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:
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Wait -- I have to pay for a breathalizer in my new vehicle because other people can't follow the law? That's BS. I don't drink alcohol and I hate everything about this.
The blurb at the top says "Republicans in Virginia", but the article body only mentions it was signed by a Republican governor. I think those blurbs are often added by someone other than the author, and that someone probably over extrapolated from the governor of Virginia being a Republican.
This would be a "man bites dog is news" thing; The pretense is that of course Democrats were in favor, but this time even a few Republicans relented and joined the vote.
lol I had shared the original article to a group with the comment "rare republican policy win" and then had to immediately retract that after reading your comment
Thank God. People on the roads are extremely reckless and we don't do anything about it. Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up. If you kill someone sober though, it's totally fine under our current system.
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.
Thats really only true for people with money. The problem isn't that current laws are insufficient, it is that the US justice system is largely based on profit motives, and people with money can make prosecutions against them unprofitable to push. You can bet your butt that if you went in to those same cases without the money to draw everything out for years that they would hammer you with fines and fees and programs and jail time.
> In my opinion, if you get caught driving recklessly, the punishment should be that you're banned from operating 4 wheel vehicles,
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.
>Driving scooters to work is impossible in many places due to distance or weather.
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.
Tickets can be disputed and many people make a livelihood without a vehicle.
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.
As a parent, these comments are always so weird to read. Kids play outside, including unsupervised still. Kids getting hit by drivers is statistically very rare (though no less tragic)
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.
I think it is implied that they are not allowed to by their parents and thus not killed?
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.
Once upon a time crossing the street meant walking across a 20 foot road with the occasional small car going 20-25 mph. Now it's a 4-8 lane stroad full of 6,000 pound trucks that can't see anyone shorter than 5 feet past the hood going 50 mph.
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.
Every single residential street in America is full of cars parked or moving at 25+ mph. It's a miserable experience for anyone outside of a car and dangerous for smaller children who don't pay attention and can run into traffic.
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?
If you want your kids to grow old and you live somewhere where cars are priority you don't have much choice but your backyard, a park or wilderness. And a backyard might not be super fun/big and parks and wilderness aren't accessible without an adult.
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.
As I said elsewhere, my neighborhood had a whole copse of kiddos, including my own, playing out and about throughout the streets this weekend.
/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.
>Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up.
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.
> 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.
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.
This sounds like high anxiety nonsense to mommy the rest of us.
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.
We speak of the Wild West as “lawless”. I assure you there were very much laws against murder and theft then. They just had sporadic enforcement. Much as roads and highways are in many parts of the country. In California I see racing, 100mph driving, weaving like mad. In the ride home from the airport I watched teenagers race and crash. Drunk driving all over wine country. Never once saw anyone like this pulled over.
The wild west is as equally misunderstood. There were far far fewer guns carried by people then compared to now and laws were well enforced even in sporadically populated areas. The exceptions were boom towns, like gold rushes, where the populations grew faster than norms could be established.
I guess if you don't see it then it must never happen to anybody ever. That isn't valid data.
I think allowing 2 wheel is not a good idea in those cases. In fact you should be even better to be allowed for 2 by I digress. You can still kill pedestrians and passers by.
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.
Repeat offenders should not be allowed to drive. In the UK we have 12 points, and lose them for various offences.
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!
> Get caught speeding more than once an year and you are guaranteed to lose your license.
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.
Around me so many areas were built to even be hostile towards anything other than a car. The business park I work in has no pedestrian/bike access without going through a few "take your life in your hands" intersections.
The problem with this model is that in a lot of places (especially in the US) public transit isn't a viable alternative to owning a car. So if your ability to drive gets taken away a lot of people just end up driving illegally. It's either that or lose your job, income and possibly home etc etc.
IMO a forced maximum vehicle speed is a useful middle ground option.
More people (and not just the poorer) needing to use the public transport will definitely have a positive impact on how much money it gets. And if it is being more strict with people who break driving laws, I don't see why that shouldn't happen.
You'd think, but that is largely not the way that political winds are blowing. There are very high rates of people who are driving vehicles illegally in states that consistently vote against public transit projects.
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.
>there is a perception among many of lower socioeconomic status
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.
Those things keeps the middle class from using it (outside of a couple of cities) or from voting for more public transit -- but it isn't the reason that poor people are driving without license/insurance -- which was what I was commenting on. Many of the poor in this country live in places that aren't well served by public transit, and probably won't be well served by any marginal investment in public transit. Most places in the US are generations behind in the investment that would need to be made both in terms of transit infrastructure and the housing infrastructure that would be necessary for viable public transit for the poor. Suburban sprawl is a huge challenge.
It's the killer of public transit everywhere. The ability to avoid such people is a huge benefit of individual transportation. Nobody sane wants to be subjected to stuff like that. Anyone saying otherwise is virtue signalling.
I’d argue not everywhere, it just requires a critical mass of “normal” (anti-anti-social?) people to use it.
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.
It's illegal to drive without insurance in Texas as well.
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.
>Approximately 17% of drivers on California roads are uninsured, according to statistics from 2022 presented by the Insurance Information Institute. This means nearly 6 million drivers in California may be unable to compensate those injured in accidents.
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.
What are the consequences? For most drivers most of the time, they save a few hundred bucks a month. If caught, they'll issue a ticket with a fine that's about a month or two of insurance. Maybe their car will get impounded (unlikely). Maybe they'll face jail time with enough repeat offenses, but once again its unlikely they'll get pulled over in the first place. We'll just continue crushing the poor.
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?
It's all but illegal in the US too but the feedback loop of increased cost, increased regulation, increased mandates for insurance has driven up the cost enough that the baseline cost of compliance is so high that unless you're solidly in the middle class driving expired/unregistered beaters with no insurance and abandoning them to impound every now and then and/or pleading financial hardship with the courts is preferable.
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.
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…
In NY, the limit is 11 points and being caught at 40mph above the speed limit will give you 11 points in 1 offense. The term super speeder tends to be used for these.
I really think there has to be more context to "speeding". I'm all against speeding, but being X over on a road (only motor vehicles) VS speeding in an are which is accessible by walking or biking should be treated differently imho
I'm always amazed that people are allowed to drive again. I had a friend who was killed by an impaired driver. The driver got a 3 year sentence, no jail time.
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.
Totally agree. Vehicles are incredibly dangerous, and operating hundreds of them in concert with each other requires responsible participants. Allowing them to be used like toys for simpletons to play out some racing fantasy with is a serious danger to people just going about their lives.
At a certain point, aggressive driving and speeding should be treated like negligently swinging about a weapon. It should be treated seriously.
This is a rare case I support civil asset forfeiture: sue the car (in addition to criminal proceedings). Impound the car until fines are paid - which go into uninsured motorist funds - or else sell the car at auction and do the same. Will other parties' vehicles get impounded? Yes and that sucks. But either don't lend them your car, or else let the people closest to the offender pay the consequences more often than the current situation where random people in traffic pay financially or with life and limb for reckless drivers.
Yes, they already have this type of point system in VA. What is the point of allowing this device when they will suspend or revoke your license after a few infractions. Additionally, you'd need to have generational wealth to afford the insurance at that point. On top of that, they have an extensive bus system in the northern VA area and biking routes so it would be pretty hard for someone to say they have some hardhip where you need to keep driving.
I think this will just be another thing leading us to full surveillance state.
I will say this as a car guy, Virgina has an exceedingly bad reputation among gear heads. If you look at virtually any east coast rally, they will all route around Virginia to avoid driving through it.
- 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.
I looked it up, in Virginia the highest interstate speed limits are 70MPH. They're 65 in New York, (and in other states), so it's patently untrue that they have the lowest interstate speed limits. Source: https://www.iihs.org/topics/speed/speed-limit-laws
It likely depends on the part of the state. There are famous parts of Virginia where the interstate is limited to 50mph and the police are some of the most productive in the country at giving tickets. These parts are connected to the parts that are 70mph, which causes people who did not notice the speed limit change to be ticketed. If they are so much as 1mph over 70mph when the speed limit changes to 50mph, it is a misdemeanor charge for reckless driving.
Sounds good to me. People shouldn't be driving 30 over. Reckless driving should be taken seriously. These don't sound anti-car. They're pro-life and safety.
The public doesn't take "reckless driving" seriously because it is not defined in a serious manner.
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.
Many places in the United States use speed traps as revenue streams, and in many of the same places in the US it's nigh impossible to get around without a vehicle.
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.
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.
> 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.
What percentage of people who would be effected by this do you think match this description?
I would imagine most. In my experience, laws intended to catch specific bad actors usually end up being enforced mostly against the easiest-to-catch mild offenders.
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.
The example above is bad but not by much. In the parts of NY outside the city, we have 65mph roads (state max speed limit) between large areas and 55mph roads between smaller areas. Doing 10 over in both is common with speeds being 65 and 75 respectively. Doing 15 over in a 55 is safe in many areas that I have driven and is 70mph, which is a safe speed to most states.
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.
There are cars that can go way over 100 mph, and they almost all speed controlled by software. High performance cars are often speed limited by software to about 150 mph. How is this legal? Cars with speed limits that high belong to the track, not public roads, with a possible exception for emergency vehicles.
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.
> with a possible exception for emergency vehicles
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.
> 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.
> There are cars that can go way over 100 mph, and they almost all speed controlled by software. High performance cars are often speed limited by software to about 150 mph. How is this legal?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Most people go below 130km/h on an autobahn. German drivers are pretty good and aware.
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.
It is challenging and expensive to get a driver's license in Germany, and the repercussions for screwing up are high. Also driving isn't as necessary--the excellent public transit means there are alternate means of traveling, so not having one is less of a detriment. So while the Autobahn might be considered the Platonic ideal of high-speed driving, it isn't always feasible or likely and I don't think it should be considered as such. As much as I wish we could have that in the US!
Phone usage while driving is a big one. Flat out looking down at your lap and texting, instead of looking at the road. I have seen people do this everywhere, in the city, in the highway.
> What reason is there ever for a car to go 110?
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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 utterly ignores any context of German drivers and roads vs those in the US, context that makes comparing the Autobahn (which doesn't have that many unrestricted zones, and even fewer times of day where you can actually stretch your legs due to traffic).
This reads like "I speed all the time and how dare you say it's a bad thing" cope.
You don't seem to have ever driven on a long, empty, well lit 4 lane carriage way at 4am in he morning. If I am going 70MPH (UK Motorway speed limit) or 120MPH in such a situation makes no difference in terms safety.
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.
Except the average person isn't a highways engineer and isn't aware of the road design limits which means 120mph can be unsafe even on a visually empty road.
Even the German autobahns are only unrestricted in specific stretches where someone will have done the legwork to demonstrate safety at those speeds.
> Except the average person isn't a highways engineer and isn't aware of the road design limits which means 120mph can be unsafe even on a visually empty road.
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.
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.
The argument is mutually exclusive though. People going 80 in a 60 will be considered the same as those going 40 in a 20 and the punishments won't diverge between the two when they should. The latter is significantly more dangerous - especially to others.
The primary reason is political: people don't like the idea of the government living inside our cars 24x7, telling us how fast we're allowed to go. Even though most of us don't speed. Other examples of this phenomenon include:
* 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 that, but in this case it is not particularly authoritarian.
- 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 think you're logically correct. It's the feeling such a policy elicits which makes it untenable. I agree with your points conceptually, but the moment I would have to install a government speed limiter on my car is the moment I vote for someone else. It feels invasive, and I don't like feeling like the paternal hand of the government is all the way up my ass, controlling my gas pedal.
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.
I think you're probably right that most drivers are speeding but I will note that a sampling of drivers that pass you necessarily will not include any that are going your speed or slower. It doesn't take many drivers on the road to feel like you are constantly getting overtaken.
That's one thing I found weird driving in the US. Everyone consistently drove about 5 mph above the speed limit, which I ended up doing too as driving at the speed limit felt like being a nuisance, and was probably less safe too. I remember joking that American are so much into tipping that they even tip speed limits.
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".
I think the 5-10 mph above the limit that most people drive originates from the fact that police in most U.S. jurisdictions will almost never ticket someone going less than 10mph over the limit (except perhaps in school zones or construction zones). Due to that, the unofficial limit over time naturally drifts up to just under where you're likely to be ticketed.
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.
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.
One of those is not like the others.
Speeding drivers kill innocent bystanders. Obesity, cigarettes or what not will just kill you.
Speeding in a car is like swinging a machete in a crowd.
People don't like the government telling you you can't leave the room you're in but if you break the law you go to jail. This is no different. As usual, anti-government people tend to miss the point completely and jump to extreme non-related situations. Having people who repeatedly break the speed limit have their cars adjusted so they can't do that but can still travel freely and drive anywhere they want is the topic here and you're talking about limits on free speech and government surveillance of our emails. This is not an authoritarian policy. If you break the law, you face consequences.
Extreme non-related situations? Not true at all. Cars are just computers on wheels. They can even be hacked. Remotely. They've got embedded cellular network connectivity. They've got microphones. They've got cameras. They've got goddamn privacy policies these days.
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.
How will my road legal car know when it’s on a track or a closed road? Some how putting a way to disable it defeats the purpose. If its GPS controlled, people will be spoofing GPS to remove the limit, just need a raspberry pie and some other components. You’ll have unintended consequences.
You could have steeper penalties for people who use those types of systems and then go on to get into accidents and kill people. I don't think first degree murder is beyond reason for someone who installs a defeater device and drives at 100 mph and kills someone.
They demonstrated the japanese system on topgear once, and it was disgustingly accurate. They drove onto a track and bing it opened up. No lag or anything.
This is a common turn of phrase in many languages in informal speech, using negative adjectives for emphasis, instead of positive ones. It carries a light humourus tone, as it kind of implies that the thing "had no right" to be as good as it was, so the speaker is "chastising" it for being so good.
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.
I personally would be perfectly fine with a default software limiter that can be disabled when you get to the track (or a German autobahn). If you get in an accident on a public road with the car in track mode… they get to throw the book at you
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
California tried to do this, the bill got watered down in committee [1]. It's probably true that purely GPS-based speed-limiting is not good enough. Imagine being on a 75mph highway with a 25mph service road right next to it and the GPS not knowing the difference.
Still, interesting idea that could have legs when the technology got better.
The reason I mentioned the rich and powerful is not in a sense that you have to get rich to drive fast. In fact, with a good motorbike, you can leave supercars in the dust for the price of the cheapest cars.
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.
The tricky part is definitely enforcement - as you said, if people can mod around it, it risks becoming another "only the responsible people obey" situation
Speed limiters built into cars. Anti-infringement technology built into general-purpose computers. And yet, guns and ammo freely available and unrestricted outside of automatic weapons and the like? Yeah. Can’t wait to move off-grid someday. (Yes, obviously American)
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.
The problem is people who as matter of course travel above the speed limit regardless of if any other motorists are around them, as they are “playing by different rules”, making them more unpredictable and stressful for those around them.
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.
Nope, because people are overestimating themselves. I know a couple of people who can do 2x the speed limit relatively safely, but this is because they were race drivers in a previous life. However, not everyone (incl. me) has that reflexes and situational awareness all the time.
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.
> Nope, because people are overestimating themselves. I know a couple of people who can do 2x the speed limit relatively safely, but this is because they were race drivers in a previous life. However, not everyone (incl. me) has that reflexes and situational awareness all the time.
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.
Exactly. This is why I used the word "relatively" there. Moreover, a prominent race driver, happened to be a friend of my dad, died because of the same unpredictability of the traffic.
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.
> "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".
Explain how the German autobahn has fewer collisions than US high ways with lower than 85th percentile speed limits if the lower speed limits are such an advantage. Actual data does not support the idea of low speed limits. They are only in place as an attempt to reduce fleet fuel consumption, and hurt safety by causing big differences in vehicle speeds.
- _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.
You make a number of assertions, but you omit any concrete examples.
> 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.
As others have pointed out, the inspection standards are wildly different. Here’s [0] an amusing and eye-opening look at what is needed to restore an older vehicle to pass inspection. For example, removing surface rust on a spare tire mount.
Even then, he still failed inspection [1], and goes into much more detail on the rigorous checks performed.
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.
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.
That’s great, good for New York.
Now go get Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington to do the same. Also, remember that licensing reciprocity means that if I have a vehicle titled in South Carolina, nothing stops me from driving it into North Carolina.
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.
> That’s great, good for New York. Now go get Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington to do the same. Also, remember that licensing reciprocity means that if I have a vehicle titled in South Carolina, nothing stops me from driving it into North Carolina.
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:
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?
> 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.
“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.
They also could introduce standards gradually by grandfathering older vehicles into the previous lack of standards, which is what NY did. Newer vehicles subject to the standards can be repaired to stay up to the minimum standard. This largely avoids the issue of impoverishment.
You can read about the 85th percentile principle here:
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:
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 german driving culture is largely responsible for the lack of spectacular fatalities on the autobahn.
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)
Then instead of doing all of these increasingly draconian measures, perhaps we should try to copy the Germans. The interstate highway system itself was a copy of the German autobahn system. We should have copied it in all of its aspects. It is never too late to do this.
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.
It does seem reasonable to find out what works in other countries and pursue the most effective and freedom-preserving approaches.
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.
What interim? These are mutually exclusive approaches. Either you mimic what is known to work elsewhere, or you institute backward measures under the misguided claim that it helps. There is no embarking on both paths at once, since they involve doing largely opposite things.
The grand-parent suggested that the source of low German fatalities despite higher speeds is a driving culture that has respect for the "correct" way to do things.
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.
An example of a system that works well is usually the target of low-fidelity attempts to copy without understanding the fundamental principles that make it possible, I.e. copying the obvious form, but ignoring the cultural underpinnings. Also, muh freedoms. And I don’t need no edumacation, I ken drive jest fine.
Unfortunately, the USA has a weird version of the noble savage mythos that enshrines ignorance.
The Germans avoided speed limits on the autobahn specifically because they viewed it as a form of freedom. Your remarks about ignoring cultural underpinnings seem misplaced.
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.
It sounds like NYS is very progressive. My exposure is anecdotal, but I don’t think that level of vigilance is the norm across the expanse of the interstate system.
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.
> Explain how the German autobahn has fewer collisions than US high ways with lower than 85th percentile speed limits if the lower speed limits are such an advantage.
There is no reason in the world to assume that US drivers have the same level of driving skill as German drivers.
> the notion of Germans being intrinsically superior
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.
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.
Then it is possible to replicate German success in vehicle safety in the U.S. without increasingly draconian speed limit restrictions. As for laws/culture/training, look at NYS:
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.
That’s a straw man. Nobody is saying Germans have some “safe driving” gene, but rather that German culture has higher standards for driver training and enforcement. 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.
The way he worded his reply suggested some sort of intrinsic superiority that by definition could not be replicated anywhere else.
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.:
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.
> The way he worded his reply suggested some sort of intrinsic superiority that by definition could not be replicated anywhere else.
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.
I cannot speak for other states, but NY requires a driving test and has police regularly enforce traffic violations too. None of this supports the idea of setting highway speed limits below the 85th percentile or even having high way speed limits. It instead suggests that we should copy the Germans.
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.
KE = ½mv² shows that kinetic energy is directly proportional to the mass of an object and proportional to the square of its velocity. This means that doubling the mass doubles the kinetic energy, but doubling the velocity quadruples the kinetic energy.
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.
This is the most annoying thing, they risk the lives of themselves and everyone around them and gain at most 1-2 minutes on 30 minute drive.
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.
My favorite pastime in traffic is to pull next to the person who was speeding and doing aggressive lane changes at the next red light by driving completely calm and under speed limit, and even without changing lanes.
Consider how none of this matters if the vehicle never touches another object. If motorists reach their destinations sooner, then there are fewer cars on the road. This naturally increases the average distance between vehicles. Bad things only happen when those distances reach 0, so higher average distances inhibit collisions.
> KE = ½mv² shows that kinetic energy is directly proportional to the mass of an object and proportional to the square of its velocity. This means that doubling the mass doubles the kinetic energy, but doubling the velocity quadruples the kinetic energy.
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.
I don't think anyone was looking at the kJ numbers and going "ah that makes sense". I put 3 examples to show the relativity, it's still squared to the relative crash speed.
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.
The number of people I see on the highway driving 20mph over and weaving through traffic or driving like 30ft behind the car in front of them is alarming. These behaviors are just simply less safe.
