Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
https://wjla.com/news/local/anti-speeding-device-car-reckles...
That story is probably more useful than the Fast Company one. It clarifies that the new law gives judges the option to require an ISA device to be installed at the defendant’s expense.
> Before the legislation, judges only had the power to suspend a driver’s license, issue fines, or sentence to jail.
It does not require manufacturers to pre-install them, and it does not use the electronics built into the car. It sounds analogous to the breathalyzer devices that are an option for judges in some jurisdictions.
ETA: click the "Votes" tab.
Official state legislature bill page for future reference: https://lis.virginia.gov/bill-details/20251/HB2096
Patrick Hope (D)*, Betsy Carr (D), Holly Seibold (D)
So, really not sure how the author got to "Republicans in Virginia"
Reminds me of the "German news is different" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jphacgBLrc0) that explains the difference between US "news" and Tagesschau (famous for being considered a neutral, trusted source across most of the political spectrum).
Edit to add: Since these are add-on systems, the requirement to install one also imposes a (usually very high) financial cost on the person, and I suspect this may be part of why it's being pushed - it's a convenient way to drastically raise fines without overtly appearing to do so.
Maybe in a parallel universe. /s
While I agree with your interpretation that modern American "news" is trapped into clickbait and outrage headlines, immediately rejecting anything that is perceived as "biased" does not necessarily mean the article is wrong.
> The Fast Company article says “Republicans in Virginia just passed a law to make it a punishment for repeated traffic violations.” But the Virginia legislature is currently controlled by the Democrats. And the delegate quoted in this local news story is a Democrat
And from other GP:
> Just reading phrases like "sky-high rate of crash deaths", "Blazing-fast vehicles" (and similar ones throughout the article) makes it very clear that this is not an attempt to report news, but push an agenda.
The agenda is one of fear and distrust.
We're not good at it. It doesn't really fit our reaction times, it doesn't really fit our attention spans, and it keeps trading places with gun violence for the #1 acute condition (i.e excluding heart disease) that kills people.
The article could certainly have done a better job of pointing this out, but the unfortunate truth is that people still believe the exact opposite of the facts and insist that they should be allowed to drive fast and not be hassled over traffic laws.
There's already a law on the books requiring breathalyzers in all new cars by next year: https://live959.com/law-mandates-mass-cars-to-have-breathaly...
Presumably, anti-speeding tech will be made mandatory by the same incremental approach in time.
But you might. Remember, everyone is a potential terrorist. /s
We cannot treat it like we treat other things, simply due to the extreme risk. That means we have to prevent accidents any way we can and put safety nets where we can.
Yes, it sucks that now you're going to have to pay marginally more for your vehicle. If it's any consolation, you're already paying 10x more than you should for the variety of safety structures in place, research, testing, regulations, policing, etc. The fruits of this are real, though. Please look into vehicle fatality statistics.
There 1001 ways we could ensure that most of the cost and externalities of driving are not foisted on others, but we don’t do that because so many people drive and most vote, if they think getting fewer auto deaths means they’ll have to pay $0.01 for parking or that they might be 1% more likely to be caught when they speed, they reject it.
So instead we socialize it, pushing costs, inconveniences, injuries and death on others.
After she got hit, ultimately leading to her death in time, by an uninsured guy we had to get a lawyer and fight Eire Insurance for three years for them to honor that line on the bill.
Not to be too pedantic, but this is the nature of most taxes and regulation. It's part of living in a society.
This means that one is installing 1000 devices for each one in use. It should make more sense to me to provide a means to communicate with such a device wirelessly and software support for making starting contingent on such communication.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2024-12/report-t...
You get a fine, usually with the alternative of a course the first time.
Speed again within 12 months and you get a fine and a minimum of three points (more if you are well above the limit).
Speed again within four years and you will lose more points, and AFAIK pretty much guaranteed to be more than the minimum.
Get caught speeding more than once an year and you are guaranteed to lose your license.
I think this is necessary. I say this as someone who complains about some of the speed limits in my area as they are too low (20mph zones seem a bit random) - I still follow them!
It's also illegal to murder someone and yet people still do it from time to time. Stealing is illegal and yet stuff gets stolen. Drunk driving is illegal and yet people drive drunk. Turns out just making something illegal doesn't completely stop the action.
When we build our societies where you need to drive to function it's not surprising people will continue to drive when they shouldn't. Maybe we should build our societies so people don't have to drive just to live.
About 1% of cars do not have insurance in the UK at any given time.
> When we build our societies where you need to drive to function it's not surprising people will continue to drive when they shouldn't. Maybe we should build our societies so people don't have to drive just to live.
In cities, definitely. In rural areas?
The consequences for those they harm are pretty severe. Having your car destroyed can be lifechangily expensive for someone who is barely scraping by. Adding healthcare costs on top of that are pretty bad. Even with health insurance injuries from a car accident could get expensive fast, and add to the fact the single most expensive thing you owned just got destroyed while you're now unable to work. Too many people forget about the costs of driving they impose on others, thinking "that won't happen to me, I just won't hit anyone".
Driving without insurance is an incredibly reckless and selfish act.
> In cities, definitely. In rural areas?
Most people don't live in these "rural areas". And even then, I'd argue those "rural areas" could do quite a bit to reduce car dependence. Once again, how can these places solve transportation issues for those who can't afford insurance?
I meant consequences for those who are caught - i.e. is there a real deterrent?
Why do some of the US states mentioned have such high rates of lack of insurance.
> Most people don't live in these "rural areas".
but many do
> And even then, I'd argue those "rural areas" could do quite a bit to reduce car dependence
Depends how rural they are. In an edge of town/close to town location (such as I live in) a huge difference would be made by more frequent bus services. Righ
Most people not bothering to pay for car insurance aren't wealthy. They're doing so because being asked to pay several hundred bucks a month just so they can go to a $12/hr job and eat is a stretch too far, and chances are nothing will happen on any random day of them driving without insurance. Meanwhile on the unlucky day they massively harm someone else and will probably flee the scene and end up continuing on without consequences. And even if they do, they'll once again probably just get a fine, maybe get some kind of judgement against them which will be like getting blood from a stone.
The consequences are most of the time they'll be fine. Otherwise they'll get a fine. If they keep doing it and they keep getting caught their car will get impounded and they'll go to jail. Then they'll get out, scrape together enough to buy a car, and the cycle continues. But that requires actually getting caught many times which the whole "getting caught" part is pretty lacking.
why is it so expensive? :0
And when most people running expired or no reg are just everyday working stiffs and most of them can't afford huge fines it's neither useful as a pretext for fishing nor revenue so the harassment by cops stops happening. And the rhetoric of the voting public has pretty firmly against the cops harassing the crap out of people recently too.
No amount of screeching about how these people should be stomped by the jackboot for noncompliance will make the economics of that pencil out for the state. You force these people to pay up either to the state or the insurers and they won't be able to live at their current economic level and they'll just turn right back around and be on the section 8 and welfare rolls which is probably worse for the public good. It's just a shitty situation no matter how you cut it.
Taking someone's license away for getting caught doing 5 over a few too many times on the freeway where literally everyone is always doing 5 over and you are more of a danger by not going the speed of traffic doesn't in any way serve the public interest as far as I can tell. It's a death sentence for a victimless crime.
Aggressive driving, reckless driving, major speed infractions (15 mph+ over), etc are far more dangerous and worthy of major penalties.
What percentage of people who would be effected by this do you think match this description?
For example: one of my neighbors speeds like an idiot through our neighborhood — easily doing 60 mph and often blowing right through the stop sign at the end of the block. He’s a real danger.
The neighborhood complained to city hall. Their solution? They lowered the speed limit from 30 mph to 20 mph. It changed nothing. He still speeds. He still blows stop signs. He doesn’t get caught — there usually aren't any cops hanging around our sleepy end of town.
Meanwhile, I have seen people get pulled over for doing the previously legal, entirely reasonable, 30 mph — which is still the limit for most of the city.
Now, at 71 mph, you officially trigger the 15+mph rule mentioned to be a super speeder. Based on anecdotal experience from numerous trips between NY and Ohio, I would estimate that minimum 1 in 5 cars are doing 80+ in a 65. So, at least 20% by my obviously flawed and biased observations. For an actual estimate, in 1988 during the national 55mph speed limit era, an observed 85% of drivers in NY were above the speed limit.
For more context, I have paced many law enforcement vehicles (usually state troopers) doing 10 over with regular traffic.
The highest speed limit for Virginia is 70mph. Their bill gives judges the option of offering this for people who drive >100mph, as an alternative to license recovation.
The DC bill gives people whose license the judges are already suspending or revoking for speed-related offenses an alternative - drive with this limiter enabled for one year.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2024/02/08/d-c-to-dangerous-driv...
Georgia is working on a similar bill for people convicted of street racing.
https://visionzeronetwork.org/accelerating-safety-states-cha...
I think this will just be another thing leading us to full surveillance state.
It's like you're laying one brick on the road to hell. Multiply by everyone else and their pet issues and the whole damn thing gets paved.
What even is the point of principals if you don't stand by them?
It's a huge issue which warrants radical steps.
Slippery slope fallacy. Why don't you refute the central point of what I suggested?
IMO a forced maximum vehicle speed is a useful middle ground option.
This is because there is a perception among many of lower socioeconomic status that "spending more will raise my taxes, and I already can't afford car insurance", and that public transit projects will not be built to their benefit.
I don't think this is it at all. In the US we don't enforce social norms. The public transit experience in the US is dominated by an extreme antisocial minority ("crazy" bums, drug users, bluetooth speakers, etc).
This is the true killer of public transit in America.
Like in NYC. Most assuredly there are anti social people on the subway but they’re a tiny minority of overall passengers so people still use the system. But it’s a self-reinforcing thing that has danger of collapse, the more people drop off the more the ratio will change… and more will drop off.
I mean yeah, subway homeless people make you feel unsafe. But you're not actually unsafe. Just by taking the subway you're a few orders of magnitude less likely to die during your journey.
I see - every day - near misses from missing exits, dangerous lane changes, and aggressive driving/brake checks - and all these infractions go unpoliced
- VA is the only state to ban radar detectors
- It has the lowest interstate speed limit in the country
- It has some of the stiffest super speeder and reckless driving laws in the country. In most places if you go like 30 over that's just a bad ticket but in VA that's criminal reckless driving.
- And many other anti-car related laws.
I will be the first to say, don't speed, don't street race and if you have that itch to go a track but also, VA is a horrible place to be if you're a car person. It's not in the least bit surprising that they are the first to pursue such legislation.
It encompass people who are going 60/65/75 (depending on state) in a 55 on the interstate that's actually a 45 because of an inactive construction zone and also people who are going 60mph on 30mph city streets (probably genuinely reckless per common usage of the word). They're two very different degrees of misconduct and the former vastly outnumbers the latter and everyone knows it and political will for penalties is based off this.
You wanna see reckless driving taken seriously the first step is to stop advocating for definitions of reckless that include behavior the general public doesn't see as reckless.
Where was I advocating that? Also, just because the general public believes something doesn't mean it's true.
I was eventually able to clear everything up thanks to a sympathetic judge, but overall Virginia is not a serious state.
https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacodefull/title46.2/chapter8/a...
I'm not overly familiar with British transportation outside of its major city centers, but in the US, we also yank licenses, but people drive without them anyways, mainly because there's no real alternative.
Even those convicted of DUI in my area can make a plea to the judge for a "hardship" license that effectively allows them to operate a motor vehicle only for emergencies and going to-and-from work. It's so hard to live without a car in the area that you could possibly make an Eighth Amendment case against pulling the license of a drunk.
But, the sort of person who gets 12 points isn’t exactly the sort of person who you would expect to actually stop driving once they’ve got there. They’ve already been in court for speeding (or worse) at least twice, possibly 4 times. Maybe more if they were offered a speed awareness course the first time. If the goal is to stop them speeding then these devices might actually do it…
Yes, the devices might help, but I also think cars can be seized etc.
I believe the UK and the EU already require speed limiters be installed on all new cars. https://www.parkers.co.uk/car-advice/speed-limiters-what-the...
At a certain point, aggressive driving and speeding should be treated like negligently swinging about a weapon. It should be treated seriously.
I followed the case closely, all the public records on the hearings, etc.
A few months after the incident, while still on probabation, she got her driving privileges back. The judge agreed it would have been an undue hardship on her not to drive.
> You get a fine, usually with the alternative of a course the first time.
Note that the course isn’t currently an option in Scotland: https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/speed-awareness-courses/
There are some rare (emergency) situations where "superspeeding" might help, but I can think of many others where it may kill. It is not great for the environment either.
I think limiting speeds to, say, 100mph for every road legal car will be unpopular. People love their fast cars, especially the rich and powerful, and manufacturers love to sell them. But technically, it should be easy to implement, and may improve road safety.
I am only talking about the top speed, powerful cars will keep their high acceleration. There is also a good chance that people will modify their cars to raise the top speed, and it is fine outside of public roads, but could result in serious penalties if caught using such a modification on public roads.
> it was disgustingly accurate
You’d see this here in NZ and not blink an eye.
Is a beautiful turn of phrase!
I don't think it's specific to English in any way, but maybe it's also not common in every language or culture. It may also be more common in the UK and certain other English-speaking countries, that use irony a lot in regular (informal) speech.
How many, and how long before they straight up deserve to just go to jail for a little society time-out?
Ambulance and fire truck driver here. There's no good reason for emergency vehicles to ever go much faster than the speed limit, and we would experience life-changing amounts of personal liability if our driving got someone hurt.
While it's sometimes important to get a patient to the hospital as quickly as possible, that's less frequent than you might think, and it's always more important to get them there in one piece.
In addition our vehicles are heavy and they don't stop quickly, so physics is another good reason for us not to speed.
Police cars might be another story but my personal opinion is that speeding police cars probably don't create a net benefit for public safety either.
100%. The UK police will happily abandon a pursuit these days, it's been shown all too often that it causes far more damage and harm than it prevents. It's usually easy enough to track fleeing vehicles in other ways (helicopter, traffic cameras, static observations) that it's simply not proportionate.
LOL. You have no idea. Street racers are usually people who have little or no money.
Performance mods are surprisingly affordable if you do all the labor yourself.
if carOnAutoBahn { setLimiter(155) }
What reason is there ever for a car to go above 40mph? The obvious answer to your question is: quality of life. People like getting places faster. The purpose of governance is to balance quality of life with public safety. No matter how slow the speed limits, some people will die each year, so we're not haggling over the concept itself, but rather were we draw the line.
For context, it's important to remember that the Autobahn is actually safer than U.S. highways despite the lack of speed limit (https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-pedia/is-the-autobahn-safer...). In fact, it's even safer than other German roads (https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-pedia/what-is-the-accident-...). Speed does not appear to be a primary contributing factor in accidents and fatalities insofar as the Autobahn is concerned. Meaning arguing to reduce or restrict speed provides marginal social benefit at comparatively larger cost.
This reads like "I speed all the time and how dare you say it's a bad thing" cope.
In the UK we have variable speed limit roads. When they are busy/obstructions the speed limit is lowered. It is put back to 70mph when the traffic is light / no safety issues.
The safe speed on a road is dependant on the road and the conditions. I've been in situations where driving at faster than 10mph would be dangerous and I've been on the same road and doing 40mph was safe.
Even the German autobahns are only unrestricted in specific stretches where someone will have done the legwork to demonstrate safety at those speeds.
Firstly there is no such thing as the average person.
Secondly, I don't need to be a "highways engineer" to be able to see there is few / no cars in front of me for over several miles on a long straight, multiple lane highway with no junctions for sometimes miles.
Thirdly, the decision for the motorway speed in the UK is a historical artifact.
https://readcars.co/2017/06/20/history-speed-limits-uk/
Generally most cars (even modern ones) it is unwise to sustain speeds over 90mph for a long duration if the engine is small (coolant systems are more likely to fail, it is hard on engines), it is also not fuel efficient to drive much faster than 60 mph in cars that have engines that are lower than 2.0 litres IME (I've done a lot of driving in different vehicles).
I would prefer they have variable speed limits on motorways / or special toll roads where the limit is higher.
Too much correlation, not enough causation here.
Only "rich people" can afford pricey cars, while there are with much certainty "non rich people" that enjoy fast cars.
And there are a ton of affordable cars that can go 200kph+, or that can be riced into being able to do so.
The reasons I mentioned this goes the other way: the rich and powerful have more influence than the average guy, by definition. And they tend to like fast cars, it is a status symbol and they can afford it, and there is no denying that driving fast can be enjoyable. It means that they are going to do what they can (which is a lot) to keep the privilege.
Good question. My guess is as follows:
Per the NHTSA [1] alcohol, excess speed, and not wearing restraints are the top three causes of vehicle-related deaths in the US in roughly equal measure (although alcohol edges out the other two). The German autobahn infamously doesn't have a blanket speed limit and is about as safe as other European highway systems. To me this means that a case can be made for high speeds on public roads in the interest of expediency (though, for cultural reasons, I would not personally make it for the US). I can't, on the other hand, imagine endorsing road sodas or not wearing seat belts. In other words speed is only contextually dangerous while driving drunk and not using safety equipment are inherently bad which is why I'd imagine the latter two have been legislated.
Anecdotally I'd be much happier if more attention was spent on enforcement against bad driving behavior like tailgating, weaving, failing to signal, driving drunk, and running traffic signals than speeding. Nearly every brush with death I've had on public roads has been due to these, not somebody doing 95 in the fast lane.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
It's actually even safer: https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-pedia/what-is-the-accident-...
When roads are well designed, maintained, and drivers well educated, and within the constraints of a culture which consider the impact of one's behaviour on others, speed does not appear to be a primary contributing factor in fatalities or accidents in general. However speed is a compounding factor when accidents occur. Meaning it increases the likelihood of fatalities when accidents do occur for other reasons. Still, despite all of this, the Autobahn has a significantly lower rate of fatalities than other roads within Germany.
In comparison in Poland we have way more speed related accidents on our highways even though there is a speed limit. It's because we have a lot of very bad drivers who go too fast.
It's not enough to look at the speed limit. You would need to look at actual speed.
Traveling by train ... is it some sarcasm or you've never been to Germany?
The long distance ones are a disaster in Germany, whereas in the US, they don't meaningfully exist.
Neither of those are blanket dangerous. Driving a car on a rural road in the middle of the night is about as dangerous whether you're doing 100mph or mildly drunk. Not being restrained is only dangerous if you crash or someone crashes into you. They can all three be performed in normal road conditions without actually resulting in a crash, injury, or death.
But everyone speeds. It's fun, everyone does it once in a while, as a treat! And driving sucks too, so the faster you go the less you have to do it. You can't punish everyone, but you can punish a drunk because, gosh, that couldn't/wouldn't ever be me. Those drunk jerks! And seatbelts? You only get punished for those if you get pulled over and don't remember to put it on.
Most driving related crimes don't go punished because the judges and the juries are probably guilty of the same damn thing, all the time, and gee whiz, I'm not a criminal, so this person isn't either.
Its why you can pulp a pedestrian in your car while speeding and dicking around with your phone and get off pretty much scot-free.
Even modern cars have some trouble knowing the actual speed limit of the road you're currently on.
In Canada I don't think the speed limit is ever higher than 110 or 120km/h - limit to 130km/h and have an override, get full on in trouble (incl loosing all insurance) when disabled.
If track use only maybe even have some kind of device that isn't publicly sold to disable the speed limit there.
Also I doubt any north American car is randomly gonna show up at the German Autobahn - gonna get across the Atlantic first
* A government mandated alcohol, cigarette, and BMI limit to prevent major health issues.
* Government surveillance of our emails, messages, phone calls, bank accounts and internet activity.
