while this is not a bad idea, why not prevent them from driving at all and massive punishments
You probably want a car in most places, just like almost everywhere in the US.
“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 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.