That's just drivers normalising the breaking of the speed limits. If you raise the limits just because drivers are going faster, then the drivers will just increase their speeds until again, a majority of drivers are breaking the limit.
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.
> If you raise the limits just because drivers are going faster, then the drivers will just increase their speeds until again
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.)
> 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.
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.
> I think the better alternative s to design roads so that drivers naturally travel slower, or at least the careful ones do.
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.
Driving 10 mph above the speed limit on a highway at every opportunity will only lead to a very limited reduction in travel time, because you spend a lot of time breaking (i.e. to avoid crashing into law-abiding drivers, reacting to speed controls, etc.).
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).
Failure to drive 70 mph on a highway posted at 60 will (very often, road depending) result in far more cars overpassing you. Each instance of passing carries a small but definite amount of risk; it is safer to match the speed of the other cars on the road than to obstinately stick to the limit and get passed hundreds of times in a single trip.
(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.)
When everyone is driving beyond the speed limit, the ones actually obeying the speed limit are the dangerous drivers. It is unfortunate that speed limits in the US have not corresponded to how people actually drive since 1973.
How does this make sense? If I'm driving the speed limit and someone else is crashing into me from behind while speeding, they are the dangerous driver. No matter how many other people also ignore the speed limit.
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:
This is correct. Laws should reflect the values of the democratic consensus, speed limits included. If almost everybody is traveling at a speed other than the posted speed limit, whether that's faster or slower, that is a strong signal that the speed limit needs to be adjusted. Speed limits should be set such that most people naturally think the limit is a sensible speed to drive anyway.
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. If almost everybody is traveling at a speed other than the posted speed limit, whether that's faster or slower, that is a strong signal that the speed limit needs to be adjusted.
If almost everyone is going a speed other than the speed limit I'd agree something should be done. But it's quite a leap to suggest the thing that should always be done is to change the speed limit. Maybe the roads should be restructured and add traffic calming. Maybe through traffic should be encouraged to use an alternate route. It's not like speed limits are the only lever one can use.
Sure, but the parent comment didn't leave any room for nuance or considerations, instead broadly stating:
> 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.
This whole thread confirms it. Speed limits are always a burden for reckless drivers, but never an issue for people like me who drive under the limit. They should reflect on themselves about that but I doubt they are capable of it.
You’re not American, are you? The number of roads marked 55 mph on which nearly every vehicle is moving 75 mph is very high. Driving under the speed limit would be hazardous to yourself and everyone else.
Other countries tend to follow the 85th percentile for setting speed limits, so driving under the speed limit is actually safe there. People in them do not realize that a road that would be 140 km/h in Europe is 90 km/h in the U.S.
I have tried driving at the speed limit in NYS. So many near collisions occurred from other drivers cutting me off that it was clear that the speed limit is unsafe.
This also explains why the best engineers are also the best at admitting what they don't know. Which is something we have worked into our interviews - amazing how easy it is to spot a poor engineer by asking what their latest failure was.
This is generally true for actions at every level of risk. Designing around how humans will actually behave is better than trying to artificially restrict everyone's behavior preemptively.
That seems like the result of a normal skill level distribution that allows some people to take more advanced actions at the same risk level. Interesting how there is never a push to punish people who actually cause wrecks with this technology.
Every boy racer thinks “look at me, controlling the vehicle easily at 90mph! I’m clearly amongst the high-skilled group!” but the skill that actually matters is reaction time to sudden unexpected hazards (and consequent need for stopping distance) and I don’t think most people get enough practice at that to be materially better than average at it.
> the skill that actually matters is reaction time to sudden unexpected hazards (and consequent need for stopping distance)
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.
I see those rarely, mostly (SoCal) I see people going much faster than other traffic on a 6 to 12 lane freeway that is packed with cars, cutting people off, swerving across lanes, not signaling, treating driving like a video game except the people they kill don't get to restart the game.
More like a normal cognitive level distribution that let some people put themselves and bystanders in unnecessary danger because they "know" they can handle it.
Firearms are a constitutionally enshrined right - driving is not. For the vast majority of Americans, cars represent a significantly higher threat than assault by gun [1]. We also let drivers flagrantly and repeatedly break the law and negligently kill people with essentially near-impunity. The same cannot be said for firearms.
You may be surprised to learn how much kinetic energy is possible to wield in terms of man portable firearms that are also legal for purchase.
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.
And yet pedestrians would understandably get very nervous if there were a bunch of people firing those rifles along a typical street, yet they have learnt to accept the risk that comes with car-heavy traffic.
At 20mph in a well-designed street, there’s still a lot of opportunity for people to keep themselves safe. Not so much with guns.
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.
Love this, thanks! Sadly haven’t found time to go shooting in years. And am always careful not to point either of these things (cars, guns) at other drivers.
Fyi, this is being written from public transit. You didn’t think I would actually drive to work, did you? ;-)
Most car "accidents" are intentional - drivers are choosing to speed (35%), drive intoxicated (30%), or scroll tiktok (15%) rather than pay attention to the road.
I was wrong about absolute numbers, still if you subtract suicides and gang infightings reckless driving kills and hurts way more people.
>>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.
Considering the whole world, gun utility for the civilian population is clearly much smaller than car utility. You will also find even in US a higher number of individuals that have at least one car VS number of individuals that have at least one gun.
Sure the reverse might be true for a minority, but the majority scenario is out there with plenty of statistical and empirical evidence.
I lived mostly in rural areas but this still sounds too wild. Are US rural areas so dangerous? Especially aggressive humans? I've newer felt that I need the gun to protect myself, but than again I do not live in a place where 'aggressive humans' could easily[0] have a gun.
[0] As it is harder to obtain gun on illegal market when it is harder to obtain one on legal market.
Most of the time I don't need a puncture repair kit / spare inner tube when cycling, but when I have a puncture I really need it.
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.
Except it's the other way around? Some people here claim that they do feel the need for a gun. However, if that's true, then it's surprising that in most counties with stricter gun (i.e. most counties) laws don't agree.
No it isn't the other way around. Some young men (in the UK) in high crime areas will carry them illegally because it makes them feel safer. UK has strict gun and knife laws.
Just as mutually assured destruction brought lasting peace on the international scale, widespread civilian ownership of military weapons has also been a remarkably effective deterrent and safeguard against would-be tyrants across history. If both Karl Marx and the US founding fathers agreed that a well-armed public is important for a lasting civil peace, it's probably a good idea to listen.
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.
All democracies before the current era began as revolutions. Roman plebeians were well armed enough that the state could never become too abusive towards them. English democracy, and the entire modern idea of constitutional democracy itself, came about because 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. Some of the most peaceful and healthiest democracies in the world are also the most heavily armed: look at Switzerland for an example. 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, and that the weapons themselves never have to be used. Civil institutions can be captured over time by corrupt interests, but it's quite difficult to capture an empowered public.
Your prior comment spoke of "deter and safeguard against tyrants". No you argue based on the "beginnings" of democracies. These are different things.
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 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.
Great. Even accepting your case (I assume you mean the US revolutionary war, which, for the record, I don't think is that great of an example to begin with), you provide a n=1 in support of your argument.
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:
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).
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.
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.
>Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?
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.
> If both Karl Marx and the US founding fathers agreed that a well-armed public is important for a lasting civil peace, it's probably a good idea to listen.
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...
To be frank, it hardly seems to have helped the United States out of their current constitutional crisis. Compulsory preferential voting is a much better protection against tyrants.
> Compulsory preferential voting is a much better protection against tyrants.
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.
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.
<< And yet, guns and ammo freely available and unrestricted outside of automatic weapons and the like? Yeah. Can’t wait to move off-grid someday. (Yes, obviously American)
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.
I agree with you that guns are a an insane problem. However, that shouldn't discourage us from solving other unrelated problems when the solutions present themselves.
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.
Ehh the roads are public property. I don't think its unreasonable that if you want your car to be registered to drive on a public road it needs some sort of speed limiter. Its about the same level of infringement on your personal rights as requiring a car have seatbelts. Feel free to buy a car with no limiter or no seatbelts and drive it on your own private roads as fast as your heart desires.
Some kind of exoskeletons to control people just walking around in public, too. Stop them doing bad things.
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.
This is complete nonsense. You could say this for literally any law.
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.
I'm all for stronger enforcement of speed limits to save lives (e.g. ticket everyone over the speed limit with cameras automatically, no cops needed), but requiring shit to be installed into someone's car doesn't seem effective. They could just disconnect it.
This device doesn't make it easier to catch speeders, what it does is give a way for habitual speeders to stop speeding. The primary goal is no doubt that these people will simply stop breaking the law now that there's a device there helping them do that without the need for further law enforcement. To the extent that fails though, it's a measure which makes it reasonable to increase penalties and thus increase the level of deterrence.
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.
I'm not sure that intent should be at all relevant. If you're not capable of routinely keeping the vehicle within the speed limits, then perhaps you shouldn't be driving it?
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".
I don't understand the argument about "judging your speed". Isn't there a speedometer prominently displayed in every car in the USA as well? You don't have to "judge" anything, just read the number the speedometer shows - is it above or below the speed limit?
You can't keep a constant eye on both the road and the speedometer. Further, you might have missed the last speed limit change or remember it incorrectly. It's also possible for the speed sensor in your car to be faulty or out of calibration. This happens if you change the size of your wheels/tires significantly without reprogramming the ECU - and that setting isn't made available to the owner of the vehicle, at least not in most cars I'm aware of¹.
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.
> 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.
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.
The graph seems a bit too much. It says that GPS 110 means ~125 on the odo. Although from personal experience I'd say it's more around a delta of 5 at those speeds, and 3 for lower speeds.
Most modern cars phone home on lte/4g/5g. Police could auto-ticker speeders if they wanted to today. Probably don't want people to know how ubiquitous the tracking already is though.
I am not sure why you are being downvoted. The potential for abuse is clearly in place. It did not happen in our timeline yet, because it would likely cause an uproar, but to me writing was on the wall, when, way back when, Elon sent an update to a Tesla during a disaster to change a battery behavior.
As an Hardware designer I don't think that is the problem nowadays. Make it physically hard to remove and add a gps tracker to the unit and if it doesn't move for a few days, have them proove to you it wasn't tampered with. Then the only way to do it is to break the thing open and simulate trips that match yours all the time, which requires you to MITM the connection between the GPS and the microcontroller.
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.
You’re forgetting a step - which, being a hardware designer instead of a lawyer, is understandable.
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.
We already require breathalyzer interlocks be installed for habitual DUI drivers in a majority of states. This is an extension of that same legal principle. Road access is a privilege (as evidenced by the requirement to have a driver’s license and vehicle tags).
No I did not forget it, I was responding to an technical argument with an technical answer. And I am the type of person who wouldn't design such a system if you held a gun up to my head.
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.
The technical aspects of this seem concerning. I'm wondering exactly who has the authority to set a car to this mode and how the mechanism of doing so works. What happens if you sell the car or let somebody else borrow it? Or when you get another car, or rent one? What are the failure modes of it, like if the GPS glitches a little and decides you're on a feeder or surface road when you're actually on a freeway? I think we've all seen GPS guidance devices do that.
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!
> What happens if you sell the car or let somebody else borrow it?
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.
How is being prevented from going 10 mph above the posted speed limit in the car of someone convicted of speeding over 100 mph an onerous burden? The car is the property of the person convicted of speeding and sanctioned with an ISA. If someone behaves reckless with their gun in a way that obviously endangers others, is taking their gun away an onerous burden to a neighbor who may borrow it?
...like if the GPS glitches a little and decides you're on a feeder or surface road when you're actually on a freeway
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.
It 100% happens repeatedly to me (my car has the little "tell you the speed limit" feature). It'll suddenly say the limit is 30 because the GPS thinks I'm on the feeder road nearby.
To account for such errors the limiter should probably set the limit to the highest of any road within ~50 m, with a possible exception for school zones that aren't immediately adjacent to highways.
I recall hearing about Japan putting speed limiters in all cars and using GPS to determine the road and therefore speed limit to set the limiter dynamically in vehicles. (Perhaps some details are wrong or confabulated; regardless, it’s a neat idea.) I’m in favor of such a system in theory; I’d be concerned about privacy issues but there’s no reason for such a system to require driver identification anyway.
My family rented a car in England last summer, and this was an optional feature of the car. I didn't want to try it out on my first time driving on the left, so I didn't turn it on. Moreover, the speed limits on the motorways were changing in real time. I observed very little speeding -- almost none.
You’ll have been on a variable speed zone of the motorway which is covered in cameras to enforce the limit reductions. People tend to behave themselves when they think they’ll lose their toys.
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.
My car has this feature and a method to read signs but it cannot read white exception signs. There are plenty of speed limits when wet signs which get cought by the thing as normal signs.
And the maps are continuously outdated so lots of smaller roads simply do not work properly.
That's what happens if you sell the car. What happens if the thing thinks the speed limit on a 65 MPH highway is 30 MPH? Or you have some emergency situation where a higher travel speed is a matter of life and death?
Machines should never enforce laws because they don't have the ability to know when doing so would be unreasonable.
> Or you have some emergency situation where a higher travel speed is a matter of life and death?
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.
> 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?
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.
> What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?
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.
> What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?
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.
People with that medical condition should make alternative plans. If you are an alcoholic, so much so that you have driven drunk so many times that you were caught and convicted multiple times and required to have an interlock device installed, then you need account for that. There are plenty of people who don’t own a car at all, so lets not pretend that we are talking about taking away someone’s pacemaker.
You are really reaching here. We're talking about speed limiters on cars, not accidentally murdering alcoholics who would be able to escape from a wildfire by speeding except that they can't drunk drive because their car has a breathalyzer on it.
I would instead say that people who cannot legally drive should avoid living in places where driving is likely to be essential to their survival. But also I have nothing but contempt for drunk drivers. If you're addicted to alcohol, there's a simple solution: don't drive, at least not at the same time you're drinking. Maybe plan a little. You have to spend a lot of time placing your petty convenience over the lives of others before you get your license taken away.
I agree with you that the road deaths caused by repeat offenders outweigh their personal safety, but if a b-double decides to side-swipe you when you're next to its cabin then you're going to need to accelerate past the speed limit for a few seconds.
Train crossings. I live in a port city with tracks that run right through the middle of the city. No, the safety lights don't always work. No, you can't always hear them coming. Yes, I've had to floor it to avoid being hit. This just seems like a bad idea on the face of it to me. It makes people drive in a way that other drivers may not expect them to, and that's always dangerous.
This isn't an acceleration limiter. How fast did you need to be going to cross those tracks before the train arrived? And why was stopping not an alternative? Are you a stunt driver for '70s action movies?
I don't understand this scenario, how long is the piece of track that you had to clear? Does the road not simply cross over the track? Even at 10km/h, you'd clear the <2m of track in 0.72 seconds, barely enough time to notice the train was coming and start accelerating. Is this instead a situation where you were nearing the track with too much speed to stop before reaching it, so you had to accelerate instead to clear it?
Do you report the incident to the local city when they don't work? Or you can send a letter to your national safety board that regulates freight trains.
> "avoid being hit"
You were not careful enough when crossing the train tracks. When you get a driver's license in Japan, they strictly train (and test!) you to stop at a train tracks (regardless of lights), roll down the window, and listen. If we are talking about a 200 ton diesel locomotive, you shouldn't have any issue hearing it. If you follow these simply instructions, you can avoid most safety issues at railroad crossings. Many trucking companies are required by company policy to do the same.
if you are a serial speeder that has been caught multiple times doing 100+ mph, then maybe you shouldn't be speeding over the train tracks in the first place. Maybe, go over them traveling, you know, the speed limit so you will be able to floor it for a couple of seconds if need be.
California wildfire evacuations, maybe, in very specific edge cases. But even then I very much doubt it would matter much, given how actual videos out of those incidents show relatively low-speed caravans with limited visibility from smoke.
Medical emergencies are not "unrealistic action movie scenarios". If my family member is bleeding and I'm driving them to the ER, I don't and shouldn't have to care about precise speed limits.
If you're in that situation and you've already broken the speed limit so flagrantly multiple times that the courts have installed a speed limiter, that family member may well be safer waiting for the ambulance.
Is there any correlation between speeding tickets and the probability of getting into an accident at a given speed? If you have to exceed the speed limit by 20 MPH today, better the person who does it all the time than the person who isn't used to it, no?
> Is there any correlation between speeding tickets and the probability of getting into an accident at a given speed?
“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.
how long did it take you to find a study from a country known for driving like new zealand to make this crazy claim?! surprising the study is not like from 1950’s :)
> how long did it take you to find a study from a country known for driving like new zealand to make this crazy claim?
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.
speed limits, if majority of cases are not about public safety but generators of revenue. if we all started driving the speed limit the number of accidents would not be significantly reduced while many, many cities/counties/… would fully go bankrupt. I have spent more than a decade in state&local courts records management business and can tell you this first-hand. you can cool deals if you just pay the fine and don’t come to court at all and neat stuff like that. speed limits never were and never will be about public safety
This is a false dichotomy. You seem to think that the way speeds are enforced, with a focus on revenue generation, means that speed limiting is only for revenue generation. That is just not true. At higher speeds your reaction time, combined with stopping distance increases, mean that you need more warning and space to avoid hazards. Cars pulling out of driveways/side streets/parking lots, cars changing lanes, cars stopping to turn, pedestrians crossing roads, bicycles, etc. all take time and space to respond to. That is why we don’t have home driveways or crosswalks on a freeway. We have 15-25 mph school zones because children can and do behave unpredictably and may dart out into traffic, so a drive will have almost no time or space to respond.
This goes in complete opposition to every single study ever performed on this matter. Higher speed very directly translates into higher risk of accidents and higher risk of fatalities or serious injuries per accident. Now, it's true that there are cases of occasional unscrupulous places placing onerous speed limits only to force fines (I've seen places on highways that are normally 100 km/h that have a short portion of 30km/h on flat straight land with no houses around, but with a good place for a police car to stay hidden), but these are the exception and nowhere near the rule.
Have you seen emergency vehicles in city areas going to an emergency? Unless they are willing to cause more injuries on their way, they can’t just casually speed to your destination. They’re pausing and making sure people notice them or hear their sirens before running the red light or driving in the wrong lane.
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.
I thought about specifying the exact degree of increased risk I would actually be willing to accept, but saw that it took up as much space as the rest of my post. Suffice to say, I would still be careful.
This kind of thinking is what gets people killed. Lights and traffic are what keep you from getting to the hospital. So you would be driving too fast to stop in time for lights or cars pulling into the road, while distracted, and hit someone. No wonder they installed a speed limiter on your car. You’re a public menace.
If you're driving a bleeding family member to the ER, I'm especially concerned about your ability to drive safely and concentrate on the road. You don't want to turn one emergency into two or three, and your main obstacle on the way to the hospital will probably be traffic, not speed limits. High speed collisions are typically fatal and it's not okay to kill yourself or a pedestrian on the way to the hospital.
If your family member is bleeding to the point where this will make a notable difference you should be staying with them, applying direct pressure and a tourniquet, not letting them bleed out in the back of your car while you race to the ER.
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".
Almost all decisions have downsides. This is not by itself a reason to avoid the decision. We compare the costs against the benefits.
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?"
> What happens if the thing thinks the speed limit on a 65 MPH highway is 30 MPH?
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
> What happens if the thing thinks the speed limit on a 65 MPH highway is 30 MPH?
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.
Same as with breathalyzers. They'll start off with ones registered to the offender because otherwise the law wouldn't pass. Then, 5yr later, at the behest of the interests running the breathalyzer/speed limiter company, they change the law to be "all cars at this address".
The idea of limiting reckless driving makes sense in theory, but once you start handing over control to software (and whoever manages it), the edge cases get really messy. GPS errors, ownership changes, rentals
Cities can replace smooth asphalt with rough brick and cobblestone, and replace traffic lights with traffic circles / roundabouts. If they really want to force cars to slow down, they could, in a way that doesn't take anyone's rights away and doesn't require any vehicle manufacturer to play ball.
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.
Yes, lets just reorganize and rebuilt the entire city infrastructure to fix bad behavior by a few people. I don't want to actually oppose your suggestions because I think they are all good, but I also think that if a person repeatedly breaks a law then that is precisely the circumstances under which their freedom can be decreased as long as due process is respected.
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.