* Abolishing cash so all our transactions are electronically monitored to prevent fraud, money laundering, crime, and tax evasion.
* Limits on free speech.
There are many examples of ways in which authoritarian policies could, in theory, make society safer. Some of us are more comfortable with authoritarianism than others.
- There is already a whole lot of regulations on what makes a car street legal, including rules that can be quite unpopular among drivers and yet important on a large scale. In particular those related to the environment.
- Limiting the top speed of cars does not imply surveillance or advanced GPS-based systems. The idea is just to make it so that the car can't exceed speeds well beyond the highest speed limit in the country.
- The gouvernement is already telling you how fast you are allowed to go, and will watch you for it.
A 100mph limitation will only affect you if you are speeding, if you don't speed, nothing will change for you. There are some exceptions and special cases: race cars, imports, etc... but these are just details that can be dealt with, as it done today on other aspects.
I'm curious where you live. In the major US city I live in, well above 50% of drivers are going above the speed limit at any particular moment on any particular highway.
I visited California once and was going from LAX to Kings Canyon National Park. I was driving the speed limit (I wasn't in any hurry) and got passed by literally everyone on the road. The vast majority of people drive faster than the speed limit. The question is "how much" over the speed limit you can comfortably go before you run the risk of being stopped and fined.
Repeat offenders should choose between not having a license to drive and having a mandatory speed limiter installed in their car. The issue is that it is not trivial to do on all vehicles.
But why? If people, including law enforcement are comfortable with doing 70mph on 65mph roads, why not make the speed limit 70mph? Why is there an official and an unofficial speed limit? I heard even self driving cars are programmed to go at the "unofficial" speed limit.
For the context, I live in France. We have a lot of automatic speed traps that will systematically fine you for going 5 km/h above the speed limit, which isn't a wide margin. It means that either you are speeding, or you are driving at the posted speed limit, there is no "speed limit + tip".
This unofficial leeway likely developed due to things like mechanical issues with speedometers and tires causing reasonable doubt about actual speed within a few MPH. If they were to raise the official speed limit by 5-10MPH, then people would just do 5-10MPH above that. If police then started enforcing much more strictly, you're going to jam up the courts with more people contesting a 1mph over ticket as being due to speedometer calibration or whatever. Or just in general being much more resentful of the police for being so draconian.
This is the same in Europe as well. At least from my experience(-s) of driving in Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland and Germany.
> If people, including law enforcement are comfortable with doing 70mph on 65mph roads, why not make the speed limit 70mph
The speed limit is set based on what is considered safe upon collision in a particular area. Furthermore, if you increase the speed limit from 65 mph to 70 mph, you'll likely see drivers going at 75 mph.
Governments setting policies on cars is just the transportation version of global mass surveillance and control. It's not your car anymore, and it's not you who's driving. The computer is controlling everything, and it's not your computer, it's theirs. If they can set speed limits, they can easily do a lot more than that, it's literally one mandatory over the air software update away.
The only question is: are you gonna sacrifice your freedom for security? The so called "anti-government people" made their choice. It seems you have made yours. The consequences will be felt either way.
If safety were your overriding concern, you'd set the speed limit at 20 mph. Or better yet, 5.
Still, interesting idea that could have legs when the technology got better.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5099205/california-tech...
I think we'll live without that one.
But yes, 75 would be more correct.
Furthermore, speed limits are changed regularly. There are still cars on the road that were sold when we had lower national speed limits.
I didn't propose anything related to existing cars.
I don't think it is reasonable nor do people want to buy cars that won't even go the speed limit.
> I didn't propose anything related to existing cars.
I am saying that your proposal(s) will be obsolete after the car is sold. Because speed limits change and cars move to different places over time.
If it could be waived at time of sale, this would just be a part of pre-deliver paperwork that dealers have everyone sign. Dealers don't wan't headaches of people coming back ticked off that their car won't do the speed limit. You're not mandating safety, you're mandating a new piece of paperwork.
If this is actually being implemented as widely as the article suggests, I guess we'll all find out the answers to these questions pretty soon, the hard way!
I.e. you just remove it.
Machines should never enforce laws because they don't have the ability to know when doing so would be unreasonable.
I'd presume the state would need to update its GIS record, in the meantime you'd put your hazard lights on and move over to the right lane.
> Or you have some emergency situation where a higher travel speed is a matter of life and death?
Suddenly while driving, or something that you'd need to use the car for in order to travel fast? In the latter case, you'd just return to the wild and live like anyone else does without the ability to travel at arbitrarily sufficient speeds to deal with any personal emergency. These situations could be accounted for prior to repeatedly breaking speed laws and moving to some backwoods area where you'd also be screwed if it broke down.
The problem isn't the GIS record, it's that the highway is directly adjacent to a mountain and the GPS isn't accurate enough there to distinguish between the highway and the lower speed roads near it, so they can't fix it. Or maybe they just don't care to because it's a bureaucracy. Also, the highway is the only road that goes over the bridge, so it's not a one-time problem because you can't avoid using it on a regular basis.
> Suddenly while driving, or something that you'd need to use the car for in order to travel fast?
Why isn't the issue. The hurricane comes and the phones are down and you need to get the kid to the hospital before they bleed out. You're the on-call service tech for something which is going to result in human tragedy if you don't get there first. You're not even involved but a firefighter had to commandeer your vehicle.
Stuff shouldn't be strictly enforcing rules in an emergency.
> These situations could be accounted for prior to repeatedly breaking speed laws.
How is the dying kid supposed to account for the only car in the area belonging to a stranger with one too many speeding tickets?
Why is definitely the issue, it's one of the first questions you might be asked when pulled over, and in this case if you don't have a good enough answer quick enough, it seems you could lose the freedom to make a determination about whether it's an issue or not.
Can you describe such a situation?
I can't think of anything other than completely unrealistic action movie scenarios.
“There is a strong relationship between the number of tickets a person has in a two-year period (2015–16) and the likelihood of a crash outcome (2017–2019). However, the accumulation of tickets is not the best predictor of crash likelihood. A combination of the excess in speed and the accumulation of tickets increases the relative odds of a subsequent crash” [1].
So no, the person who regularly breaks the limit by 20 mph is the textbook person who should not drive their bleeding relative to the hospital but instead wait for an ambulance.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752...
About five minutes on Kagi. There is a solid global meta analysis [1], but it’s not as simple to read and doesn’t discriminate by the speeding magnitude. So I opted for the cleaner source as it’s more relevant to the question of people who speed so aggressively and often that a judge might consider putting a governor on their car.
Also: not sure why it’s a crazy to analogise kiwis and Americans. I honestly thought it was common knowledge that folks with lots of speeding tickets tend to crash more frequently than population.
I've driven ambulances for a living (as a critical care paramedic). It's not the speed that saves lives. If transport is a factor, it's Opticom that makes a difference (traffic light pre-emption).
To be blunt: in the space of nearly ten thousand patient transports -by ambulance-, fewer than 1%, far fewer than 1% would have a discernible outcome change due to "how fast can I drive to the ER".
Not to mention, you are not going to be a focused driver when your family member is bleeding in the back seat of your car.
And all of this matters very little, because if you've only ever had a couple of "regular" speeding fines, you're not going to have this device on your car stopping you from "saving a life".
Also why are you moving a person with that much blood loss? Shouldn’t you apply pressure to the wound to stop the bleeding and call for help? It’s been years since I had to requalify myself for first aid though.
Can you provide such a scenario?
Or, more importantly... can you provide a reason why this hypothetical, extremely unusual edge case should take precedence over the 12,000 speeding deaths per year in our calculation?
For example, I'm willing to wager more people get hurt speeding TO the hospital while their wife is in labor than preventing any sort of injury due to out of hospital birth. Even EMTs know this implicitly: ground transport is one of the most dangerous parts of their job.[1]
Machines are absolutely capable of enforcing laws, and they do a pretty good job of it in many cases. Speed cameras reduce crashes and fatalities, and car breathalyzers reduce the incidences of drunk driving.[2][3][4]
Even still, humans (judges) review these cases individually and decide which offenders' cars to put breathalyzers / speed limiters on.
Also of note - presumably if you're a decent driver using your speeding card just this once to get your pregnant wife to the hospital, you wouldn't have repeated 100+ MPH speeding convictions on your record, so you wouldn't have a limited speed, anyway. In the US, these limiters are only installed for repeated offenses.
This affects the guy who has a history of reckless driving, the same way car breathalyzers affect the guy who has a history of drunk driving.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221414052...
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2025/nyc-dot-speed-camer...
[3] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-cameras-reduce-injury...
That one's easy. Because the 12,000 "speeding deaths" are caused by 300+ million people, so the probability that one is caused by any given person is extremely low. And even 12,000 is an overestimate because those statistics count every fatality where speeding was occurring, but some large fraction of those fatalities would have occurred regardless. And this measure would prevent only a small fraction of that smaller number of actual speeding fatalities.
Meanwhile more than 3 million people die every year of something else, so it doesn't take a large percentage of those being impacted to add up to a larger number.
> For example, I'm willing to wager more people get hurt speeding TO the hospital while their wife is in labor than preventing any sort of injury due to out of hospital birth.
That's because child birth outside of a hospital isn't actually that dangerous, not because some large fraction of people die in car crashes on the way to the hospital. But there are a lot of things that are more dangerous than child birth and are very likely to be fatal if you don't receive prompt medical attention.
> Speed cameras reduce crashes and fatalities, and car breathalyzers reduce the incidences of drunk driving.
Speed cameras don't actually stop you from speeding. If you had to get to the hospital then you can make your case to the judge after the fact instead of having a dead kid.
Car breathalyzers "reduce the incidences of drunk driving" by causing the same problem. What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?
> Even still, humans (judges) review these cases individually and decide which offenders' cars to put breathalyzers / speed limiters on.
The issue is there is no judge available on site to take it back off again in an emergency.
I have my own concerns about the technology in question, but frankly this is a terrible example. If you have already proven to make such terrible decisions that you have been court-ordered to have a breathalyzer installed in your car and then you choose to get drunk as a wildfire approaches or at least is highly likely...
Well, then you make terrible decisions and now you sleep in the bed you made. Maybe forever.
There are also people who are addicted to alcohol. "People with that medical condition should literally die in a fire" is not a great take.
A drunk person on the road while a lot of people are panicked and trying to get out of town as quickly as possible sounds like a terrible idea. The winning strategy here is you get help from somebody sober who is able to help you escape. And this is a remarkably rare situation in comparison to harm caused by drunk drivers.
> No, the safety lights don't always work.
> "avoid being hit"
If someone on foot may not hear a train in time, how well is someone in a car with the windows down going to do?
A couple thoughts on that.
1. I would expect that they won't be developing their own system for finding out speed limits and monitoring for changes. They will most likely use the same commercial sources that are used by many mapping and navigation apps and built-in car navigation systems.
Those sources do occasionally have errors, but the only roads with speed limits above 55 mph there are interstates and some major divided highways. Those are all high traffic roads with plenty of drivers using navigation apps on them, so a speed limit being too low in the data is going to get quickly noticed by a lot of people and reported.
Less frequently traveled roads might have data errors that last longer, which would be annoying, but the limiter does let you go 10 mph over what it thinks is the posted limit. I expect that the most common error will be missing when the type of zone changes. For example you have a 40 mph road and the data mistakenly says it goes through a business zone when actually it goes around that business zone. Business zones typically have a 25 mph limit, so you'd be stuck going 35 mph (25 mph it thinks is the limit plus 10 mph) instead of 40 mph until you get past what it thinks is the business zone.
That's annoying but it is not so slow compared to the real limit that you'll be a danger to other drivers.
2. Route around the error if it is too annoying.
Virginia law only gives judges the authority to require someone to use this if they have been convicted of speeding over 100 mph.
That's 30 mph faster than the highest speed limit in Virginia, which is 70 mph on interstates and a few major divided highways. The limit everywhere else is 55 mph or less.
20 mph or more above the posted limit or over 85 mph in Virginia is reckless driving which is a criminal offense (a class 1 misdemeanor, which is the highest level of misdemeanor) rather than a mere infraction, with up to a year in jail and/or a $2500 fine.
There should only be a few people who are forced to get one of these limiters, and they are people who arguably should be getting their driving privileges suspended for a few months at least.
If they are given one of these limiters instead of their license being suspended and so driving will be inconvenient for a few months, I'm having trouble dredging up much sympathy for them. It's kind of like when someone in prison is paroled two years before their sentence is up, and then complains about the burden of having to check in with their parole officer periodically for the next two years.
My feelings on people with that kind of problem are nicely summed up by Frasier's response on an episode of "Frasier" when a caller named Roger on his radio show wanted advice on something completely stupid:
> Roger, at Cornell University they have an incredible piece of scientific equipment known as the tunneling electron microscope. Now, this microscope is so powerful that by firing electrons you can actually see images of the atom, the infinitesimally minute building block of our universe. Roger, if I were using that microscope right now... I still wouldn't be able to locate my interest in your problem. Thank you for your call.
Where are these emergency situations you describe? Not only have I never needed to speed for some emergency situation, I don't even think I know a single person who has had to do this. How often is "this person would have died if they got to the hospital five minutes later but the highway was clear and somebody drove them there 30mph over the limit and got there in time?"
Also, glitch does not look like a big problem, since for now the system will only verbally warn, just once.
Some places might just have a more sane driving culture?
If you drive in an area that’s known to not be covered by cameras, you’ll see it more, though it might be less than where you’re from.
And the maps are continuously outdated so lots of smaller roads simply do not work properly.
This will put an onerous burden on people who borrow cars.
If they intend to go more than 10 mph over the posted speed limit in the borrowed car they will need to make sure to only borrow cars from people who have not been convicted of speeding over 100 mph and forced to have an ISA installed.
I recall someone analyzing records from LexisNexis or similar (maybe in a news article or lawsuit?) and uncovering all kinds of instances where they were incorrectly labeled as speeding due to crossing a lower-limit road. Unfortunately I can't find the link.
I’ve got enough sense to keep it slow and safe in populated areas, yet occasionally open it up elsewhere when conditions are right. Guess that’s another thing we’re going to lose in our brave new world.
Aside from that cars phone bome anyways as ot is, so another way to crossreference data.
This can be as nontrivial as you want it. The problem is rather that a state shouldn't treat its citizens like that. That is probably why they start with repeat offenders.
The fourth amendment means that there should never be a situation where you are arbitrarily required to provide the government access to, or information about, the ways that you use or modify private property like a vehicle.
Break the law enough and you can be provided two options - revocation of license or installation of limiter.
Of course there is a legal layer to this as well. But given how the US legal system treats other constitutional rights that ought to be valid for everybody on American soil at the moment, I thought I'd skip that for now, because apparently something being a constitutional right doesn't make it so.
https://www.ncsl.org/transportation/state-ignition-interlock...
Increasing penalties for speeding without this device has issues. It's basically impossible to prove that you intended to break the law, and that you didn't just misjudge your speed. Worse there's become a culture of mildly breaking the law, and it's even harder to prove you intentionally went beyond what's acceptable in that culture. There's a reasonable doubt that it was a honest mistake. This makes it politically, legally, and morally problematic to have significant penalties attached to speeding.
But if you're caught speeding because you disabled the device that a court ordered installed to prevent you from speeding, all worries about intent go out the window. It is, beyond a reasonable doubt, a deliberate violation of the law. Not the actions of a well intentioned person who was in a hurry and bad at judging their speed. This means that, relative to speeding, penalties can be significant increased resulting in better deterrence.
Specifically it looks like Virginia's new law makes it a "class 1 misdemeanor", which is the harshest class of misdemeanor in Virginia law, and the same as a DWI or simple assault. Sentencing maximums are a bit deceptive because they typically aren't what are assigned, but theoretically punishable by up to a year of confinement.
In fact, most cars lie to you about the speed - reporting a speed slightly faster than reality. It's a cover-your-ass measure for the car manufacturers because it's illegal to sell a car (in the US, at least) where the speedometer is inaccurate in the other direction, that is, reading slower than actual speed.
1. Some older vehicles, including pre-1996 GM trucks (and probably others from the same era) had the speedometer calibration controlled by a resistor array on a circuit board under the dash, those can be changed with a lot of effort and a soldering iron, or by swapping out the whole circuit board with a different one that matches your tire size + rear end gear ratio.
Haven't seen that in a long time. Everything I've driven in recent years has a speedometer speed that matches roadside speed sign speed within 1 MPH.
If the reasonable speed for a road is 70, the legal hard limit could be at 75 to be considerate of this effect. But make 75 the actual hard limit with $200 fines for hitting 75, $1000 fines for hitting 80, and jail time for hitting 85. Make it almost certain to be caught if you hit these hard limits.
I guarantee you fewer people would die on the roads if this is the way things worked.
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:42...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16mquqv/sp...
If you're caught once, then a fine and a slap on the wrist should be enough to make you pay more attention. Twice - bigger fine & harder slap. If you're caught N times, then lose your license.
Something like "ignorance is not an excuse in the eyes of the law".
Preemptively restricting the space of possible (or likely) situations is the cornerstone of designing safe systems.
Giving system owners RBAC controls so they can choose who is an admin, versus not giving system owners admin privileges at all.
But more importantly, the point of my comment is that the axiom that everyone thinks themselves competent enough, is true at every level of risk. No matter how low risk something is, someone can and will still overestimate their capabilities and muck it up. If we're using that as justification to impose restrictions, there would be no actions that someone could not justify restricting.
More important than that is actually learning to predict hazards. Over years of experience, what was unexpected becomes hedging risks. Tight corners in residential areas, parked cars blocking visibility, managing distance not just from the car in front of you but behind you. That obviously requires slowing down in those sections.
One of the few places unrestricted speed makes sense, is a fully enclosed highway with very little traffic and enough lanes, during the daytime.
that makes such a person unpredictable, and a road danger.
When skilled people either underestimate how hard it is to do something, or gauge a complex task that they have expertise in as easier than it actually is.
[Edit: Interesting that there are multiple effects, e.g. the sibling comment, that refer to similar but distinct phenomena!]
If you are doing 45 on a California freeway, YOU are the danger. Not the car going 75. You.
Wait, no, that's an excessively extreme level of control, while seatbelt laws are an acceptable level of control because, actually I don't know why, but anyway speed limiters are somewhere between these two levels of control, and therefore acceptable. Or not. One of those.
Yes, we have laws that exist to control people's behavior. We have systems which exist to control people's behavior. This is intended and completely necessary to live in a society with other people. For an example that causes no controversy to anyone on this board - we have laws that control people's ability to take open-source code and use it without sharing.
You're pretending like this is completely crazy by inventing a position nobody has taken, claiming "speed limiters in cars for repeat speed offenders" is the same as that insane position you just invented, and then pretending to be an idiot so that you don't have to do the work of actually justifying yourself. You should try practicing some actual thinking instead of resorting to pretending the people you disagree with are stupid.
It's true that I didn't want to do this work myself, but then, I don't know how. It's your idea.
Society is based on coercion. Coercion is awful. Society is awful. We prefer it to the alternative. So we continually argue and wrangle and split hairs about how best to arrange the appalling system of controlling people. Shrug
Is this a reference to your driving, or your shooting?
A 20mm rifle is a perfect example of how velocity kills in gun terms. 60000J of energy in one trigger pull. This is equivalent to a car traveling at 15-20mph.
On badly designed streets and with bad and/or speeding drivers, on the other hand.
And don’t get me started on the dangers of cars with high hoods. We’ve known for years that to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe, they need to go on top of the car, instead of under it.
A Toyota Corolla going 65MPH is a lot of kinetic energy.
