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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

But laws shouldn't be set based on how easy they are to avoid. Lots of people drive too fast all the time, yet few argue that we should do away with speed limits. Besides, there is zero empirical evidence that suggests that raising rich people's taxes is ineffective. Yes, they are good at avoiding taxes, but professional tax collectors are probably even better at enforcing taxes. It's a question of political will, or lack thereof, due to not wanting to lose your biggest donors.

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I understand this is a tangent but you picked a really bad example. We should be trying to remove every single speed limit that we can.

If the design speed of a road does not match the speed limit of the road, people will drive the design speed, cops will learn to sit there all hours of the day waiting for people to mess up, and get ticketed. Instead of just putting up the speed limit sign, city planners should design for the road to be safe without need for the speed limits to be in place. This can mean things like reducing the width of a lane, could mean speed bumps, to purposeful non-straight sections.

That’s a horrible idea. I very much like driving on straight wide roads without speed bumps, even if I’m going 25mph.

If the safe speed of the road is 25mph, and the design speed of the road is above 25mph, you will not have safety no matter what the speed limit is. Vision Zero strategies take these factors into account to ensure safety.

Bollocks. The only thing that gets you is young and reckless drivers going 200mph on the highway, endangering everyone around them. There are limits to increasing safety in road design, and limits in the reaction speed of humans.

Yes, this nuance was already included in my previous post. Thank you for agreeing with me.

> that we can

Highways are designed to be unsafe by design, so without a redesign they require speed limits.

There's a third choice, though. It's bad when speed limits are much lower than the natural speed of the road, for the reason you describe. And it's good when the natural speed of the road is the safe speed of the road. But in addition to those two, it's also possible to introduce fast, automated enforcement— speed cameras.

This, of course, applies just as much to the actual topic of the Economist article; new inheritance taxes are just and good, but they should be written to be enforceable, and then they should actually be enforced.

There will always be people who go much faster than the design speed. They are ignoring their and everyone else's safety.

I live on major street where the speed limit is 25 to slow people down. It used to be 35, and people normally go 35-45. The problem is that people go much faster when there is no traffic because the street feels wider. I would love if they redesigned for a slower speed. But there are cars in the middle of the night that drive over 60. It doesn't matter if street is calmed, they will go super fast and only tickets with slow them down.

There will always be people who go much faster than the design speed. They are ignoring their and everyone else's safety.

Those people don't care about speed limits, in part because they are generally set significantly too low. This has the effect of normalizing the scofflaws' attitude even when carried to a genuinely reckless extreme.

Conversely, if you raise the speed limit to the 85th percentile, anyone exceeding it significantly will stand out enough to catch easily.

Speeding is a victimless crime anyway. If you hit something or someone, you were doing something wrong besides speeding.

You don't cut your own fingers. And that pretty much the whole story.

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