You should look into why cities use smooth asphalt over concert which would be significantly less maintenance.
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.
Bricks and cobblestones don’t handle high traffic well, require too much maintenance i.e. too expensive. Cobblestones are only good for areas with heavily restricted or banned vehicle traffic. For roads and higher traffic streets, asphalt is more practical.
Agree with the rest of your comment. I also think the main reason for high traffic deaths in America is road design.
"Cities can replace smooth asphalt with rough brick and cobblestone"
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.
I think someone can drive 80km/h on this one. Plus they should be super-slippery in rain, right?
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.
This has as much to do with chronic speeding as bans on encryption have to do with terrorism.
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.
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 problem is even if you got the legislature to pass that privacy bill (they never would, at least not without 1,000 exemptions that every large company would qualify for multiple times over), it would just get repealed a year or two later with little fanfare.
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.
I think the point is that we should aim to solve it without surveillance / sacrificing rights. So in this case, increasing the fines / jail time is at least one alternative.
Not sure how incarcerating people who are guilty of a crime is unconscionable but monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately is totally fine and no problem whatsoever.
It's a much bigger leap to go from "punish people for speeding" to "physically prevent their car from going past a certain speed" than it is to go from "prevent this car from going past a certain speed" to "prevent all cars from going past a certain speed."
your slippery slope argument is not very convincing. What do you suggest be done (that isn't already) about people who regularly speed, putting themselves and those around them in danger?
Judges already have the power to permanently revoke people's license to drive, the problem is they don't.
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."
This is specifically about a judge mandating tracking as a punishment for a crime. The comment I responded to suggested incarceration as a lesser sacrifice to rights.
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are used by every state in the US. They already have algorithms on top of these ALPRs to pull out suspects for possible drug mules.
>>monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately
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.
Automated license-plate readers are a completely different topic
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.
Do you apply the same logic to backdoors in encryption? I am sure you could say no one is proposing implementing and using back doors on the general public as a whole, as they would only be for criminal elements. The reason that people oppose this is because the shift from only affecting criminal elements to affecting everyone is so easy to do that nothing would stop it once the infrastructure is in place.
It is extremely difficult to have a backdoor for encryption that only applies to some people, and no proposal for encryption backdoors AFAICT differentiate based on whether the subject has previously committed a crime. They are always blanket backdoors.
There is no difference between applying this to only criminals and applying it to everyone else. Vehicles are already being made with software speed limiters that users can control (e.g. Tesla vehicles). Once the state controls these, there is no technical barrier preventing it from only being applied to criminals.
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.
Is this merely adding a device to a criminal’s vehicle? What stops manufacturers from including speed limiters by default to make it easier to retrofit cars? Then what stops a switch from being flipped to enable it for all cars regardless of “criminal” status? Unlike breathalyzers, which had an economic barrier from reaching step 2, a software limiter has no economic barrier.
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.
>>Is this merely adding a device to a criminal’s vehicle?
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.
With encryption backdoors, you only need two steps, and the second step is on the honor system, which is why people resist the first step. With this, it looks like there are more than two steps, but given that all future cars will effectively support this in software and will be internet connected such that it can be enabled remotely, we really only have two steps. It only appears to be multiple steps because older cars need retrofits, but again, that is not the case for all cars, and especially is not the case for future cars. Once we are in the future, it will be clear that this first step that seems so benign is the only step where there was any difficulty and the second step can be done with ease.
Backdoors for encryption have mathematical impossibilities relying behind them. Speed regulators on cars are not mathematically impossible. Your analogy is fatuous, like most HN analogies. Argue the actual incident, not your made up analogies.
You seem to have ignored that the analogy was applied to the slippery slope aspect of this where cars start having this built into them by default and then it is enabled for all cars at some point afterward without due process.
I'm as anti-car/pro urbanist as they come. I would totally support this. Speeding on highways doesn't bother me and is relatively safe. Speeding in cities endangers pedestrians and sees no enforcement. Stop signs aren't even obeyed any more (they require a complete stop, in case you forgot).
Seriously? It is logically no different from drink driving. No one has the right to drive. You need to qualify, be tested, licensed and competent. If you break the law repeatedly, then you should be restricted from driving by any means necessary to protect you from yourself and others.
You could do it without any surveillance. Just have a feature in the car where the ECU will limit the speed when e.g. programmed via the CAN-bus.
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).
I am fully in support of making cars or mopeds or all travel safer.
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.
There is already massive police surveillance of all motor vehicles.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve seen cars improve a lot over that last 10-20 years. Faster, smoother, quieter, and safer, they can cruise all day at 80-90 mph.
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.
This distinction has been made with engine capacity (number of CCs) for scooters or motorcycles in many places including in the US.
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.
In Europe this exists with the l6e an l7e class vehicles - which lead to a number of interesting microcar designs, often for 2 people with a top speed of about 90km/h and ranges around 150-200km. Great commuter vehicles.
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.
My hybrid SUV halves its mileage over 40-45 mph which is enough incentive for me not to be a maniac. I treat the average mpg as a game, trying to maximize it for my driving pattern.
Sucks when I have long stretches on the highway though.
Such a vehicle wouldn't be able to travel on a freeway at all [1], which means the market for them is very limited. Even in cities, people will want to hop on a freeway to cut across town more quickly.
[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.
Today. But, no reason why we couldn’t change the rules to let these vehicles travel in the right lane only. Just as trucks are restricted so on certain highways.
Technically, everyone is expected to drive in the right most lane unless they are passing or there is a left-hand exit coming up.
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.
Why restrict it there? If you up it to 65 or 70, far more freeways become accessible. Maybe not in crazy ass 85 mph speed limit Texas, but that ain't my problem (luckily).
I don’t get that. Repeat offender => temporary removal of driving license. Done. You can make it progressive, remove it for a week, next time 3, etc. I guarantee this will calm people down.
It says in the article that people who lose their drivers license on account of speeding usually keep on driving anyway. I also feel like this is already the case in a lot of countries yet speeding still exists so I don't know if I agree that this is this simple solution no one is thinking of.
Most police cars that I know of have license scanners and that scanner will inform police if the owner of said car has a suspended license, which results in an immediate trip to jail.
The problem is, at least in Virginia, every single speed limit is set low, and cops randomly pull over cars that are just traveling the same speed as the cars around them, all above the speed limit.
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.
I drive through Virginia a lot, and have never seen speed limits set any differently than any other east coast state. Never had a problem obeying the speed limit, knowing the risks of speeding there.
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?
Bunching together happens because of irregular speed. You have traffic clusters because the front is slower than whatever the "natural" speed is, but not so slow that people elect to pass.
If traffic is all moving in a narrow range of speed the clusters are smaller and less dense.
Good.
The pandemic really opened up roads in the US to ever more dangerous Wild Wild West shenanigans.
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.
lots of "freedom"-loving pushback on this law here. sorry y'all, we live in a society and your actions affect others. you choosing to endanger my life on the road does not make me more free.
i think these speeders should just lose their license to drive forever, so maybe choose to view this law as a compassionate compromise.
This is 100% a political issue. Instead of introducing privacy-violating software, we could instead institute massive policing campaigns to curb speeding. But that would require actual effort by police, something they don't want to do.
I do not believe the US or VA constitutions guarantee a right to exceed speed limits. No idea what freedom they’re talking about!
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.
yea there are some wild hypotheticals being thrown around in the comments with one of my favorites being "what if you're drinking and you have to speed to escape a wildfire but have a breathalyzer in your car?". Jeeze I guess we really should just do nothing instead.
So if I have this device installed is it enough proof that I can never speed again in my life ? If yes, I will volunteer to get one. Will also order a raspberry pi, for a project I have in mind.
I doubt it, police departments issue tickets as a major source of revenue. I've heard it said if you want to get rid of police departments, just have everyone follow the driving laws.
I suspect they'll allow just enough over so that police can still get their sweet, sweet tax revenue in this brave new world.
Kind of makes one wonder why all those politicians who spend 2020-2022 talking big talk about defunding the police didn't introduce "well everyone is already going 80 on this stretch of interstate so that ought to be the speed limit" bills in that time.
Why are typical passenger vehicles even sold with the ability to go so fast? Or perhaps more pertinently, why aren't any typical passenger vehicles I've ever heard of sold without the ability to go so fast?
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?
There is always the autobahn. If systems like that existed endangered there could be incredible time savings. A related question of mine is ‘If cars can go so fast why do we not find ways to raise speed limits while keeping roads safe?’
Why are assault weapons so difficult to own in Europe? They make them in the US and you can own them there.
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.
There are typically no pedestrians on highways. Being a pedestrian on a high way is hazardous no matter what the speed limit is for any realistic speed limit.
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.
Traffic flow theory looks tidy on a whiteboard, but real roads don’t follow V D L arithmetic. Drivers open their following gaps faster than speed rises, so capacity peaks around 55 mph at roughly 2 000 veh/h/ln. Push limits higher and flow falls while crash energy soars. Because kinetic energy scales with the square of velocity (½ mv²), a 20 mph jump doesn’t give you 33 % more punch, it delivers nearly 80 % more. NHTSA data put it bluntly: fatal-injury odds about double for every 10 mph over 50 mph [1]. That’s an exponential climb in destructiveness, not a linear trade-off.
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.
> Traffic flow theory looks tidy on a whiteboard, but real roads don’t follow V D L arithmetic.
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 much of a gear head but I believe that a car would perform much worse at 0-80mph if it couldn’t physically reach 120mph. You can artificially limit it and I think that’s what folks take with.
Most people driving on I-294 in Illinois would agree. Just "keeping up with traffic" normally requires you to go about 80mph. If my car topped out at 50 or 60mph, I'd be frustrated as hell.
Found another article that mentions it adjusts to the speed limit and allows you to go up to 9mph over.
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.
Separately from whether you think a policy is good on its own merits, you have to consider whether you think the existing establishment will enforce a policy correctly, fairly, or well.
This should honestly be a requirement on ALL vehicles. Speed governors are such an easy retrofit and would save so much pain and death. Tailgating and speeding are the two biggest quality of life problems on the road today.
Pretty much everywhere except for the area inside the 495 beltway (right next to DC), where public transit is good. But even then, housing prices near metro stations are higher.
You probably want a car in most places, just like almost everywhere in the US.
Someone who's jailed for driving on a suspended license because it's the only way they can get to their job probably isn't going to discontinue that behavior upon their release. I don't want my tax dollars being spent on a punishment that's just going to exacerbate the problem, especially when the crime isn't particularly odious in the first place (whatever they did to get their license suspended probably was, but once you have a suspended license it's almost impossible to just stop driving).
> when the crime isn't particularly odious in the first place
“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.
>“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].
"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.
Lose your license? You get a ride, ride a bike, take the bus, get compassionate permission to only drive to work, etc. there are many ways to move yourself around. Then don’t mess up again once the suspension is over.
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.
This is wishful thinking, the people I know who drive on suspended licenses also don't have jobs and refuse to work. The vast majority of people with suspended licenses are not otherwise productive members of society. The kind of antisocial behavior that gets your license suspended doesn't magically stop when you stop driving. These are, by in large, just bad people.
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.
I had a suspended license for failing to return a license plate. I have never had a moving violation in my life. I continued to drive like normal until the DMV realized that I had turned in the other plate in a two-plate state.
The automobile is not the primary mode of transportation simply because the US is "big." Its dominance stems from a series of deliberate, damaging historical and policy decisions, not inherent necessity or geography.
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.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair in a country where a car is practically a requirement for living (getting to work, grocery shopping).
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.
Yes, those life choices having been made for them by their city planner before they were born about the feasibility of getting anywhere in their or doing anything in their city without a vehicle.
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."
I think that is the best solution. I would shortcut this though, anyone caught speeding even 1mph over the limit goes to jail immediately, 90 days feels right. no need to wait for the license to be suspended /s
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.
While I'd accept that there are tight situations on remote highways similar to the one you described with the semi and tailgater, I also relish in those moments where I do just slow down and let the tailgater be pissed, sometimes they do get the ticket, and my conservative speeding gets vindicated.
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.
Having driven extensively in nearly every city in this country, the drivers in Atlanta are absolutely the most dangerous. It is the only city I refuse to drive in, and I try to limit my physical presence in the Atlanta Metro (aside from transiting the airport) to reduce the risk of being in an accident.
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.
Because you can always count on people to have sufficient self awareness to rationally evaluate the pros and cons of their decisions before the fact, especially those who have demonstrated a repeated willingness to drive recklessly.
How is this different from actual criminals that we lock up behind bars? Sometimes till the remainder of their lives. These aren't children, and the quicker we start treating them as adults, the quicker they'll learn to obey the laws before the real and life-changing consequences kick in.
Speed limits in the US have a particular problem. The speed limits are set too close to the speed people are expected to drive.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 don't doubt that you could further reduce the problem with stricter laws.
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?
Ah yes, the person that makes the mistake of conflating random laws and arbitrary numbers for political reasons with some sort of lack of risk awareness / mitigation.
Yet we’d be better off if we at least adhered to the 85th percentile speed limit process rather than having the 85th percentile speed be 75mph and the posted limit be 55mph.
Speeding is widely accepted, because it seems such a low level offense. 50km/h instead of 30, it’s only 20 more. But the physics are against you - the energy of the vehicle grows quadratic with the speed. At 30, you need about 18 meters to come to a stop. So you can prevent an accident if a person appears about 20 meters from your hood. At 50, you’ll run them over with a remaining speed of more than 30km/h. Speeding kills.
Road conditions change. Sometimes it’s the middle of the night and nobody is on the county road, so you can run your brights. Sometimes a particular section of road has high visibility that makes a higher speed safer, while other sections are best taken under the limit. Some vehicles have better headlights than others, different stopping distances. Your logic only says “lower is safer,” it provides no means by which to draw the line on what level of risk is acceptable and, make no mistake, any amount of driving always implies risk. We balance the risk against its reward, that’s the function of traffic law.
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.
You’re trying to apply the “I am a good driver and my judgment is better than other people’s” argument - but the majority of people believe they’re an above average driver. That’s a dangerous fallacy. Now, you might truly be, but your argument paves the way for everyone else to say the same. After all, nothing happened so far. And that other driver might be the one that misjudges and crashes into you.
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.
Yet the German autobahn suggests that the fallacy is the reasoning that highways even need speed limits. The autobahn is safer without speed limits than every single innovation we have had in setting speed limits. Perhaps it is time to stop blaming drivers and blame highway speed limits for causing safety issues.
The german autobahn demonstrates exactly the opposite. Everywhere that speed limits are introduced, the number of accidents drop. Less injured people, less fatalities. One example is the A24 https://www.geo.de/wissen/vergleich-auf-a24-weniger-verletzt... where the number of fatal accidents dropped by 50%.
This is a relative matter. The autobahn, without speed limits, is safer than US high ways with speed limits. The speed limit being suggested there is also a higher speed than the speeds reached on most US highways, which were a clone of the autobahn. Research into this matter has long suggested that there is an optimal limit at the 85th percentile and setting a speed limit above or below it harms safety. The autobahn demonstrates the optimal limit is well above the limits that are used in the U.S., which coincidentally are well below the 85th percentile.
This all seems like a moot point to me until there is actual consequences for people who ACTUALLY cause accidents. We all know someone (maybe ourselves) who had their car totaled, seriously damaged, or been harmed by people that hit and run, had no financially responsibility for their damage, intoxicated, etc. And jack shit happened to them.
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.
My car was damaged by a guy who drove into my rear quarter panel in bumper to bumper traffic and convinced the officer and insurance that it was my fault by fabricating a story that I cut him off. He was trying to merge into my lane after I had been fully merged. He had stopped inches from the center of my car, and the moment he saw me move forward, he pressed the accelerator, going into my car. I suggested we move to the side of the road so that we would not block two lanes of traffic, which had worked against me because it made things look consistent with his story versus having stayed in place and blocking traffic. When I called 911 to have an officer come, the guy started yelling in my ear so much that I was deeply shaken and could not even speak to the officer well to describe what had happened.
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 a person appears 20 meters from my hood while I'm on the interstate, they're toast, whether I'm going 100 km/h or 150. Surely the unpredictable can happen at any moment with other cars, but I find follow distance more important than speed. If you're bumper to bumper at 100 km/h, you're going to have a worse time than if you give 10 cars space at 150 km/h.
>“This should be telling all of you in the U.S something important. I wish you all listened to it.”
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.
Then move somewhere they don’t need a car is what I would tell them. I’d rather live in the sky but I can’t fly so I have to live on the ground. They can’t drive so they have to live somewhere where they don’t need a car.
The US has really poor highway policy that encourages speeding. Many highways have a speed limit of 55mph (89kmh) left over from some ancient oil rationing law. [0] So folks are conditioned to think that speed limits are stupid, because frankly many of them are here. I regularly drive on highways that would be 120kmh (75mph) in Europe but are instead 89kmh. Most traffic ends up going 70-75mph (including traffic enforcement) anyways which makes the speed limits look like a joke when 80% of folks ignore it.
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.
Enforcement should focus on the speed outliers, less on the posted limit itself. If the speed limit is 65mph, but all traffic is moving at 75mph, then I'm going to drive at 75mph. The most dangerous drivers I've seen are those going 30mph or more faster or slower than the rest of traffic. Yes, the problem is that then makes enforcement subjective and that itself can lead to abuses. But it's a sensible approach in the short term.
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.
Also, many municipalities have stupid or predatory speed limits. Many town roads have a natural safe 40-45 mph limit, yet some coalition of neighbors got together once and convinced the town to drop it to 25-30 mph because "cars just go by way too fast on that road!" Either that or it's a small town on the way to a tourist spot that drops the limit from 55 -> 30 for a 1/4 mile segment behind a blind curve just to rake in tourist dollars through modern highway robbery.
Virginia has built a reputation for tighter highway speed enforcement than most other places. There are officers out there enforcing as hard as the judges will let them. Now Virginia will put speed control devices in the cars of repeat offenders. Like breath testing ignition control devices, these will save lives and the offenders will pay the cost. Just another step toward better road safety for Virginia. They’re a good example for other states to follow.
I expect this to increase the number of vehicle accidents since it is forcing people to drive at speeds well below the well established principle of the 85th percentile. We could have improved safety from increasing speed limits to the 85th percentile rather than trying to artificially slow down motorists. Higher speeds mean cars get off the road faster, which means there is more distance between them. Collisions only happen when the distances between vehicles reach 0, and higher average distances inhibit collisions. Trying to force people to drive slower has all of this logic work in reverse, causing more collisions.
This product doesn't exist because it isn't actually correlated with claims paid out.
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.
A page linked from the article (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zLaBRWMSSnjGzMOpoZwUSw_H...) cites a $4/day rental fee for the equipment, which works out to roughly $120/month. I understand there are assistance programs promised by the article. Can someone in the space help me understand this pricing model? Seems high to me.
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?
I’d be surprised if only 75% of suspended drivers continue to drive. I’d expect that to be 90% or more (at least for those aged 21-65).
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.
If your license plate is flagged as being associated with a suspended license, I suspect your rate of being stopped will increase significantly. In my area, the police blotter is filled with ALPR hits triggering traffic stops due to suspended license. Good!
The pricing is high for the same reason ignition interlock rental fees are high: because they have a captive market and nobody can stop them from charging whatever the hell they want. Once the first couple vendors are certified they lobby hard to make sure the state doesn't certify too many more, which would create competition, and result in reasonable prices.
If it's narrowly targeted at repeat super-speeders with some emergency override built in, it might strike a reasonable balance. Definitely feels like one of those "good idea, but needs extremely careful implementation" situations.
I wonder if speeding is like other crimes, where a very small percentage of people cause a very large percentage of the problems. If so, seems like this could make a significant difference.
Starting off with superfluous agitprop... And ending with it. Hate for Trump is classic misdirection, it's amazing just how much propaganda is in even the most basic public policy articles.
Like, damn, it was the Biden administration that told the NTSB to go pound sand.[1]
All it takes is a simple law stating that if you circumvent the speed limiter you face far more serious penalties. Done and done. Literally no different than how we handle suspended licenses.
Criminalising driving on a license suspended for a traffic offence (note: not expired or for financial reasons) seems like the easiest no brainer imaginable.
That just means the penalties are not strict enough. Even worse, we're afraid to impose real penalties (jail) so we rather just "fine" people (because it's more humane?), which will affect those most likely to drive without a license more than the regular folk. The regular folk will be scared shitless and will just get a lift with someone till their license issue is resolved.