Fyi, this is being written from public transit. You didn’t think I would actually drive to work, did you? ;-)
It also introduces atmosphere of terror on public roads making walking or cycling dangerous. It's a way bigger problem than guns.
Gun utility: small Car utility: large
(data from CDC and NHTSA for 2023)
Suicides (that is, guns) are intentional.
(Not abruptly stopping the car because looking at TikTok, but ... Fines? Limiting speed? Withdrawn license, if repeated?)
And building more railways, subways! Also creates jobs.
Edit: From where did you get the numbers? I googled for "solo car crash reason statistics",
and sleepiness seemed to be one main reason (too?)
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving [2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding [3] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
For you.
Sure the reverse might be true for a minority, but the majority scenario is out there with plenty of statistical and empirical evidence.
I'm neither pro nor anti-gun, just stating facts.
I'm no hunter and have never felt like I need a gun.
Would-be tyrants get power (and stay in power) by gaining the support of people capable of projecting force and power onto the populace. From the perspective of tyranny, it is irrelevant if their supporters are i.e. the military or a bunch of militia guys who have acquired their guns privately.
Source: Many, many civil wars across history.
Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb, because you are simply creating another group of people that would-be tyrants can use to gain and retain power.
Actualy tyranny-proofing a society involves building a strong network of institutions (as in laws, civil society, courts, legislative bodies, distributed wealth and sets of norms) that can effectively counteract the attempt of any one group or individual to centralize power.
Also: even if you completely disarm a society and armed resistance becomes necessary in the future (for example western and northern European countries under Nazi occupation during WWII), getting access to firearms is usually not the hardest, nor the most important part of building an effective resistance movement. The organizational part and effective operational security is much harder and more important.
I'd continue to argue that widespread gun ownership within democratic societies is detrimental, not beneficial for their continued existence.
As for "starting" a democracy, there are certainly those that came about by violent means. But more often than not, the capacity for violence has nothing to do with the availability of arms in civilian hands. Much more relevant is the organizational capacity of revolutionaries and their support within the armed forces (or from actors that could provide well-trained and armed men prior to the widespread use of standing militaries).
>All democracies before the current era began as revolutions.
[citation needed]
>Roman plebeians were well armed enough that the state could never become too abusive towards them.
The roman republic was likely founded due to the support of the roman armed forces and nobility during a power struggle with the then-King: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Roman_monarch...
The plebeians certainly played a part, but probably not because they were "well armed". Legitimacy is a real and important thing in politics and it derives from the willing support of your constituencies.
I would also question that plebeians were particularly well armed. Plebeians were (for the most part) not allowed to serve in the army, while higher social classes were required to and also required to provide their own weapons. Therefore it is likely that the higher social classes were both quite well trained, had combat experience and weapons and armor at their disposal, while most plebs likely hat little in the way of arms and/or training and experience.
>the British public happened to be well armed enough with longbows, originally intended for times of war, that they could resist the tyrannical acts of the state and the professional military that it commanded.
Not sure where you draw the line for democracy being established in Britain, but it would be hard to argue that this was before the British civil war starting in 1642. By then longbows were mostly outdated military technology and battles were fought with "pike and shot", which required quite a lot of training and substantial capital to be effective (and adequately supplied). Neither pikes, nor matchlock firearms were particularly widespread in civilian hands.
>Some of the most peaceful and healthiest democracies in the world are also the most heavily armed: look at Switzerland for an example.
Swiss reservists haven't had their service rifles at home for a couple of decades now. The justification for the Swiss system was also always based on repelling outside threads. The practice of keeping service rifles at home produced significant problems (suicides and gun violence) so it was abolished.
>The entire point of widespread civilian ownership of military weapons is that they can serve as a deterrent so that no tyrants, whether in the government or another private faction, can ever wield unassailable power over the masses
Which is dumb, because tyrants don't care how many people they have to kill. And having a lot of weapons in civilian hands gives them one more lever to kill their internal enemies. Private militias are an essential aspect of most genocides in the modern era (see Rwanda, Serbia, etc.).
>Civil institutions can be captured over time by corrupt interests, but it's quite difficult to capture an empowered public.
It is very hard to corrupt well-established institutions (that is the whole point of institutions), while it can be quite easy (in the right circumstances) to get critical shares of a population to support a murderous ideology.
Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?
AFAIK even the European societies that have a lot of guns in hands of civilians (hunting or others), such as the Swiss or Scandinavians, are mostly fairly free long-term.
They could be conquered by much stronger external foes such as the Nazis, but the theory that those guns would be a boon to a would-be internal tyrant does not seem to be borne out.
Plenty. The population of the Weimar Republic was pretty militarized (lots of WWI veterans with combat experience and plenty of activity of "Freikorps" militia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps#Freikorps_involvemen...). These militant and armed forces largely threw in with the Nazi political movement and contributed to the collapse of the first German democracy and the institutionalization of the Nazi Reich. Just to make one very obvious example.
Worked once
On the other hand, there are literally dozens of examples of civil society organizations organizations and protest movements successfully countering government overreach or military coup d'etats with peaceful means and bringing about profound political change:
- US civil rights movement
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_(Polish_trade_union...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_Revolution
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democrac...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_transition_to_democrac...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quit_India_Movement
Just to name a few.
While armed resistance against injustice can sometimes be effective (and certainly not all peaceful movements succeed), there is well established qualitative and quantitate research that violence comes at much higher cost (in terms of life lost) and risks (to subsequent democratic and evononomic development) than peaceful resistance. Erica Chenoweth is one particular scholar worth checking out in that regard: https://www.ericachenoweth.com
It makes sense if you think about it for a second: resisting violently against tyranny requires you to build up systems of violence (duh!). Those systems have the tendency to stick around, even if you are successful in removing or fending off tyranny.
You can see this live in the US, if you are willing to look: Tens of thousands of people die every year solely because the US treats firearms differently from the entirety of the rest of humanity. At the same time, the US does not seem to be uniquely resistant to the undermining of democratic institutions, as Trumps current antics demonstrate (this should hold true no matter which side of the Trump/Democrats divide you sit on. Both sides claim that the other is (successfully) undermining democracy).
But peaceful resistance (which goes beyond protests and can – depending on situation and definition – encompass everything from sabotage to strikes, espionage, boycotts and "Work to Rule") has been demonstrated to be more effective to both establish long-term democratic rule, as well as safeguard it against authoritarian rollback, when compared to violent means.
There simply is no actual argument based on historical facts that widespread civilian gun ownership is particularly effective at establishing democratic rule or deterring authoritarian tendencies. Which makes sense, because (again) guns are only good at projecting or threatening violence and authoritarian actors (in contrast to democratic ones) are quite comfortable with violence.
This guarantees worse outcomes. You will be effectively forcing people to participate that typically don't care about politics and will be ignorant of many of the issues they are voting on.
The reality is that most elections are won in the same way the X-Factor, or "I'm a celebrity get me out of here". It is nothing more than a popularity contest.
[Citation needed]
An opposite argument is that compulsory voting smooths out or buffers the extreme radical urgency of any faction that might, in the right circumstances, carry the day in a low-turnout election.
> An opposite argument is that compulsory voting smooths out or buffers the extreme radical urgency of any faction that might, in the right circumstances, carry the day in a low-turnout election.
That is a bad thing IMO. I am (and many other people) are disenfranchised by mainstream politics and I want to see more radical ideas/policies/opinions, I (and many others) don't want more of the same.
Compulsory voting, and in particular compulsory preferential voting also has a highly centralising effect, which adds to long term stability.
All of this is an anecdote. It isn't proof of anything.
I also think that the people that you think are more informed actually weren't more informed and were probably just happened to have the same brand of politics that you happened to subscribe to, and vice versa for the people that you thought were ignorant / uninformed. I see this pattern in almost all mainstream political discussion.
BTW being actually informed means having a deep understanding of the topics at hand and the majority of people simply won't have this because they may not have the time/motivation to delve into such topics. The vast majority of people aren't willing to do this seriously and end up just parroting what they've been told by people on the TV/Youtube/Twitch/Tiktok etc.
> Compulsory voting, and in particular compulsory preferential voting also has a highly centralising effect, which adds to long term stability.
I doubt there is any proof to this assertion at all.
Also why would be a centralising effect be considered a good thing?
Many people (including myself) are disenfranchised with the current political class/system because they don't offer anything different, so you are telling me (someone that is disenfranchised) that I should support this because it will guarantee more of the same. You aren't selling me this idea.
I don't want to participate in the circus that is politics. I see it nothing other than a popularity contest, where my choice is largely irrelevant (as the voters always get shafted) and the candidates are all almost always scumbags that I wouldn't want representing my interests anyway.
So you are suggesting not only that I have to vote (something I think is absolute waste of time), that I also have to put a preference of how I would rank these people I want nothing to do with, so I propagate a status quo that I want to see demolished.
You aren't selling me on this idea.
Centralisation is a useful property since the median opinion is closer to the centre. First past the post adds variance that isn't reflective of the average voters opinion, since votes go to the mode party. Under preferential voting, votes flow to the median party.
Because of this effect, you also get a broader range of parties representing the views of a wider cohort of voters. In my local electorate, for example, there are over 7 parties vying for our seat, ranging from an agrarian socialist party, to far right sovereign citizens. I'm not aware of any country without preferential voting with this type of range.
The fact that people like you are disengaged with politics is kind of why I prefer compulsory voting. In countries without compulsory voting, opinions like yours don't get reflected in party policy. Here (apart from the stance against compulsory voting, which is wildly unpopular, and only held by very fringe parties), the opinions of people less likely to vote in other countries are broadly reflected in parliament.
If you say so (I have no way to verify this). Generally however it is the case that people behave the way I describe. This is because most people analyse things through a them/us filter, not based on the facts.
> Centralisation is a useful property since the median opinion is closer to the centre. First past the post adds variance that isn't reflective of the average voters opinion, since votes go to the mode party. Under preferential voting, votes flow to the median party.
There is no "median" opinion, like the concept of the "average person" they don't exist, so how can they be represented?
Also the concept of "centre" is assuming that "right" vs "left" politics is valid model. Since the right and left have literally changed important policy positions (when convenient) in the last 20-30 years, I realised the descriptors don't actually really mean anything. The right vs left is just a way of labelling people as part of the alternative faction, so people can easily dismiss their opinion.
Most people think I am part of the right. I realised I wasn't when I noticed I shared a number of views with a Revolutionary Black communist in the USA than the Conservative party of the UK (I am English).
> Because of this effect, you also get a broader range of parties representing the views of a wider cohort of voters. In my local electorate, for example, there are over 7 parties vying for our seat, ranging from an agrarian socialist party, to far right sovereign citizens. I'm not aware of any country without preferential voting with this type of range.
This assumes that this is all a good thing. It also assumes that those elected represent the interests of their voters (they don't BTW, that is another rabbit hole).
Have you asked yourself why should everyone be represented? I do not ask my mechanic their opinion about medicine, I do not ask my doctor his opinion about car repair.
So why is it a good thing that someone's views are represented when they will have at best a very surface level understanding of a particular speciality / issue / topic? It isn't a good idea.
> The fact that people like you are disengaged with politics is kind of why I prefer compulsory voting.
So you want to force me to participate when I don't want to? I don't want to participate at all. Why do you think that is okay at all? Because you think it gives better representation. Whether something is "better" is very subjective. That is bullshit as far as I am concerned.
> In countries without compulsory voting, opinions like yours don't get reflected in party policy. Here (apart from the stance against compulsory voting, which is wildly unpopular, and only held by very fringe parties), the opinions of people less likely to vote in other countries are broadly reflected in parliament.
You don't understand my political opinions at all. No party policy would/could or would I want them to reflected in party policy. I told you I don't want to participate in it at all. I don't want it to exist. So how it could it represent me? It can't.
The US founding fathers could not have imagined the weapons systems at the disposal of today's would-be tyrants. Don't bring a gun to an autonomous drone fight...
* Protection against aggressive wild animals.
* Protection against aggresive humans. This often applies elsewhere, but becomes less and less optional the further away law enforcement is.
* Arguably more humane way of killing pests than poison or most types of lethal trap.
[0] As it is harder to obtain gun on illegal market when it is harder to obtain one on legal market.
You don't feel the need for something like a gun for self defence. However if/when you do need to defend yourself then your opinion will quickly change.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/london-knife-crim...
https://www.barnardos.org.uk/blog/what-young-people-say-abou...
https://theconversation.com/why-so-many-young-british-men-ar...
As compared to cars - which is pretty much the last line of defense against you being homeless and without a job.
I would wager most people can give up their guns, say, 50% of the time and nothing changes. The same isn't true for cars.
recreational shooting. Though that's not exactly high utility
>>Gun utility: small Car utility: large
It's not about cars but speeding in cars. You can eliminate one without the other. This is not the case with guns. Utility of speeding is negative even if you never kill anyone.
That's like saying "it's not about guns but killing by guns".
If we could only identify those pesky people that will kill with their guns before they do it, we could solve our problem! Just as if we could separate out only the drivers that will crash before they actually do it.
Alas, while you can probably speed many times without serious consequences, shooting someone without serious consequences is far rarer! This means we at least have a chance to catch the repeated speeders before they do irreparable harm, but we rarely have the same luxury with shooters.
Oh, that's OK then, they clearly don't matter.
Then, guns aren't the cause of suicides and it's disingenous to count those as gun deaths.
To be clear, I'm not for gun rights and live in a place where they don't exist.
Gangs have easy access to guns when everyone does.
Making guns is very hard. The only way to get them is from people who actually make firearms. If they don't exist, then you can't get guns, no matter how gangster or organized you are.
I mean, it's not like the Mafia is making fucking factories to produce steel firearms.
Depending on the state, you can't own a gun with a barrel of a certain length, or a certain magazine capacity, or you can't own a gun if you're a felon, or you can't sell a gun without doing a background check on the purchaser, or you need to hide your gun when you leave your home, etc.
You might think guns should be regulated more strictly and cars should be regulated less, but it's dishonest to represent the situation as you have. America has decided as a society that both guns and cars are valuable enough to let people use, yet dangerous enough to control the use of.
Just two days ago I did a long distance trip and in general I could engage cruise control at the speed limit allowing me to focus more on other potential hazards around me.
Occasionally I would need to move out the left lane (I live in country where we drive on the left side of the road) to overtake someone travelling slower than me, and somewhat often while in the process of overtaking, someone who was going 20+km/h over the speed limit would drive at a completely unsafe following distance behind me until 30s later or so when it would be possible for me to move back into the left lane.
I don’t care much if other people want to speed past me, but I’m not going to slow down or unlawfully speed for them to do so, so this makes these situations way more and needlessly stressful.
No doubt at least some of these other drivers regard me as the unsafe driver in these situations.
If people would rather just generally use cruise control themselves at the speed limit, the roads would be more predictable, it would be safer and stress free. They’re at most saving 10s of minutes on 7hour trip, it’s not worth the cost.
Speed limiter seems justified for people who are repeatedly endangering others.
Speed limits should be defined to reduce the harm from the inevitable crashes e.g. we have a lot of 20mph limits here in the UK in cities such as Bristol which are designed to reduce pedestrian deaths.
Personally, I think roads are poorly designed - they often prioritise speed which then encourages drivers to go faster (e.g. long sight lines, sweeping corners etc) and then a speed limit is applied. I think the better alternative s to design roads so that drivers naturally travel slower, or at least the careful ones do.
When I drive, 99% of the time it's to get someplace, not go for a Sunday cruise.
The better alternative is ongoing driver training beyond initial study.
At the same time it drastically increases both the risk of accidents, as well as the severity of accidents when they happen. You also endanger not only yourself but also everyone else on the road with you.
Sensible road design takes this into account and constructs roads in a way that disincentivizes speeding and is safer for everyone. One example would be "lazily" meandering highways instead of perfectly straight ones. The broken sightline is a great incentive to keep your foot off the gas, most people do it instinctively.
"Ongoing driver training" on the other hand is burdensome and expensive for the individual drivers and will probably lead to little noticeable effect, as speeding is not related to "not knowing better", but to "feeling entitled to break the rules" (for whatever reason).
Braking
(As for ripping up roads and relaying them so drivers intuitively find the safe speed to match the posted speed limit, it would be much cheaper to simply adjust the speed limit than establishing entirely new right of ways through existing neighborhoods, farms and industrial zones. That would be bonkers.)
Also, increasing the speed limit does nothing to make traffic safer. That doesn't make any sense at all, as increased speed is correlated very well with increased accident rates and severity of traffic-related injuries:
https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/eu-road-safety-po...
Increasing the speed limit to the 85th percentile so that you do not have the few people who actually obey it posing a hazard to others does make things safer.
Getting cars off the road sooner by reducing travel time, decreases the number of cars on the road. This increases the distance between cars and accidents only when the distance betweeen a vehicle and something else reaches 0. Forcing people to drive slower therefore causes collisions by bringing cars closer to one another.
The severity is a separate matter from whether there is a collision. As for severity, people drive much faster in Germany where there is no high way speed limit for much of the autobahn yet their autobahn network has half the fatalities that U.S. highways have. The safety data from 2012 shows this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety
As for your link, it talks about pedestrian safety. As per the data there, pedestrians are unsafe on highways no matter what the speed limits are. There are also no pedestrians on highways. There is no point to setting highway speed limits based on studies showing the danger to non-existent pedestrians.
Did you post the first link that seemed to agree with your position as part of some fallacious appeal to authority because logic failed to agree with your preconceived notions that you were never equipped to defend? I suspect that is exactly what you just did.
[citation needed]
Seriously. That is a pretty bold claim that you should be able support with actual studies, if true. You have several things working against your hypothesis:
- While it may be true that driving at the legal speed limit might slightly increase the risk of accidents when many other drivers drive faster than the speed limit, a general increase of the speed limit might severly increase risk for everyone.
- Many people do not drive above the speed limit, because they have a "higher normal", but because they feel entitled to "drive faster". I.e. they claim that they are "better drivers", they have a superior need to arrive faster, etc. Those people will just adapt their behavior to the new, higher speed limit and again drive above that, making the entire exercise pointless and dangerous.
- A potential and less risky alternative would be improved enforcement of the current speed limit.
There are probably plenty of other arguments that actual experts in this field would bring up.
>Getting cars off the road sooner by reducing travel time, decreases the number of cars on the road. This increases the distance between cars and accidents only when the distance betweeen a vehicle and something else reaches 0.
That makes no sense at all. It has been proven in both theoretical and practical tests that driving "all out" does not decrease travel time drastically in almost all circumstances. But it substantially increase the risk of accidents. So any minuscule decrease in car density will be far outweighed by increased accident risk per kilometer driven.
>Forcing people to drive slower therefore causes collisions by bringing cars closer to one another.
It's actually the other way around: Forcing people to drive slower drastically reduced the risk of collisions because people are slower and have more time to react. It also reduces the incidence of traffic jams (because sharp braking prevalent with speeding drivers is a main contributor to traffic jams), which are in turn a major factor in collisions.
>As for severity, people drive much faster in Germany where there is no high way speed limit for much of the autobahn yet their autobahn network has half the fatalities that U.S. highways have.
You'll have to control for other factors, of course. Cars in the US are much larger and heavier than in Germany, for example. In statistics, you want to compare apples to apples, so you control for vehicle weight when trying to make observations about the impact of speed on accident severity.
>As for your link, it talks about pedestrian safety.
True. But the same holds true for vehicle collisions. It's really basic physics. All other things being equal, faster cars have more energy. More energy = more severe accident outcomes.
>Did you post the first link that seemed to agree with your position as part of some fallacious appeal to authority because logic failed to agree with your preconceived notions that you were never equipped to defend?
