the "herd", perversely you will draw more CHP attention and be more likely to be pulled over. are you drunk? is your car unsafe? are you on the phone? violating CVC 24000? are you unlicensed or uninsured? are you simply the first/slowest car the motor-officer catches up to, and therefore a safer/faster option to get to the next doughnut?
Moreover, the coming generation of cops don’t see speeding the same way older cops do, so yes you can’t speed, but in my state cops are rarely sitting in medians and doing enforcement (and definitely not going thru all the trouble to hide in the trees and risk their life to pull out on a highway), post Covid and with the new gen of cops it’s very noticeable. Savvy speeders know this, and the cops that are there are marked on Waze or are going to be detected by radar otherwise.
The rules are unwritten. Like you said, but beyond that - You can use signals intel (radar) and intel (Waze) in combo with situational awareness to avoid most situations where you’d get caught (most of the time) the decision to make this calculated risk and rely on your skills and equipment lets you avoid the law. Stuff like this happens with regulations all over I imagine
When a street is designed to allow someone to comfortably do 45 because it’s maybe 2 lanes in one direction instead of 1, but posted as a 25, people will speed on it.
A YouTube short I saw the other day about this concept: https://youtube.com/shorts/MyT7F5zuOU4
also great way to get someone killed if they meet one
There are many laws on the books that are rarely enforced and its not a recipe for disaster. Some laws are just old and achieve functional obsolescence. Some laws exist only so that they can be enforced as helpful to prevent or investigate other unrelated criminal behavior. The only disaster here is irrationally limiting the discretion of judicial and law enforcement agents to appease some blind appeal to authority.
Why is an appeal to authority wrong, when we are literally talking about the speed limit, which is a law posted by an authority? Obviously what is legal is not what is moral/ethical, but if the speed limits should be changed, that is a different conversation than if the law should be enforced.
What is the point of a law that is not enforced? I guess Americans are used to seeing a posted number and then having to do mental math to calculate what the real number is (prices). That feels literally insane to me. I feel like I am living in Crazytown, USA.
Appeals to authority are logical fallacies because they are blanket excuses to ignore evidence in order to satisfy an opinion out of convenience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#In_the...
They’re not saying it’s logically objectively correct that people should go 65mph on a highway, due to the fact that authority has stated it thusly.
They’re simply saying that because the authority has made that law, the authority should enforce that law.
Now, they might be committing the Just World fallacy by complaining about the unequal treatment average drivers get versus immigrants.
There is some ground we can cover to discuss how to reasonably increase traffic law enforcement without just shutting it down with a poorly applied accusation of logical fallacy.
WRT speeding, I think automatic speed enforcement would be pretty simple. We already have automatic tolls and traffic cameras everywhere.
You're looking at it like:
This is a law. It is not perfectly enforced. We must perfectly enforce it.
Everyone else looks at it like:
This is a law. We pay lip service to it's utility, and pay fines out of tradition, but are fairly certain it probably shouldn't even be a law anymore, but unfortunately other systems are cripplingly dependent on it as a revenue source. It's not actively causing much harm. If it were perfectly enforced, so many goddamn new problems manifest. If it isn't enforced at all, so many problems manifest. Leave it alone.
You should sit and meditate on the legal system, and maybe do a bit of reading up on some examples of terrible/counterintuitive outcomes of legislation.
Having done exactly that, I've come to the conclusion that legislation/enforcement is more about making threats against the governed populace, and in reality, many things passed as law could not survive being perfectly enforced without becoming severely disruptive.
Besides which, this is the United States. Law enforcement is technically an extra obstacle placed in the way of people engaging in the pursuit of their own happiness. Only the pursuit is guaranteed. Not others being safe other people's pursuit thereof.
There was a reason why "home of the brave" was a moniker; and it had nothing to do with warfare or the natives. It had to do with the fundamental level of courage necessitated by living in a culture in which liberty was valued above all else. Everything was okay by default. That was radical thinking at the time.
Those are exactly the people I want to limit though - the kind of people who decide “driving while black” is a crime they need to investigate.
try empathy for the people killed by other drivers doing in excess of 100mph.
There are situations, where it would be dangerous if you cannot exceed the speed limit. All cars in Japan are limited to 160 km/h, even though the fastest speed limit is 120 km/h, this to allow for situations where exceeding that limit is necessary.
Or perhaps getting away from a natural disaster.