The law mentioned in the article will allow judges to require a device to be installed at the defendant’s expense. It’s not about what is built into cars at the factory.
"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.
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.
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.
Over the 15 years from 2008-2023, fatality rate per 100 million VMT has largely been stable, maybe increased some. I think that qualifies as not having recent wins.
Americans are driving more than ever and fatalities per capita has been steadily rising again since the 2010s per the Wikipedia provided data. The goal should be fewer deaths overall, not fewer deaths per VMT.
I wonder if insurance would be a partial solution? Allow/encourage providers of liability insurance to raise rates on people with tickets, unless they are to the electronic limit.
In theory, yes. In practice typical insurance requirements are already far below realistic modern-day damages possible from vehicular collisions, and people still routinely drive without even that minimal insurance.
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.
No, draconian punishment of uninsured drivers should go way up. I am already paying a lot of money to compensate for them; I shouldn't pay more. Auto insurance is extremely expensive already.
My point is the overall cost of any level of insurance is way higher than it should be because of uninsured drivers. Maybe, if we solved that, everybody should be able to afford a higher level of coverage to better account for serious accidents.
Just put it in yearly registration fee, like most modern countries do.
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.
Then you'll have people not registering their cars. Which already happens a lot. They steal a plate or renewal sticker from another car or just drive with it expired.
Maybe. I see cars driving around without any visible plates at all sometimes, and they don't seem to get pulled over. Traffic violations seem to be the lowest priority for cops the past few years.
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.
Agreed. I don't want more uninsured drivers on the road.
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.
> The safety argument against speeding is ironclad. Blazing-fast vehicles take longer to brake and exert more force in a crash, thereby endangering everyone else on the roadway.
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.
Can we all stop equating speed with being unsafe? I've heard this BS stat that speed is a factor in car deaths. If speed were really so dangerous, then planes would be one of the least safe methods of travel.
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.
Maybe this has already been discussed elsewhere on hn but surely this is the scariest part:
> 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.
I did actually look a bit harder before I commented, I'm aware of how the media works. "Unleashing American Energy" pauses (cancels) all the "Green New Deal" programs as stated in the article. There was supposedly federal funding for a lot of new public transit projects that's now gone. Maybe it'll come back later, reframed as new projects... but I think that's extremely unlikely for a lot of this. The focus is now elsewhere.
An interesting thing is that I've observed a lot less speeding over the years, as more cars acquire active cruise control. Correlation or causation? Who knows. I don't think enforcement has changed.
I don't know where you are but that is not my observation. More cars are going 15+ over the limit than I can ever remember. I drive on Chicago expressways a few times a year and that is especially insane. Everyone is already driving 15+ over the limit, and then there are those in Chargers, Challengers, or tuned BMW or Mercedes just weaving from lane to lane through the slightest gaps at 90+
No cops ever to be seen. I have not seen anyone pulled over on a Chicago expressway since before the pandemic.
I don't know what happened, but since the pandemic it also feels like traffic enforcement is as lax as it's ever been here in Southern Ontario. And not just for speeding - I've seen more people run red lights in the last few years than in the 20 years before that.
Like actually run reds or sneak through as a yellow turns red?
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.
Literally had the same experience this past weekend driving out to the Chicago suburbs. Doesn't matter if general traffic is going 15 over, you're still going to have a handful of unsatisfied daredevils just blowing past at 30 or more over as they weave between those "slower" cars.
Due to local law changes, my 50k population town has had 10 weed shops open up in the past 6 months. Previous to that, the closest store was 4 hours away in another state.
No idea if it's just a coincidence, but people seem to be driving way slower on average compared to last year.
I think it's causal. The cruise control on my car is busted and I don't really feel like shelling out four figures to fix it, so I drive without. I also speed probably 10-15 over pretty often when I'm on long stretches of highway. Of course, I'm also in Texas where this is fairly common and poses less of a risk than eg in Virginia.
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.
The speed of most traffic on the interstate I travel on most frequently was 67ish when I was driving home from college in the early 00s. I drove on the same road yesterday, and the average speed is easily 75, with many going much faster.
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!
The biggest change for me I've noticed is I'm vastly less likely to speed with a digital speedometer than with a dial spedometer. Adaptive cruise control also helps a lot
(I was never particularly a speed demon in the first place though)
I think a partial reason for that is a ton of cars put 80 in the middle of the dial speedometer. So, it's bizarrely easier to see your speed accurately if you're going over the speed limit.
Personally, I tend to get irritated when someone swings 10-15 mph over/under the current speed limit. I often have to speed around them to avoid them. I probably would care less if the car just followed their erratic behavior for me.
I am thinking a Black Mirror-like scenario, that in the peak of the episode, someone's life is at risk, and they got the speed-limiter to 10km/h (due to past offenses) and the baddie can run fast, catch them, kill them.
(kinda like 15MM or Nosedive but for driving speed)
This is like, "lock your doors? Nah bro, it's entirely possible to get through any lock, therefore locking is pointless."
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.
Even a license suspension doesn’t necessarily change behavior: A federally funded study found that 75% of people with suspended licenses continued to drive.
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.
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.
Let's do both! In neighborhoods, street design is going to be far more effective than things like electronic speed limiting, speed cameras, etc. But for dedicated rights of way for high throughout vehicle traffic, limiting speeds to engineering-based safe limits seems pretty reasonable as well.
Pretty sure the shithead that killed a family in King County two years ago, while doing 110 in a 40 zone (after already wrecking two cars) didn't give two figs about street design.
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.
At least in WA State there's not-reckless speeding, which is something like 1-14 mph over the posted limit (I argue it should be more like a _percent_ E.G. going 40 mph in a 25 is WAY worse than going 75 on a 60 mph freeway).
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.
The problem is that the speed limit itself has nothing to do with safety. To take your example of Seattle, there are 4 lane main roads with a 25 mph speed limit that in any other city would be 35 to 45. And everybody drives 40-45 on the anyway.
Those are the worst, because there's always a huge speed differential between the "law-abiders" who stay at 25, and the others who drive the speed the road was obviously designed for (40). Felt a lot safer when the limit on them was actually 40 and everyone was more or less going the same speed.
> My argument is that tracking, inhibitors, etc should be too far for the other cases,
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?
Slippery slope. It'd be assigned in way more cases because they can, because the _perceived_ impact is lower to someone else. Because it can be handled like yet another tax on offenders, including the poor. Because the companies selling it to the government would continue to lobby to sell it more often for more classes of offense.
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.
This is... a regressive tax on... Reckless drivers who, after multiple convictions keep putting the lives on the public in deadly danger? Do people stumble into that kind of criminal history by accident, or something? How many times do they have to be hauled before a judge before they knock it off? Are these Jean Valjean crimes of necessity, or something?
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?
Again, slippery slope. As use of this tool expands to _any_ driving related offense. As it applies only to those who must themselves drive.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
But doesn't "better street engineering" passively reduce speed because the road is full of bends that's difficult to negotiate at high speed and/or will make you much likely to crash into bollards/tree/stationary cars and/or will wreck your suspension with speed bumps ?
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.
Honestly that just seems more of a case that 18 year olds shouldn't be allowed to drive. If you're not old enough to smoke or drink alcohol, you're not old enough to operate heavy machinery that can kill people.
Might as well decorate their cars with warnings as well, like learners, e.g. "Warning, irresponsible driver".
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.
Seems like an over engineered solution. Revoking drivers license and seizing the car would be cheaper and easier to implement. We don't tolerate repeat offenders in most other circumstances. So why is it that you can keep breaking traffic laws without ever really being stopped from driving?
You don't want to devastate a person's livelihood if you can avoid it. I'd rather have an asshole with a nerfed car and a job than an asshole with no car, no job and way too much time on his hands.
For driving offenses, it's exponentially cheaper and easier to revoke driving privilege than to imprison the offender. Of course if someone ignores the ban and continues driving without a license, consequences would then need to escalate.
Because revoking a license doesn't stop someone from driving, and seizing the car doesn't stop a person from driving someone elses car.
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)
>doesn't stop a person from driving someone elses car
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 stop driving in places with stiff penalties for driving without a license. I used to live in a state that made driving with suspended or revoked license punishable by up to 3 months in jail. Repeat offenders would have their vehicle taken off of them. Taken off as in seized; it is no longer yours. It becomes a rather burdensome crime when the car they seized has a bank not attached to it. Having a car seized doesn't end your obligation to pay off the loan.
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.
The article says that 75% of people with revoked licenses continue to drive anyway. So yes… you’re completely right. But if you don’t take away their car, then that’s the car they are most likely to use (there is no excuse to borrow someone else’s car). So maybe this is a better punishment.
?? Yes it does. You presumably go to jail if you get caught driving without a license. Or do they not have legal penalties for driving without a license in virginia? If so, then it sounds like the problem is whatever dumb laws keep people that are driving illegally from going to jail.
Does anyone know why Virginia has always been so notoriously draconian about speeding? Is it DC-adjacent policy wonks outsized faith in the effectiveness of top-down prescriptions, lots of DC politicians flagrantly violating the law, culture clash between stuffy suburbanites and yokels (Virginia was the first place I ever saw a trans truck), or what?
Virginia also has the shameful distinction of being the only state in the USA to outlaw radar detectors (I think they are also outlawed in DC). Totally ridiculous and draconian. Anyone should be allowed to observe RF or lack of RF that gets broadcast to them.
No, they're both south of the Mason-Dixon line and Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. Texas is considered less South, culturally, than Virginia.
"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."
Yeah, I don't really consider virginia part of the south, culturally. Maybe it was different in the past but proximity to DC has rotted any of that away.
I can see parts of Virginia not feeling culturally like a lot of the rest of the south but I’m still intrigued by the use of yankee. Like is someone from Wyoming a yankee because they aren’t from the south or is it more cultural to you?
Nope, yankeedom as I see it is Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
There is another, semi-derisive, use in which it means any non-southerner. But that is less common and context-dependent.
We're talking about interstates though. And from my New Englander perspective traffic mostly self regulates without draconian speed limit enforcement, it's the slow end of the distribution that is far more scattered and worse for road safety.
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 really like the grids for cities. Say what you want about traffic in Houston or Dallas but, though they move tons of people, driving their is way, way better than e.g. Boston.
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.
Does nobody else see the pattern? Speed governers are dead-simple to install. They could be in all new cars within days through software. But they dont want simple. They want a system that needs to be installed by a contractor. Id bet good money that the people supporting these bills are the same ones who want the monopoly on the state-mandated service. If you have ever dealt with ankle monitoring companies, or those who install court-mandated breathalizers in cars, you know they are scum. They bid for/buy a state monopoly then set about milking people who have no other choices. Rather than simple software, they will want a byzantine system of install, monitoring and removal fees, preferably attached to every car in someone's household.
Yet another regulation to control people. Taking your freedom away one law at a time...
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 pretty clear at this point that people want this kind of control implemented, its in the ”zeitgeist”. I have not figured out why, but it does seem that people are more scared then ever.
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 agree. What's next? Controlling where, and when we can drive? The groups lobbying for this bill already say that they want mandatory, automatic, remotely-controllable speed restrictions on everyone's car - they will publicly tell you as much - from there, any further erosion of our liberties is just a software update away.
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.
> The 1/3 of annual traffic deaths caused by speeding
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
The main thing I would call attention to is: There are other governments around the world who have similar technologies required on their cars, and who have distributed that technology without much negative impact to their people. I might, if I were a Japanese citizen, trust the Japanese government to handle a technology like this with the care and respect it deserves; but we are not Japan. Do you trust the current American government to do the same?
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.
Franklin was born 200 years before the automobile and more than 300 years ago today. I doubt driving a giant metal box around at 100mph was what he had in mind for essential liberties.
That's why I just said it, not Franklin. Did you think that Franklin posted that comment? He's been dead for like 300 years bro. Last I checked I am fully aware of the benefits and risks of driving giant metal boxes around at 100mph, I live with it every day.
Because engines aren't designed to be run at max output. The fact that an engine can do 150 means it's a lot nicer to drive at 75. I've driven a car that has a top speed of 85 on a good day, with a tailwind and going downhill, and it sucked. Fine for city streets but in my state we have bits of highway that have posted speeds as high as 85 and realistically most people do 9-10 over on long roads outside cities.
Well 80 would be a bad limit; there are roads in Texas posted 85 which means you can do 94 without even state troopers hassling you. I don't want a static limit because I can't go race, and I don't want a dynamic limit because 1. it's not perfect and I'd really chafe against being limited to 65 or 75 as a fallback, and 2. I don't trust the government that once tried to put in a nationwide 55mph speed limit for non-safety-related reasons, and 3. I hate prior restraint. I believe it's generally wrong to limit normal, law-abiding people because of bad actors. So, if your argument is "this might be practical to reduce collision deaths", I'm not going to agree with you on that, because "reducing collision deaths" isn't as important as my values.
This law isn’t prior restraint - the state is trying to g to install these in repeat offenders’ cars.
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 have less of an issue installing these in the vehicles of repeat offenders but much of the conversation here has been around more general installation or mandating of governors.
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.
And out in the country, excessive speeding is less a problem. Fewer people to main and kill. Less density, so less chance hitting somebody’s stuff. Here in suburbia, designing it to be more walkable (or bus able) would give repeat offenders (speeding, DUI, whatever) another option vs driving.
VW and Audi MEB vehicles have an interesting difference: the ID.4 is limited to 100mph, while the Audi version with the same motors and platform is not limited to said speed.
From Newsome - "Federal law, as implemented by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), already regulates vehicle safety standards, and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations that undermines this longstanding federal framework. NHTSA is also actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal assessments."
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.
The vetoed California law would have required passive ISA, I.e. a dashboard light that comes on when it detects speeding, on all new vehicles sold in California.
High speeds are not an added feature of these vehicles. The power output required for practical acceleration also affords sustained high speeds. To prevent those speeds, manufacturers would have to add speed governors, which Americans would not be delighted to pay for (paying to have their freedoms restricted by bureaucrats, of course). Even if they came standard, speed demons could easily remove a governor.
My understanding is that vehicles already have speed governors that constrain them to the max speed rating of their tires.
(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)
I think a general speed limit for all vehicles would be a good idea. If you want it removed then your vehicle can't travel public roads, any kind of modification of it in secret would be a crime.
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.
EU includes Germany with its no-limit Autobahns. Left lane usually does around 180km/h, with occasional vehicles going way past 200km/h. Even 300km/h is not unheard of.
I kind of hoped more EU would become like that, not the other way round.
I am convinced after having spent time in Germany that for Autobahns to work in other countries, you'd need to import Germans to exclusively drive on them.
If you are used to driving in the US or in the central/South America, the German driver is basically an incredibly superior species from another planet.
When I visited, Autobahn left lane traffic seemed to be about 50% people in black Audis and BMWs tailgating and flashing their lights at other drivers who dare to only drive at 90MPH.
I grew up in Texas, but have spent most of my adult life in Germany. It's not that Germans are innately better drivers, it's that there's not the same level of cultural entitlement to a driver's license. Driving is a privilege, not a right. This causes them to take it more seriously.
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.
more people have driver license in los angeles metro area than entire country of germany :)
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…
It really is so obviously reasonable it makes you wonder why this isn't already in place. For instance e-bikes are all speed and power limited, why aren't cars?
I think this is a valid comparison. I believe eBikes are limited for safety of the rider and other cyclists they share the bike lane with, otherwise they would practically be a different class of vehicle and a menace. The exact same logic would apply to cars.
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.
No, they aren’t. The big brands’ sell limited e-bikes, but there’s a massive market for unlimited e-bikes that are basically electric motorbikes with nominal pedals to try and pass as bikes.
Well I mean, in Canada, Europe and the US these would be illegal if they're able to go more than 32, 25, and 40 km/h respectively. That doesn't mean there aren't illegal ebikes out there but I think the vast majority of e-bikes on the road comply with the legal limits.
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.
In my younger years groups of friends would rent time on racing tracks in Ontario and Quebec. Mecaglisse and Shannonville tracks were a couple that I drove on, at speeds of over 220kph.
This would be incredibly annoying. You what, have to tow your car to a track if you want to race? So now you need two vehicles?
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.
I don't know how much racing you do, but as far as I've seen, racers do tow their race cars to the track. They rent or own tow trailers and transporters.
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.
You are talking about serious people not street racers. This is not the demographic who's going down my street five nights a week at a hundred mph in clapped out mitsubishi.
It's a spectrum. If you're really serious you buy a trailer and all that. But people do bring their street legal cars to the track all the time. Either because they go to the track as an occasional hobby or they don't have the money to shell out for a second car just for racing (i.e. they're young).
Towing your racecar to the track is an incredibly common thing. You're going to be using your vehicle to its limits, things can go massively wrong. You don't want your only way home to break on the racetrack. Plus you probably have some amount of supporting equipment.
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.
My point is precisely that. How can you hope to encourage people to move to tracks if you require them to find a pickup that can tow cars there? If you keep closing down more and more tracks?
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.
> How can you hope to encourage people to move to tracks if you require them to find a pickup that can tow cars there? If you keep closing down more and more tracks?
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?
You are allowed to use the state to restrict the freedom of people who are going 100 in a 50MPH zone. You don't get to use the state to restrict people with a theoretical capacity to go 100 in a 50.
This isn't how I believe free societies should be constructed. It's morally wrong and I really don't care to share a society where people who believe otherwise get to vote, because it's an irreconcilable values break that has no place in America. Safetyists fit much better in places like Europe.
Not communist but this is basically at odds with how we should run. It's a great shibboleth for where people's values lie. I don't think I've ever driven a car without a seatbelt. It's stupid and has no benefit. But I am deeply opposed to any government that says someone must.
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.
I used to race cars. Driving a race car on the street is dumb AF. Rollcage will crush your skull if you aren’t helmeted and in the 6-point harness. Suspension is bone jarring (and expensive to maintain). The exhaust is not legal. And on and on.
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.
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.
Ha! I cut my teeth on Spec RX-7. I drove it to the track for a season and it was a terrible idea. The car was nominally legal (catalyst in place, full exhaust). But it was loud AF, the rollcage was dangerous on the street, and getting 4 race wheels in the back with a jack, tools, tent, etc was an endeavor.
Most street racers have some illegal modifications, but the guy driving the riced-out kia isn't really safety-conscious. The hope is to use punishment to shove those people towards tracks (which more people might use if they hadn't been pushed out by noise complaints and such).
Is the guy in the riced out Covic or whatever really interested in the track? Actual racing would require most car prep, different insurance (or none), more effort overall. The generic car person is doing it for social reasons, not because they want competition.
He might capitulate and put up with it if tracks were more common and not pushed out everywhere and if punishments for specifically street racing were increased. Plenty of places "takeovers" should be addressed by bringing about a dozen cop cars and arresting everyone but aren't.
Sure. Or if you don't want to have to tow a non-street-legal vehicle to move it on public streets, we could probably include a provision for GPS/vision-based dynamic speed limiting, allowing you to make your vehicle automatically street legally-speed-limited on public streets where others are at risk, and unlimited off public streets. The technology already exists and is very reliable for this.
Another method for the state to collect tax dollars. Speed limits have a very low effect on “saving lives”. People will drive whatever speed they think is suitable for the road they’re on.
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).
I would bet against these devices seeing widespread deployment or requirement. There are hundreds of counties around the rural US where a huge portion of their income comes from speeding tickets on vehicles on the one state highway going through their jurisdiction. Money talks louder than a few pedestrian deaths every year.
But... so many people are practically forced to exceed the limit just to keep up with the rest of the traffic that's already blowing past the limit. If you force a few people to go at the limit, that's frustrating for everyone behind them in the best case at best... and I imagine possibly even more dangerous in the worst case, no? If they're going to enforce then shouldn't they try to enforce it as widely as they can?
> that's frustrating for everyone behind them in the best case at best... and I imagine possibly even more dangerous in the worst case, no?
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.
Your link is about Waymo. It doesn't imply the same is true for human drivers. When I search around whether driving too slowly is too dangerous, basically every source I see says it is. Random example:
if slow driving wasn’t as dangerous (if not more), highways would not have minimum speed. would you personally choose cars driving 15mph on a highway you are on or 90mph? between those two choices, I’d choose 90mph any day of the week and twice on sunday
You must live somewhere warm. On Canadian highways 15 mph is just a fact of life a few times a year. I've never seen a Canadian highway with a minimum speed.
