Hacker News Reader

Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

1) build a society that requires a car to get around

2) exclusively sell cars with ludicrous acceleration and top speed

3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles

4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.

I’m strongly anti-car - I think we fucked up a whole lot designing society the way we did, but at this point, actual strict enforcement of speed limits with financial penalties is just robbery. If you want fewer people to die in car accidents, build a world that doesn’t obligate everyone to drive, or build a world where the vehicles for sale aren’t all SUVs with 0-60 times that would embarrass a Ferrari from 40 years ago, but don’t just start fining people when they use the vehicle you made them buy to do the thing it was made to do.

View on HN

> 3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles

> 4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.

Most consumer cars are going to have a hard time at 120mph, if their tires are even rated for it.

So then you're claiming that most speed limits are 20mph.

Which they're not.

And then, I'm not sure? Should it be legal to drive suburban streets at triple digit speeds?

I am not sure what you're trying to get at, beyond "we should be able to use our cars to the limit of their capability, even if it exceeds our own as a driver".

Please be realistic about what interventions are available given the current US system. Redesign our entire road system? Sounds great, but how are we going do it?

Think about the policy changes and thousands or more of political wranglings across every populous jurisdiction in the United States.

Even if we get it done over the next 20 to 120 years, what are we going do in the meanwhile?

Like a lot of things, start with reviewing what works elsewhere, start some pilots, and what works do bigger and bigger rollouts.

Like, use data. If marketers and TikTok can trick us so easily using these techniques we can do the same in socio-technical settings too.

Like most things, “architectural” systems solutions will work better than point behavioural interventions, but it’s always going to be a mix.

Bike safety in The Netherlands was a multigenerational effort ranging from creating standards around roads intersections, bike paths and pavements and slowly remediating old ones while building new ones.

That’s only a tiny part of a society-wide effort to improve quality- and length-of-life measures, but like the US Interstate highway system, has had measurable results in terms of economic and social outcomes.

Some actions taken today will have individual results tomorrow. Some in 30 years. Better get started, right?

If something is illegal and enforced, people won't do it.

We’ve tried that with Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and speed limits. Even where speed limits are enforced, people speed.

Singapore style drug enforcement seems to work. It's just a question of political will. Same applies to speeding etc of course.

TIL there are no drugs in Singapore.

Vastly, vastly less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com