Austria to 'Super-Speeders': We're Taking Your Car
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Just came back from Germany and drove on the no speed limit part of the autobahn. It was orderly and I felt perfectly safe with family going equivalent of 120mph. No one cutting you off, unless passing, no sitting in left lane. Getting passed at that speed like you are standing still takes a bit getting used to, but again, it’s very predictable. Did not witness any accidents in 2 weeks of driving. It can be done, just need proper rules, penalties for breaking them that are actually enforced and of course good roads (didn’t see any pot holes either).
Speed substantially increases the severity of collisions when they do happen. A non-fatal collision at 70mph might be a fatal one at 80mph.
I’ve been hit a few times in US and always it’s a distracted driver going fast and not following any rules. Speed limit didn’t slow them one bit. Not even in a school zone. Training, enforcement and more training is in my view a better answer. Not perfect, but better.
The problem here is the problem of casinos, people here buy into the illusion of control.
I, too, prefer socialist trains over the individuated, elitist inefficiency of cars. https://youtu.be/9-Jy-yBboCM
Americans would simply not put up with this.
What the US really needs (also like Germany), is to make it much more difficult to get a license, and make it much easier to lose one for bad driving. Unfortunately that’s a political nonstarter since decades of poor zoning policy have resulted in nearly everything requiring a car to get to.
While I agree, getting a licence in most of places in Europe is pretty difficult, but driving culture is nowhere close to German.
9/11 killed a month's worth of road fatalities, and in response we invaded two countries.
I guess it's understandable: if we invaded two random countries every month we'd soon run out of countries.
Despite vivid imagination, there is 0 reasons for you go 10-20% over speed limit, ever.
Why should you endanger everyone when you are in emergency? Why overtake someone if they are driving within 10% of speed limit?
If you want experience speed - get trained and go to a racetrack.
There's no reason why your car (and road agency) shouldn't exactly know speed limit and state of every single road. We live in a global realtime SAR imaging sat coverage and global sat internet coverage. We can track every single car in the world and you say we can't make a realtime database of speed limits? Get outta here, decel.
At least 80% of the cars pass me constantly and I constantly see drivers pissed off at me driving slowly. I have no solution, I feel unsafe going slower but I also don't want to go faster, it stresses me (tickets, losing driving license etc.), but I also don't want to endanger anybody.
If you have suggestions, great. I'll keep going at the posted speed limit.
But the effective outcome of all the sound and fury is that police enforcement seems way way down. I can't understand why they allow so many drivers to go around with expired license plates and worse (no plates, hand written plates, etc). They just don't stop them any more. There was a claim that laws about safe pursuit were a reason to not stop them, then they reversed the laws, still happening). I'm very ticked about it.
1. LA https://apnews.com/article/3ad962eb78e30975354f6036c6451022#....
2. NYC https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/01/us/new-york-budget-nypd-1-bil...
3. Austin https://www.npr.org/2021/10/24/1048790508/officials-in-austi...
4. Seattle https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-h...
5. Portland https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/protests/defunding-po...
I could go on.
We lost 70% of the officers to other jurisdictions that don't hate them.
There are two kinds of speed camera systems. One uses two cameras in short succession to measure instantaneous speed. You can dodge this by slowing down right before it.
The second uses the same concept but puts the cameras a mile or so apart to measure duration over that distance. This is harder to game.
You need traffic police to enforce reckless driving kaws
The Democrat stronghold cities have less police now than three years ago.
>Officials said they drew inspiration from neighboring Switzerland, which has been confiscating cars owned by extreme speeders for more than a decade.
We have so many technological fixes for it too. Modern cars can actually read speed limit signs, yet they don't have a feature to limit the speed of the vehicle to that limit. Some cars have a feature to limit the speed limit depending on whose car keys are in the car, but the owner has to enable it. Even if sometimes you have to speed for some extraordinary circumstance, the car could limit it to <85mph after 30 seconds (the fastest public road speed limit in the US is 85mph). And to reduce the number of drunk driving incidents, all cars could have a built-in breathalyzer.
But we don't do these things for the same reason people refused to wear masks during the pandemic: fear of an attack on personal liberty. We care much more about our ability to do terrible things than our responsibility to not do harm. Humans suck. But culturally, some do more than others.
Mine only tells me and often picks up the signs for wet weather (reduced to 90kph) and sometimes from the parallel road which usually is either 50 or 80.
Sounds like a bad idea (though limiting to the countries max is reasonable and safe).
> The law applies when a driver within a city is going 60-plus kilometers per hour over the speed limit. Outside the city, the vehicle must be going 70 or more kph (44 mph) over the limit. But at that level, the vehicle is only confiscated for two weeks. For repeat offenders, as well as for those who go 80-plus kph (50 mph) over the speed limit in a city or 90-plus kph (56 mph) outside a city, the vehicle is permanently confiscated and sold.
Doing 110 kpm in a 50s zone is willingly putting people's life at risk. It's beyond reckless driving, and might be considered as a super weak form of attempted murder (and suicide) even. And you get your car taken away for 2 weeks. Unless you're doing the Autobahn max Speed in a 50s zone or be a repeat offender for it to actually trigger.. What the hell?
Even better, if the racer doesn't own the car, there's (as they admit themselves) nothing they can do.
Why is this so weak? Is there some ethical concern about taking someone's car, or is this a political maneuver?
If 50 km/h limit is appropriate for a given road. I would expect speed limits to be reasonable in AT but if an organization which sets speed limits can profit from fines and forfeiture it creates an incentive to set the limit as low as possible.
In Russia I've seen a road going around the city (but formally still in the city) with the speed limit 60 km/h. With a central reservation and a large distance between traffic lights 80-90 km/h would be reasonable but guess police wanted to profit from fines. May be the speed limit has been increased eventually, don't know.
If not a problem now in Austria, it eventually will be.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8909133/civil-forfeiture-states...
https://www.propublica.org/article/police-say-seizing-proper...
That really depends on the jurisdiction. Many police departments in the US self fund via confiscations, sometimes even not as a penalty for breaking the law. In a big city, that's a small part of the budget. In some more rural counties, it can be a surprisingly large amount of the budget.
See "civil asset forfeiture"
Per the article you would have to be exceeding the speed limit by a very sizable margin to be eligible for this seizure, I find it hard to imagine the police engineering situations in which to take advantage of this.
It is only when you allow police to sieze anything and then require you to disprove the allegations (such as is currently the case in much of the USA), that you legalize highway robbery.
See generally https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...
[1] https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-arkansas-town-banned-fro...
The issue in Menifee is that tickets were issued for speeding violations that were in the "acceptable" speeding range of less than 10mph over. No exaggeration was required because speeding small amounts was ubiquitous. Personally I like people to drive the actual speed limit and don't think consistent minor speeding should be as socially acceptable as it is. However, the article explains to the new law only applies in cases of extreme speeding and only when there is documented proof of such. Personally, I think criminal charges, jail time and permanent license revocation are also called for when someone goes 135 on a 80 mph road (barely sufficient to warrant permanent vehicle confiscation under the Austrian law under discussion.)
As I alluded to, civil forfeiture is very different in that you have you prove your innocence rather than having the presumption of innocence.
What about dangerously changing lanes, jumping red lights, and tailgating? These actions can be more hazardous than orderly speeding, but there is no such punishment for them.
If speeding is such a danger, why even allow car makers to sell vehicles that can drive so fast? Because the money supply from fines will dry out fast; that's why.
This is a standard waste of time designed to make useless politicians look active.