Of course! I did not mean that anyone should ever drive any speed that is too slow for given conditions, I have driven 5-10mph on higways with minimum speed of 45+mph during inclement weather.
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
No. No one is 'forced' to exceed the limit, not remotely, and there are plenty of drivers who, for a variety of reasons, drive at or under the speed limit (many large trucks, for example).
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.
What really messes up flow is traffic "waves"[1] and these are often caused by drivers hitting the brakes because they're following too closely or someone cuts in front of them aggressively.
Yes. Once I realized this, I tried to put a higher priority on maintaining a more steady average speed, even though that usually means leaving a larger gap ahead of me.
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.
I blame automatic transmissions. Stop and go traffic is hell in a manual, so there's a bigger incentive to maintain a constant slow speed instead of zooming forward then slamming the brakes.
It's always the fault of the tailgater. There are other ways to ask someone to move over like flashing your high beams. Tailgating just creates a dangerous situation.
In my experience, if someone is tailgating you in the right lane, then speeding up is not likely to make them tailgate you any less, because such a person is either not paying attention or intentionally being a jerk.
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.
I have never understood the chronic war on travel velocity. Its like the war on drugs, but far more pointless.
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.
Keeping sufficient distance doesn’t account for other lanes, where people could be entering or exiting your lane. Keeping all cars moving within 20-30 mph of each other make everything else more predictable. Saying that speed is not related to probability is just false. You can mitigate risks at higher speeds to a point, but higher speed is more risky just by the fact of human reaction times and that roads are not a simplistic system where the only factor is distance to the car directly in front of you.
The speed limits are set artificially low to try to reduce fleet fuel consumption, yet are well known to increase the probability of accidents since they violate the 85th percentile principle. Attempts to enforce the artificially low speed limits cause more collisions while claiming to be intended to prevent collisions. Given that, it makes perfect sense why he cannot understand it. It is unfit for its stated purpose.
Even more severe than high speed is driving while sleepy, but nobody is proposing a law to regulate sleep. Also more severe than speed is the mass of vehicle. Severity is also far more impacted by vehicle mass, but I don't see any movement towards regulating vehicles be as heavy as possible.
I can come up with many more examples to illustrate the stupidity of focusing on severity and speed versus frequency and probability.
> 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.
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.
High pedestrian traffic areas, such as school zones or city down town areas with one way traffic lanes enjoy the lowest speed limits because external factors are more important than the vehicle that is driving. These aren't areas where people are most frequently cited for speed violations, though, because those external factors are generally enough to enforce low speeds naturally.
Freeways, where drivers are overwhelmingly more likely to be cited for speed violations, are not high pedestrian areas.
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:
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.
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.
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.
After decades of reading internet news stories, my brain automatically starts deducting trust points as it encounters more adverbs.
> Tagesschau (famous for being considered a neutral, trusted source across most of the political spectrum).
Maybe in a parallel universe. /s
Here are the votes: https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1767611
ETA: click the "Votes" tab.
Which looks bipartisan with Democrats strongly for it and only some Republicans against.
Official state legislature bill page for future reference: https://lis.virginia.gov/bill-details/20251/HB2096
> 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.
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.
Wait -- I have to pay for a breathalizer in my new vehicle because other people can't follow the law? That's BS. I don't drink alcohol and I hate everything about this.
> That's BS. I don't drink alcohol and I hate everything about this.
But you might. Remember, everyone is a potential terrorist. /s
These were the sponsors.
Patrick Hope (D)*, Betsy Carr (D), Holly Seibold (D)
So, really not sure how the author got to "Republicans in Virginia"
The blurb at the top says "Republicans in Virginia", but the article body only mentions it was signed by a Republican governor. I think those blurbs are often added by someone other than the author, and that someone probably over extrapolated from the governor of Virginia being a Republican.
This would be a "man bites dog is news" thing; The pretense is that of course Democrats were in favor, but this time even a few Republicans relented and joined the vote.
lol I had shared the original article to a group with the comment "rare republican policy win" and then had to immediately retract that after reading your comment
Thank God. People on the roads are extremely reckless and we don't do anything about it. Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up. If you kill someone sober though, it's totally fine under our current system.
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.
Thats really only true for people with money. The problem isn't that current laws are insufficient, it is that the US justice system is largely based on profit motives, and people with money can make prosecutions against them unprofitable to push. You can bet your butt that if you went in to those same cases without the money to draw everything out for years that they would hammer you with fines and fees and programs and jail time.
> In my opinion, if you get caught driving recklessly, the punishment should be that you're banned from operating 4 wheel vehicles,
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.
>Driving scooters to work is impossible in many places due to distance or weather.
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.
> Maybe some folks need to take a moment to deal with a little discomfort.
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.
Meh. If a person can't be responsible while driving, then I don't really care what the consequences are for them; they shouldn't be on the road.
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.
Tickets can be disputed and many people make a livelihood without a vehicle.
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.
What's remarkable is that we already effectively banned kids from playing outside and drivers still kill many of the few that still try.
As a parent, these comments are always so weird to read. Kids play outside, including unsupervised still. Kids getting hit by drivers is statistically very rare (though no less tragic)
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.
Having a toddler who’s a runner radicalised me. Every walk outside required a death grip.
> Having a toddler who’s a runner radicalised me. Every walk outside required a death grip.
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.
It is like the road has some sort of lure for them.
I think it is implied that they are not allowed to by their parents and thus not killed?
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.
>... we already effectively banned kids from playing outside...
Do what now?
Once upon a time crossing the street meant walking across a 20 foot road with the occasional small car going 20-25 mph. Now it's a 4-8 lane stroad full of 6,000 pound trucks that can't see anyone shorter than 5 feet past the hood going 50 mph.
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.
>How far will you let your kid walk from home alone?
Pretty damn far, actually, as the parent of two.
From what age? I think people are talking past each other here.
There is a point in time between infant and adulthood were you have to start letting them play unsupervised.
> Now it's a 4-8 lane stroad
People weren’t letting their kids play near 8 lane freeways back in the day, either.
You missed the point, which is that many roads that used to be easily crossable roads are now 4-8 lane stroads.
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.
Is this a California or Texas thing or something?
The hyperbole in this thread is wild to see.
Maybe? I grew up in California. The streets where my dad lives are ludicrously wide
Every single residential street in America is full of cars parked or moving at 25+ mph. It's a miserable experience for anyone outside of a car and dangerous for smaller children who don't pay attention and can run into traffic.
>Every single residential street in America...
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?
If you want your kids to grow old and you live somewhere where cars are priority you don't have much choice but your backyard, a park or wilderness. And a backyard might not be super fun/big and parks and wilderness aren't accessible without an adult.
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.
Or move to the Netherlands. But even here it's getting worse fast.
Or Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Japan (I think?) and parts of many other countries as well.
If you chose to live in a car friendly suburb in Sweden that's on you rather than "society" I'd say.
As I said elsewhere, my neighborhood had a whole copse of kiddos, including my own, playing out and about throughout the streets this weekend.
/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.
>Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up.
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...
> 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.
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.
This sounds like high anxiety nonsense to mommy the rest of us.
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.
We speak of the Wild West as “lawless”. I assure you there were very much laws against murder and theft then. They just had sporadic enforcement. Much as roads and highways are in many parts of the country. In California I see racing, 100mph driving, weaving like mad. In the ride home from the airport I watched teenagers race and crash. Drunk driving all over wine country. Never once saw anyone like this pulled over.
The wild west is as equally misunderstood. There were far far fewer guns carried by people then compared to now and laws were well enforced even in sporadically populated areas. The exceptions were boom towns, like gold rushes, where the populations grew faster than norms could be established.
I guess if you don't see it then it must never happen to anybody ever. That isn't valid data.
I think allowing 2 wheel is not a good idea in those cases. In fact you should be even better to be allowed for 2 by I digress. You can still kill pedestrians and passers by.
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.
Where do you live where vehicular manslaughter is not being prosecuted?
Speed isn't the issue. Lack of education to get license in USA is, and of course DUI.
Repeat offenders should not be allowed to drive. In the UK we have 12 points, and lose them for various offences.
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!
> Get caught speeding more than once an year and you are guaranteed to lose your license.
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.
Around me so many areas were built to even be hostile towards anything other than a car. The business park I work in has no pedestrian/bike access without going through a few "take your life in your hands" intersections.
The problem with this model is that in a lot of places (especially in the US) public transit isn't a viable alternative to owning a car. So if your ability to drive gets taken away a lot of people just end up driving illegally. It's either that or lose your job, income and possibly home etc etc.
IMO a forced maximum vehicle speed is a useful middle ground option.
More people (and not just the poorer) needing to use the public transport will definitely have a positive impact on how much money it gets. And if it is being more strict with people who break driving laws, I don't see why that shouldn't happen.
You'd think, but that is largely not the way that political winds are blowing. There are very high rates of people who are driving vehicles illegally in states that consistently vote against public transit projects.
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.
>there is a perception among many of lower socioeconomic status
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.
Those things keeps the middle class from using it (outside of a couple of cities) or from voting for more public transit -- but it isn't the reason that poor people are driving without license/insurance -- which was what I was commenting on. Many of the poor in this country live in places that aren't well served by public transit, and probably won't be well served by any marginal investment in public transit. Most places in the US are generations behind in the investment that would need to be made both in terms of transit infrastructure and the housing infrastructure that would be necessary for viable public transit for the poor. Suburban sprawl is a huge challenge.
It's the killer of public transit everywhere. The ability to avoid such people is a huge benefit of individual transportation. Nobody sane wants to be subjected to stuff like that. Anyone saying otherwise is virtue signalling.
I’d argue not everywhere, it just requires a critical mass of “normal” (anti-anti-social?) people to use it.
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.
"make people depend on the thing and that will incentivize the government to make it better" feels like logic that doesn't play out in reality.
“Why should my tax dollars go to criminals who lost their driving privileges?”
The only problem is a decent percentage of people plead to the courts that they need their vehicle to work and hence get let off
That is true, but they should still face fines, lost points and higher insurance costs.
You're assuming they have insurance. I think it's something like 1-5 don't have insurance in Texas.
Interesting. It's illegal to drive without insurance in the UK.
It's illegal to drive without insurance in Texas as well.
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.
>Approximately 17% of drivers on California roads are uninsured, according to statistics from 2022 presented by the Insurance Information Institute. This means nearly 6 million drivers in California may be unable to compensate those injured in accidents.
/s/may be unable to/almost definitely unable to/g
What are the consequences?
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?
What are the consequences? For most drivers most of the time, they save a few hundred bucks a month. If caught, they'll issue a ticket with a fine that's about a month or two of insurance. Maybe their car will get impounded (unlikely). Maybe they'll face jail time with enough repeat offenses, but once again its unlikely they'll get pulled over in the first place. We'll just continue crushing the poor.
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?
It's all but illegal in the US too but the feedback loop of increased cost, increased regulation, increased mandates for insurance has driven up the cost enough that the baseline cost of compliance is so high that unless you're solidly in the middle class driving expired/unregistered beaters with no insurance and abandoning them to impound every now and then and/or pleading financial hardship with the courts is preferable.
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.
Most US states have similar point systems.
I agree with everything you’ve said.
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…
In NY, the limit is 11 points and being caught at 40mph above the speed limit will give you 11 points in 1 offense. The term super speeder tends to be used for these.
And if you get caught, you get jail time. What's the issue?
I really think there has to be more context to "speeding". I'm all against speeding, but being X over on a road (only motor vehicles) VS speeding in an are which is accessible by walking or biking should be treated differently imho
In NY, we operate on a 11 point system. Gain 11 points and lose your license.
I'm always amazed that people are allowed to drive again. I had a friend who was killed by an impaired driver. The driver got a 3 year sentence, no jail time.
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.
Totally agree. Vehicles are incredibly dangerous, and operating hundreds of them in concert with each other requires responsible participants. Allowing them to be used like toys for simpletons to play out some racing fantasy with is a serious danger to people just going about their lives.
At a certain point, aggressive driving and speeding should be treated like negligently swinging about a weapon. It should be treated seriously.
This is a rare case I support civil asset forfeiture: sue the car (in addition to criminal proceedings). Impound the car until fines are paid - which go into uninsured motorist funds - or else sell the car at auction and do the same. Will other parties' vehicles get impounded? Yes and that sucks. But either don't lend them your car, or else let the people closest to the offender pay the consequences more often than the current situation where random people in traffic pay financially or with life and limb for reckless drivers.
I hope you don't wonder why civil asset forfeiture persists.
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?
What other "pet issue" kills 40k people a year and injures 50-100x of that?
It's a huge issue which warrants radical steps.
> Multiply by everyone else and their pet issues and the whole damn thing gets paved.
Slippery slope fallacy. Why don't you refute the central point of what I suggested?
In the UK you also have police visit you over shitposts, and you receive incessant mail demanding you pay a license for owning a TV
Yes, they already have this type of point system in VA. What is the point of allowing this device when they will suspend or revoke your license after a few infractions. Additionally, you'd need to have generational wealth to afford the insurance at that point. On top of that, they have an extensive bus system in the northern VA area and biking routes so it would be pretty hard for someone to say they have some hardhip where you need to keep driving.
I think this will just be another thing leading us to full surveillance state.
I will say this as a car guy, Virgina has an exceedingly bad reputation among gear heads. If you look at virtually any east coast rally, they will all route around Virginia to avoid driving through it.
- 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.
I looked it up, in Virginia the highest interstate speed limits are 70MPH. They're 65 in New York, (and in other states), so it's patently untrue that they have the lowest interstate speed limits. Source: https://www.iihs.org/topics/speed/speed-limit-laws
It likely depends on the part of the state. There are famous parts of Virginia where the interstate is limited to 50mph and the police are some of the most productive in the country at giving tickets. These parts are connected to the parts that are 70mph, which causes people who did not notice the speed limit change to be ticketed. If they are so much as 1mph over 70mph when the speed limit changes to 50mph, it is a misdemeanor charge for reckless driving.
Sounds good to me. People shouldn't be driving 30 over. Reckless driving should be taken seriously. These don't sound anti-car. They're pro-life and safety.
The public doesn't take "reckless driving" seriously because it is not defined in a serious manner.
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.
Many places in the United States use speed traps as revenue streams, and in many of the same places in the US it's nigh impossible to get around without a vehicle.
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.
Read the article.
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...
> 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.
What percentage of people who would be effected by this do you think match this description?
I would imagine most. In my experience, laws intended to catch specific bad actors usually end up being enforced mostly against the easiest-to-catch mild offenders.
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.
The example above is bad but not by much. In the parts of NY outside the city, we have 65mph roads (state max speed limit) between large areas and 55mph roads between smaller areas. Doing 10 over in both is common with speeds being 65 and 75 respectively. Doing 15 over in a 55 is safe in many areas that I have driven and is 70mph, which is a safe speed to most states.
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.
There are cars that can go way over 100 mph, and they almost all speed controlled by software. High performance cars are often speed limited by software to about 150 mph. How is this legal? Cars with speed limits that high belong to the track, not public roads, with a possible exception for emergency vehicles.
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.
> with a possible exception for emergency vehicles
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.
> 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.
The era of the high-speed pursuit is basically over; you have "freeway speed pursuit" and "bear in the air" mostly these days.
> There are cars that can go way over 100 mph, and they almost all speed controlled by software. High performance cars are often speed limited by software to about 150 mph. How is this legal?
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/...
> 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.
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.
> The German autobahn infamously doesn't have a blanket speed limit and is about as safe as other European highway systems.
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.
Most people go below 130km/h on an autobahn. German drivers are pretty good and aware.
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.
It is challenging and expensive to get a driver's license in Germany, and the repercussions for screwing up are high. Also driving isn't as necessary--the excellent public transit means there are alternate means of traveling, so not having one is less of a detriment. So while the Autobahn might be considered the Platonic ideal of high-speed driving, it isn't always feasible or likely and I don't think it should be considered as such. As much as I wish we could have that in the US!
> excellent public transit
Traveling by train ... is it some sarcasm or you've never been to Germany?
Local transit is usually decent. Regional trains are also much better than the long distance ones.
The long distance ones are a disaster in Germany, whereas in the US, they don't meaningfully exist.
Phone usage while driving is a big one. Flat out looking down at your lap and texting, instead of looking at the road. I have seen people do this everywhere, in the city, in the highway.
I'm much more concerned about someone going 40mph in a 25 zone than someone going 110 in a 75.
They aren’t mutually exclusive. What reason is there ever for a car to go 110?
> What reason is there ever for a car to go 110? reply
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 utterly ignores any context of German drivers and roads vs those in the US, context that makes comparing the Autobahn (which doesn't have that many unrestricted zones, and even fewer times of day where you can actually stretch your legs due to traffic).
This reads like "I speed all the time and how dare you say it's a bad thing" cope.
You don't seem to have ever driven on a long, empty, well lit 4 lane carriage way at 4am in he morning. If I am going 70MPH (UK Motorway speed limit) or 120MPH in such a situation makes no difference in terms safety.
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.
Except the average person isn't a highways engineer and isn't aware of the road design limits which means 120mph can be unsafe even on a visually empty road.
Even the German autobahns are only unrestricted in specific stretches where someone will have done the legwork to demonstrate safety at those speeds.
> Except the average person isn't a highways engineer and isn't aware of the road design limits which means 120mph can be unsafe even on a visually empty road.
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.
The argument is mutually exclusive though. People going 80 in a 60 will be considered the same as those going 40 in a 20 and the punishments won't diverge between the two when they should. The latter is significantly more dangerous - especially to others.
Autobahns prove that it can be safe and reasonable.
Could that not be allowed by the GPS based limiter system that Japanese sports cars have used in Japan for decades?
if carOnAutoBahn { setLimiter(155) }
in german autobahns there are segments with limits, either because the road conformation does not allow "unlimited" or because of temporary road work
The Japanese GPS based limiters were accurate enough to handle that, when Top Gear tested them around 15 years ago.
The primary reason is political: people don't like the idea of the government living inside our cars 24x7, telling us how fast we're allowed to go. Even though most of us don't speed. Other examples of this phenomenon include:
* 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 that, but in this case it is not particularly authoritarian.
- 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 think you're logically correct. It's the feeling such a policy elicits which makes it untenable. I agree with your points conceptually, but the moment I would have to install a government speed limiter on my car is the moment I vote for someone else. It feels invasive, and I don't like feeling like the paternal hand of the government is all the way up my ass, controlling my gas pedal.
It's not about being paternalistic. It's about protecting others, not you.
> Even though most of us don't speed.
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.
I think you're probably right that most drivers are speeding but I will note that a sampling of drivers that pass you necessarily will not include any that are going your speed or slower. It doesn't take many drivers on the road to feel like you are constantly getting overtaken.
That's one thing I found weird driving in the US. Everyone consistently drove about 5 mph above the speed limit, which I ended up doing too as driving at the speed limit felt like being a nuisance, and was probably less safe too. I remember joking that American are so much into tipping that they even tip speed limits.
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".
I think the 5-10 mph above the limit that most people drive originates from the fact that police in most U.S. jurisdictions will almost never ticket someone going less than 10mph over the limit (except perhaps in school zones or construction zones). Due to that, the unofficial limit over time naturally drifts up to just under where you're likely to be ticketed.
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.
> Even though most of us don't speed
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.
One of those is not like the others. Speeding drivers kill innocent bystanders. Obesity, cigarettes or what not will just kill you. Speeding in a car is like swinging a machete in a crowd.
Is it so different? Obesity significantly increases societal costs. And given tradeoffs, those costs add up to other people's lives.
If safety were your overriding concern, you'd set the speed limit at 20 mph. Or better yet, 5.
People don't like the government telling you you can't leave the room you're in but if you break the law you go to jail. This is no different. As usual, anti-government people tend to miss the point completely and jump to extreme non-related situations. Having people who repeatedly break the speed limit have their cars adjusted so they can't do that but can still travel freely and drive anywhere they want is the topic here and you're talking about limits on free speech and government surveillance of our emails. This is not an authoritarian policy. If you break the law, you face consequences.
Extreme non-related situations? Not true at all. Cars are just computers on wheels. They can even be hacked. Remotely. They've got embedded cellular network connectivity. They've got microphones. They've got cameras. They've got goddamn privacy policies these days.
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.
