This could make it impossible or dangerous to pass in many situations where it may be necessary to temporarily exceed the speed limit.
OK, it won't help you escape the bad guys chasing you but they'll probably have the limiter too.
Also, can some describe in detail a scenario where accelerating makes things safer than simply slowing down. Or where the knowledge that a speed limiter would kick in would not already have changed behaviour in a safety enhancing way?
Mostly in a situation where you've already messed up. Like you're in a middle of an overtake and suddenly you realize you're not going to make it before the incoming car, speeding up to close the gap can save your life in a way that slamming the brakes and just getting hit head-on wouldn't.
And yes, you shouldn't have gotten into that position in the first place. But if you did then accelerating can save your life(obviously dependant on the specific situation, it's an extreme edge case of course).
If you push on the accelerator, you are just increasing the risk, as you'll hit the car at a much higher speed. The crash is going to be 10x worse.
A speed limit would safe a lot of lives, but no-one will implement it because people like to speed.
I'm sure you can imagine a scenario where it's impossible to abort - the vehicle incoming is a 40 tonne truck, they won't stop in time to not hit you, you can't merge back into your lane, and there is no room on the other side to escape to - your only option is to accelerate and hope for a tight squeeze.
>>If you push on the accelerator, you are just increasing the risk
Or saving your life, depending on the outcome.
Like I said, it's a situation no one shouldn't be in. But you asked for a clear example where accelerating helps, and that is one, as rare as it is.
Well, I can't help with that. Either you can choose to believe me that this can and does happen, or you can choose to believe that it's a fantasy scenario that doesn't exist.
If limits were there it sounds like you think this scenario would also become less common?
If you're in a middle of the overtake with nothing but trucks on the side, once the differential in speed is large enough you'd need the skill of an F1 driver to slow down just enough to merge back in(assuming they even let you in) and not get hit by the traffic behind you and not to lose control of the car. Add any kind of adverse weather conditions and I'd argue this is actually much more difficult to pull off.
>>This scenario doesn’t make sense.
I guess if you've never seen that scenario play out in real life it's hard to imagine how it would happen.
>>f limits were there it sounds like you think this scenario would also become less common?
Of course, but OP wanted an example where accelerating helps, so I gave them one.
If stuck behind an actually slow vehicle it’s possible to overtake. If stuck behind someone close to the speed limit it’s not. If someone killed my family while speeding and overtaking I would be angry and ask them why their freedom to speed was more important than their freedom from injury and death. Speed is the major contributor to injury on roads. Arguing for more speed during the riskiest maneuvers we make doesn’t sound like a smart move to me.
There's a straight road, almost no traffic, and someone still manages to hit an oncoming car because they feel that they really need to overtake that slow asshole right now but are too stupid to check if there's anyone coming towards them in the other lane.
People are fucking stupid. And I'm also including myself in that, because I've been the stupid idiot in a few situations -- fortunately always had good luck and never caused a serious accident.
Safe follow distances are, At 65MPH, I'm assuming you're in the US, is approximately 300 feet. I'd be kind of shocked that you're getting stones hitting you and detectable fumes 300 feet away.
Regarding stones and lose cargo, they would hit you even 300m away as they bounce and quickly lose speed while you’re still flying into at them at 130km/h.
That said, I'm not talking about what people do, I'm talking about what is considered safe.
So for example in the UK on a single lane road a regular car can go 60mph, a car towing a trailer can only go 50mph, but a heavy goods vehicle(over 7.5 tonnes) can only go 40mph.
So on most roads that aren't dual carriageways you constantly encounter a situation where everyone is driving at their top legal speed limit but there is still a need to overtake vehicles.
Its not uncommon to see stretches with traffic constantly packed 4+ lanes going 75+ each way.
Trying to put the same burden of vehicles through at 65 with 300 ft between would be a joke. A given lane would carry less than half actual traffic. Bad traffic would become a city wide disaster.
Then consider that you can only impose this on a portion of drivers per year and drivers have to drive with those without governors indefinitely.
You also discount issues with safety by following at an appropriate distance. Trying to fall back 300 ft can only be achieved by driving too slow leading to both passing and people taking this new huge space whist giving you the finger leaving you with even less space.
I don't understand your point about having to slow down to follow at a safe distance. If I pull onto a highway and find myself _right_ behind someone I can decrease my speed by one or two mph to fall back to a safe following distance. How is that not safe? The car behind me, who should already be either already at a safe distance or adjusting their own distance should have no issues here.
What I think you mean to say is that because you're assuming that everyone else on the road is behaving in an unsafe manner you believe that you, too, have to behave in an unsafe manner. This simply is not the case.
Areas that are already burdened as far as the amount of traffic they can bear, which is basically every major urban area in America, see traffic moving at a high rate of speed with 20-30 feet between cars.
Picture a simple chute in which you are dumping jelly beans one at a time. Even at the same speed of descent you will be able to drop 1/3 of the beans if you wait 3 seconds between drops instead of 1. Everyone trying to keep 300 feet between to be "safe" would create an expanding parking lot behind that would crash the entire traffic systems ability to function at all.
When everyone started arriving 3 hours late for work businesses would fine themselves dysfunctional including critical businesses. People would die because emergency vehicles couldn't move. The mayor would be on TV discussing what they would do about the collective insanity.
Anyway this is an awfully long way to say people do need the ability to control the speed of their car in order for the current flawed highway system to function normally. People do actually have cause to pass. They sometimes do have a reason to drive slower than the limit. Others need to exceed it briefly or in an emergency.
So just relax, the time lost is minuscule.
If you were to follow that truck for all 1300 miles of 395 you would get to your destination 3 hours later than if you were going 70mph the whole way.