We talked to the medic on site, and luckily the symptoms seemed to be abating. The medic (also a LEO), told me to drive my friend to the nearest hospital, 45 minutes away. The medic said, "Drive fast, but not too fast. Unless the symptoms get worse, in which case drive REALLY fast."
The symptoms did not get worse, gratefully. But this is a case where a LEO was telling me when it would be a good time to speed.
Would you trust the system to be reliable? (Among the many issues in topic.)
I have met many that call car systems trying to keep people inside lanes "plain dangerous after experience".
What I’m hearing is that you either want to have a mixed bag of automatic enforcement on some cars and none on other cars, or, you want everyone with a noncompliant car to be forced into an upgrade.
If you think about it for more than a few seconds, either approach is bad. In the first case you have added new safety issues while you try to remove them. In the 2nd case, it only sounds like a good plan if you want to redistribute wealth from the middle and lower classes to car manufacturers.
For the upgrade path, it could be treated like building codes, which change every so often without requiring immediate retrofit of all homes/buildings: require it as a part of resale.
Not trying to be contrary or throw up imaginary hypotheticals, I drive a car that sometimes has trouble keeping up with traffic on such downhills because I’m very top heavy.
People that talk about stuff like this seriously have no appreciation for the variety of car and road types that are already present in the real world. Robot assistance being offered is fine. But robot enforced compliance killing people in the name of safety is absurd.
The bad logic is as follows: Speed in excess of posted limits increases the probability of a traffic related accident. This is affirming the consequent in combination with an appeal to probability. The reality is that there are typically a multitude of variables responsible for traffic accidents, and so isolating and then blaming one of those variables in isolation results in a belief system that ignores evidence.
The primary cause of most traffic accidents is driver inattention irrespective of their speed. A driver who is not paying sufficient attention and driving with excess speed is more dangerous still, but the primary factor there is still not the speed.
Now instead of heavily enforcing speed limits aggressively everywhere, often as a money making venture for local municipalities, Texas police instead focus on more import aspects of criminal law and community service. Reckless driving is still just as heavily enforced however.
https://ftp.txdot.gov/pub/txdot-info/trf/trafficsafety/engin...
If thats true wouldnt addressing an easy one of them be a way to start?
A collection of humans making a collective decision compromising on everyone’s biases is called politics.
California has decided through a political process to take a step against speeding.
Now, you may not personally like it, but you are in no position to say they are wrong.
Applying Texas’ example as evidence of California’s objective mistakenness is also logically inconsistent. You did not state any conditions which may apply in Texas but not in California. You are equating the two in an all-else-remaining-equal fashion.
When traffic on the highway is near a standstill you really shouldn’t fly down an open lane at the highway speed limit
Sometimes roundabouts are found to increase accidents relative to four way stops, but they're still held to be an improvement because the accidents are on average much less severe.
That's why road redesigns that makes drivers less comfortable with high speeds are important. It makes them slow down and also become more attentive. People respond to the psychological cues of their built environment. Here's a YouTube short explaining it: https://youtube.com/shorts/MyT7F5zuOU4
But your conclusion is not supported by this -- if anything it encourages towards a similar result through technology...
Less people can speed.. less police officers would be needed to police 'just' speeding, those police officers would not be able to collect money for their local municipality.. and would be assigned alternative duties, or focus on wreckless driving (which could still generate money)
During this same time period Texas has become drunkenly addicted to traffic circles. Supposedly these simultaneously ease congestion and reduce accidents. These are also generally unpopular, but not so much so to warrant large law suits or rush to the voting ballots.
In that GPS subsystems I want off are off.
I have seen vehicles which worked with some security subsystems disconnected, and others that refused to work properly.
Plus, you have the issue of the method: "Welcome to your wedding: this is your wife, and this the complimentary gimp (should you want to dispose it, you have the onus)".
Plus: have you considered how much the complementary gimps (etc.) that come with the car inflate its price?
You get to choose which smartphone to use, and when to upgrade them. The lifecycle of a car is A LOT longer than its onbaord infotainment.
I see no mandated free of charge on data updating, nor mandated support timeframe.
However I do agree that self-driving would reduce mortality a lot, the question is whether the price is too high. This is in fact an interesting dilemma, not the trolley problem.
The car has a camera that records speed limit signs as it passes, and shows the last speed it saw on the dashboard. I'm not sure if it's the camera or the built-in maps that allow it to distinguish between single carriageway and dual carriageway roads, which have different limits for the same signage, but it's pretty good at it. It does have GPS, but it doesn't seem to use it for limits in general driving -- that probably means it's insufficient for this law.