How will my road legal car know when it’s on a track or a closed road? Some how putting a way to disable it defeats the purpose. If its GPS controlled, people will be spoofing GPS to remove the limit, just need a raspberry pie and some other components. You’ll have unintended consequences.
You could have steeper penalties for people who use those types of systems and then go on to get into accidents and kill people. I don't think first degree murder is beyond reason for someone who installs a defeater device and drives at 100 mph and kills someone.
They demonstrated the japanese system on topgear once, and it was disgustingly accurate. They drove onto a track and bing it opened up. No lag or anything.
This is a common turn of phrase in many languages in informal speech, using negative adjectives for emphasis, instead of positive ones. It carries a light humourus tone, as it kind of implies that the thing "had no right" to be as good as it was, so the speaker is "chastising" it for being so good.
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.
I’m picking the poster is from somewhere like UK/Au/NZ.
You’d see this here in NZ and not blink an eye.
Is a beautiful turn of phrase!
I personally would be perfectly fine with a default software limiter that can be disabled when you get to the track (or a German autobahn). If you get in an accident on a public road with the car in track mode… they get to throw the book at you
This!!
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
California tried to do this, the bill got watered down in committee [1]. It's probably true that purely GPS-based speed-limiting is not good enough. Imagine being on a 75mph highway with a 25mph service road right next to it and the GPS not knowing the difference.
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...
> People love their fast cars, especially the rich and powerful
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 reason I mentioned the rich and powerful is not in a sense that you have to get rich to drive fast. In fact, with a good motorbike, you can leave supercars in the dust for the price of the cheapest cars.
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.
Exactly. Otoh even the most patetic and slow cars can speed in urban zone with 30kph limit without problems.
The tricky part is definitely enforcement - as you said, if people can mod around it, it risks becoming another "only the responsible people obey" situation
Would assume the penalty would be the same as bypassing the court-ordered breathalyzer and getting caught.
> People love their fast cars, especially the rich and powerful
LOL. You have no idea. Street racers are usually people who have little or no money.
What about the Gumball rallies? If that’s not a wealth flex over the unwashed masses, I don’t know what is.
Because they spent it all on performance mods for their car.
No, because rich car enthusiasts can afford track time.
Performance mods are surprisingly affordable if you do all the labor yourself.
Speed limiters built into cars. Anti-infringement technology built into general-purpose computers. And yet, guns and ammo freely available and unrestricted outside of automatic weapons and the like? Yeah. Can’t wait to move off-grid someday. (Yes, obviously American)
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.
The problem is people who as matter of course travel above the speed limit regardless of if any other motorists are around them, as they are “playing by different rules”, making them more unpredictable and stressful for those around them.
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.
The question is, if everyone is speeding, would it not make sense to raise the speed limit?
Nope, because people are overestimating themselves. I know a couple of people who can do 2x the speed limit relatively safely, but this is because they were race drivers in a previous life. However, not everyone (incl. me) has that reflexes and situational awareness all the time.
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.
> Nope, because people are overestimating themselves. I know a couple of people who can do 2x the speed limit relatively safely, but this is because they were race drivers in a previous life. However, not everyone (incl. me) has that reflexes and situational awareness all the time.
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.
Exactly. This is why I used the word "relatively" there. Moreover, a prominent race driver, happened to be a friend of my dad, died because of the same unpredictability of the traffic.
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.
> "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".
Brilliant! That's so well put.
Explain how the German autobahn has fewer collisions than US high ways with lower than 85th percentile speed limits if the lower speed limits are such an advantage. Actual data does not support the idea of low speed limits. They are only in place as an attempt to reduce fleet fuel consumption, and hurt safety by causing big differences in vehicle speeds.
Germany (and many parts of the EU) have:
- _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.
You make a number of assertions, but you omit any concrete examples.
> 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.
As others have pointed out, the inspection standards are wildly different. Here’s [0] an amusing and eye-opening look at what is needed to restore an older vehicle to pass inspection. For example, removing surface rust on a spare tire mount. Even then, he still failed inspection [1], and goes into much more detail on the rigorous checks performed.
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...
Here is the NYS vehicle inspection program requirements:
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.
That’s great, good for New York. Now go get Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington to do the same. Also, remember that licensing reciprocity means that if I have a vehicle titled in South Carolina, nothing stops me from driving it into North Carolina.
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.
> That’s great, good for New York. Now go get Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington to do the same. Also, remember that licensing reciprocity means that if I have a vehicle titled in South Carolina, nothing stops me from driving it into North Carolina.
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?
> 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.
“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.
They also could introduce standards gradually by grandfathering older vehicles into the previous lack of standards, which is what NY did. Newer vehicles subject to the standards can be repaired to stay up to the minimum standard. This largely avoids the issue of impoverishment.
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 german driving culture is largely responsible for the lack of spectacular fatalities on the autobahn.
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)
Then instead of doing all of these increasingly draconian measures, perhaps we should try to copy the Germans. The interstate highway system itself was a copy of the German autobahn system. We should have copied it in all of its aspects. It is never too late to do this.
It's actually not possible in the US.
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).
As I said to someone else, look at NYS:
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.
It does seem reasonable to find out what works in other countries and pursue the most effective and freedom-preserving approaches.
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.
What interim? These are mutually exclusive approaches. Either you mimic what is known to work elsewhere, or you institute backward measures under the misguided claim that it helps. There is no embarking on both paths at once, since they involve doing largely opposite things.
The grand-parent suggested that the source of low German fatalities despite higher speeds is a driving culture that has respect for the "correct" way to do things.
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.
An example of a system that works well is usually the target of low-fidelity attempts to copy without understanding the fundamental principles that make it possible, I.e. copying the obvious form, but ignoring the cultural underpinnings. Also, muh freedoms. And I don’t need no edumacation, I ken drive jest fine.
Unfortunately, the USA has a weird version of the noble savage mythos that enshrines ignorance.
The Germans avoided speed limits on the autobahn specifically because they viewed it as a form of freedom. Your remarks about ignoring cultural underpinnings seem misplaced.
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.
It sounds like NYS is very progressive. My exposure is anecdotal, but I don’t think that level of vigilance is the norm across the expanse of the interstate system.
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.
I felt safer doing ~110mph on the Autobahn than doing 70 here in Arizona.
> Explain how the German autobahn has fewer collisions than US high ways with lower than 85th percentile speed limits if the lower speed limits are such an advantage.
There is no reason in the world to assume that US drivers have the same level of driving skill as German drivers.
> 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.
> the notion of Germans being intrinsically superior
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.
That does not state how they would be more skilled. NYS has requirements on drivers too. You must satisfy pre-licensing requirements:
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.
Yes, I recall there was a war fought.
Intrinsically, of course not, but how about due to laws/culture/training?
Then it is possible to replicate German success in vehicle safety in the U.S. without increasingly draconian speed limit restrictions. As for laws/culture/training, look at NYS:
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.
That’s a straw man. Nobody is saying Germans have some “safe driving” gene, but rather that German culture has higher standards for driver training and enforcement. 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.
The way he worded his reply suggested some sort of intrinsic superiority that by definition could not be replicated anywhere else.
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.
> The way he worded his reply suggested some sort of intrinsic superiority that by definition could not be replicated anywhere else.
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...
Well for one you have to take an actual driving test? Police that regularly enforce traffic violations. And really gruesome accidents.
I cannot speak for other states, but NY requires a driving test and has police regularly enforce traffic violations too. None of this supports the idea of setting highway speed limits below the 85th percentile or even having high way speed limits. It instead suggests that we should copy the Germans.
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.
Let’s start by copying the German requirement that all new cars have intelligent speed assist systems.
KE = ½mv² shows that kinetic energy is directly proportional to the mass of an object and proportional to the square of its velocity. This means that doubling the mass doubles the kinetic energy, but doubling the velocity quadruples the kinetic energy.
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.
This is the most annoying thing, they risk the lives of themselves and everyone around them and gain at most 1-2 minutes on 30 minute drive.
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.
My favorite pastime in traffic is to pull next to the person who was speeding and doing aggressive lane changes at the next red light by driving completely calm and under speed limit, and even without changing lanes.
Consider how none of this matters if the vehicle never touches another object. If motorists reach their destinations sooner, then there are fewer cars on the road. This naturally increases the average distance between vehicles. Bad things only happen when those distances reach 0, so higher average distances inhibit collisions.
> KE = ½mv² shows that kinetic energy is directly proportional to the mass of an object and proportional to the square of its velocity. This means that doubling the mass doubles the kinetic energy, but doubling the velocity quadruples the kinetic energy.
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.
I don't think anyone was looking at the kJ numbers and going "ah that makes sense". I put 3 examples to show the relativity, it's still squared to the relative crash speed.
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.
The number of people I see on the highway driving 20mph over and weaving through traffic or driving like 30ft behind the car in front of them is alarming. These behaviors are just simply less safe.
This makes sense until they mow down a pedestrian just trying to cross the street.
It does make sense. See the 85th percentile speed:
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.
That's just drivers normalising the breaking of the speed limits. If you raise the limits just because drivers are going faster, then the drivers will just increase their speeds until again, a majority of drivers are breaking the limit.
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.
> If you raise the limits just because drivers are going faster, then the drivers will just increase their speeds until again
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.)
> Their objective was "drive at the speed which is safe for this road"
Not really. The problem people are not prioritizing safety, they are rushing in an ego fueled spasm of disobedience and disrespect.
> 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.
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.
> I think the better alternative s to design roads so that drivers naturally travel slower, or at least the careful ones do.
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.
I dislike how you think.
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.
Driving 10 mph above the speed limit on a highway at every opportunity will only lead to a very limited reduction in travel time, because you spend a lot of time breaking (i.e. to avoid crashing into law-abiding drivers, reacting to speed controls, etc.).
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).
> breaking
Braking
Failure to drive 70 mph on a highway posted at 60 will (very often, road depending) result in far more cars overpassing you. Each instance of passing carries a small but definite amount of risk; it is safer to match the speed of the other cars on the road than to obstinately stick to the limit and get passed hundreds of times in a single trip.
(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.)
Everyone doing 60 doesn't see each other because we're all doing the same speed, the ones going faster are the dangerous drivers.
When everyone is driving beyond the speed limit, the ones actually obeying the speed limit are the dangerous drivers. It is unfortunate that speed limits in the US have not corresponded to how people actually drive since 1973.
How does this make sense? If I'm driving the speed limit and someone else is crashing into me from behind while speeding, they are the dangerous driver. No matter how many other people also ignore the speed limit.
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...
That's the US philosophy and it's why road deaths per mile are so bad there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
That is arguably more aligned with the German philosophy given the no speed limit autobahn and road deaths per mile are not so bad there.
A similar method is in indeed used in many jurisdictions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Operating_speed
There are advantages and disadvantages as with everything.
This is correct. Laws should reflect the values of the democratic consensus, speed limits included. If almost everybody is traveling at a speed other than the posted speed limit, whether that's faster or slower, that is a strong signal that the speed limit needs to be adjusted. Speed limits should be set such that most people naturally think the limit is a sensible speed to drive anyway.
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. If almost everybody is traveling at a speed other than the posted speed limit, whether that's faster or slower, that is a strong signal that the speed limit needs to be adjusted.
Is democracy only for drivers?
If almost everyone is going a speed other than the speed limit I'd agree something should be done. But it's quite a leap to suggest the thing that should always be done is to change the speed limit. Maybe the roads should be restructured and add traffic calming. Maybe through traffic should be encouraged to use an alternate route. It's not like speed limits are the only lever one can use.
So if most people keep speeding past the elementary school and kindergarten, we should raise the speed limit on that street?
These are objectively endangered places. A highway in the middle of nowhere, with reasonably well maintained roads and even terrain however?
Sure, but the parent comment didn't leave any room for nuance or considerations, instead broadly stating:
> 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.
I’ve never met a person taking high risk actions who thinks they are unqualified to do so. But they always think some other people are.
This whole thread confirms it. Speed limits are always a burden for reckless drivers, but never an issue for people like me who drive under the limit. They should reflect on themselves about that but I doubt they are capable of it.
Driving under the speed limit is just as dangerous as someone driving way over the speed limit on the freeway.
If you are doing 45 on a California freeway, YOU are the danger. Not the car going 75. You.
You’re not American, are you? The number of roads marked 55 mph on which nearly every vehicle is moving 75 mph is very high. Driving under the speed limit would be hazardous to yourself and everyone else.
Other countries tend to follow the 85th percentile for setting speed limits, so driving under the speed limit is actually safe there. People in them do not realize that a road that would be 140 km/h in Europe is 90 km/h in the U.S.
I have tried driving at the speed limit in NYS. So many near collisions occurred from other drivers cutting me off that it was clear that the speed limit is unsafe.
I forget the scientific term for this — but 95% of people think they are above average at doing X skill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
[Edit: Interesting that there are multiple effects, e.g. the sibling comment, that refer to similar but distinct phenomena!]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect
That’s weird, because just think about how unskilled the average person is — and then realize that half of ‘em are even worse.
Isn't this sort of just the Dunning-Kruger effect?
No, Dunning Kruger is that skilled people are better at judging where they are on the skill spectrum.
This also explains why the best engineers are also the best at admitting what they don't know. Which is something we have worked into our interviews - amazing how easy it is to spot a poor engineer by asking what their latest failure was.
This is generally true for actions at every level of risk. Designing around how humans will actually behave is better than trying to artificially restrict everyone's behavior preemptively.
[citation needed]
Preemptively restricting the space of possible (or likely) situations is the cornerstone of designing safe systems.
That seems like the result of a normal skill level distribution that allows some people to take more advanced actions at the same risk level. Interesting how there is never a push to punish people who actually cause wrecks with this technology.
Every boy racer thinks “look at me, controlling the vehicle easily at 90mph! I’m clearly amongst the high-skilled group!” but the skill that actually matters is reaction time to sudden unexpected hazards (and consequent need for stopping distance) and I don’t think most people get enough practice at that to be materially better than average at it.
> the skill that actually matters is reaction time to sudden unexpected hazards (and consequent need for stopping distance)
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.
I see those rarely, mostly (SoCal) I see people going much faster than other traffic on a 6 to 12 lane freeway that is packed with cars, cutting people off, swerving across lanes, not signaling, treating driving like a video game except the people they kill don't get to restart the game.
More like a normal cognitive level distribution that let some people put themselves and bystanders in unnecessary danger because they "know" they can handle it.
Car insurance does that
Lol, that is pretty ineffective and mild compared to say pumishment for a dui. we need 6 months interlock attention monitoring for accident causers.
> take more advanced actions
that makes such a person unpredictable, and a road danger.
Firearms are a constitutionally enshrined right - driving is not. For the vast majority of Americans, cars represent a significantly higher threat than assault by gun [1]. We also let drivers flagrantly and repeatedly break the law and negligently kill people with essentially near-impunity. The same cannot be said for firearms.
[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
> I’ve got enough sense to keep it slow and safe in populated areas, yet occasionally open it up elsewhere when conditions are right.
Is this a reference to your driving, or your shooting?
Both. Driving is much scarier in terms of kinetic energy, anyway.
You may be surprised to learn how much kinetic energy is possible to wield in terms of man portable firearms that are also legal for purchase.
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.
No I wouldn't be surprised at all :)
A Toyota Corolla going 65MPH is a lot of kinetic energy.
And yet pedestrians would understandably get very nervous if there were a bunch of people firing those rifles along a typical street, yet they have learnt to accept the risk that comes with car-heavy traffic.
At 20mph in a well-designed street, there’s still a lot of opportunity for people to keep themselves safe. Not so much with guns.
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.
Love this, thanks! Sadly haven’t found time to go shooting in years. And am always careful not to point either of these things (cars, guns) at other drivers.
Fyi, this is being written from public transit. You didn’t think I would actually drive to work, did you? ;-)
The problem with an American autobahn is that someone will inevitably be driving 55mph in the fast lane.
So true, because it’s their right to do so, so screw everyone else.
Speeding kills much more people than guns. It also kills much more innocent outsiders (a lot of gun death are suicides or gang infightings).
It also introduces atmosphere of terror on public roads making walking or cycling dangerous. It's a way bigger problem than guns.
Gun deaths: 46,000 Car deaths: 40,901
Gun utility: small Car utility: large
(data from CDC and NHTSA for 2023)
I feel like intentional self-inflicted gunshot deaths should be removed. Not to say you still aren’t correct.
If you want to make a fair comparison, then one-sided car accidents should be removed too.
No, they're not intentional, they're accidents. And can be reduced by traffic laws and speed limits.
Suicides (that is, guns) are intentional.
Most car "accidents" are intentional - drivers are choosing to speed (35%), drive intoxicated (30%), or scroll tiktok (15%) rather than pay attention to the road.
Exactly. People rarely purposely kill themselves in their cars.
I was wrong about absolute numbers, still if you subtract suicides and gang infightings reckless driving kills and hurts way more people.
>>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.
> Gun utility: small
For you.
Considering the whole world, gun utility for the civilian population is clearly much smaller than car utility. You will also find even in US a higher number of individuals that have at least one car VS number of individuals that have at least one gun.
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.
Yeah but it's about utility of cars but speeding in cars.
I am not comparing the relative utility of cars and guns, but questioning the claim that the utility of gun ownership is small.
If you're not in a warzone or deep in a jungle needing to fend of jaguars the utility of a gun is likely extremely small.
Assuming you have high utility for guns, what do you use it for? Hunting?
I'm no hunter and have never felt like I need a gun.
I'm guessing you've never lived in a rural area?
* 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.
I lived mostly in rural areas but this still sounds too wild. Are US rural areas so dangerous? Especially aggressive humans? I've newer felt that I need the gun to protect myself, but than again I do not live in a place where 'aggressive humans' could easily[0] have a gun.
[0] As it is harder to obtain gun on illegal market when it is harder to obtain one on legal market.
Most of the time I don't need a puncture repair kit / spare inner tube when cycling, but when I have a puncture I really need it.
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.
Except it's the other way around? Some people here claim that they do feel the need for a gun. However, if that's true, then it's surprising that in most counties with stricter gun (i.e. most counties) laws don't agree.
No it isn't the other way around. Some young men (in the UK) in high crime areas will carry them illegally because it makes them feel safer. UK has strict gun and knife laws.
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...
> what do you use it for?
recreational shooting. Though that's not exactly high utility
Just as mutually assured destruction brought lasting peace on the international scale, widespread civilian ownership of military weapons has also been a remarkably effective deterrent and safeguard against would-be tyrants across history. If both Karl Marx and the US founding fathers agreed that a well-armed public is important for a lasting civil peace, it's probably a good idea to listen.
[citation needed]
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.
All democracies before the current era began as revolutions. Roman plebeians were well armed enough that the state could never become too abusive towards them. English democracy, and the entire modern idea of constitutional democracy itself, came about because 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. Some of the most peaceful and healthiest democracies in the world are also the most heavily armed: look at Switzerland for an example. 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, and that the weapons themselves never have to be used. Civil institutions can be captured over time by corrupt interests, but it's quite difficult to capture an empowered public.
Your prior comment spoke of "deter and safeguard against tyrants". No you argue based on the "beginnings" of democracies. These are different things.
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.
>Trying to guard against tyranny by increasing private gun ownership is dumb
Worked once
Great. Even accepting your case (I assume you mean the US revolutionary war, which, for the record, I don't think is that great of an example to begin with), you provide a n=1 in support of your argument.
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).
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.
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.
>Is there any example of a widely armed society that nevertheless succumbed to classical authoritarianism from the inside?
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.
> If both Karl Marx and the US founding fathers agreed that a well-armed public is important for a lasting civil peace, it's probably a good idea to listen.
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...
To be frank, it hardly seems to have helped the United States out of their current constitutional crisis. Compulsory preferential voting is a much better protection against tyrants.
> Compulsory preferential voting is a much better protection against tyrants.
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.
>> This guarantees worse outcomes.
[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.
It's a safeguard in addition to, not in replacement of, other measures.
>a lot of gun death are suicides or gang infightings
Oh, that's OK then, they clearly don't matter.
Yes, a gang member's life matters 10^large times less than that of a regular guy walking down the street.
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.
> or gang infightings
Gangs have easy access to guns when everyone does.
They also do when everyone doesn’t.
Not really. When guns are illegal they're harder to get even on black markets. Gangs usually resort to the next most powerful weapon like knives.