No. There are plenty of other sources that support my views, i.e.
https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/eu-road-safety-po...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014... ("Impact speed was found to have a highly significant positive relationship to risk of serious injury for all impact types examined.")
Where are your sources?
The 85th percentile rule/principle has been understood for decades. Just search for information on it. You will find tons of results. Calling it a bold claim is like claiming asymptotic complexity is a bold claim. It is something that is well known, just not to you.
> It has been proven in both theoretical and practical tests that driving "all out" does not decrease travel time drastically in almost all circumstances.
Those tests do not seem relevant to highways, where it is easy to measure differences in travel time between driving at the speed of traffic and driving at the speed limit. When traffic is at 70mph and the speed limit is 55mph, keeping pace with traffic results in a 21% reduction in highway travel time. How things go when someone is ‘driving "all out"’ is not relevant here.
> Forcing people to drive slower drastically reduced the risk of collisions because people are slower and have more time to react.
A highway is not a regular road where it is stop and go based on lights. The purpose of a highway is to have a free flow of traffic such that you do not need to be continuously reacting to others. You do need to maintain a certain distance between you and the car to react in emergencies, but these are supposed to be exceptional and plenty of collisions occur when changing lanes, which would be lessened with fewer cars on the road. Cases where everyone needs to stop would also be lessened.
> You'll have to control for other factors, of course. Cars in the US are much larger and heavier than in Germany, for example. In statistics, you want to compare apples to apples, so you control for vehicle weight when trying to make observations about the impact of speed on accident severity.
Those same vehicles are legal to drive in Germany as far as I know. There is a possibility that they are popular in the U.S. because of the speed limits such that they would be less popular if the highways did not have speed limits. After all, their acceleration, braking and fuel economy are terrible. They would only be worse at autobahn speeds. The knowledge that it is legal to drive at higher speeds tends to encourage people purchasing vehicles to purchase ones that can handle higher speeds well. We could see vehicles more similar to those driven in Germany become popular if there were no speed limits and then things would naturally become apples to apples.
> True. But the same holds true for vehicle collisions. It's really basic physics. All other things being equal, faster cars have more energy. More energy = more severe accident outcomes.
There is no law of physics that dictates that such things cannot be done with greater safety than we currently have. Germany is a fantastic example of this. Germany permits speeds that would be considered hazardous by the thinking behind motor vehicle rules in the US, yet is substantially safer.
> No. There are plenty of other sources that support my views, i.e.
If I tell you what is wrong with your sources one last time, I hope you will stop posting links under the misguided hope that some random thing superficially agrees with your claims sticks. Your first link involved studies in a country where speed limits should obey the 85th percentile. The findings are not relevant to the U.S. where the 85th percentile is ignored. Even without knowing about the 85th percentile, it is obvious the applicability to other countries would depend on how similar the process for establishing the speed limit is. Your second link is behind a paywall and cannot be scrutinized, but the German autobahn likely contradicts it. Problems only occur when the distance between a vehicle and another object reaches 0. If that is avoided, the speed does not matter.
That said, it is impossible to prevent future Darwin Award recipients from earning their awards. If you insist on trying to stop them from earning rewards from motor vehicles, you might as well push for a complete ban on motor vehicles. That is the only thing that would eliminate motor vehicle fatalities.
Usually traffic on American interstates is staying at the speed limit if: there is a fair amount of congestion, everybody is stuck behind somebody doing the limit, or there is rain/fog/snow/etc.
A cursory look at traffic safety statistics would seem to dispute this statement. The US consistently ranks quite high in traffic fatalities, which seems to indicate that you couldn't safely drive faster than the current speed limit in most circumstances. Of course you'd have to control for a lot of other factors for a definite conclusion, but conversely, I'd like to see an actual source for your theory.
Enforcing a speed limit is actually not that hard if you want to. You can of course put stationary or mobile speed cameras in place. But even better may be systems I've seen in some places in southern Europe: Cameras at the beginning and end of a stretch of highway that compare time stamps of your passing and calculate the average speed of your car in that stretch. If you've passed the stretch quicker than should be possible according to the speed limit you'll be fined. It's quite low tech, cameras are prevalent on the highway systems of many countries, anyway, and it solves the problem of people adhering only to the speed limit if they know they are being observed by law enforcement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
We're talking about long distance roads. The purpose of these should be to accommodate travel, not prohibit it.
Here in Germany, the Autobahnen do a surprisingly well job, although I agree that a speed limit of around 200 km/h makes sense because those with cars capable of going above that are so much faster than others on the road that even someone with perfect reflexes and racing-grade brake systems will have a hard time avoiding an accident.
No. Most people who drive significantly faster than the limit are disregarding the limit and are driving at the speed they feel to be safe. They aren't considering the limit and blindly choosing to drive X over it, such that they'd drive X even faster even if the posted limit were raised by X.
If a long flat and straight country road in good condition has a posted limit of 30 and most people instead do 60 (this is common in many parts of the country), they wouldn't start doing 120 if the limit were raised to 60 because "do double the posted limit" was not their objective in the first place. Their objective was "drive at the speed which is safe for this road" and the condition of the road didn't change, so that speed doesn't change.
(The reason I know this to be true is because the proportion of drivers who speed on any given road varies wildly with the road. On some roads, 95% do substantially faster than the limit while on other roads that ratio is flipped around the other way. This demonstrates that speeds are being chosen by the condition and nature of the road, not derived in some way from the posted limits.)
Another way to arrive at this conclusion is that if the speed limit is both 65 for trucks and cars its trivially not the limit of how fast one can safely drive. And as expected, you see trucks going 65 while cars speed around them at 70+.
And also the inability for people to use the pedal and the steering wheel at the same time resulting in large 15+ mph speed drops around a highly visible curve.
Not really. The problem people are not prioritizing safety, they are rushing in an ego fueled spasm of disobedience and disrespect.
Recently I got into an accident. A car changed into my lane completely unannounced, and I was blinded by a car in my front diagonal. The car "jumped" into my vision, I braked and hit them relatively slowly. Being slow, uphill and on a wet road helped all of us (the car took some of the damage by sliding).
Consider this in a freeway at speed limit. We'd be hurt. Consider this at 1.5x speed limit, because everyone speeds, and we would be dead.
Do not forget, the police found out that I had no wrongdoing and blame. It was impossible to see them, and they neglected to check their mirrors and signal a lane change, plus I had some distance to them and braked as hard as I could the moment I saw them, and I was going 50KM/h to begin with.
And even then, although the ex-race drivers can drive safely at high speeds, it doesn't mean other people can drive safely while other people are moving a racetrack speeds. The key to safety on the road is predictability. Any form of driving that reduces predictability, even if the unpredictable driver has the necessary skill for that form of driving, creates a dangerous situation because other drivers will react to that unpredictability in unpredictable ways, and likely lacking the skill to pull it off.
What matters isn't the driving skill of the most skilled driver on the road, it's the skill level of the least skilled driver on the road.
Another race driver, whom I forgot his name, said "A race track is where people who know what they are doing drive at high speeds, and traffic is a race track where people don't know what they are doing, yet still drive at high speeds". I always keep that in mind and cite to other people to urge them to be careful in the traffic.
What caused my accident was that unpredictability. A car changed lanes in front of me, without proper signaling and precautions from a point where it was impossible for me to see them.
Brilliant! That's so well put.
There is no reason in the world to assume that US drivers have the same level of driving skill as German drivers.
That is a very typical response, yet the notion of Germans being intrinsically superior to others has long been debunked.
That said, if we can replicate Germany’s success in vehicle safety in the U.S., we should, yet discussion on vehicle safety seems to justify increasingly draconian bandaids on the status quo rather than just mimicking what the Germans do. It is also easy to say that they have higher standards, yet no one has stated precisely what these standards are.
In NYS, we have annual mandatory vehicle inspections. Driving an uninspected vehicle is illegal and you cannot get the inspection certificate for your windshield unless your vehicle passes. The state requires a driving test to get a license and effectively forces everyone to take driver education courses every 3 years by raising insurance rates if they do not. It is unclear to me what is done in Germany that is not already done in NYS as far as driver education and vehicle road worthiness are concerned. NYS might even be ahead of Germany if Germany does not have any incentive for regular driver education.
> I’m sure that if the United States would see incident rates decline significantly if we made drivers licenses harder to get and easier to lose before a fatality, or simply ended our effective trillion-dollar annual subsidy of driving and required people to carry insurance coverage sufficient to actually compensate the other parties.
You just described NYS. It has some of the highest insurance coverage requirements in the U.S.:
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/minimum-car-ins...
Losing your license is fairly easy to do here. There is a points system. Reach 11 points, and you lose your license. Reaching 11 points is fairly easy to do. Having any points on your license increases insurance rates, so there is a strong incentive to avoid it.
This is something you read into the comment. Given how Germany is tied with Japan for the assumption that they place a higher priority on attention to detail and safety culturally, I would suggest the more parsimonious explanation thar they were simply echoing a stereotype Americans have observed for at least a century.
While you’re apparently very proud of NYS you’re simply drawing a false equivalence. Perhaps NY is above average for the United States but having driven there many times I had to laugh at the idea that the bar is very high having seen people grossly speeding, running red lights, using the highway should or parking lanes to pass illegally, driving around with illegally tinted dark windows, double parking, or parking on the sidewalk. Even if I ignore upstate and only compare NYC to Munich, it’s not even in the same league – especially since some of the biggest scofflaws around NYC are the cops who park their personal vehicles blocking the sidewalks and are clearly more interested in hassling pedestrians and bicyclists.
On to insurance, it is simultaneously possible for NYS to have higher insurance requirements and still be lower than what’s needed. American healthcare is significantly more expensive than our peer countries so we need much higher insurance to compensate the people hit by drivers, especially because private insurance means a massive cost problem if the victim is unable to work. Studies have estimated that Americans subsidize driving by roughly a trillion dollars a year by not requiring drivers to pay for their choices, so even the most expensive states aren’t high enough.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...
If you paid attention the remarks about the 85th percentile, you would know that speeding on NY high ways is actually safer than following the speed limits. That is because the speed limits were lowered in the 1970s in a misguided attempt to save fuel that never worked since nobody listened to the speed limits after they stopped reflecting the 85th percentile. Many of the things you cite have nothing to do with highways where the discussion of speed limits is centered either.
As for insurance, the minimum standards are still the highest in the country. Many (myself included) go higher for insurance policies. You can write to the state legislature if you believe the minimum should be higher.
Intrinsically, of course not, but how about due to laws/culture/training?
1. There are annual mandatory vehicle inspections. Driving an uninspected vehicle is illegal and you cannot get the inspection certificate for your windshield unless your vehicle passes.
2. The state requires a driving test to get a license (in addition to prelicensing education requirements) and effectively forces everyone to take driver education courses every 3 years by raising insurance rates if they do not.
3. There is a points system for violations. Reach 11 points, and you lose your license. Reaching 11 points is fairly easy to do.
It is unclear how driving skill in Germany would be much different than driving skill in NYS. If you believe it should be, then you should have reasons for it that would give concrete things that can be changed.
By "German drivers" I mean drivers who are trained, licensed and insured in Germany. There is nothing "intrinsic" about it, and it has nothing to do with genetics or national origin.
https://dmv.ny.gov/driver-license/complete-pre-licensing-req...
Those are the minimum standards. After meeting them, you can receive a learner’s permit at age 16, that allows you to drive under the supervision of a licensed driver. Parents will sometimes make things even more rigorous. My mother for example required me to drive her under supervision nearly every day for an entire year before she let me proceed to the next step for my license. This was in addition to study at a driving school that was already beyond the state’s minimum standard.
Then you must pass both written and practical exams. Interestingly, the minimum age for this varies. If you have gone through much more rigorous training (e.g. by studying at a driving school), you may receive your license at age 17. If you have not, you must wait until age 18. This encourages people to exceed the minimum standard for training.
After you have your license, if you do not take driver education courses every 3 years, you face higher insurance rates, so nearly everyone does. Finally, if you commit a few driving infractions within an 18 month span (which causes 11 points to be placed on your license), your license is suspended. Insurance rates rise if even a single point is added, so there is pressure to avoid even a single infraction. As for insurance, it is mandatory and the requirements are among the highest in the U.S.
It is unclear to me how German drivers would be more skilled than drivers trained/licensed/insured in NY per your phrasing. You have not given a single concrete example of anything that would make them better drivers.
As for gruesome accidents, there will always be Darwin Award recipients. Trying to prevent them from earning their rewards is a foolhardy task. I believe the maxim is that the moment you make something idiot proof, the world makes a better idiot.
In general, German culture has more respect for the “correct” way to do things, cars tend to be better maintained, and there is a much higher level of driver education going on.
Comparatively, American drivers are a bunch of filthy savages. (I say that as an American driver, currently driving in a country where the locals, in comparison with American drivers, are a bunch of filthy savages)
Unfortunately, the USA has a weird version of the noble savage mythos that enshrines ignorance.
That said, I am not convinced that any of what you said is necessarily true. The annual vehicle inspection that NYS mandates generally ensures a minimum level of quality. In NYS, you need to pass a test that shows a minimum level of competency before you receive a license. You also need to take a driver education course every 3 years or face higher insurance rates. I assume other states do the same (and if they do not, they should start). Germany is unlikely to be very far ahead in either vehicle maintenance or driver education. If they do not have recurring education requirements, they might even be behind.
I’m with you on freedom and how it ideally translates into responsibility.. but I think that there is a substantial block of US drivers that fail to grasp the intersection of those tightly entangled concepts.
In short, Freedom != freedom from consequences.
Hopefully, my view on the prospect of improving the situation is overly pessimistic. I like your version better, but my faith in cultural progress during what seems to me a significant retrograde slide over the last half century is pretty low.
The US is too car dependent and as such it's practically non-viable to
- put high (skill/knowledge) requirements on drivers (especially given that this normally entails increased monetary requirements)
- put high car maintenance/road safety requirements on cars
and in generally fundamentally changing driving rules is hard in general and also a safety hazard during transition. I.e. it is very much too late to do this.
Like one of the many benefits of not having a hyper car dependent society is you can say "no more driving for you" to people who can't show to safely drive a car (or have repeatedly shown to not keep with the laws (at lest the safety related ones)). Or say "no more driving" to not well enough maintained cars (until fixed).
1. There are annual mandatory vehicle inspections. Driving an uninspected vehicle is illegal and you cannot get the inspection certificate for your windshield unless your vehicle passes.
2. The state requires a driving test to get a license (in addition to prelicensing education requirements) and effectively forces everyone to take driver education courses every 3 years by raising insurance rates if they do not.
3. There is a points system for violations. Reach 11 points, and you lose your license. Reaching 11 points is fairly easy to do.
You are saying that improved driver education and vehicle maintenance cannot be done in the U.S., yet NYS does it. You say that people’s licenses cannot be taken away for unsafe driving in the U.S., yet NYS does it. NYS is part of the U.S.
The problem is, it's only NYS. Not the entirety of the US. And the federal government can't go and mandate it without a constitutional amendment - and the last one has been passed over 30 years ago, so there is no practical chance something as controversial as that could ever become law.
The only way around this would be a repeat of the Minimum Drinking age, similar to what's being discussed for the "SAVE Act" - the federal government effectively forcing states to abide by tying federal highway or other funding to that condition. And that tactic is, let's be real, outright disgusting and trampling on states rights.
However, in the interim I'd support draconian measures (e.g. cameras, speed limiters, more effective consequences) until Americans demonstrate empirically that they are capable of operating dangerous equipment with some degree of competence.
Can you explain how you think encouraging such a culture would be at odds with measures like cameras or speed limiters? I'm also unsure why you think it's "misguided" to expect those technologies to help reduce behaviors like illegal speeding.
I don't see them at odds myself, but if you are correct then I would just support the draconian measures alone. I have low confidence that such a broken driving culture can be fixed and that American drivers can be trusted to follow the rules and stop killing so many people.
Doing draconian things that are ineffective has an opportunity cost that requires diverting time and effort from doing things that actually make a difference. Data on traffic cameras improving safety is mixed (mainly because of people flooring their brakes to avoid fines only to cause themselves to be rear ended). It also does not help that a number of places actually try to cause motorists to run red lights when traffic cameras are put into place by decreasing the amount of time used for yellow lights so that they can increase revenue. Interestingly, increasing the time spent with the light yellow decreases collisions at intersections and unlike traffic cameras, always has a positive improvement on collisions. Another option would be to eliminate intersections by adopting cloverleaf and/or diamond interchanges, which not only make traffic flows more efficient, but also improve safety (since you cannot run a red light, or have a collision caused by someone suddenly stopping upon seeing a yellow light). As for speed limiters, they are outright dangerous when they restrict people to speeds well below the 85th percentile.
That said, NYS has done a number of things to improve driver safety. They probably do not do as much as they would in less densely populated areas, but it is not hard to imagine other U.S. states adopting them. The real problem is that there are so many cars on the road that the average distances between them are very small. As long as the distance between vehicles remains non-zero, collisions are avoided. Efforts really should be focused on maximizing the distance between vehicles, rather than on minimizing the speed at which they travel. Raising the speed limits to the 85th percentile would help there. Car pooling lanes would also help. Modernizing public transport so that people do not need as many cars would also help.
Why the left lane? I used to live in NYC and when traffic was light enough to actually drive the speed limit I generally stuck to the right lane to avoid inconveniencing other people who wanted to drive faster. Wouldn't people with court-mandated speed limiters simply stick to the right lane?
> Any attempt to force people to drive slower than the 85th percentile speed poses a danger to others on the road.
Perhaps they'd need the "ATTENTION: This vehicle's speed is monitored by GPS" stickers that I occasionally see on fleet trucks in the city.
Regardless, this seems to be an objection to selective enforcement methods, right? For example, if all drivers are subject to the same constraints (whether speed cameras, universal speed limiters, road diet, etc) then not only would this not increase discrepancies in speed, but it would likely decrease them. Does this mean you would support such measures?
> Doing draconian things that are ineffective has an opportunity cost
Agreed. But that applies to ineffective things whether or not they are draconian.
I do agree that stoplight cameras have mixed results -- typically reducing serious T-bone collisions while increasing rear-end collisions -- but to be clear, when I said "cameras" I was referring to speed cameras, not red-light cameras. On the topic of NYS, their school zone speed cameras seem to have been effective at reducing injuries caused by drivers in school zones.
> As long as the distance between vehicles remains non-zero, collisions are avoided. Efforts really should be focused on maximizing the distance between vehicles, rather than on minimizing the speed at which they travel.
Due to human reaction times and the physical limitations of braking, maintaining a time between vehicles is more relevant than distance. That's why defensive driving courses teach you to keep about three seconds between your car and the car in front of you, more if you're hauling a trailer. If you're driving at 8mph that's only about 10ft, but at 80mph that's 100ft. So while I agree that increasing distance is useful, the distance necessary to ensure safe operation is a direct function of speed.
I heard of a few cases in which so many drivers were already breaking the speed limit on an overengineered highway that raising the speed limit did not increase collisions e.g. in Michigan, Texas, British Columbia. But otherwise the data is pretty clear that making people drive more slowly improves safety.
- _way_ higher requirements for "safe normal care usage skill" then the US
- way higher care safety requirements (as in what cars are allowed to be on the street)
- a different driving rules especially wrt. how they affect traffic on highways which do allow faster driving at the cost of putting higher requirements on people understanding and keeping with the rules
- also laws and judges will "in general" faster lead to your driver license being lost (most times temporary). If you lose your job because of losing your driver license it's in generally seen as fully your fault
In addition there are quite a lot of studies about speeding limits and safety and they are very clear in the conclusion that speeding is one of the more common sources of deadly car accidents.
Through also in most countries city and country side streets are have way more accidents for similar care usage then highways.
