I'm not saying I'm down with the idea of a government robot following me everywhere to see if I'm breaking the law, but I'm not very sympathetic to the idea that we have some sort of right to violate traffic regulations without consequence.
And I often find myself on empty highways in the early morning. With good tires and brakes, and a rested driver, why _shouldn't_ I go 100 miles an hour? Especially since I am off the gas well before anything that looks slightly sketchy.
Cruise control has made most drivers far stupider, as they surrender speed to the car and stop making the subtle adjustments to maintain or create buffers needed to be safe. Worse, they camp out in the left hand lane simply to avoid the necessity of those adjustments to accomodate merging traffic.
In theory, "autonomous" vehicles could drive faster and maintain those same buffers better than any set of human drivers. In practice, I expect those autonomies to be programmed to fit the preferences of a bunch of safety nannies and police departments determined to maintain ticketing revenues.
I recently saw a half-dozen police cars on that trip, all in a 200 mile stretch, on a fine early Saturday morning. They weren't out to ensure the safety of the traffic.
The essence of safety is situational judgment. And traffic law is already a matter of discretionary enforcement, on US highways police routinely ignore speeds up to 10mph over the limit. That discretion should be further deployed to spot and cite unsafe drivers: weavers, passing-lane congesters, bad-weather speeders, right-lane passers. But there is more work and less revenue in that, isn't there?
I'm not trying to say all the rules are right. Some of them should be changed (and consistent enforcement is a great first step toward that). But this idea that you have some right to not have them enforced because you find them inconvenient is absurd.
I say "few" because I'm sure there are some people who like this setup. Like maybe you for example.
You have the same right to the roads as anyone else. You pass the test, you follow the rules, you're free to drive. Not wanting to follow the rules doesn't exempt you from them. Ever. I mean in what part of your life is that how it works?
(And pretending you don't benefit from public roads because you don't drive on them is crazy too. Where does your food come from? Your mail? Leave aside the craziness of the idea that you shouldn't have to pay taxes for things which don't directly affect you, which completely misses the point of taxation... An issue for another time, perhaps.)
Sorry, I don't have time to put in the requisite political theory, but in short, what gives the "public" the right to claim the entire continent, or indeed if you look at the issue correctly, THE ENTIRE PLANET unto their driving rules?
Follow the rabbit hole Alice.
The public paid for the roads.
Say, when you decided to write in English, you agreed to obey the rules of grammar, which state that every sentence should have a subject, an object and a verb. Constructions such as "Not some of the rules . . . " etc break that rule.
And when you decided to pick a fight with me, you agreed to not put words in my mouth. Suggestions that I assert some right to not have the laws enforced upon me, when I made no such statement, or any statement of any kind about my rights, break that rule.
I'm not saying all these rules are right. But this idea (that is, that while lecturing others, you have some right to break those rules because you them inconvenient) is absurd.
Heh. Protip: When criticizing style as a point of argument, make sure you don't accidentally a word.
I'd actually recommend against criticizing style at all, unless someone's paying you to do it for them. It's hard to do in good faith. But thanks for the help, anyway.
And I'm not criticizing style "in good faith" but to make a point: the spirit of a rule is more important than its letter. Your agreement is obvious in the annotated violations of common rules of usage and argument.
I don't really care about your grammar. But putting words in my mouth irritated me enough to craft a snarky response.
That's _expensive_
What if because of extra accurate military gps precision and laser "radar" they can ticket you for going 5mph over? How many times a day do you do that? Will you accept a $100 ticket for that? Your insurance rates going up every time you go 5mph over?
What if they aren't generating enough tickets so they decide to vary the speed limit up and down the same stretch of road or highway? Perfectly legal.
Then you develop two classes of citizens, those who don't care about $100 tickets so they speed all they want, and those who reach a point where they cannot afford to drive.
That said, I think most current speed limits are too low, so I wouldn't like having to drive 5mph over instead of 10mph over, but I'm not terribly worried about it: I doubt that technological changes will be perfectly handled by legislation initially, but I expect things to work out to a serviceable state eventually.
The current system of semi-arbitrary rules with extraordinarily selective enforcement is utterly inane, and has nothing to recommend it except that it may be somewhat safer than having no rules at all. But, again, I cannot comprehend where people get the idea that they have a right to ignore the rules when it suits them.
One of the main reasons cities use red light cameras is to increase revenue. They aren't doing it to make the road safer.
Can't the law be used to target dissent now? If the law were enforced more strictly, like Cushman wants, wouldn't that have the opposite effect?