I guess it would work as a breath alcohol ignition interlock device when reselling.
I.e. you just remove it.
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?"