And it's also quite unclear what you mean with "low speeding limit" and "big difference in vehicle speeds", especially given that lower speeding limits in general limit how big the difference in vehicle speed can be (assuming it's reasonably enforced and as such people somewhat kinda keep to the rules, but if not it's an enforcement problem, not a speed limit problem).
Anyway the main point is that comparing US high way safety with German or man other EU state highway safety is like comparing apples with oranges.
> And it's also quite unclear what you mean with "low speeding limit" and "big difference in vehicle speeds", especially given that lower speeding limits in general limit how big the difference in vehicle speed can be (assuming it's reasonably enforced and as such people somewhat kinda keep to the rules, but if not it's an enforcement problem, not a speed limit problem).
Very few people actually drive according to posted speed limits. They instead drive at a natural speed for the road and conditions. Those that do drive according to posted speed limits when the speed limits are set below the 85th percentile will find that driving at the speed limits is hazardous. This is why in countries with sane traffic laws, the speed limits are set to the 85th percentile and you get an illusion that people are obeying it. Differences in speeds tend to be small when the speed limits are set to the 85th percentile.
In the U.S., speed limits were lowered in a misguided attempt to conserve fuel following the 1973 oil crisis. This never conserved fuel since nobody listened to the new limits and it has made driving at posted speed limit hazardous ever since then.
> In addition there are quite a lot of studies about speeding limits and safety and they are very clear in the conclusion that speeding is one of the more common sources of deadly car accidents.
Having the distance between a vehicle and anything else reach 0 is necessary for there to be a collision. Get the cars off the road faster and the distance between vehicles will naturally increase. Larger distances between vehicles inhibits collisions. Thus, while collisions might be worse at higher speeds, you are not going to have as many of them. Germany’s autobahn has no speed limits and while collisions happen, they are relatively rare. Furthermore, 0 collisions is an unattainable goal. I believe the maxim is that if you make something idiot proof, the world will make a better idiot.
except they don't, they reliably frequently drive above what is save
heck what is safe isn't even always obvious
Especially if you look at urban settings where you have pedestrians, bicycles and motorcycles this is quite common.
Similar people, including some otherwise experienced drivers, tend to fail to internalize that the emergency stopping distances increases exponentially (roughly squared).
A grate example for why you should never base care speeds on percentiles is a street close by to where I live, it looks like it's safe to drive ~50km/h but even when driving just 30km/h you will find it hardly possible to safely keep with other traffic laws, like e.g. precedence on crossroads. It also has funny parts like subtle getting smaller in some areas (including after turns). And playground, primary school and a retirement home are close by. And in difference to some other countries it not uncommon for children here to travel alone (or in groups of children) to primary school and sometimes playground. Potentially as young as 6 years of age.
And that doesn't even include special situations like idk. roads which are especially unsafe during rain due the kind of dust they get exposed too and similar.
> drive according to posted speed limits
sure, but if you have appropriate enforcement most will at most drive slightly above them limits as they don't want to pay high fines or lose their license. If you raise the limits they will again drive slightly above the limits and due to the roughly squared increase in breaking distance this is more then just slightly bad.
> his is why in countries with sane traffic laws, the speed limits are set to the 85th percentile
except it's kinda the opposite
most (not all) countries with very high levels of road safety do not use a percentile system. Most common is a system with fixed speeds for urban, "country side", and "highway" and then assess safety for given speed based on expected reaction time and maximal road safe emergency breaking distance and if it's not safe reduce it (als in general not gradual reduction but based on a preset of "speeds", e.g. in Germany urban walking speed, 30 or 50 for urban streets. The fixed choice of speeds seems a bit strange, but people are animal of habit so it's a better choice, it also makes it easier for everyone (for drivers to not get confused about the speed limit and for state to manage it).
> Get the cars off the road faster and the distance between vehicles will naturally increase.
But if you drive a lot you might have realize that it doesn't increase as much as it must to be as safe. People vastly miss-estimate distance traveled during reaction time and emergency breaking distance all the time. E.g "traffic jam out of nowhere" are not uncommon on German highways and are most times a consequence of people not keeping the required safe distance between cars leading to a chain reaction of people breaking much more then they should need to leading to a traffic jam (as in most commonly a long blob of cars going much slower then they normally would, like just 80km/h instead of 130km/h).
> Germany’s autobahn has no speed limits and while collisions happen, they are relatively rare.
This is not quite right 40% of German highway road has speed limits, because it not being safe to drive faster in that areas.
In addition the recommended maximal safe driving speed is 130km/h, if you drive faster it can lead to reduced insurance coverage and in case of a crash the amount of fault attributed to you might increase, too (depending on you actual speed above 130km/h).
Then there is the thing that the highways are (in the areas without speed limits) designed to allow very fast driving. For one there is the rule that you need to keep on the right most lane as long as you aren't overtaking someone/it's viable. The rule that you aren't allowed to take over on the right side (except in traffic jams). The fact that all highways entrances and exits are strictly only on the right side. And some other smaller stuff which are essential parts of why no speed limit kann be safe. So you really can't easily compare it to other highways.
Lastly in Germany safe driving trump any "rights" speed limits give you and similar. E.g. lets say there is no speed limit but it's relatively crowded and you still insist on driving 200km/h. You might then still get pulled over for non safe driving. Through to be fair ignoring idiots this normally works itself out just fine without such rule on highway. Through the general idea of "looking out for others on the road" being a indoctrinated during driving lessens still does matter.
> maxim is that if you make something idiot proof
Which brings us back why you would want speed limits based on what is actually safe not what feels safe/what people feel like driving. Or why you would only want to have a few categories of speed limits. Or why there are studies which show that building road to wide and safe looking isn't the best idea.
In contrast, there are U.S. states with zero inspections of any kind. No emissions, no safety, nothing.
The problem is complicated, but IMO it boils down to lack of widespread public transit, and low salaries. Unless you live in a metro that has reliable and inexpensive public transit, you generally need a car to get to work. You also need to pay for fuel and insurance, so things like preventative maintenance are often put off for lack of funds. When repairs are finally needed, chances are you’ll opt for the cheapest part available, even if it won’t last nearly as long. Same with tires: good tires are far more expensive than bad ones. My wife’s Mazda CX-9 has Michelin CrossClimate2 tires. They’re $307/ea right now on TireRack. There are also off-brands available for literally half that. I (and probably most people on this site) am lucky enough to have a job that allows me to buy the best tires, but that is definitely not true for most Americans. $1200 (plus mounting and balancing costs) for a set of tires is completely out of the realm of possibility. So now you have a car with parts of dubious reliability on tires that don’t grip as well, and remember, in some states there are no checks that your tires even have tread depth left, let alone their stopping ability.
If every U.S. state (or the federal government, but that’ll never happen) were to require the level of safety checks that Germany does, I guarantee you that a solid 1/4 – 1/2 of cars I see on the road would fail. It would be a devastating blow to the U.S. economy, purely from the sudden drop in worker availability.
Finally, re: speed limits, it’s unclear to me how you think Newton’s 2nd Law doesn’t apply.
[0]: https://www.jalopnik.com/heres-everything-i-fixed-to-prep-my...
[1]: https://www.jalopnik.com/i-took-a-250-000-mile-minivan-throu...
https://dmv.ny.gov/new-york-state-vehicle-safetyemissions-in...
If there is anything missing that is needed for road safety, I am sure that the NYS legislature would be happy to add it. You can write to them with your findings.
In any case, there is an inspection program that keeps vehicles to a minimum standard in NYS. Other states could easily adopt it. If a significant percentage of vehicles are deemed unsafe to drive because of this, then removing them from the road would be a good thing.
> Finally, re: speed limits, it’s unclear to me how you think Newton’s 2nd Law doesn’t apply.
It is unclear to me how you think I think that. This sounds like a strawman to me.
I think you missed the entire part of my post where I discussed how a significant portion of the population is unable to properly maintain their vehicles, and also lack access to reliable public transit.
Re: Newton, you said that “Actual data does not support the idea of low speed limits.” You did not cite your source, and without that, I am defaulting to the basic physics principle that an object moving faster will impart more force on another if they collide.
Germany is no different. There is licensing reciprocity with the rest of the EU and even other countries beyond the EU. I could drive in Germany with my NY license:
https://de.usembassy.gov/driving-in-germany/
People can even drive in Germany with licenses issued by any of the states you mentioned. You can even drive cars registered in the U.S. in Germany:
https://www.zoll.de/EN/Private-individuals/Travel/Entering-G...
The only restrictions occur when you wish to do it for longer than 6 months.
> I think you missed the entire part of my post where I discussed how a significant portion of the population is unable to properly maintain their vehicles, and also lack access to reliable public transit.
This does not pose a problem in NY. Other states could easily follow suit. I think you missed that.
> Re: Newton, you said that “Actual data does not support the idea of low speed limits.” You did not cite your source, and without that, I am defaulting to the basic physics principle that an object moving faster will impart more force on another if they collide.
The German autobahn is the most obvious source. There is also a huge body of work around the 85th percentile principle. Do I really need to say more?
“Good” is not a binary state, and it’s also wildly subjective. If by removing 100,000 unsafe cars from the road, you prevented 10,000 vehicle collisions, but 20,000 people became impoverished, is that good? It depends on your point of view. New York State, being largely dominated by NYC, I assume has an above-average social safety net. Perhaps they really are able to have these stricter requirements, while also ensuring that the negative impact felt on their citizens is minimized. Mississippi neither has that nor wants it. Were they to implement strict vehicle safety standards, the ripple effects would be much larger than those felt by a state with a stronger desire (and the budget) to care for their citizens.
Re: sources, can you post some? I’m not trying to Sealion you here, but I have no idea what specific studies you’re thinking of, and I would prefer to be on equal footing.
You can read about the 85th percentile principle here:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=85th+percentile+speed
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=85th+percentile+speed
I actually cannot check the second since Google is blocking queries from the iCloud Private relay, but I assume it will give you a list of scholarly work on the subject. As for the autobahn, Wikipedia has some numbers from 2012:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Safety
1.74 fatalities per billion vehicle km on the autobahn versus 3.38 for US highways. There is evidence that introducing speed limits of around 80mph (130km/h, well above the speeds used drivers drive on most U.S. roads) on the autobahn would further lower it. The paradoxical situation where high speeds on the autobahn are safe and low speed limits on US highways are unsafe would be explained by the 85th percentile principle.
The GScholar link had many studies, yes. I found some conflicting opinions.
Institute of Transportation Studies, UC California [0]:
“There is, however, no empirical study that demonstrates that the 85th percentile rule optimizes safety.”
Hilda Ofori-Addo, University of Louisiana [1]:
“85th percentile speeds of vehicles are greatly affected by roadway characteristics. Therefore, roadway characteristics should be considered as equally important…”
I’ll note that this also had the lowest rate of crashes when vehicle speeds were <= 1 MPH from the 85th percentile, but there was also a confusing (to me) multi-modal distribution after that, with a 7 MPH delta having strikingly higher rate than anything else. I suspect, as the author admits, this may be due to other factors such as area type, road traffic volume, etc.
[0]: https://escholarship.org/content/qt5hg5m6sm/qt5hg5m6sm.pdf
[1]: https://media.proquest.com/media/hms/PFT/2/gUjrJ?_s=mHpv4T4%...
The kinetic energy of an 1800 kg car traveling at 30 km/h is about 62.5 kJ
The kinetic energy of an 1800 kg car traveling at 50 km/h is about 173.6 kJ
The kinetic energy of an 1800 kg car traveling at 70 km/h is about 340.1 kJ...
If your only consideration is getting to your destination very few minutes sooner with complete disregard for other peoples health it makes perfect sense, but cars are dangerous and at anything but completely isolated roads it makes sense to lower speed limits since the average speed wouldn't drop significantly while improving safety for everyone.
It ridiculous how often someone speeds by, breaking the speed limit and often various other traffic laws and 30 seconds later we're side by side in traffic because their wreckless driving didn't actually but them any time.
You're wrong there, that assumption fundamentally only makes sense on a full-on hard crash to 0 km/h - and about the only cases where that happens on a German road are suicides or someone not recognizing a traffic jam. Most crashes on highways are at relatively close speeds so the energy delta is way, way smaller.
What matters is keeping speeds especially low where humans without cars/trucks can be involved.
But people are also scrolling their phones and might miss a panic brake, and while that's an issue in itself it would also be safer at lower speeds.
Considering the time gained is going to be relatively low unless you're traveling extremely far at consistent speed it makes little sense to increase speeds, it also makes for more brake dust and emissions both being at speed and getting up to speed.
Funnily enough the air resistance also increases by the square, so think about that if you think that petrol is expensive.
As it is, speed limits are rarely set to the individual roads specific circumstance according to some sort of scientific or engineering method, instead most speed limits are set to a default speed used for that class of road across the state. As such, it is silly to act like extant speed limits are all correct even when nearly everybody is ignoring the limit on a specific road, evaluating that road's condition for themselves and choosing to drive at another speed.
> Laws should reflect the values of the democratic consensus, speed limits included.
Maybe they considered the nuance to be something obvious, but their statement is still flawed. The funny thing about nuance is that most nuance isn't visible to the naked eye and requires some degree of familiarity or expertise to observe. And that degree is why we shouldn't be assigning speed limits based on what the average driver thinks is appropriate for a given road, as more likely than not (much more likely than not) they don't have the necessary context to make an appropriate judgement.
If its a stretch of road where we don't want cars going more than 30mph, we should set the speed limit at 30mph and design the road, so people tend to go about that speed. Not have a stretch of road where we want people to go 30, build a road people feel comfortable driving 55 in, and then decide "welp, nothing we can do, just change the speed limit I guess."
Is democracy only for drivers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Operating_speed
There are advantages and disadvantages as with everything.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=85th+percentile+speed
Setting the limit at the 85th percentile and having most drivers drive at it creates uniformity of speed, which is known to increase safety.
Have you actually tried to purchase guns or ammo lately? There are genuinely few states, where freely available and unrestricted can be used without an asterisk attached.
They are not. This is a very common misconception. I suggest you go purchase one at a gun store.
[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
In my opinion, if you get caught driving recklessly, the punishment should be that you're banned from operating 4 wheel vehicles, and only allowed to operate light 2 wheel vehicles like scooters where you will only kill yourself and no one else.
Do what now?
How far will you let your kid walk from home alone?
Anyway my point is just that pedestrian deaths have gone up even as the number of miles walked and biked (_especially_ by kids - the modeshare for biking to school has absolutely plummetted) goes down.
People weren’t letting their kids play near 8 lane freeways back in the day, either.
Yes, people didn't let their kids play near freeways in the past. But now a much larger number of streets are freeway-style roads.
The hyperbole in this thread is wild to see.
Don't know what rinky dink town you're from, but here most roads are 6-8 lanes across. Yes, that includes in our small cities. They're essentially highways but with signal lights. Go to Arlington, Grand Prairie, Richardson, Fort Worth, Roanoke, Southlake, you name it, and it's just roads after roads like this. Trying to cross them is extremely dangerous.
Stroads is a correct description.
You'll have smaller streets inside of neighborhoods which are islands of nothing but houses, then massive busy streets in between. Sidewalks directly abutting these very busy streets, if even there. Usually no bike lanes.
> I never lived anywhere where kids were playing right beside an eight lane road
You leave my neighborhood and immediately it's a 50 MPH 6 lane stroad. Granted, I'm counting 3 one way, 3 the other, occasional turning lanes makes it 7 or 8.
It's true your neighborhood is fine. But there's literally nothing in your neighborhood but homes. If you need anything, no matter how trivial, you have to cross stroads. This is very much in contrast to urban mixed-use pedestrian friendly areas.
Pretty damn far, actually, as the parent of two.
There is a point in time between infant and adulthood were you have to start letting them play unsupervised.
I remember vividly when I was a kid and we were biking on the street and someone drove too fast, dad went out in the road and yelled him down, which was reasonable.
If you chose to live in a car friendly suburb in Sweden that's on you rather than "society" I'd say.
/shrug
Edit: I don't care about upvote tallies or karma count, but it does seem pretty silly to downvote a comment for pointing out that areas like this, and play in those areas, still exist.
Even the largely carless (read: not many cars parked on the street) ones like my neighborhood that had a whole bunch of kids happily playing outside and in the street this weekend without issue? Every single one?
The cul-de-sac behind my house through the alley is a good bit calmer. That's where my kids go to play.
Suggesting that “many” of the kids who “try” to play outside get killed by cars is the kind of conclusion you can only arrive at by living life through hyperbolic headlines or the dramatic evening news.
Ha. I had twins. One was a sprinter/climber and the other was One Slow Plodding Step At A Time. We took most of our walks at 10pm.
There is no way 1.5 to 4yo can play unsupervised, as in grabbing distance from adults, in areas close to traffic? Maybe 4yo can do with yelling distance from adults.
Like, if people wouldn't care so much as they do, I would guess there would be a lot of fatalities.
When I was a kid, the amount of kids outside was easily orders of magnitude more. Things I did as a kid are pretty much unthinkable now. I mean, as young as 7 I was riding my bike miles away.
It's not that things are worse now, it's that enough kids died that newer parents are much more cautious.
Take a look at this photo from 1995: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F5...
Note how visible all of those primary school children would be to anyone using one of those cars in the car park. Now imagine the same scene today with the car park full of modern cars (and 'trucks') where the bottom of any of the vehicle's windows would be well above many of those children's heads.
The other issue is that in a lot of countries speed limits are arbitrary: either too low or too high for the area. Speed limits are not dynamic and usually are actually set so that a percentage of traffic violates them. Or are set once and never adjusted.
States in the US are culprits of all above issues. Plus the lack of alternative transportation. So this whole topic is a Pandora's box that doesn't take easy solutions.
https://dmv.ny.gov/driver-license/complete-pre-licensing-req...
Other states could adopt the same requirements.
This sounds good if you imagine perfect enforcement, but reckless driving can be a very subjective charge depending on the location.
Driving scooters to work is impossible in many places due to distance or weather. Making everyone’s livelihood hinge upon one officer on a power trip giving them a reckless driving ticket is not a good idea.
People do this all over the world. Maybe some folks need to take a moment to deal with a little discomfort. Or better yet, build out infrastructure so people have better options.
Your scooter wouldn’t even clear the snow here, let alone stay upright on the ice.
I think some folks need to realize the world is a big place that doesn’t always look like their local area.
In fact, I hope it does make life difficult for them - maybe they'll think twice and not drive like an idiot and put innocent people's lives at risk.
If you take away someone's ability to get to their job because a racist/corrupt/grumpy/power-tripping police officer decided to perjure themselves to declare that they drove recklessly, you have given police a tool to destroy the lives of anyone they dislike.
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsure...
If policies continue to push more people to operate vehicles extralegally, problems caused by these drivers may get worse instead of better.
It’s always possible.
I think current penalties for reckless driving are far too lenient. Driving is not a right, but a privilege. If someone chooses to use that privilege irresponsibly, they should lose that privilege.
Personally, I would advocate for a license revocal process that happens much quicker than what we do now and provides a mechanism for regaining access to that privilege through a rigorous process of eduction and community service.
You don't know what you are saying. Virginia already has the strongest speeding laws in the entire United States. Doing 20 over is a criminal act, and entire law practices exist due to Virginia' speed laws.
https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title46.2/chapter8/secti...
Absolutely. Grew up in VA a few generations ago and it was just as strict then. Compared to everywhere else I've lived - Virginia is Police Everywhere, All The Time.
Our highways are not lawless. They are among the most regulated areas of daily human life in the US after accounting for both criminal and civil penalties. Whether people abide by those regulations is a different matter, but to say its lawless is a wild fantasy of people who probably shouldn't be on the roads in the first place.