<< And yet, guns and ammo freely available and unrestricted outside of automatic weapons and the like? Yeah. Can’t wait to move off-grid someday. (Yes, obviously American)
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.
What do you mean by "when conditions are right"?
I agree with you that guns are a an insane problem. However, that shouldn't discourage us from solving other unrelated problems when the solutions present themselves.
We haven't really figured out how to balance personal freedom with public safety when it comes to cars
There are lots of restrictions on guns.
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.
Ehh the roads are public property. I don't think its unreasonable that if you want your car to be registered to drive on a public road it needs some sort of speed limiter. Its about the same level of infringement on your personal rights as requiring a car have seatbelts. Feel free to buy a car with no limiter or no seatbelts and drive it on your own private roads as fast as your heart desires.
Some kind of exoskeletons to control people just walking around in public, too. Stop them doing bad things.
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.
This is complete nonsense. You could say this for literally any law.
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.
Cars have to have seatbelts, but that's different from having to not work unless they're buckled.
>And yet, guns and ammo freely available and unrestricted outside of automatic weapons and the like?
They are not. This is a very common misconception. I suggest you go purchase one at a gun store.
I'm all for stronger enforcement of speed limits to save lives (e.g. ticket everyone over the speed limit with cameras automatically, no cops needed), but requiring shit to be installed into someone's car doesn't seem effective. They could just disconnect it.
This device doesn't make it easier to catch speeders, what it does is give a way for habitual speeders to stop speeding. The primary goal is no doubt that these people will simply stop breaking the law now that there's a device there helping them do that without the need for further law enforcement. To the extent that fails though, it's a measure which makes it reasonable to increase penalties and thus increase the level of deterrence.
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.
I'm not sure that intent should be at all relevant. If you're not capable of routinely keeping the vehicle within the speed limits, then perhaps you shouldn't be driving it?
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".
I don't understand the argument about "judging your speed". Isn't there a speedometer prominently displayed in every car in the USA as well? You don't have to "judge" anything, just read the number the speedometer shows - is it above or below the speed limit?
You can't keep a constant eye on both the road and the speedometer. Further, you might have missed the last speed limit change or remember it incorrectly. It's also possible for the speed sensor in your car to be faulty or out of calibration. This happens if you change the size of your wheels/tires significantly without reprogramming the ECU - and that setting isn't made available to the owner of the vehicle, at least not in most cars I'm aware of¹.
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.
> 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.
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.
My 5-year-old Volvo reports 73-74 mph when GPS tells me that I'm exactly at 70mph. Similarly 21 mph when GPS says 20.
My experience from all the cars i have driven is that GPS shows 3-5km/h less than the car does. (In Europe)
That's actually a legal requirement (had to google some to get the source): [0]. And a graph: [1]
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:42...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/16mquqv/sp...
The graph seems a bit too much. It says that GPS 110 means ~125 on the odo. Although from personal experience I'd say it's more around a delta of 5 at those speeds, and 3 for lower speeds.
it has to fall somewhere in the shaded area. So if it shows 125, then the actual speed must be between 125 and 110 at worst.
Oh for sure they are not far off, but they always round up to be safe.
Most modern cars phone home on lte/4g/5g. Police could auto-ticker speeders if they wanted to today. Probably don't want people to know how ubiquitous the tracking already is though.
I am not sure why you are being downvoted. The potential for abuse is clearly in place. It did not happen in our timeline yet, because it would likely cause an uproar, but to me writing was on the wall, when, way back when, Elon sent an update to a Tesla during a disaster to change a battery behavior.
As an Hardware designer I don't think that is the problem nowadays. Make it physically hard to remove and add a gps tracker to the unit and if it doesn't move for a few days, have them proove to you it wasn't tampered with. Then the only way to do it is to break the thing open and simulate trips that match yours all the time, which requires you to MITM the connection between the GPS and the microcontroller.
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.
You’re forgetting a step - which, being a hardware designer instead of a lawyer, is understandable.
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.
Maybe. But driving is not a constitutional right.
Break the law enough and you can be provided two options - revocation of license or installation of limiter.
We already require breathalyzer interlocks be installed for habitual DUI drivers in a majority of states. This is an extension of that same legal principle. Road access is a privilege (as evidenced by the requirement to have a driver’s license and vehicle tags).
https://www.ncsl.org/transportation/state-ignition-interlock...
You mean, like, AT&T and phone calls?
No I did not forget it, I was responding to an technical argument with an technical answer. And I am the type of person who wouldn't design such a system if you held a gun up to my head.
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.
The technical aspects of this seem concerning. I'm wondering exactly who has the authority to set a car to this mode and how the mechanism of doing so works. What happens if you sell the car or let somebody else borrow it? Or when you get another car, or rent one? What are the failure modes of it, like if the GPS glitches a little and decides you're on a feeder or surface road when you're actually on a freeway? I think we've all seen GPS guidance devices do that.
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!
> What happens if you sell the car or let somebody else borrow it?
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.
Going the speed limit is an onerous burden?
I read GP as sarcastic, as in it’s not an onerous burden at all
It’s gotten me aggressively tailgated and subjected to dangerous passing.
Sounds like it would have been better and safer for society if the tailgater had a speed limiter.
A little while ago I was doing 20mph in a 20 zone and got overtaken by someone on an electric bicycle lol
Which I have no problem with, since an ebike/pedestrian collision at 25 mpg would be less serious than a vehicle/pedestrian collision at 15 mpg.
How is being prevented from going 10 mph above the posted speed limit in the car of someone convicted of speeding over 100 mph an onerous burden? The car is the property of the person convicted of speeding and sanctioned with an ISA. If someone behaves reckless with their gun in a way that obviously endangers others, is taking their gun away an onerous burden to a neighbor who may borrow it?
...like if the GPS glitches a little and decides you're on a feeder or surface road when you're actually on a freeway
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.
It 100% happens repeatedly to me (my car has the little "tell you the speed limit" feature). It'll suddenly say the limit is 30 because the GPS thinks I'm on the feeder road nearby.
To account for such errors the limiter should probably set the limit to the highest of any road within ~50 m, with a possible exception for school zones that aren't immediately adjacent to highways.
I bet all the insurance companies tracker apps and dongles make good money off that bug.
I recall hearing about Japan putting speed limiters in all cars and using GPS to determine the road and therefore speed limit to set the limiter dynamically in vehicles. (Perhaps some details are wrong or confabulated; regardless, it’s a neat idea.) I’m in favor of such a system in theory; I’d be concerned about privacy issues but there’s no reason for such a system to require driver identification anyway.
My family rented a car in England last summer, and this was an optional feature of the car. I didn't want to try it out on my first time driving on the left, so I didn't turn it on. Moreover, the speed limits on the motorways were changing in real time. I observed very little speeding -- almost none.
You’ll have been on a variable speed zone of the motorway which is covered in cameras to enforce the limit reductions. People tend to behave themselves when they think they’ll lose their toys.
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.
My car has this feature and a method to read signs but it cannot read white exception signs. There are plenty of speed limits when wet signs which get cought by the thing as normal signs.
And the maps are continuously outdated so lots of smaller roads simply do not work properly.
They have a ton of speeding cameras which is probably why.
My experience driving in NZ was that people generally drove the speed limit +/- 10% or so, and speeding cameras certainly weren't ubiquitous.
Some places might just have a more sane driving culture?
I guess it would work as a breath alcohol ignition interlock device when reselling.
I.e. you just remove it.
That's what happens if you sell the car. What happens if the thing thinks the speed limit on a 65 MPH highway is 30 MPH? Or you have some emergency situation where a higher travel speed is a matter of life and death?
Machines should never enforce laws because they don't have the ability to know when doing so would be unreasonable.
> Or you have some emergency situation where a higher travel speed is a matter of life and death?
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...
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7879393/
> 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?
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.
> What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?
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.
> What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?
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.
Wildfires move fast and "a wildfire is likely" is a condition that can persist for months on end in some places.
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.
People with that medical condition should make alternative plans. If you are an alcoholic, so much so that you have driven drunk so many times that you were caught and convicted multiple times and required to have an interlock device installed, then you need account for that. There are plenty of people who don’t own a car at all, so lets not pretend that we are talking about taking away someone’s pacemaker.
You are really reaching here. We're talking about speed limiters on cars, not accidentally murdering alcoholics who would be able to escape from a wildfire by speeding except that they can't drunk drive because their car has a breathalyzer on it.
I would instead say that people who cannot legally drive should avoid living in places where driving is likely to be essential to their survival. But also I have nothing but contempt for drunk drivers. If you're addicted to alcohol, there's a simple solution: don't drive, at least not at the same time you're drinking. Maybe plan a little. You have to spend a lot of time placing your petty convenience over the lives of others before you get your license taken away.
I agree with you that the road deaths caused by repeat offenders outweigh their personal safety, but if a b-double decides to side-swipe you when you're next to its cabin then you're going to need to accelerate past the speed limit for a few seconds.
Train crossings. I live in a port city with tracks that run right through the middle of the city. No, the safety lights don't always work. No, you can't always hear them coming. Yes, I've had to floor it to avoid being hit. This just seems like a bad idea on the face of it to me. It makes people drive in a way that other drivers may not expect them to, and that's always dangerous.
This isn't an acceleration limiter. How fast did you need to be going to cross those tracks before the train arrived? And why was stopping not an alternative? Are you a stunt driver for '70s action movies?
I don't understand this scenario, how long is the piece of track that you had to clear? Does the road not simply cross over the track? Even at 10km/h, you'd clear the <2m of track in 0.72 seconds, barely enough time to notice the train was coming and start accelerating. Is this instead a situation where you were nearing the track with too much speed to stop before reaching it, so you had to accelerate instead to clear it?
It's a bit more than 2 m because trains are wider than the tracks. In the US they can be up to 3.25 m wide and in Europe up to 3.15 m wide.
Trains move quickly enough that even someone on foot may not hear them before being run over. It's why one should never walk along railroads.
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?
if you are a serial speeder that has been caught multiple times doing 100+ mph, then maybe you shouldn't be speeding over the train tracks in the first place. Maybe, go over them traveling, you know, the speed limit so you will be able to floor it for a couple of seconds if need be.
> some emergency situation where a higher travel speed is a matter of life and death
Can you describe such a situation?
I can't think of anything other than completely unrealistic action movie scenarios.
California wildfire evacuations, maybe, in very specific edge cases. But even then I very much doubt it would matter much, given how actual videos out of those incidents show relatively low-speed caravans with limited visibility from smoke.
Medical emergencies are not "unrealistic action movie scenarios". If my family member is bleeding and I'm driving them to the ER, I don't and shouldn't have to care about precise speed limits.
If you're in that situation and you've already broken the speed limit so flagrantly multiple times that the courts have installed a speed limiter, that family member may well be safer waiting for the ambulance.
The grandparent poster was asking a broader question about automatic enforcement in general, and when it would be appropriate to avoid enforcement.
Is there any correlation between speeding tickets and the probability of getting into an accident at a given speed? If you have to exceed the speed limit by 20 MPH today, better the person who does it all the time than the person who isn't used to it, no?
> Is there any correlation between speeding tickets and the probability of getting into an accident at a given speed?
“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...
how long did it take you to find a study from a country known for driving like new zealand to make this crazy claim?! surprising the study is not like from 1950’s :)
> how long did it take you to find a study from a country known for driving like new zealand to make this crazy claim?
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.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4851372/
speed limits, if majority of cases are not about public safety but generators of revenue. if we all started driving the speed limit the number of accidents would not be significantly reduced while many, many cities/counties/… would fully go bankrupt. I have spent more than a decade in state&local courts records management business and can tell you this first-hand. you can cool deals if you just pay the fine and don’t come to court at all and neat stuff like that. speed limits never were and never will be about public safety
This is a false dichotomy. You seem to think that the way speeds are enforced, with a focus on revenue generation, means that speed limiting is only for revenue generation. That is just not true. At higher speeds your reaction time, combined with stopping distance increases, mean that you need more warning and space to avoid hazards. Cars pulling out of driveways/side streets/parking lots, cars changing lanes, cars stopping to turn, pedestrians crossing roads, bicycles, etc. all take time and space to respond to. That is why we don’t have home driveways or crosswalks on a freeway. We have 15-25 mph school zones because children can and do behave unpredictably and may dart out into traffic, so a drive will have almost no time or space to respond.
This goes in complete opposition to every single study ever performed on this matter. Higher speed very directly translates into higher risk of accidents and higher risk of fatalities or serious injuries per accident. Now, it's true that there are cases of occasional unscrupulous places placing onerous speed limits only to force fines (I've seen places on highways that are normally 100 km/h that have a short portion of 30km/h on flat straight land with no houses around, but with a good place for a police car to stay hidden), but these are the exception and nowhere near the rule.
The typical "it's not incrementalism" response.
Have you seen emergency vehicles in city areas going to an emergency? Unless they are willing to cause more injuries on their way, they can’t just casually speed to your destination. They’re pausing and making sure people notice them or hear their sirens before running the red light or driving in the wrong lane.
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.
I thought about specifying the exact degree of increased risk I would actually be willing to accept, but saw that it took up as much space as the rest of my post. Suffice to say, I would still be careful.
This kind of thinking is what gets people killed. Lights and traffic are what keep you from getting to the hospital. So you would be driving too fast to stop in time for lights or cars pulling into the road, while distracted, and hit someone. No wonder they installed a speed limiter on your car. You’re a public menace.
If you're driving a bleeding family member to the ER, I'm especially concerned about your ability to drive safely and concentrate on the road. You don't want to turn one emergency into two or three, and your main obstacle on the way to the hospital will probably be traffic, not speed limits. High speed collisions are typically fatal and it's not okay to kill yourself or a pedestrian on the way to the hospital.
If your family member is bleeding to the point where this will make a notable difference you should be staying with them, applying direct pressure and a tourniquet, not letting them bleed out in the back of your car while you race to the ER.
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".
Almost all decisions have downsides. This is not by itself a reason to avoid the decision. We compare the costs against the benefits.
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?"
Here's a solution--in an emergency, you can override it but you get a massive fine that can be removed if deemed to be true emergency.
> What happens if the thing thinks the speed limit on a 65 MPH highway is 30 MPH?
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
I not infrequently see my GPS decide that I’ve taken an exit and am on the parallel local road rather than still on the expressway.
> What happens if the thing thinks the speed limit on a 65 MPH highway is 30 MPH?
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.
Also: Maybe your family has two or three cars, but only one of the people in your family needs this "enforcement". Which car do they nerf?
Same as with breathalyzers. They'll start off with ones registered to the offender because otherwise the law wouldn't pass. Then, 5yr later, at the behest of the interests running the breathalyzer/speed limiter company, they change the law to be "all cars at this address".
The idea of limiting reckless driving makes sense in theory, but once you start handing over control to software (and whoever manages it), the edge cases get really messy. GPS errors, ownership changes, rentals
Will it be widely implemented? This is only for repeat offenders, which the article says would affect less than 2% drivers.
Also, glitch does not look like a big problem, since for now the system will only verbally warn, just once.
Cities can replace smooth asphalt with rough brick and cobblestone, and replace traffic lights with traffic circles / roundabouts. If they really want to force cars to slow down, they could, in a way that doesn't take anyone's rights away and doesn't require any vehicle manufacturer to play ball.
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.
Yes, lets just reorganize and rebuilt the entire city infrastructure to fix bad behavior by a few people. I don't want to actually oppose your suggestions because I think they are all good, but I also think that if a person repeatedly breaks a law then that is precisely the circumstances under which their freedom can be decreased as long as due process is respected.
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.
You should look into why cities use smooth asphalt over concert which would be significantly less maintenance.
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.
They added concrete and metal bollards that narrows the road around crosswalks here. It's made a nice difference.
If you also want to encourage biking, don't replace your asphalt with cobblestone. Maybe more speed bumbs and traffic slowing curves.
just pave the bike lane
Bricks and cobblestones don’t handle high traffic well, require too much maintenance i.e. too expensive. Cobblestones are only good for areas with heavily restricted or banned vehicle traffic. For roads and higher traffic streets, asphalt is more practical.
Agree with the rest of your comment. I also think the main reason for high traffic deaths in America is road design.
"Cities can replace smooth asphalt with rough brick and cobblestone"
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.
You mean the historic city center? Pretty sure that's not exactly state of the art
This place: https://maps.app.goo.gl/hfDcJek99whs9Ghu8
Cobblestone is an old technology, though. How does "state of the art" differ from what we can see on this street view?
I think someone can drive 80km/h on this one. Plus they should be super-slippery in rain, right?
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.
This has as much to do with chronic speeding as bans on encryption have to do with terrorism.
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.
You're using a highly regulated piece of equipment that kills over 40,000 people in America annually. What do you feel is the appropriate balance?
How is this different to driving around with a mobile phone on?
I think my concern is that we are being lied to.
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 problem is even if you got the legislature to pass that privacy bill (they never would, at least not without 1,000 exemptions that every large company would qualify for multiple times over), it would just get repealed a year or two later with little fanfare.
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.
I think the point is that we should aim to solve it without surveillance / sacrificing rights. So in this case, increasing the fines / jail time is at least one alternative.
Not sure in how incarceration can be considered a smaller sacrifice of rights than vehicle tracking.
Not sure how incarcerating people who are guilty of a crime is unconscionable but monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately is totally fine and no problem whatsoever.
> monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately is totally fine and no problem whatsoever.
Is that what the bill proposes? everyone's vehicle is now monitored all the time?
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...
It's a much bigger leap to go from "punish people for speeding" to "physically prevent their car from going past a certain speed" than it is to go from "prevent this car from going past a certain speed" to "prevent all cars from going past a certain speed."
your slippery slope argument is not very convincing. What do you suggest be done (that isn't already) about people who regularly speed, putting themselves and those around them in danger?
Judges already have the power to permanently revoke people's license to drive, the problem is they don't.
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."
This is specifically about a judge mandating tracking as a punishment for a crime. The comment I responded to suggested incarceration as a lesser sacrifice to rights.
And in no world is incarcerating a person a lesser sacrifice of rights than installing a speed limiter on their car.
Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are used by every state in the US. They already have algorithms on top of these ALPRs to pull out suspects for possible drug mules.
Sorry what does that have to do with anything?
>>monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately
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.
>Again, no one is proposing monitoring everyone all the time.
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...
Automated license-plate readers are a completely different topic
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.
Do you apply the same logic to backdoors in encryption? I am sure you could say no one is proposing implementing and using back doors on the general public as a whole, as they would only be for criminal elements. The reason that people oppose this is because the shift from only affecting criminal elements to affecting everyone is so easy to do that nothing would stop it once the infrastructure is in place.
It is extremely difficult to have a backdoor for encryption that only applies to some people, and no proposal for encryption backdoors AFAICT differentiate based on whether the subject has previously committed a crime. They are always blanket backdoors.
There is no difference between applying this to only criminals and applying it to everyone else. Vehicles are already being made with software speed limiters that users can control (e.g. Tesla vehicles). Once the state controls these, there is no technical barrier preventing it from only being applied to criminals.
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).
OF COURSE NOT!
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.
Is this merely adding a device to a criminal’s vehicle? What stops manufacturers from including speed limiters by default to make it easier to retrofit cars? Then what stops a switch from being flipped to enable it for all cars regardless of “criminal” status? Unlike breathalyzers, which had an economic barrier from reaching step 2, a software limiter has no economic barrier.
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.
>>Is this merely adding a device to a criminal’s vehicle?
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.
With encryption backdoors, you only need two steps, and the second step is on the honor system, which is why people resist the first step. With this, it looks like there are more than two steps, but given that all future cars will effectively support this in software and will be internet connected such that it can be enabled remotely, we really only have two steps. It only appears to be multiple steps because older cars need retrofits, but again, that is not the case for all cars, and especially is not the case for future cars. Once we are in the future, it will be clear that this first step that seems so benign is the only step where there was any difficulty and the second step can be done with ease.
Backdoors for encryption have mathematical impossibilities relying behind them. Speed regulators on cars are not mathematically impossible. Your analogy is fatuous, like most HN analogies. Argue the actual incident, not your made up analogies.
You seem to have ignored that the analogy was applied to the slippery slope aspect of this where cars start having this built into them by default and then it is enabled for all cars at some point afterward without due process.
Come on, ALPRs violate privacy of drivers.
