London's GPS-based speed-limit trial puts Big Brother's foot on the gas pedal | Hacker News Reader

London's GPS-based speed-limit trial puts Big Brother's foot on the gas pedal

autoweek.com

9 pointsCWuestefeld22 comments

"Drivers in the trial get a switch to choose how the speed limiter operates. Advisory mode gives a dashboard warning when the speed limit changes. Voluntary mode overrides the throttle so it slows the car and prevents the driver from speeding.

One potential problem is that GPS signals fade in the shadow of tall buildings in big cities. Lines admits that this does happen, but the system is programmed to assume that the limit is unchanged until the signal reconnects."

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Man I'd hate to be in a situation where I could get out of a situation by stepping on it and being held back by some helpful little box. It hasn't happened often in my driving career that stepping on the gas was a better option than braking but the few times that it did happen I was very happy to have that option.

I'm not in favor of these devices, but if I was, I'd counter that argument by suggesting they be tuned to 5mph over the posted speed limit, and allow a burst of ungoverned speed up to one minute if the accelerator is fully depressed.

tough to be you when you're trying to get to hospital with a wounded person and the governor kicks in.

There is no substitute for human judgment. If you can't play by the rules you should lose your license, everybody else should be in full control of their cars and be held fully responsible in case they abuse their power.

The only way I'd have peace with this is if it came with an 'override' button and all I'd have to do is give a valid explanation for the use of it (or pay a hefty fine).

Suppose someone does the necessary studies, and it turns out that having a system like this would save 100 lives per unit time by reducing accidents, at a cost of losing 1 life per unit time because someone was unable to get to the hospital so quickly. Yeah, "tough to be you", and it would be really horrible for the victims and the people trying to get them to medical care in a hurry; but it could still be well worth it.

The override button isn't a bad idea, though.

The road to hell is paved with utilitarianism.

That is to say, just because you can show that a policy produces gains on some statistical matrix does not mean that it is morally correct to coerce people into your scheme, particularly people that aren't doing anything wrong.

Consider if I could show that eliminating redheads from society lowered traffic fatalities, saving 10k lives per year [1]. Would you argue it proper to kill off all the redheads [2]? Or even to use the minimum force 'necessary,' and require all redheads to keep their hair dyed brown? I hope not.

Just be cognizant of whether the outlines of your argument can lead to nonsense.

[1] Perhaps lots of men were rubbernecking behind the wheel to get a good look at those redheads, but the researchers couldn't definitively determine the causal pathway.

[2] Only if the net present value of the expected future gain in lives was greater than the number of redheads that needed to die, of course.

You're being silly: under your scenario the 'minimal force necessary' would be about what's necessary to prevent drivers from being distracted by random glimpses of penis:

- general knowledge that "hey, there's a law against indecent exposure; waving penis at passing drivers is indecent exposure"

- general knowledge that penis-flashers who get caught will suffer unpleasant consequences

...it's certainly not "cut off all the penii preemptively", and not even "surgically install unremovable loincloths"; in other words if red hair was really that unbelievably distracting the worst-case scenario minimal force for redheads would be that they cover up while in certain parts of the public.

So aside from the strawman choice of examples, you're also depending on utilitarianism to argue against it, which is pretty lame:

- don't be a utilitarian! it leads to bad outcomes!

I'm certainly aiming for a bit of comedic value, but my serious point is that if you have no real principles except the malleable 'highest social utility,' then a crafty politician or bureaucrat can basically justify anything.

I'd stick with the serious point; it's not unique to politics and bureaucracies, though: just about anything can be justified by appealing to increasing shareholder value:

- paying generously above market rates? argue it is a morale-booster that leads to happier employees -> higher productivity -> higher profits -> higher shareholder value

- paying perilously below-market rates? argue the obvious cost-cutting line -> fatter margins -> higher profits -> higher shareholder value

...and the same with any other appeal to some vague metric of utility.

My serious point is that if you are arguing against "utilitarianism" (at that hoary level of abstraction) by saying:

- here's an example where 'utilitarianism' yields bad outcomes

...you're self-defeating, b/c your sole argument contra 'utilitarianism' hinges on a utilitarian-inspired argument (that the fact that one course of action yields better actions than another => taking the better course).

All you've accomplished is shown that you, too, seem to be a utilitarian, and all you're doing is pointing out a need to be careful in how you choose your utility metric. This doesn't make a convincing case against utilitarianism-the-abstraction and opens your specific 'corner case' to examination, which likely will not fare well if you pick a silly 'corner case' to try.

I don't want to continue this thread indefinitely, but you misunderstand the example. The redhead analogy is not demonstrating a result of lower social utility. It is demonstrating a clearly unjust and immoral result to the individuals involved.