I guess if you don't see it then it must never happen to anybody ever. That isn't valid data.
eg: https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...
https://www.theautopian.com/if-you-ever-see-this-speed-sign-...
Just check out how slow it takes to do hurricane evacuations, and we know about those days ahead of time.
The Maintain Top Safe Speed thing was envisioned for transiting across fallout-contaminated areas in the weeks and months afterwards. It prescribes there would be cops stationed at the ends of such routes, limiting the flow of cars entering so that those within the stretch would not be congested and could go fast.
Freedom isn't free. It's always cheaper to take away people's freedom instead of doing the hard work of building infrastructure to naturally promote traffic calming. Too bad America (left and right) doesn't believe in freedom anymore.
There are some cobblestone streets in Prague and cars driving through them, even slowly, generate a lot of unnecessary noise.
Count me out, I don't want to suffer from extra noise just because it would slow some people down. I lived in one such street for years and even with sporadic traffic, I had to open my windows at night. I hated that.
Cobblestone is an old technology, though. How does "state of the art" differ from what we can see on this street view?
I remember crossing Poland towards Lithuania some years back, and in some village 1h from the border had a 500m part with stones, and those stones used would force me to do 25-30km/h and not more, I feared that my tires would burst, also the noise was unbearable.
American's still believe in freedom, in my opinion, its just that the entrenched powers make it increasingly impossible to imagine a world that actually nourishes human freedom and, lacking that, we just sort of flail around in frustration. The single insight which Americans must digest in order to move forward is that both governments and corporations and, indeed, any powerful entity whatsoever, can and often do interfere with human freedom and flourishing and all of them need to be continuously attended to and restrained by law and by the vigilance of the people. The second most important thing is the understanding that negative freedoms mean nothing without the resources to transform them into positive freedoms and if we fail to provide those resources then enormous amounts of human potential will be wasted. The second is a harder pill to swallow given the U.S. mythology, but I would be satisfied with the former for now.
Cars driving around create a lot of noise. Driving on a rough surface like concert, let alone a bumpy surface like brick or cobblestone, creates a ton of additional noise. Another hint is that gravel driveways are cheap, but they also make it very very easy to hear when someone is pulling up to your house.
Anyone living next to these roads _might_ have some cars go a bit slower, but at the cost of not being able to sleep at night.
Then there is the fact that America loves big cars with big off roading wheels. I think the assumption here is that most speeders would be discouraged by the uncomfortable ride, however I think reality is that the people in that hummer going 90mph on a city street just won't care about a rougher ride.
Agree with the rest of your comment. I also think the main reason for high traffic deaths in America is road design.
That is not the problem Virginia is trying to deal with with this legislation. They are trying to deal with the problem of a very small number of drivers who are driving much faster than the speed limit and much faster than even most speeders go.
These are drivers that have been convicted of speeding at more than 100 mph. That is a criminal offense of the same level as drunk driving rather than a mere traffic infraction.
It is just those drivers that they are trying to slow down.
Sadly, this is completely incompatible with 25 mph city speed limits. Thus, the need for engineering kludges like automotive speed limiters.
I’d really like a new vehicle classification, perhaps along the lines of Medium Speed Electric Vehicles. Designed with a top speed of 40 to 45 mph, they might make a reasonable primary vehicle for many, and a good second car for even more.
[1] Most states have rules around operating a minimum speed with the flow of traffic, so cars inhibiting the flow or otherwise driving significantly slower than the cars around them are considered to be a safety hazard.
Some states are more objective by posting both minimum and maximum speed limits, though I personally find that freeways with speed minimums tend to actually have more people driving slow enough to cause disruptions.
This would just force average speed drivers into the left lanes and slow traffic down overall, and contribute to more traffic jams as the uneven speeds cause ripple effects.
I think what you're most experiencing is a result of cars over 2 wheeled vehicles. Cities would be much better if the average American commuted around it with 2 wheeled vehicles, mass transit, or the occasional taxi for trips when traveling with larger items.
If you have not traveled around Asia, I recommend it. You start to see a lot of the sickness in American culture. The biggest is a culture that revolves around cars.
Sucks when I have long stretches on the highway though.
Or you can shake your head at the world.
One of the things you see where I live is they pave roads with lower speed limits with rougher surfaces. You can drive 60km/h on a 30km/h road, but it'll be very uncomfortable.
People will drive as fast as comfortable or as they feel is safe. Making roads less comfortable at high speed is not hard. Making roads feel dangerous at high speeds while still being safe is not hard.
You can't just put up a speed limit sign and expect it to work. You have to adapt the design of the road to the speed limit.
It is nothing more than a foot in the door for massive police surveillance of all motor vehicles.
Virginia famously cares more about police than the rights of its citizens so it isn't a surprise the weapons of the future police state are being born there.
How is this different to driving around with a mobile phone on?
Is that what the bill proposes? everyone's vehicle is now monitored all the time?
It's a very simple problem with a very simple solution. If someone proves multiple times they won't follow the rules of the road, revoke their ability to legally drive. Most states go to jail time on the first or second offense of driving without a valid license.
This whole argument smacks of "let's not make things too hard on these people willfully violating our laws over and over and over again."
>I drove 300 miles in rural Virginia, then asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car. Here’s what I learned.
https://cardinalnews.org/2025/03/28/i-drove-300-miles-in-rur...
That is a 100% strawman argument. NO ONE is proposing such measures
No proposal, even the blanket EU requirements eliminate privacy in travel. The devices all work entirely locally with GPS to monitor speed vs local limits, and upon exceeding local limits, output an audio/tactile alert and/or limit accelerator input. I have never seen any mention of reporting speeds or positions, and would be very alarmed if I had; if you've seen any, please provide citations.
Again, no one is proposing monitoring everyone all the time. The proposal is only for temporary monitors/limiters to be placed on cars of people convicted o related offenses after due judicial process, and only for the time of their sentence. Again, if you have citations on more extensive restrictions, please post them.
The only real difference is that old vehicles need to be retrofitted, while the hardware and software needed to do this is largely already present in new vehicles (or soon will be in the remaining exceptions on the market).
It is impossible to implement a backdoor to a broadly-used encryption method for only specific criminal individuals - it is being implemented across the entire usage base.
Adding a device to a specific criminal's vehicle for a limited time is highly specific.
I absolutely oppose any general application, and am favorable towards the slippery slope argument. I'm only responding to the above comment which falsely claims that we've already gone entirely down the slippery slope.
A user controllable software limiter is already in Tesla vehicles for example. It would not take much to go from it being user controllable to being controlled by state law. That brings us to an issue analogous to the issue opponents of backdoors in encryption want to avoid, which is that there is nothing stopping it from being used indiscriminately.
That said, this would likely start with adding devices to “criminal’s” vehicles because older vehicles do not support this, but it would end with these “device” being integrated into every vehicle from the factory, since the other safety equipment being included in vehicles makes it easy to deploy this in software. I find it odd that people who are opposed to encryption backdoors do not see this.
For the topic of the post, YES
The article was specifically about laws allowing a JUDGE to add a device to a specific convicted person's vehicle for a limited time.
OF COURSE there is the slippery-slope argument you describe very well.
The slippery slope danger is real, and I've stated that I oppose any motion down it.
But I also oppose posts which wrongly scream that we have already slid down it entirely when in fact the article is about taking a single limited step down the slope.
Descending every slippery slope is not inevitable. Falsely declaring that it's already done is at best a strawman argument.
Yet, evidently as soon as any surveillance topic comes up, hordes of HNers are happy to discard reading comprehension and act as if any hint that a step might be taken onto a slippery slope is a full endorsement of speedrunning down it.
I expect there will be a LOT of push-back on that one, and there are still also many areas without cell coverage. Would you expect all cars would stop running without cell coverage?
Here's at least one entirely new car, with Bezos' backing, that AFAICT will have zero internet connection. [0] Considering the cost trajectory of cars, and the general distaste for surveillance, a low-cost car without those add-ons may be very popular.
And, AGAIN, the point was entirely about the GP post's massive exaggerations, not about a general implementation which I strongly oppose. You and GP evidently think it is OK to exaggerate and speak like every bad thing related to the topic has already happened; I think at least some adherence to the facts makes sense. It seems we'll have to agree to disagree. Particularly since we do seem to agree on the broader topic that general implementation of speed limiters is awful and to be avoided
[0] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a64564869/2027-slate-truck...
I repeat: that ship has sailed
>I drove 300 miles in rural Virginia, then asked police to send me their public surveillance footage of my car. Here’s what I learned.
https://cardinalnews.org/2025/03/28/i-drove-300-miles-in-rur...
And yes, I oppose those also, in large part because they are 1) a general dragnet against every traveler, 2) have zero specificity to any particular individual, and 3) have no judicial check or due process on their use.
Adding an individual device to an individual's car after repeated breaking of laws (and perhaps more importantly, repeated failures to keep it discreet enough to not be repeatedly caught) has zero of those properties. It is for a specific individual, for a specific time, after due judicial process. As long as it stays confined to those parameters, it seems more acceptable than many alternatives.
Driving a car on public roads has not resembled this phrase for over a century in most of the world.
Walking is free. Pretty private too. Lace up.
My opinion is irrelevent as I do not live in Virginia and am not a lawmaker, but I would want this to be tied to a vehicle telematic privacy bill that restricted how cars use telemetry data and gives consumers rights to control what is logged and who sees it and who it can be sold to.
Until we own the data our cars generate, I don't want active speed and acceleration constraint software for "chronic criminals" because inevitably it will be mandatory on all cars and remotely controllable by law enforcement.
The only answer is to make this kind of thing illegal at the level of the state constitution and/or federal case law, at least until we bring back tarring and feathering government officials who violate their oaths.
Are you serious? I can choose to leave my mobile phone home if I want to. I can't do that with my car.
Such speed limits are quite common. E.g. mopeds in Finland have been (mechanically) speed limited for decades. Electric bikes are also limited to not supply force above 25km/h (IIRC).
The US government and state governments are openly hostile to our residents and currently implementing massive mechanisms to track and control our population including our immigrant communities, women who need access to birth control, LGBTQ communities .
The government wanting a system that requires GPS and speed information to allow law enforcement to remotely control the movement of undesirable activities is the obvious goal here.
Ignition interlocks have existed for many years and didn't do this.
Every motor vehicle has a serial number. Every motor vehicle is registered and must display an identification label on its front and rear. Every non-antique motor vehicle must be inspected annually for safety. Every motor vehicle must be operated by a licensed individual. Those individuals are assigned identification numbers and their photographs are stored in a database. Information regarding both the motor vehicle and its driver is shared among states, with private entities, and with the federal government. All motor vehicles must have insurance. The status of insurance coverage is shared with the state and other states. A network of automated license plate readers exists in the state, with police vehicles and various municipalities across the state deploying both fixed and mobile automated license plate readers. Speed and red light cameras have been deployed to municipalities across the state. Radar detectors are banned.
Anyone who has driven through Virginia knows that they have one of the, if not the, strictest speeding enforcement programs in the entire country.
> The Old Dominion has the second-highest citation rate for speeding in the nation — 67 percent higher than the national average — where many drivers are caught in the state’s notorious speed traps on interstate highways near Richmond.
https://insurify.com/car-insurance/insights/states-most-heav...
The door was opened decades ago.
This is about speeding.
On a personal level, I do one day a week as a volunteer EMT. Most of the time it's great. Taking old folks with UTIs and abnormal labs to the ER, treating injuries at high school football games, taking vitals and transporting folks with dizziness, racing to a restaurant and epi'ing someone who had an allergic reaction. Very rewarding, supremely fulfilling.
Then the drunks and the speeders show up and you go home wishing you could feed the legs of people who drive recklessly into meat grinders, up to their thighs.
Traffic laws are one of those situations where the right and left politically accidentally land on the same outcome (via different paths) - near zero enforcement.
In many cases we have the technology to solve these things and laws already there if we wanted to actually enforce them.
It’s incredibly jarring returning to NYC after a week in Tokyo and realizing how insane our roads & highways are.
Full self driving can’t come soon enough.
"GPS-based speed limiters are too draconian. We should throw more people in prison."
It's never going to be perfect, nothing will, but reducing the odds of bad behavior reduces the odds of bad outcomes.
So license removal is not really fair. Not that this is any better, but if you at least get to keep driving legally, its generally slightly less worse.
If traffic is all moving in a narrow range of speed the clusters are smaller and less dense.
Tailgating is one of the leading causes of non-fatal accidents.
Sounds like it's safer for me to let people tailgate me at the speed limit.
If everyone is disobeying the law, they should all be cited but that is difficult for an individual cop. I don’t see why, as long as the officer isn’t racially profiling, selecting one violator at random is unfair. Can you explain why?
As for license removal being unfair - did the person cited not commit the offense?
I suspect they'll allow just enough over so that police can still get their sweet, sweet tax revenue in this brave new world.
I think the overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of people would happily buy a car that couldn't go more than 100mph. Many who only rarely leave their cities and would be happy to use alternate transportation if they did would probably buy a car that couldn't go more than 50mph.
Going that fast seems like a feature most people don't care enough about that they'd be willing to pay for it, so why does the market appear to include it by default?
> I think the overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of people would happily buy a car that couldn't go more than 100mph
You are empirically wrong I think.
You can't assert that the empirical absence of data supports just one possible explanation.
As to your question - I’d like to refer you to physics. 2000 pounds of metal moving at any speed can kill pedestrians easily. More speed means more energy.
Increasing speed limits consumes more fuel, wears roads more, pollutes more tire and brake dust, and of course kills more. We should not make things more convenient for motorists just because motorists exist.
If the cars move faster, they will get off the road faster. This means fewer vehicles on the road and the distances between the vehicles will increase. It is a linear effect if you adapt a flow equation to vehicles. Here is the equation off the top of my head:
V1*D1*L1 = V2*D2*L2
V is the average speed, D is the linear density, L is the number of lanes. If you care about safety, you want D to be as big as possible so that vehicles do not have distances between them reach 0. That implies higher speeds (or more lanes, but that is harder to do).
Finally, the gun analogy is inappropriate. It is essentially saying “the data contradicts our conclusions, so let’s shutdown any rational thought that might question our conclusions”. This kind of thinking is backward and should easily lead to nonsense such as the rationalization of square wheels to give an example of the absurdity it allows. Interestingly, much of what you said could also be said in defense of the forced adoption of square wheels.
Higher limits also leak onto the streets that feed the ramps. The AAA Foundation’s 2024 before-and-after work showed a lasting uptick in operating speeds and speed-related crashes on arterials within a mile of interchanges after states boosted freeway limits [2]. Pedestrians and cyclists never set foot on the interstate yet bear some of the fallout.
Saying my analogy shuts down rational thought misreads what the analogy is doing. It's not a substitute for data but a framing device. I'm highlighting that different technologies share a core governance problem. When a private activity's danger rises faster than its utility, society uses regulation to keep expected harm below an acceptable threshold. This invites more rational analysis, not less.
If empirical data showed that 85mph highways or un-regulated assault rifles actually reduced third party harm, the analogy wouldn't block that conclusion, but instead lead to different regulatory settings. Your dismissal flips the burden of proof, hand-waving away the external-risk problem instead of engaging the numbers.
The gun analogy is serviceable once you zoom out from mechanics to externalities. An AR-15 and an 85 mph interstate both offer private utility but impose public risk that scales steeply—ballistic energy for one, kinetic energy for the other. Society uses licensing, background checks, or posted limits to push that expected harm below a tolerable threshold. Arguing that faster roads are safer because “cars clear out quicker” is like saying bump-stocks make rifles safer because the shooter finishes the magazine sooner: it flips the risk calculus on its head.
Think of operating a consumer-grade drone near people on the ground.
Private benefit: You get great aerial photos and save time compared with climbing a ladder or renting a lift.
External risk: If the drone falls from 100 ft it can hit a bystander with far more kinetic energy than if it falls from 20 ft (energy ∝ height, so the risk climbs steeply as you fly higher or faster or fly over people).
Regulatory levers: Aviation authorities cap altitude, require line-of-sight operation, limit flights over crowds, mandate geofencing near airports, and sometimes ask pilots to pass a basic safety test.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/think.pdf
[2] AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, “Uncovering the Spillover Effect from Posted Speed Limit Changes” (2024). https://aaafoundation.org/uncovering-the-spillover-effect-fr...
I have been paying attention to speed changes while driving for the past 15 years and every time I have seen a speed change, I always observe a proportional change in the other variables, within the bounds of my ability to measure. For example, speeds drop when lane counts decrease, and the difference is in proportion to the reduction in lanes and change in vehicle density. The change in things in logically forced, since cars are not magically disappearing/appearing on the road.
Empirical studies have long supported the 85th percentile for vehicle safety. The spillover effect is a new thing that likely will affect the design of the ramps for highways, but does not justify violating the 85th percentile.
If we are going to consider other effects, how about the effect that happens when the roads no longer have the capacity to carry traffic from enforcing lowered speed limits? That will result in bumper to bumper traffic during rush hour, with enormous amounts of particulates and NOx released from having so many vehicles idling. These kill people both on and off the roads. This is a problem in NY where the low speed limits philosophy has been in effect for decades. The electric future cannot come fast enough. Of course, electrification does not solve the additional problem of people dying fairly quickly because ambulances cannot reach hospitals in a timely manner due to bumper to bumper traffic.
It is really easy to take the position that high speeds are the problem, but that ignores the problems associated with lower speeds. That said, I owe you a thank you for the information about the AAA study. I had been unaware of that. Thank you for the information.
I'm not even saying such cars shouldn't be available. I'm just asking why they're the default when so few people will ever actually care to drive over 100 mph.
Most vehicles do have software speed limiters, which are typically set to the safe mechanical limits of the vehicle when manufactured (often, the speed rating of the tires).
The reason software speed limiters are not set to the highway speed limits in the US is because:
1. They might be used in places other than on highways subject to US law
2. Laws change
3. Manufacturers are not required to
If a lot of cars get these it would be scary that someone would hack the speed limit database and set 1 mph on all roads around a large city.
Its hard to find issue with applying it only to the biggest offenders, but if this does break out into all cars in 10 years we'll have yet another example of slippery slope regulations. Passing safely (single lane roads) for one would likely be more dangerous in this reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOwmgEeSoms
Now whenever I hear someone was unable to pass on a highway because of that law, I will imagine this.
By comparison, Texas we have long open stretches and up to eight lanes each way, so obviously it's less of an issue.
I'd actually assume it's due to proximity to DC, which would tend to massively increase the population of "but the data say"-type technocrats.
These days, it’s not really about the Confederacy, just culturally.
There is another, semi-derisive, use in which it means any non-southerner. But that is less common and context-dependent.
"To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_road_...
For surface roads, I'll take our bespoke road layout over a grid any day. Although I do share the sentiment that driving in the Northeast Megalopolis is much more suffocating than the rest of the country. Coming back from a road trip and hitting New York State is like vacation is over, time to get home on the interstate.
I don't object to bespoke layouts out in the country so much as that the "through roads" in the northeast are extremely un-fun to drive on if you have distance to cover. Probably bias from how I grew up, but when I have hundreds of miles to go, I like hopping on a nice, wide FM and opening the throttle.
It's not the roads themselves, it's the sheer number of people.
Also the definition of "through road" is much different. You can't just get on any random numbered route and once you're "out of town" you're good - because there is no "out of town". Traveling longer distances you focus on interstates plus a handful of controlled-access state/US routes. For example, don't get on (a non-interstate-part-of) US route 1 expecting a nice drive. They let the US route get built up with businesses and lights, with the expectation that trough traffic will be using I-95.