I would doubt that anyone would want to drive for nearly 19 hours straight, unless you're doing some sort of cannonball run like challenge.
If your destination is a mere 120 miles away, and you followed him the whole way you'd get there only 18 minutes faster. Was it really that important to get there that much faster?
I do - we used to not have real highways 10-20 years ago. And the main issue with not overtaking a car-truck that is going just 60 (in your case) is that sooner or later they will encounter someone going 40-50, and they may not be able to overtake. And because of that uou end up driving 40mph on a 70mph road for hours.
Between all the vehicles I've driven in my life I've accrued, got I hate that I know this number off the top of my head, around 350k miles.
So yeah, I do have experience with such roads.
Then you have no idea what the rest of us are talking about. Western roads are huge, and travel times are long. When you're driving the ~1000 miles between Denver and Los Angeles, 10 mph difference in speed can make your trip up to 2 hours longer. That's not insignificant, especially if you're trying to do it in a single day.
Also, you did not read my post. I specifically said that over the course of those long miles 10mph will cost you 2-3 hours. I literally said that in my post.
You also missed the part where I suggested that no one should be driving for 21 hours, let alone 18.
Let me be clear, trying to drive 1000miles in one day is unsafe.
500+500 with two drivers.
Driving isn't some binary situation, you have to constantly predict erratic behavior and react to your surroundings.
Actually yes. That truck that's going 60 on the flats is going to be doing much less than that on the hills. Best for everyone involved to pass when it's safe. It increases safety and decreases road utilization.
Keep in mind that 3 hours @ 60 mph is 3 hours with another car on the road. To compensate you'd need another lane for 180 miles, not cheap. Also the rush of passing when a truck slows down is avoided. Additionally it's safer to pass when the speed differences are lower.
Seems better for everyone involved to let cars pass. It's much easier and safer to predict conditions for half the time when passing at +20mph then trying to predict twice as long when passing at +10mph.
How does it increase safety? Someone else will just catch up to him on that hill.
> It's much easier and safer to predict conditions for half the time when passing at +20mph then trying to predict twice as long when passing at +10mph.
If safety is your concern, then it's even easier and safer to predict conditions without passing until a passing lane opens up, or a turn out is reached for him.
Instead of having an ever growing queue of cars that try to pass on the hill, they pass before hand on the flats. So there's not mass chaos when 100 cars who have been trying at 10 mph under the speed limit for an hour all try to pass on the uphill, while the truck is slowing from 60-40.
> If safety is your concern, then it's even easier and safer to predict conditions without passing until a passing lane opens up, or a turn out is reached for him.
Sure, some do that, it's the drivers choice. Personally if passing is allowed, I like to pass slower vehicles. My car accelerates quickly, so I like to pass quickly and spend the minimum amount of time in the oncoming traffic lane.
Just seems natural to let the cars get ahead whenever they can, after all the cars usually have a different speed limit than the trucks. Thus the carefully engineered lane markers, truck specific speed signs, and often passing lanes on the hills.
So for a fixed distance, the slower you go, the longer you are on the road, the more road capacity you consume.
By that logic, that the time vehicles are on the road are necessarily limiting capacity of the system, then we should be vastly increasing the speed limit! Why not 100mph? 120mph?
I mean, it's only 3 times the kinetic energy (over 70mph), so any crash would be that much more dangerous/deadly. It's also very wasteful with respect to fuel, so you'd need to stop more often which would decrease your average speed.
Regardless, all of you all drive way too fast as is. It's not safe, it's not efficient.
Sure, but not 100%.
I'm not arguing that speed limits are useless. Just that the speed limits have always been for steady state driving. You can drive all day at them and never get a speeding ticket. However in the interest of safety you should be able to exceed them to pass, this gets the pass over more quickly and is safer and less frustrating for everyone involved.
You'll often see heavy truck that's not only slow uphill but also slow downhill, in some cases even more so - because it can't afford to build up speed above what its breaks can handle.
And these passing lanes are _never_ in downhill direction.
I mean, Poland has 90mph speed limit on motorways and yet it's still safer than US which generally has very low speed limits everywhere. The only reasonable conclusion is that safety isn't directly correlated to the speed limits but to the state of infrastructure, driver training and culture.
The answer may be contingent on how many tacos you ate before this hypothetical trip.
If they're going just a _little_ bit slower than the limit, why pass them? Are you telling me that 3kmph, or even 10kmph, slower than the limit is slow enough to make an appreciable difference to your everyday driving?
No. No, it's not, not on a single land road.
Reducing control authority in a vehicle is very dangerous. It's difficult to make it obvious control authority is reduced. It also falls down in every corner case where the prohibited action is in fact necessary.
Then you must be in favour of this regulation. From the article:
> The EU regulations permit a system that can use a cascaded acoustic warning, a cascaded vibrating warning, an accelerator pedal with haptic feedback, or a speed control function in which the speed of the vehicle will be gradually reduced [...] the first two options may not quite compel any actual changes in speed on the part of the vehicle, and that's by design. They will also have to be short in duration not to annoy the driver.
The very thing you quoted has reduced control authority as points three and four! They're dangerous inclusions. It should have stopped with the audible warning, the vibrating feedback has the potential to be dangerous but isn't automatically.
I'm on board with speed warnings in cars. They're helpful in cars where it's easy to speed. My partner's ICE car has a turbocharger and a very smooth ride. It's way too easy to hit 85mph on the freeway and not really notice. Many EVs have the same problem. I'd actually like a speeding dummy light in that car.
What I don't want is reduced control authority because someone not in the car with me and not in my current traffic situation decided I should never be able to go over 75mph ever for any reason.
What you suggest would impose manufacturers who want to do 3 and 4 must also do option 1 or 2, which would make them unreasonable.