One may set visible or audible announcements, or even update the cruise control limited, based on the current detected limit. The downside of using a camera, though, is that as good as it is at picking up the right limits (and it is good!) it struggles with advance warning signs and also with some junctions on corners where the limit changes if you turn off.
On the other hand, if the audible reminder sounds when your speed goes above the limit then the obvious thing to do is to hit 85mph then not slow down and it won't bother you again :).
Unfortunately the US treats every street and road like it’s a country road when it comes to speed limits, with a lot of deaths as a result.
Great video on this at https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc?si=AseOYw8Lo7DKw0or
1. It all but eliminates plausible deniability for those fighting speeding tickets.
2. New drivers will certainly benefit from the additional alert, as they often have no idea they’re speeding.
3. The federal government has been moving in this direction for a while. It’s coming.
People drag race right in front of my house all night long on the weekends. It’s absurdly dangerous.
We are on the edge of a residential neighborhood (so our house faces the main road), and a few blocks from a police station. The police do nothing.
I don’t think I’ve seen somebody “pulled over” in my city in like a decade.
A few days ago I say a guy pull into the oncoming traffic lanes and hit the top of 3rd gear to cut in front of a line of cars at a stop light.
Just absolutely insane, deranged behavior and I see it every single day.
Edit: I was mistaken and thought this limited speed. Apparently this is actually useless.
This sounds absolutely and completely useless.
> I don’t think I’ve seen somebody “pulled over” in my city in like a decade
Seems like there’s a pretty straightforward alternative here - have law enforcement enforce the law.
As a law-and-order kind of person, this my first reaction as well.
But it seems so obvious, I have to wonder: what's at work that prevents this solution from being enacted?
I.e., are there factors I'm not aware of that make it logistically and/or politically difficult?
When something is dangerous or unpleasant, even if we are paid to do it, we will often hesitate to do it.
In MD, however, it was a very different story. They would hide behind bushes.
Also probably they spend their budget importing fentanyl or buying office furniture from their brother or something (mostly tongue in cheek here, and I certainly haven’t done or seen an audit but unfortunately “inspired by true events”)
A friend's neighbor in wine country is an early retired officer due to injury - their benefits pretty much match many tech workers.
Looks like in San Jose police salaries start at $111k and max out at $186k, BUT additionally SJ spent $58M on overtime. _Average_ overtime pay for officer, sgt, lt and captain were $38-68k and some earned as much $200k in overtime. So the salary is probably $150-$220k on average I'd assume. Not as bad as many think.
But it's possible I'm reading some of this wrong.
[1] https://www.sjpdyou.com/for-applicants/additional-informatio... [2] https://sanjosespotlight.com/san-jose-spent-58m-on-police-ov...
One weekend after my buddy and I went down there, I saw on the news that the police intervened finally to stop the drag racing. It was a very big operation to quickly and simultaneously pull enough cops cars out to block both ends of Front Street entirely to corral all of the racers and spectators in. Helicopters were also deployed in case someone wanted to try to speed through the city to escape. In the end, all the cars they managed to corral got impounded. I don't know what the long term effect was on the drag racers.
I imagine that if you're going to do it right – and not just set up a bunch of reckless high speed chases through neighborhoods/cities – it actually has to be a fairly large operation, pulling in a lot of resources for a substantial amount of time. And I don't know if it ultimately stops drag racing or just pauses it for a while, nor do I know what the opportunity cost is of pulling all the resources away from other policing tasks.
While I'm generally for impounding drag racers and ATV swarms, I do think there are tradeoffs and risks that the police department leadership has to take into account.
Hell, if they handed out a $200 ticket for everyone browsing their phones while driving, they could probably fund their entire departments.
We'll get many large backgardens ("for investment only - currently inhabited"), as the same proposal was made in the UK in 2021 (if I remember well. Cannot search for the article right now).
Edit: ok, etiquette obliged. I am checking. The results are much worse than I understood... (This is so unnerving I typed 'understool', and there could be many slips in that.)
> The EU ruled on 6 July 2022 that all new cars manufactured in Europe must be fitted with speed limiters as of July 2024
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/new-car-spee...
The acceleration should atleast should be 'opt in' some how.
e.g. “The city annexed part of the outlying county to increase its property tax base. It now has to provide services to that area.”