Very cool and certainly effective design for people who already go 30+ mph over the speed limit.
i think these speeders should just lose their license to drive forever, so maybe choose to view this law as a compassionate compromise.
You can make these arguments for anything. If we can't even get the most obvious low-hanging fruit because "aww it's slightly inconvenient" then we can't even DREAM of solving complex problems.
This new "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" mentality towards policy is so toxic. That's the only guaranteed way to not solve a problem! It's an anti-solution!
They should go further than license removal. Owning a car that can drive on public roads should be illegal for habitual, feloniously dangerous speeders. Selling or renting a car to someone who is not allowed to own a car any longer should also be punishable.
Chicago tried to put cops in the CTA stations/trains and within weeks a man accused of "walking between CTA cars", techically a forbidden thing but commonplace and relatiely victimless, was shot in the back fleeing.
It's a political issue but really a design issue. Unfair speed limits do color our perception of speed limits in general, because they are often not set correctly for the design speed of the road, but are set correctly for the present danger certain speeds in that context exhibit. It is a warranted, justfied emotional reaction to the speed limit; we feel fine driving the design speed, yet are punished for making the road "unsafe". It's entirely reasonable to doubt it. The design speed should match, and even be slightly lower, than the intended speed limit of the road.
Also in Chicago, recently a 25mph speed limit failed to pass in the city council. I was all for it, but saddened the ordinance did nothing to demand local, county, and state DOTs to redesign roads. I live next to a very wide, four lane road with middle turn lane. The blanket speed limit in Chicago is 30mph. The road I live next too feels downright comical at 30mph. Everyone does 40 because it feels natural to do that. But at 30mph, I might die if I get hit crossing that road. At 40, it is all but guaranteed.
You probably want a car in most places, just like almost everywhere in the US.
The 85% rule is and has always been bullshit.
For speed limits, the conditions are so variable that we compromise and set a number that’s reasonable-ish, most likely calibrated to the least safe conditions the road regularly experiences, and leave it at that. It’s still entirely possible, however, that a particular driver can have a much greater understanding of the risks implicit in going 10 over given their conditions, and thus increase the risk only a slight bit to save a large amount of time. This isn’t intrinsically some horrific moral crime; if you think it is then it sounds like law for the law’s sake type shit.
On country roads and highways, physics work even worse against you. Most People have good feeling for how long stopping distances are and how fast they increase at higher speeds. Increasing you speed from 100km/h to 110 increases your stopping distance by about 25 meters from 130 to 155. That puts it well above the outer limits for your brights - meaning by the time you could see any potential obstacle, you can’t stop any more. At highway speeds, in daylight conditions, high speeds can put an obstacle beyond the arc of a bend. At the same time, time savings are diminishing. Running 110 saves you 5.5 minutes on the hour compared to 100 with diminishing returns the faster you go.
When an illegal hit my car and totalled my car (and then ran off), the police told me to fuck off and would not even write a report.
I don't give a single shit about speeding limit enforcement because the yield seems just so incredibly low compared to the yield of the same effort actually going after people who generate real victims rather than hypothetical ones.
Getting consequences for people who cause accidents sounds great, but we need actual ways of achieving it. In my case, I believe retrofitting my car with a traffic camera would achieve this. I also am not going to ever move my car following an accident in such conditions until police arrive either again.
No, he's not. But that's never stopped anyone from lobbing a strawman. He's saying that limits are set based on a low-ish common denominator and wind up being way below the typical common denominator and then they get ignored a bunch of the time hence why nobody takes ignoring them as a serious violation.
You strawmanned the shit out of the headlight example because it was a foot in the door (he should have known better). The point was that vehicles and equipment vary so safe speeds vary. 90s headlights vs the best you can get today. Work van handling vs sports car handling. Etc. etc.
If the typical traffic speed on some highway is 65 MPH and someone is driving 76 MPH, that... isn't much different. It's not some night and day distinction where you can objectively say that 65 is perfectly safe and 76 is recklessly dangerous. The variation in stopping distance between those speeds is less than it is between one car and another from the same speed.
The normal way you resolve this sort of thing in the law is by setting a legal limit which is objectively reckless, e.g. by setting the speed limit to 125 MPH. Then you aren't actually expected to drive 124 MPH, you're still expected to drive around 65 MPH, but we can reasonably say that if you're caught doing 130 there you're deserving of some penalties.
However, that doesn't generate fine revenue because then hardly anyone actually drives that fast. What generates fine revenue is setting the speed limit there to 55 MPH even while the median traffic speed is still 65 MPH, and then doing only enough enforcement to make sure people don't follow the law. You maximize revenue when everyone is "speeding" all the time and all you have to do is post a patrol car there once in a while and rake in the dough. But that also makes it unjust to impose harsh penalties for it because then receiving a citation is a matter of bad luck rather than doing something outside the bounds of reasonable and expected behavior.
This is the major problem with speed limits in the USA. The speed limits are set to ensure easy revenue collection, not for safety. Nearly every single person on a given road is speeding, so they just send out officers and collect fines, regardless of whether or not the people fined are actually driving dangerously.
I can't think of any teenage boy I've ever known who would have driven anywhere near 65 mph if the speed limit were 125 mph, no matter how much they were told that people were "expected" to drive around 65 mph.
I think 125 is absurd, but the limits should actually reflect what the overwhelming majority of people do.
> Speed limits in the US have a particular problem. The speed limits are set too close to the speed people are expected to drive.
The question is, how much more are we willing to pay to do that? The US already incarcerates its population at a greater rate than most of the rest of the world (5th highest as of 2022).
If incarceration was really that effective, shouldn't we also have some of the lowest crime rates in the world? If that's not the case, then why should we think that doubling down on that strategy is likely to be effective?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...
A: The ticket was valid in the first place
B: The Speeding was reckless
I have a friend who got an entirely fabricated ticket claiming he was doing 80+ going uphill on an on-ramp in an early 90s toyota corolla with four people and four desktops + a couple of CRTs. We weren't going faster than ~35. Ticket said it was radar verified but he was sitting on his hood eating a sandwich.
Other times going the speed limit when traffic is going significantly faster is reckless (I'm looking at you, Atlanta). Cops in places like that love to ticket out of town/state plates.
I have seen a mid-90s Nissan pickup truck literally on two wheels it was weaving through traffic so recklessly on I-85.
LA, New York, Boston, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, Bay Area, Houston, Dallas, etc. They all have their bad drivers, but none of them seem to have this deeply ingrained culture of reckless driving quite like Atlanta.
Worse than Phoenix and D.C.?
Worth noting in this case that this bill does not redefine reckless driving, and is in fact dependent on a reckless driving charge and having been going over 100mph.
There is no need for this condescending attitude. The average citizen has virtually no say on these things and our infrastructure was decided decades before most of us were born. Major cities are investing in transit improvements but the nature of these projects means they will take over a decade to reach fruition. We aren’t doing nothing.
No.
“A significant association was found between all reasons for DWVL and the risk of causing a road crash. This association was particularly high for drivers with a suspended license and drivers who had never obtained a license. In these subgroups of drivers, the proportion of the relationship explained by high-risk driving behaviors is high” [1].
If the license was suspended for financial reasons, sure. If it was suspended for driving infractions, incapacitating them by putting them in jail while deterring others from driving seems socially efficient.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
"Among church attendees, those attending church services in a prison were more likely to be convicted of a crime in the future than the average"
I too can mislead with sampling bias.
Nobody with a double digit number of brain cells is going to be impressed that a group that includes a lot of people who lost their licenses is going to be more crashy than the average. The average has a lot more people in it to water down the statistical effect of those people. But that doesn't mean that a lot of people in your "bad" group are actually bad on an individual level rather than a statistical one.
Pretty much every license suspension is for financial reasons at the end of the day because people who can afford lawyers and fines and whatnot are much more able to avoid the suspensions.
What about a child molester that works in a school? It makes sense to prevent them from being in contact with children. I think preventing people from driving saves the public from similar potentially dangerous harm.
Many states also have special use permits for the case of needing to drive to work.
Also, everyone I personally know who drives with suspended licenses has the ability to get 99% of places they need to go by bus. Like we all did before we were old enough to drive. They just don't want to have to wait for a bus or walk a block or two, so they don't.
PS- I wish I didn't know these waste of space people, I don't get to choose my family. I would choose different people.
Suspending licenses is a punishment that doesn't work and can never work for anyone in most cities who isn't a well-connected suburban teenager who has parents and a network of friends to drive them around. And a lot of courts know this which is why a full suspended license is getting less common and basically is they've become a ban on "non-essential driving."
People shouldn’t speed, and they shouldn’t drive with a suspended license, but it’s hard to ignore the reality that not driving isn’t an actual option for a lot of people.
Should I go to jail?
One critical example is the National City Lines conspiracy. Backed by the totally expected actors General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, and others, this group bought up efficient electric streetcar systems across the country. They were found guilty of criminally conspiring to monopolize the sale of buses and supplies to these captive transit lines. Their actions effectively destroyed electric rail to force dependency on fossil fuel buses and private automobiles; this was manipulation, not free market competition.
Furthermore, post war suburban planning deliberately engineered car dependency. Low density sprawl, mandated parking minimums, and strict separation of housing from jobs and services made car ownership non negotiable. This planning functioned explicitly as a "means test", using the requirement of car ownership to enforce segregation and keep lower income populations out of these new communities. This represents a significant shift, as most Americans relied heavily on non automotive transport until the mid 20th century.
This dependency was cemented by massive government bias towards cars. Trillions were poured into building roads and highways like the Interstate system, representing a huge subsidy for driving. Meanwhile, public transit and passenger rail systems were systematically starved of equivalent investment, left to decline, or dismantled altogether.
Therefore, the "big country" argument fails logically. If sheer size dictated transport, why not advocate for air travel, being far faster than driving cross country? The car's chokehold is strongest for daily commutes and regional travel, precisely the areas where robust public transit could thrive if it had not been actively undermined or neglected in favor of automobile ownership. The car isn't the default because it naturally "beats" other options in a large country, it is the default because the system was deliberately shaped over decades to ensure its dominance at the expense of efficiency, equity, and alternatives.
To what extent should this right be regulated? Should children be allowed to drive? Drunk people? Senile people?
The faq also claims there are no civil liberties implications for this since people use gps for maps anyway. There is no government infrastructure to regularly inspect my gps mapping software's correct operation, unlike the speed limiter. It's unclear what kind of data exchange happens during inspection and what the implications are for other, non-speeding drivers of the car.
Don't get me wrong, I despise speeders. I regularly compete in sanctioned motorsport and I find that the more I do, the less sympathy I have for driving badly in public roadways. I wouldn't bat an eye at a system that mechanically governs a vehicle, without the possibility of data exchange, to the maximum speed limit in the state (or a value decided by a judge). This gps system seems too easy to abuse.
I'd love to hear more about the claimed statistic of 75% of suspended drivers continuing to drive. I'm surprised that addressing this has jumped to requiring modification of vehicles and GPS surveillance. What other ways of improving compliance with suspension have been tried? Why do drivers ignore the suspension?
"You're effectively forced to pay, so we'll make it as high as the system can bear" model. Kind of like the prison calls, etc.
Drivers ignore the suspension because the chances of being pulled over are extremely low.
I’m not a crazy driver, but I am usually moving with a purpose and get pulled over about once every five to seven years. That might be 40 or 50K miles between stops. Someone can get a lot of life things done in 50K miles and finding alternatives for each of those miles may rationally be less appealing than fading the risk of being caught while suspended.
Which brings me to why I think folks are generally against better speed limit enforcement here—most people regularly speed (by 15-20mph) without being unsafe.
The US should first revise its limits and actually get police officers out there enforcing them before resorting to automatic limiters.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
Because of my morning routine, I often end up getting on the highway around the same time as this other driver who merges into highway traffic at 35mph, and several times they've nearly caused a crash. They're as much a menace as the idiots weaving in and out of traffic at 100mph+.
In many cases the state and local police are always speeding here as well, going the same speed as everyone else (regularly 15-20mph over the limit). Fortunately I do often see them pulling over the aforementioned idiots going 100mph+. Though I wish they'd at least give warnings to the people going dangerously slow as well.
Same. A little "ma'am, I'm not asking you to floor it, but at least try and do a little better than a loaded garbage truck" would go a long way.
I bet 90% of initial implementations will be resettable back to unlimited speed with a simple factory reset or similar.
The article points out that 75% of people with suspended licenses continue to drive.
Not a get out of jail free card.
"Americans worried about their country’s sky-high rate of crash deaths haven’t had much to cheer lately. "
This is untrue.
America's motor vehicle fatality rate per billion vehicle miles has gone from 3.35 in 1980 to 1.27 in 2023. It's a dramatic reduction. In 1980 there were 51K fatalities in the US, in 2023 there were 40K. In 1980 there were 226M Americans, in 2020 there were 331M.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Other developed countries are doing even better. But it's disingenuous not to note that the US car fatalities have improved considerably over the past half a century.
For comparison, Australia has done even better : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
But in Australia there are still lots of articles bemoaning car fatalities without acknowledging the dramatic decline in car fatalities by distance traveled and per capita.
Enforcing speeds for repeat speeders may well be a good idea though.
In the UK applications on phones are being used for insurance policies to work out which drivers are more likely to have accidents and change insurance rates.
For the average insured hitting stuff at 100+mph is hidden in the sub basement archives of long tail risk. It happens so rarely insurers don't feel a need to address it specifically.
This seems ridiculous because it makes it too obvious what's going on, ie. allowing proven irresponsible drivers to continue using motor vehicles on the public highway.
Without better mechanisms to actually meaningfully enforce insurance requirements, changes to those requirements are unlikely to be effective.
The elephant in the room in the US is that although driving is a (very dangerous and extremely socially-costly) privilege, any attempts to hold drivers accountable and take away that privilege from repeat offenders is treated as a rights violation, so instead we just accept many deaths of innocent people from repeat DUI and speeders.
The profits stay within the government, fees can be easily adjusted to inflation and is enforced onto everyone thus reducing the headache for drivers and cops.
When you say a lot, by how much really? I suspect it's tiny.
I think if you're the sort of person who would drive with a suspended license you would also drive with expired plates and no insurance.
Maybe in this case it could work like child support: you pay the state, the state pays the insurance on your behalf, and if you don't pay the state then they're the ones coming after you.
At some point you might have to decide between letting the state garnish your wages, or giving up your car.
No idea if it's just a coincidence, but people seem to be driving way slower on average compared to last year.
(I was never particularly a speed demon in the first place though)
The funny thing is I might actually be safer without it, as it's the old static-speed cruise control not adaptive. While I'm less patient to idle along at 75, I am also more attentive. Who knows.
No cops ever to be seen. I have not seen anyone pulled over on a Chicago expressway since before the pandemic.
I've never in my life seen anyone just full send it at a red light that's been red long enough the other side could have green but you see it in videos online so it must happen somewhere.
In my state enforcement went way down until cops were called out for it in the media last year. Lo and behold, crashes and injuries are down now that enforcement is up!
Don't remove the rights of normal folks not breaking the law because a few people have zero sense or respect for the safety of others.
Both sides of the isle could learn a lot from this kind of thinking...
Can't imagine what life in 2050 will look like. By that point, you will have a mandated government inspector living in your home to make sure you comply
Its a bit weird on HN where people generally understand this problem regarding privacy, but in other topics like this one they act like the general populace ”put the speeders in jail!”
I know part of this is related to sociopathic behavior, but the bigger part of it is probably that we really need better public transit and should design walkable cities instead of cities based around cars.
People still have to get to work, to the doctor, pick up their kids from practice, etc.
Designing walkable cities has benefits beyond the obvious, including keeping criminals off the streets.
Casual speeders would benefit from better street engineering. Excessive speeders don't care. They just don't understand the concept of consequences.
A speed governor would have likely saved four lives, and that 18-year old man from a 17 year prison sentence, but sure, let's all wring our hands about why this is a worse alternative to taking away someone's license.
Everyone speeds a little when they think it's safe, but some people speed excessively.
This is about making a remedy available to judges, as an alternative to other, less effective, or more draconic (or both less effective and more draconic), forms of punishment.
And judges deal with outlier cases every single day. They job is to look at and weigh all the special cases and considerations, provided by two sides in a dispute, and prescribe one of the many remedies available to them by law.
There's nothing fundamentally immoral, tyrannical, or unfair about requiring an repeat offender who has demonstrated their inability to follow the rules of the road to have a conditional license if they want to keep driving, and there's nothing immoral or unethical about using mechanical mechanisms to enforce those conditions.
Because the alternative is a full revocation (which is catastrophic to the ability to make a living in this country), or prison (which is catastrophic for a whole lot of other reasons). There's a reason that prescribing ignition interlocks for DUIs results in a dramatically lower recividism rate than license suspensions, and a dramatically lower overall social harm than prison.
Locks keep honest people honest, and they put up enough of a hurdle for most less-than-always-honest people to not consistently act like anti-social dipshits. You can circumvent them with effort, but we still use them. They are part of a defense in depth.
Then there's 'reckless endangerment' tier which is +15 over the limit.
The example of that guy going 100 in a 40 is beyond even that. It's SO far outside of the range of permissible I don't even know that there's a good legal construct for it.
That's the vehicular version of taking an otherwise legal handgun and for relative examples. Not just happening to fire it somewhere you maybe shouldn't have but in a way that was safe. Nor the really stupid but often OK if there aren't people around act of a celebratory shot 'up'. No, that example has gone even further beyond and is like blind-firing at the side of a brick building, headless of how thin those are, of any windows, etc.
My argument is that tracking, inhibitors, etc should be too far for the other cases, and not enough for a case like the individual in question. Someone clearly made a product and wants to make money by offering it as a form of limiting other people's freedoms.
I'm sure the judge is more qualified than you are to make this determination.
But if you disagree, let me pose a simple question:
In a situation when a judge would suspend someone's license.
Why are you opposed to giving them this as an alternative? (If they refuse to comply with this, the judge would happily offer them the suspension instead.)
How is it any of your business to prevent someone from choosing this as a lesser punishment? All the harms you've listed are harms to the defendant, but for most defendants, they pale in comparison to the harm of a suspension.
Ankle bracelet monitors have all the same concerns that you've listed, yet you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would prefer sitting in prison over being ordered by a court to wear one. If the lesser punishment serves the desires of the prosecution and the courts, and the defendant agrees to it, why do either of them need your consent?
Take the suspended license situation. At what point is the impact to society enough to just require assigning the person unlimited use of professional drivers to get around instead because the impact to society would be less? Or doing that after they spend time in jail? (As another question, is jail even effective at reform?)
The sort of person who repeatedly drives not just fast, but in ways that are clearly unwarranted danger, perhaps shows a larger defect. An individual who might have medical conditions that make rational thought and risk evaluation fail.
Sometimes, a person of adult age just isn't a true adult. Some device to limit a car's speed isn't going to prevent that sort of person from running a red light or over a jaywalker.
Look, what those people need to do is never be allowed to drive ever again. This is a technological compromise in their favor.
You're valuing a few thousand dollars of their financial welfare above the welfare of the people around them? Why?
No, this device won't stop them from driving into a pedestrian, just like it won't stop them from robbing a convenience store at gunpoint or committing tax fraud. The point of censuring someone for reckless driving isn't to prevent every single other bad behavior they will ever commit in the future. The point of it is to stop them from doing more of it, to the extent possible, without being overly draconian.
And if you think that this light a consequence is inappropriate for those people, what consequences do you think are appropriate? Can any of them pass the no-slippery slope standard you're setting for it?
How is it that they are neatly fitting into your two buckets of 'These are good people who somehow keep doing this but this device is unfair and repressive to them' and 'If they can't physically speed, they'll literally start running people down instead and this will not reduce recidivism at all'? Partitioning people into those two perfect buckets stretches credulity.