Here's a serious example:

As it so happens, statistical research demonstrates that increased gun ownership generally reduces incidences of home invasion and violent crime. But if you believe fundamentally in the right of peaceful individuals to defend themselves, their families, and to own firearms, then this is just a happy coincidence. The right of peaceful people to generally do as they please is more important than the impact on some vague notion of social utility.

Your redheads example is either terrible or disingenuous or you're just innumerate; you're comparing 10k traffic accidents / annum with redheads, of whom there's several millions.

If you're going to try and have an honest debate you ought to pick an example that's not so laughable on its face; it's too hard for me to "forget" the actual sizes of the groups in question even when I try to assume they're comparable.

I pretty much give up on you; the sequence here is:

- some dude points out "if you could show that forcibly staying within the speedlimit => many more lives saved due to fewer accidents than are lost due to inability to speed to the hospital, it might be justified to hard-code the speed limit"

- rather than debate on the actual merits of the specific point in question, you pop over to trying to argue that on general principles the road to hell is paved with utilitarianism

- to make your case you invent a contrived example that's so far off as to be close to intellectual dishonesty

- you give up on your example and revert to just saying what it was supposed to accomplish -- showing that acting on utilitarian-calculus 'lives vs. lives' has revolting implications for the individuals on the wrong side of a decision -- while missing the point: utilitarianism is a tool for choosing between shitty alternatives, and that going the other way (picking the other alternative) has revolting implications for the individuals on the wrong side, too...which is why this is hard

Generally the best you can do is pray you're never finding yourself in a position where any of your decisions will inevitably have shitty consequences for other people; part of the general cussedness of life is that you can really only escape such positions -- or at least your awareness of being within one -- by shirking responsibility, adopting willful blindness, limiting the scope of your options, or becoming a jerk.

It's illegal for you to drive like an ambulance to the hospital in your own unmarked car.

It isn't where I live.

And better your own unmarked car than none at all.

In fact my insurance policy explicitly states they'll reimburse me for damage to upholstery when transporting accident victims.

That's really interesting, and I'm surprised.

My new position, if I was going to argue for adoption of GPS-based speed governors, would be that there could be an override switch that required a service appointment to reset, a small EZ-Pass-style transponder, and a hefty fine for getting caught disabling your governor.

Now the .001% of drivers that need to make emergency runs to the hospital can do so with no interference, and minimal after-the-fact overhead to comply with the enforcement system. I'd probably still keep the 5mph buffer and the minute-long burst, since you can't hit a switch in a driving emergency.

In most jurisdictions, necessity is a justification for violating most laws. Necessity is defined as something along the lines of having a reasonable belief that the results of not violating the law would be worse than the harm done by violating the law. The actual outcome is not usually relevant; it's about what a reasonable person would expect.

When the other option is death, I'll take the speeding ticket.

Voluntary mode overrides the throttle so it slows the car and prevents the driver from speeding.

Kudos for the Orwellian naming convention :)

I think the point is that in this trial drivers get to choose whether the device is actually limiting their speed or not; what's voluntary is their choice to be limited by it.

Yeah, I get it, but I still think it's ironic. I mean, if this becomes required someday, it could still be called "voluntary" because you don't have to drive.

Like many road-safety campaigners, Lines is very persuasive with his argument. "There are 200 people killed and 2,500 seriously injured on London's roads each year, and it costs £1.2 billion [about $1.9 billion]," he said.

This argument is not persuasive at all. Lines offers no evidence that regulating speed by GPS would produce a net decrease in traffic fatalities, injuries or economic damage. It is reasonable to assume that if all vehicles were required to equip such a device, some of each of the following (in unknown proportions) would occur:

* Some crashes caused in whole or in part by excess speed would not occur.

* Some crashes that could have been avoided by accelerating suddenly and briefly exceeding the speed limit would occur.

* Some people would be exposed to dangerous situations, such as criminal assault that they may have been able to flee in an unrestricted car. It is probably safe to assume that some criminals will figure out how to bypass the devices on their own cars.

* Some people requiring urgent medical care will suffer increased harm or death because they could not reach a hospital as quickly.

And I'm probably forgetting a few things. Without some analysis of the likely changes in these outcomes, it's impossible to say whether the harms cited by Lines support the introduction of such devices.

The sad thing is, even if it led to a net increase in death and injury due to the causes you described, the traffic regulators would likely still see it as a gain, because it would reduce the number of "traffic deaths". (Even if it lead to a larger increase in "crime deaths" and/or "medical trauma deaths".)

It's another case of being careful what metrics you use, and what you optimize for.

I really hope this doesn't go anywhere. I hate this idea. If you have the option to speed but don't, you are still free. If you don't even have the option you aren't.

I wonder what happens when the GPS miscalculates which road I'm on and cuts my speed limiter to 25 MPH on the freeway.

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