Not to mention that similar devices (breathalizer ignition interlocks) dramatically reduce recidivism, compared to other, both more and less serious punishments. How is it that that technological solution manages to statistically mitigate (but not cure) a health and addiction and judgement issue, while this one can be dismissed out of hand?
The dangers? I think I covered that just fine with the end of my previous post. People who aren't operating as adults require different solutions. You could have the death penalty as a punishment for this and it would not change their behavior.
EDIT:
Replying within this post since this has spun out of control. What solution? If someone can't behave like an adult they aren't an adult, don't let them run around without a guardian and supervision, though the specifics are WELL beyond any random person like me to iron out.
So, again, please tell me - how do you want to censure reckless drivers in a way that does not run afoul of slippery slope problems?
You complain that this is a slippery slope. Okay. What's the non-slippery slope solution?
> You could have the death penalty as a punishment for this and it would not change their behavior.
You don't seem to be endorsing the death penalty for speeding, so I ask again. What is your solution, that meets your standards?
(And a bonus question: Does any criminal censure for anything meet your standards and desire to avoid a slippery slope?)
> Why are you opposed to giving them this as an alternative? (If they refuse to comply with this, the judge would happily offer them the suspension instead.)
Nobody would be opposed to it if that were really the only situation it could be used. The problem is that now that it's available, it's going to get used in tons of situations that wouldn't have been a suspension otherwise.
Good! It's about time we took road safety seriously.
Far too many people drive in a completely inappropriate manner, yet are treated with kid gloves, because nothing short of putting them in prison will fix that behavior, and the courts are, for obvious reasons, reticent to use that remedy.
Ignition interlocks have gone a long way to solving this problem for DUIs.
My understanding is that a good engineered road will not gently suggest you to drive at this or that speed, but will make you so forcibly.
Most of these people are just generally reckless, they're not really intent on Going Fast No Matter What.
Sure, people who actually modify their cars to race around will probably go around this kind of safety measure, but even most people speeding aren't that.
That is not a good take if you include the fact that reckless driving in Virginia is already the lowest bar in the United States. 86 MPH is a criminal act. If you are caught doing 86 MPH you are literally put in handcuffs and go to jail.
The presence of which demonstrates wilful intent, turning another ticket into jail time and a criminal record.
Acceleration != speed. Muscle cars accelerate fast. Disabling a speed governor ordered to be installed by a judge is as black and white as it gets.
You think a radar return cannot be used to calculate the speed of a constant-velocity object?
If a judge ordering you to install a speed governor because you keep getting tickets for excessive speeding is a proximate concern, maybe the problem isn’t the radar detector.
Also, since we live in a card dependent world, you can argue that taking away someones car is destroying their ability to make a living (as much as I think this excuse is horseshit when dealing with dangerous driving)
same, with this law :)
It's why a lot of states will occasionally do license fine forgiveness.
Oh it does. Nobody will lend you a car that be lost to seizure. Denmark has car confiscation for speeding (not even repeated, just for single time 100% over the speed limit), and they will even take rental cars. It has definitely changed how easy it is to loan a car from friends, family, and businesses. Naturally consequences for driving without a license should also be increased.
I don't buy the car dependent argument. People are put in prison for minor victimless crimes. Something much much more life destroying than loosing your car and right to drive. If you need your car to live don't break the law repeatedly.
They'll buy a car or use a friend/family members.
This is an issue in almost rural areas. Something like 75% of people who get their licenses taken continue to drive. They just rack up fines.
All the local police and state police have license plate scanners, and would also alert on DWLS/DWLR. No point in trying to get around it by driving someone else's car. That vehicle also subject to seizure.
All this sounds rather hardcore, but the payoffs were many. Low number of accidents and traffic deaths, low cost of car insurance. Really dangerous activities like reckless driving and DWI could have life changing consequences even from the first offense.
> U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants to stop funding “active” transportation projects such as sidewalks
The powers in the US think they don't need to sort out their embarrassing pedestrian facilities. Amazing. Shocking. I feel sorry for US residents, at least those that didn't vote this dumpster fire in.
"Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned states that they will lose federal funding for roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects if they continue to foster diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, impede President Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts or defy other directives from the administration."
It far time to stop taking what the news says at face value. They've been doing this for decades.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unle...
This is not so iron clad if you do some basic reading or thinking. Research has shown that setting speed limits blow the 85th percentile increases crashes from vehicles having less uniformity of speed. Rather than work against something that is natural, they would be better off getting the people who actually listen to the speed limits to drive faster so that they stop endangering others.
Another way of looking at things is that higher speeds mean cars spend less time on the road. Fewer cars on the road implies that the distances between them are greater. Crashes only occur when distances between cars reach 0. Lower speeds as are being advocated by that article mean that the distances between cars will decrease, making things potentially more accident prone. All of those arguments about what happens in a collision do not matter when the cars never collide. For example, the German autobahn has far higher speeds than US roads and their collision rate is lower, which illustrates the benefits of having more space between cars from having them drive faster to get them off the road sooner.
Finally, it is unfortunate that attempts at safety are trying to make motorists drive slower, which will cause more car accidents, causing people to push even harder for more measures to prevent them, that are likely to be just as backward.
Go out to places where the speed limit is 55mph but it’s a straight stretch with high visibility and everyone will be going 90mph+. Is everyone suddenly dying on this road? No. However, it’s great revenue generation for the local police departments to start ticketing people.
If you’re concerned about the speeds of which people are going - design your roads such that they don’t make sense to go quick. (And I don’t mean ridiculous speed bumps that are wildly ineffective and just increase the amount of noise in your local neighborhood)
I don’t think most people are concerned about 25 vs 30mph in cramped city roads with many pedestrians. I think most Americans get pissed off when you start saying you can’t go 80mph on what is essentially an autobahn like 280 in Silicon Valley. It’s ridiculous the speed limit there is sometimes 55 for no justification whatsoever. It’s a massive open road where you can often have visibility for miles.
I’m saying this as someone living in NYC where I don’t think cars should even exist. But if you have to have cars, Jesus Christ make it efficient to get around and stop using every fucking mean possible to just tax middle class people to death. These things won’t bother anyone with any real money. I should know, I get my tickets every so often. I consider them my little tax and I get no points to my license every time. I have radar and will be installing laser jammers soon (god damn cops on 280 are running laser at midnight now, wtf).
The real problem is people driving outside the limits of what is safe for the road, car, situation, or themselves. This is the reason there is a 25MPH limit in school zones, where some kid darting out in front of you is likely, but the exact same road during non-school hours is often 35 or 40 MPH.
Cars these days are extremely safe at high speeds, and speeding in and of itself isn't necessarily unsafe. It's when the driver does something else unsafe, and couples it with high speeds, that things get deadly.
Like, damn, it was the Biden administration that told the NTSB to go pound sand.[1]
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2024-04/NHTSA-NT...
And heaven forbid, safety inspections to remove some deathtraps?
Just remember to use proper names for the legislation, like "make our streets safe again" and "keep foreigners away from schools", or you'll get an executive order.
Also what the heck is with Newsom vetoing the passive ISA bill?
Makes sense, everything else that CA does essentially causes things to cost more. This would be another thing. Not everyone has your salary. That said, I agree with you, cars going that fast are driven by idiot teenagers (or people that want to be a teen again) and are endangering people.
Which is exactly what California has been doing for decades.
But, to that point, I mostly agree. I’d rather we hired some quality road engineers and urban planners who are willing to build roads and towns that aren’t car-dependent hellscapes.
I doubt that existing areas are going to see that happen. Plus, I'd rather live in a totally car-dependent area because 1. it makes it harder for people I don't want to live near to move in. Lower crime, fewer cars on blocks in front yards, etc. and 2. I like having lots of space. I like having room for a shop/lab combo. I like having space for a full-size piano. I am not willing to surrender all that for the sake of "walkability". Also 3. it's 105F in the summer here. Honestly, I'm not much interested in walkable cities in this part of the country.
People who want to go faster can trailer their race cars to a track.
(I'm not really trying to be on the opposite side of this argument though. If speed limits reflected the speeds most traffic goes, police themselves followed the speed limits, and disrupting traffic by dawdling in the middle lane stoned or with AI missile mode engaged were a law enforcement priority - then maybe I'd believe. But as it stands speed limits mostly serve as an excuse for cops to sit around playing candy crush until they selectively hassle a motorist)
Not sure about the US but in Europe (at least the EU) 150km/h max would be fine, at least it would make life harder for some sociopaths that treat public roads as a racing track.
It would take a lot more effort and political will to roll this out to millions of vehicles already on the road than to enforce it on a budding new vehicle category, though. That's pretty much how new safety codes always work.
The US is a hodgepodge of local laws. AFAIK, there is no federal speed limit for e-bikes. The class 1/2/3 designation is optional. And class 3 often conflicts with local laws.
Given that outright street racing is common amongst blue-collar or inner-city demographics, this is an unrealistic expectation that will just push more people away from legal venues. It's a policy that says "you can't enjoy your hobby" in disguise that shows disregard for others' preferences, plus it's practically difficult.
https://komonews.com/news/local/teen-to-be-sentenced-for-hig...
Would you be willing to say the same for firearms and their availability? It meets much of your criteria, sans perhaps the portability part and location of many enthusiasts.
I believe in high availability of firearms because I'm principally against prior restraint. The state doesn't get to take machineguns away from people who haven't demonstrated abuse of them to the standard of reasonable doubt. The state doesn't get to take hellcats away from people who haven't demonstrated abuse of them to the standard of reasonable doubt. That's my moral position, which I assume you don't share, so I'm trying to point out a more practical reason why this is a bad policy in terms of outcome.
I doubt most people speeding in the streets do track or street racing as a hobby, so I think track availability is pretty much irrelevant.
I think I should have the freedom not to get splattered by dumbasses going 100 in a 50MPH zone. Why don't I get that freedom?
Says who?
This isn't something on which we can compromise or establish bipartisanship, generally, so the conflict will only continue to escalate. There's just no frame in which I can frame a society which mandates seatbelts as good or just. People like you like to use it to deride my values, purposely picking a trivial example to trivialize what I believe. But that's neither constructive nor respectful nor a rebuttal of my views. Those who wish the state to impose safetyism on them should self-segregate into maybe a few states and spare the rest of us having to group together to counteract their votes.
Ideally, the virtue of a federalist system should be that it offers choice in under what regime one elects to live. Strip every vestige of this from the federal government and ensure safetyists can promulgate their desires only at very local levels, so they can go live as they choose, where they choose, without polluting the rest of America.
Nobody races steeet legal cars. Except maybe a few drag racers, and half those cars probably have illegal tires or emissions removals, but they drove on the street anyway.
Source: Many years in the car hobby.
Most people don't but that's an overly broad generalization.
I raced Spec Miata in its early days (2000-2010) and it was possible (and I did) to keep a moderately competitive Spec Miata still street legal. I didn't have space for a trailer so had to drive it to the track.
Race cars are usually heavily modified and aren't street legal, and the drivers don't want them dinged up on the way to the track, and if they fail while racing they need a way to get it back home.
If you're racing a street-legal car on a track... it's unlikely to be very good at racing, compared to all the other cars there that are stripped to bare minimum.
Perhaps you're thinking of a demographic who can't even afford a second car but like the idea of racing anyway, so they break all laws and race the one car do they have, on public streets without permission, which is strongly disregarding others' preferences for remaining alive, uncrippled, and their vehicles and street furniture remaining unscathed.
I kind of hoped more EU would become like that, not the other way round.
in america everyone from 15/16 through their death needs a car for basic functioning life, in germany though - not as much. german driver only seem superior…
For starters, driver education is taken a lot more seriously - it's not a one-semester elective in high school or something your parents pay $500 for you to do over a few weeks in the summer before you turn 16, and you cannot take a road test without it, no matter how old you are. People save up for driver's ed in Germany; depending on how many lessons it takes for you to learn the actual driving part, it costs anywhere from 2000 EUR to 5000 EUR. Your license will have a note if you took your test on an automatic, restricting you from driving a manual shift, so everyone makes sure to learn how to drive a manual shift for the test.
They also more readily accept strict suspensions for a level of traffic tickets that most Americans would find excessively harsh - get a few 15-20 km/h (10-15 mph) over within a two or three year period, and your license will be fully suspended for a month, no "work and school" exception.
DUI is also taken far more seriously - if your license is suspended for that, there aren't any "work and school" exceptions either, and if you were drunk enough, or it was a repeat offence, you might have to pass the "medical-psychological exam" (MPU) to ever get it back, involving six months without touching alcohol and a bunch of other things that I've heard are a huge pain.
Part of what sustains widespread acceptance to high barriers to a license is that while Germans love to complain about how bad Deutsche Bahn (rail service) delays have gotten (even I'm starting to get irritated), it's still far more feasible to live a middle-class adult life without driving in a mid-sized city than it would be to in a comparable US metro area.
You'd also have to import German road design, construction and maintenance, and I'm pretty sure my people are unwilling to pay for that. The first time I visited home after a few months in Germany, I was initially afraid I'd get caught driving like I do here.
Nope, not even a temptation, because after a few months of driving here, the roads in Texas had too many random cracks and other inconsistencies for me to feel comfortable driving any faster than the other people on the road, and I even found myself driving a bit more slowly than a lot of the others!
I feel far safer driving here than I do in Texas or anywhere else in the US, no matter how fast the occasional vehicle blasts past in the left lane. The price of fuel and the level of strict attention that going any faster requires keeps most people cruising at a max of 130 kmh/80 mph.
Do you really think that a government, in the height of an emergency, that can restrict where and when you can drive with just a simple OTA update, would resist that temptation?
And to the other commenter who was saying that Franklin didn't envision modern dangers like the automobile: life was far, far more dangerous in his time than ours. The 1/3 of annual traffic deaths caused by speeding - twelve thousand in a country of 340M - works out to the equivalent of thirty five deaths across the entire thirteen colonies in Franklin's middle age, not even a drop in the bucket of the many lives paid for other liberties at that time.
Those who supported these mass surveilience and control systems under, for example, Obama and Biden, may find themselves quiet when wondering whether they support them again under Trump. Yet, this is precisely, to the T, what our Founding Fathers had considered: that no government can be trusted to do things like this, or what the NSA does, or anything like it. Even if you approve of the regime today, your approval may quickly change, but the power you granted that previous regime does not.
I always question those numbers: which collisions/deaths would have still happened without speed being a factor? And was the speed even above the limit or e.g. "too fast for icy conditions" and limiters wouldn't have done anything.
Typically speed-related collisions require some other mistake/issue to occur, speed just exacerbates the consequences
Cops won’t do their bare minimum job we pay them to do, so it’s time for technology to close the gap.
There was a quote about this, but failed to find it now. Hmprhrf.
Seems like a much easier solution, no?
Like, you floor the accelerator and as soon as you reach 100mph you get a text message with a fine and a link to pay.
Speed is just one of many factors, and perhaps the least significant, in the frequency and probability of traffic accidents. Speed is absolutely a factor in the severity of an accident, but not the probability of one after accounting for all other variables. For example, if you leave sufficient distance between your vehicle and the vehicle in front of you then speed is almost completely eliminated as a factor of accidents on most freeways.
I really think municipalities go to war on speed just as a means to retrieve extra tax revenue.
I can come up with many more examples to illustrate the stupidity of focusing on severity and speed versus frequency and probability.
That's because you are afflicted with Car Brain and are only thinking about speeding affecting other cars and not speeding affecting acidents involving cars and pedestrians or cyclists. Municipalities going to "war on speed" are protecting human lives of people outside of the car.
Freeways, where drivers are overwhelmingly more likely to be cited for speed violations, are not high pedestrian areas.
That is already accounted for in existing traffic laws, such as failure to yield or failure to signal.
No.
Waymo put the myth to bed [1]. Even if you might piss off a speeder, driving the limit in speeding flow remains safer as the handling advantage (frequency) and exponentially-lower energy in the event of a collision (magnitude) dwarf other effects.
https://www.allstate.com/resources/car-insurance/dangers-of-...
Anecdotally, I see people dangerously tailgate slow drivers too; it makes sense that everyone warns against slow driving.
I live in the USA and can tell you with 100% certainty that if I drove 15mph on a highway drivers that pass me will call 911 and I will be pulled over. driving 30-40mph over the limit is unlikely to trigger the same concern from other drivers unless I am “street racing” other cars or driving erradicaly
On a highway, driving slow in the left lane is not good, but doing 65 in a 70 in the right lane is perfectly fine.
Of course, the problem then becomes that people will often use that gap to cut in front of you, thus negating much of the benefit. Tragedy of the commons.
You never get tailgated when you go too slow? People do it all the time and it's dangerous as heck.
If you're in the right lane and being tailgated, it's the fault of the tailgater.
There's a reason why some states have traffic signs that state "left lane for passing only".
And people tailgate in every lane when they feel you're going slow. Just with more frequency on the left lane.
And it's not like you can always choose. Highway lanes split in two all the time.
I am hoping we get personal in-car police cameras. I see dangerous driving regularly, and yet there is no easy way to report drivers. Today a truck cut back in from a turning lane and cut off the car in front of me causing an emergency braking situation for everyone driving behind. Perhaps there could also be AI auto-detect of thoughtless driving that auto-sends a simple video to the driver showing their behavior? Trucks and buses really need cameras because people drive like lunatics around heavy vehicles (cutting off, insane overtaking, yadda yadda).
Speeding itself is definitely dangerous in many places, but often it seems too be enforced in places where it is against the rules but not actually dangerous (enforced to get money and infraction-count incentives). My guess is that we enforce speeding in part for correlation (those who ignore speed limits often ignore more sensible safety rules?)
Clearly speeding is correlated with dangerous drivers, but that doesn't mean that speeding is always dangerous per se.
Dangerous drivers are not caught often enough, and catching dangerous driving would be the best signal for detecting likely harmful behavior towards others.
What about those that drive less safe cars for themselves/other drivers/pedestrians?
What are you actually imagining this would look like?
Perhaps cameras are somewhat networked to capture multiple cameras when an incident is flagged?
Dangerous incidents should lead to consequences (financial, licensing, insurance etcetera).
My assumption is that that a majority of serious accidents are caused by a few reckless drivers. Remove those reckless drivers from the roads and we can reduce harm.
The difficulty is to design a system that is fair and that isn't abused by authorities (Extremely difficult to avoid - and perception of abuse cannot be avoided). My assumption could easily be wrong: perhaps most accidents are good drivers on a bad day?
I wish tailgaters could be automatically ticketed (easily detected by camera in car going opposite direction on two way roads).
With cameras, we could also start to scientifically detect the right signals to detect people before they cause accidents. Lane wandering? Emergency brakers? People who cut off cyclists?
I know old drivers that would never speed, but who are dangerously poor driving due to other causes.
In New Zealand we have many fatalities every year from tourists who are used to driving on the right, who collide head-on with other innocent drivers because the tourist drives on the wrong side of the road on rural roads. This is detectable and fixable.
I absolutely loath the idea of state surveillance, and there's a slippery slope that starts with "won't you think of the children", but sometimes thinking of the children is the right thing to do. Avoiding misuse and abuse by authorities is hard, but society has the responsibility to design systems to avoid that.
Here is an article on reckless drivers: https://transalt.org/reports-list/yn29thckywv9n0qpsv4jb1ab07...
I think the article indicates
(1) speeding is correlated with dangerous driving (e.g. running red lights), and
(2) that adding speed limiters won't fix the problem. If hundreds of tickets didn't fix them, limiting speed won't either.
(3) that people love to fix correlations but that we need to fix causations.