Raise the speed limits on major highways to match the speed of traffic, and strict enforcement will have a lot more support.
I'm as anti-car/pro urbanist as they come. I would totally support this. Speeding on highways doesn't bother me and is relatively safe. Speeding in cities endangers pedestrians and sees no enforcement. Stop signs aren't even obeyed any more (they require a complete stop, in case you forgot).
Seriously? It is logically no different from drink driving. No one has the right to drive. You need to qualify, be tested, licensed and competent. If you break the law repeatedly, then you should be restricted from driving by any means necessary to protect you from yourself and others.
How is this different to driving around with a mobile phone on?
Are you serious? I can choose to leave my mobile phone home if I want to. I can't do that with my car.
You could do it without any surveillance. Just have a feature in the car where the ECU will limit the speed when e.g. programmed via the CAN-bus.
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).
I am fully in support of making cars or mopeds or all travel safer.
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.
Cars are the leading cause of death of children in the US. More than cancer. Maybe you're right, I don't know, but it's not the "obvious goal".
There is already massive police surveillance of all motor vehicles.
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.
People who regularly endanger the lives of others SHOULD be tracked. Want to live freely? Then don't be an asshole.
Or be in the U.S. on a green card or student visa, apparently. But those are just people experiencing oppression. We're all being tracked.
> It is nothing more than a foot in the door for massive police surveillance of all motor vehicles.
Ignition interlocks have existed for many years and didn't do this.
Just remember to disable the features when nukes land.
https://www.theautopian.com/if-you-ever-see-this-speed-sign-...
The full relevant book was: "A guide for highway traffic regulation in an emergency". https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ien.35556021306899&se...
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.
That is a goofy solution favoring the people who get to the highway first. Increasing inequality of fallout damage is the intended outcome?
The checkpoint is supposed to be in a place where it's safe to wait.
The scale of vehicular traffic these days make such a scenario seem quaint. The highways and interstates would be littered with cars.
We already know how evacuations by car would play out; poorly.
Just check out how slow it takes to do hurricane evacuations, and we know about those days ahead of time.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a63365174/palisades-fire-c...
Having been through a few, the general rule is this - if it normally takes 2 hours to get there, it will take 12 hours to get there.
I’ve seen cars improve a lot over that last 10-20 years. Faster, smoother, quieter, and safer, they can cruise all day at 80-90 mph.
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.
This distinction has been made with engine capacity (number of CCs) for scooters or motorcycles in many places including in the US.
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.
In Europe this exists with the l6e an l7e class vehicles - which lead to a number of interesting microcar designs, often for 2 people with a top speed of about 90km/h and ranges around 150-200km. Great commuter vehicles.
> Faster, smoother, quieter
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.
My hybrid SUV halves its mileage over 40-45 mph which is enough incentive for me not to be a maniac. I treat the average mpg as a game, trying to maximize it for my driving pattern.
Sucks when I have long stretches on the highway though.
Why buy a SUV then?
Even on the highway you can take comfort in the fact that someone passing you at 90 while you go 65 or 70 is getting way worse mileage than you.
Or you can shake your head at the world.
Such a vehicle wouldn't be able to travel on a freeway at all [1], which means the market for them is very limited. Even in cities, people will want to hop on a freeway to cut across town more quickly.
[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.
Today. But, no reason why we couldn’t change the rules to let these vehicles travel in the right lane only. Just as trucks are restricted so on certain highways.
Technically, everyone is expected to drive in the right most lane unless they are passing or there is a left-hand exit coming up.
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.
Yes and yes it would but I thought the point was people are driving too fast.
We have “neighborhood electric vehicles” in my state, basically overgrown golf carts. I want one so badly!
The challenge, I guess, would be infrastructure and regulations
Why restrict it there? If you up it to 65 or 70, far more freeways become accessible. Maybe not in crazy ass 85 mph speed limit Texas, but that ain't my problem (luckily).
I don’t get that. Repeat offender => temporary removal of driving license. Done. You can make it progressive, remove it for a week, next time 3, etc. I guarantee this will calm people down.
It says in the article that people who lose their drivers license on account of speeding usually keep on driving anyway. I also feel like this is already the case in a lot of countries yet speeding still exists so I don't know if I agree that this is this simple solution no one is thinking of.
Ok the problem is not the speeding then, it’s the fact people without driving licenses can drive daily without getting caught.
Most police cars that I know of have license scanners and that scanner will inform police if the owner of said car has a suspended license, which results in an immediate trip to jail.
Fairly simple solution - catch someone driving with taken license - 364 days in jail.
(Yes, I know I am conflating your view with other people's in this thread.)
"GPS-based speed limiters are too draconian. We should throw more people in prison."
The problem is, at least in Virginia, every single speed limit is set low, and cops randomly pull over cars that are just traveling the same speed as the cars around them, all above the speed limit.
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.
I drive through Virginia a lot, and have never seen speed limits set any differently than any other east coast state. Never had a problem obeying the speed limit, knowing the risks of speeding there.
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?
Just because everybody else is doing it doesn't mean you have to as well.
Except that driving at a speed significantly different from the surrounding traffic increases the risk of a crash.
Speeding is one of the leading causes of fatal accidents.
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.
I’m not sure that is the case. Bunching together look like a higher risk to me.
Bunching together happens because of irregular speed. You have traffic clusters because the front is slower than whatever the "natural" speed is, but not so slow that people elect to pass.
If traffic is all moving in a narrow range of speed the clusters are smaller and less dense.
So does speeding.
Yeah. That solves the problem. Repeat 3 times? Lifetime ban.
Full self driving can’t come soon enough.
Good. The pandemic really opened up roads in the US to ever more dangerous Wild Wild West shenanigans.
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.
lots of "freedom"-loving pushback on this law here. sorry y'all, we live in a society and your actions affect others. you choosing to endanger my life on the road does not make me more free.
i think these speeders should just lose their license to drive forever, so maybe choose to view this law as a compassionate compromise.
This is 100% a political issue. Instead of introducing privacy-violating software, we could instead institute massive policing campaigns to curb speeding. But that would require actual effort by police, something they don't want to do.
A lot of things are more dangerous than going over speed limits, and it will not be possible to prevent everything with technical gadgets.
So let’s just do nothing! Why bother doing anything!
I do not believe the US or VA constitutions guarantee a right to exceed speed limits. No idea what freedom they’re talking about!
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.
yea there are some wild hypotheticals being thrown around in the comments with one of my favorites being "what if you're drinking and you have to speed to escape a wildfire but have a breathalyzer in your car?". Jeeze I guess we really should just do nothing instead.
So if I have this device installed is it enough proof that I can never speed again in my life ? If yes, I will volunteer to get one. Will also order a raspberry pi, for a project I have in mind.
I doubt it, police departments issue tickets as a major source of revenue. I've heard it said if you want to get rid of police departments, just have everyone follow the driving laws.
I suspect they'll allow just enough over so that police can still get their sweet, sweet tax revenue in this brave new world.
Kind of makes one wonder why all those politicians who spend 2020-2022 talking big talk about defunding the police didn't introduce "well everyone is already going 80 on this stretch of interstate so that ought to be the speed limit" bills in that time.
Why are typical passenger vehicles even sold with the ability to go so fast? Or perhaps more pertinently, why aren't any typical passenger vehicles I've ever heard of sold without the ability to go so fast?
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?
There is always the autobahn. If systems like that existed endangered there could be incredible time savings. A related question of mine is ‘If cars can go so fast why do we not find ways to raise speed limits while keeping roads safe?’
Why are assault weapons so difficult to own in Europe? They make them in the US and you can own them there.
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.
There are typically no pedestrians on highways. Being a pedestrian on a high way is hazardous no matter what the speed limit is for any realistic speed limit.
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.
Traffic flow theory looks tidy on a whiteboard, but real roads don’t follow V D L arithmetic. Drivers open their following gaps faster than speed rises, so capacity peaks around 55 mph at roughly 2 000 veh/h/ln. Push limits higher and flow falls while crash energy soars. Because kinetic energy scales with the square of velocity (½ mv²), a 20 mph jump doesn’t give you 33 % more punch, it delivers nearly 80 % more. NHTSA data put it bluntly: fatal-injury odds about double for every 10 mph over 50 mph [1]. That’s an exponential climb in destructiveness, not a linear trade-off.
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...
> Traffic flow theory looks tidy on a whiteboard, but real roads don’t follow V D L arithmetic.
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 much of a gear head but I believe that a car would perform much worse at 0-80mph if it couldn’t physically reach 120mph. You can artificially limit it and I think that’s what folks take with.
Volvo limit all their cars to 110mph and no-one seems to care. https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
Because people dont want to buy cars that cant go over 100 mph.
> 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.
Most people driving on I-294 in Illinois would agree. Just "keeping up with traffic" normally requires you to go about 80mph. If my car topped out at 50 or 60mph, I'd be frustrated as hell.
Found another article that mentions it adjusts to the speed limit and allows you to go up to 9mph over.
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.
This seems appropriate here:
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.
> uses GPS to identify the speed limit on a road segment and then deter drivers from going more than a programmed amount beyond it
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.
Separately from whether you think a policy is good on its own merits, you have to consider whether you think the existing establishment will enforce a policy correctly, fairly, or well.
This should honestly be a requirement on ALL vehicles. Speed governors are such an easy retrofit and would save so much pain and death. Tailgating and speeding are the two biggest quality of life problems on the road today.
while this is not a bad idea, why not prevent them from driving at all and massive punishments
How many places in Virginia are car-centric enough that you realistically need one for basic daily activities and work?
Pretty much everywhere except for the area inside the 495 beltway (right next to DC), where public transit is good. But even then, housing prices near metro stations are higher.
You probably want a car in most places, just like almost everywhere in the US.
I mean, they already sentence people to jail for speeding, as in this amusing case of an automotive journalist. https://www.jalopnik.com/never-speed-in-virginia-lessons-fro...
TFA says 75% of people with suspended licenses drive anyways.
Sounds like 75% of people with a suspended license need to spend some time out in jail where they can ponder their life choices.
Someone who's jailed for driving on a suspended license because it's the only way they can get to their job probably isn't going to discontinue that behavior upon their release. I don't want my tax dollars being spent on a punishment that's just going to exacerbate the problem, especially when the crime isn't particularly odious in the first place (whatever they did to get their license suspended probably was, but once you have a suspended license it's almost impossible to just stop driving).
> when the crime isn't particularly odious in the first place
“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...
>“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].
"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.
Lose your license? You get a ride, ride a bike, take the bus, get compassionate permission to only drive to work, etc. there are many ways to move yourself around. Then don’t mess up again once the suspension is over.
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.
This is wishful thinking, the people I know who drive on suspended licenses also don't have jobs and refuse to work. The vast majority of people with suspended licenses are not otherwise productive members of society. The kind of antisocial behavior that gets your license suspended doesn't magically stop when you stop driving. These are, by in large, just bad people.
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.
I had a suspended license for failing to return a license plate. I have never had a moving violation in my life. I continued to drive like normal until the DMV realized that I had turned in the other plate in a two-plate state.
Should I go to jail?
Okay let's lower the number from 75 to 74 to accomodate situations like you're describing.
No, let's reconsider the entire idea of what you're proposing. Let's redefine driving as a right and punish antisocial behavior.
No, let’s reconsider the entire idea that a car is the default mode of transport.
But it is, because America is big. Sure, improve public transportation, but if it can't beat cars, it shouldn't.
The automobile is not the primary mode of transportation simply because the US is "big." Its dominance stems from a series of deliberate, damaging historical and policy decisions, not inherent necessity or geography.
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.
Providing a vehicle or fuel to someone with a suspended license should be an offense.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair in a country where a car is practically a requirement for living (getting to work, grocery shopping).
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.
It is also not fair for ones family to be killed by repeat speeder.
Yes, those life choices having been made for them by their city planner before they were born about the feasibility of getting anywhere in their or doing anything in their city without a vehicle.
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."
I think that is the best solution. I would shortcut this though, anyone caught speeding even 1mph over the limit goes to jail immediately, 90 days feels right. no need to wait for the license to be suspended /s
Because if you don't have a car in most of the US then you're fucked.
Which gives you a really strong incentive to not put other people’s lives at risk by driving recklessly.
This makes the assumptions that:
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.
While I'd accept that there are tight situations on remote highways similar to the one you described with the semi and tailgater, I also relish in those moments where I do just slow down and let the tailgater be pissed, sometimes they do get the ticket, and my conservative speeding gets vindicated.
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.
I'm from Atlanta. On 285 the speed limit is 55. Traffic moves at 80.
Having driven extensively in nearly every city in this country, the drivers in Atlanta are absolutely the most dangerous. It is the only city I refuse to drive in, and I try to limit my physical presence in the Atlanta Metro (aside from transiting the airport) to reduce the risk of being in an accident.
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.
> Having driven extensively in nearly every city in this country, the drivers in Atlanta are absolutely the most dangerous
Worse than Phoenix and D.C.?
Only 80? Last time I went there it was going even faster but it's been years.
Because you can always count on people to have sufficient self awareness to rationally evaluate the pros and cons of their decisions before the fact, especially those who have demonstrated a repeated willingness to drive recklessly.
How is this different from actual criminals that we lock up behind bars? Sometimes till the remainder of their lives. These aren't children, and the quicker we start treating them as adults, the quicker they'll learn to obey the laws before the real and life-changing consequences kick in.
Speed limits in the US have a particular problem. The speed limits are set too close to the speed people are expected to drive.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Ok, now run the same thought experiment with a speed limit of 65, basically same results because teenagers gonna teenager.
I think 125 is absurd, but the limits should actually reflect what the overwhelming majority of people do.
Germany with their autobahn is the best example. There is no speed limit and it is far safer than US highways.
I don't doubt that you could further reduce the problem with stricter laws.
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...
Ah yes, the person that makes the mistake of conflating random laws and arbitrary numbers for political reasons with some sort of lack of risk awareness / mitigation.
The 85% rule is and has always been bullshit.
Yet we’d be better off if we at least adhered to the 85th percentile speed limit process rather than having the 85th percentile speed be 75mph and the posted limit be 55mph.
By speeding, and nothing else? This shit is so silly man.
Speeding is widely accepted, because it seems such a low level offense. 50km/h instead of 30, it’s only 20 more. But the physics are against you - the energy of the vehicle grows quadratic with the speed. At 30, you need about 18 meters to come to a stop. So you can prevent an accident if a person appears about 20 meters from your hood. At 50, you’ll run them over with a remaining speed of more than 30km/h. Speeding kills.
Road conditions change. Sometimes it’s the middle of the night and nobody is on the county road, so you can run your brights. Sometimes a particular section of road has high visibility that makes a higher speed safer, while other sections are best taken under the limit. Some vehicles have better headlights than others, different stopping distances. Your logic only says “lower is safer,” it provides no means by which to draw the line on what level of risk is acceptable and, make no mistake, any amount of driving always implies risk. We balance the risk against its reward, that’s the function of traffic law.
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.
You’re trying to apply the “I am a good driver and my judgment is better than other people’s” argument - but the majority of people believe they’re an above average driver. That’s a dangerous fallacy. Now, you might truly be, but your argument paves the way for everyone else to say the same. After all, nothing happened so far. And that other driver might be the one that misjudges and crashes into you.
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.
Yet the German autobahn suggests that the fallacy is the reasoning that highways even need speed limits. The autobahn is safer without speed limits than every single innovation we have had in setting speed limits. Perhaps it is time to stop blaming drivers and blame highway speed limits for causing safety issues.
The german autobahn demonstrates exactly the opposite. Everywhere that speed limits are introduced, the number of accidents drop. Less injured people, less fatalities. One example is the A24 https://www.geo.de/wissen/vergleich-auf-a24-weniger-verletzt... where the number of fatal accidents dropped by 50%.
This is a relative matter. The autobahn, without speed limits, is safer than US high ways with speed limits. The speed limit being suggested there is also a higher speed than the speeds reached on most US highways, which were a clone of the autobahn. Research into this matter has long suggested that there is an optimal limit at the 85th percentile and setting a speed limit above or below it harms safety. The autobahn demonstrates the optimal limit is well above the limits that are used in the U.S., which coincidentally are well below the 85th percentile.
This all seems like a moot point to me until there is actual consequences for people who ACTUALLY cause accidents. We all know someone (maybe ourselves) who had their car totaled, seriously damaged, or been harmed by people that hit and run, had no financially responsibility for their damage, intoxicated, etc. And jack shit happened to them.
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.
My car was damaged by a guy who drove into my rear quarter panel in bumper to bumper traffic and convinced the officer and insurance that it was my fault by fabricating a story that I cut him off. He was trying to merge into my lane after I had been fully merged. He had stopped inches from the center of my car, and the moment he saw me move forward, he pressed the accelerator, going into my car. I suggested we move to the side of the road so that we would not block two lanes of traffic, which had worked against me because it made things look consistent with his story versus having stayed in place and blocking traffic. When I called 911 to have an officer come, the guy started yelling in my ear so much that I was deeply shaken and could not even speak to the officer well to describe what had happened.
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.
>You’re trying to apply the
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.
But I’m a good driver, I can defy the laws of physics!
If a person appears 20 meters from my hood while I'm on the interstate, they're toast, whether I'm going 100 km/h or 150. Surely the unpredictable can happen at any moment with other cars, but I find follow distance more important than speed. If you're bumper to bumper at 100 km/h, you're going to have a worse time than if you give 10 cars space at 150 km/h.
Time also kills. And not speeding costs lots of time, especially in aggregate.
This should be telling all of you in the U.S something important. I wish you all listened to it.
>“This should be telling all of you in the U.S something important. I wish you all listened to it.”
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.
"don't live in a rural area, don't own property, trust government"
No.
Then move somewhere they don’t need a car is what I would tell them. I’d rather live in the sky but I can’t fly so I have to live on the ground. They can’t drive so they have to live somewhere where they don’t need a car.
The US has really poor highway policy that encourages speeding. Many highways have a speed limit of 55mph (89kmh) left over from some ancient oil rationing law. [0] So folks are conditioned to think that speed limits are stupid, because frankly many of them are here. I regularly drive on highways that would be 120kmh (75mph) in Europe but are instead 89kmh. Most traffic ends up going 70-75mph (including traffic enforcement) anyways which makes the speed limits look like a joke when 80% of folks ignore it.
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
Enforcement should focus on the speed outliers, less on the posted limit itself. If the speed limit is 65mph, but all traffic is moving at 75mph, then I'm going to drive at 75mph. The most dangerous drivers I've seen are those going 30mph or more faster or slower than the rest of traffic. Yes, the problem is that then makes enforcement subjective and that itself can lead to abuses. But it's a sensible approach in the short term.
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.
> 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.
Also, many municipalities have stupid or predatory speed limits. Many town roads have a natural safe 40-45 mph limit, yet some coalition of neighbors got together once and convinced the town to drop it to 25-30 mph because "cars just go by way too fast on that road!" Either that or it's a small town on the way to a tourist spot that drops the limit from 55 -> 30 for a 1/4 mile segment behind a blind curve just to rake in tourist dollars through modern highway robbery.
Virginia has built a reputation for tighter highway speed enforcement than most other places. There are officers out there enforcing as hard as the judges will let them. Now Virginia will put speed control devices in the cars of repeat offenders. Like breath testing ignition control devices, these will save lives and the offenders will pay the cost. Just another step toward better road safety for Virginia. They’re a good example for other states to follow.
I expect this to increase the number of vehicle accidents since it is forcing people to drive at speeds well below the well established principle of the 85th percentile. We could have improved safety from increasing speed limits to the 85th percentile rather than trying to artificially slow down motorists. Higher speeds mean cars get off the road faster, which means there is more distance between them. Collisions only happen when the distances between vehicles reach 0, and higher average distances inhibit collisions. Trying to force people to drive slower has all of this logic work in reverse, causing more collisions.
> Proposals typically include a limited “override” feature allowing further acceleration during an emergency.
Very cool and certainly effective design for people who already go 30+ mph over the speed limit.
Could I choose to have a device that lowers the maximum in exchange for lower insurance rates? I've never seen the point in speeding
This product doesn't exist because it isn't actually correlated with claims paid out.
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.
You sort of can, the OBD port dongles offered by some insurance providers take things like braking and acceleration into account to determine rates
A page linked from the article (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zLaBRWMSSnjGzMOpoZwUSw_H...) cites a $4/day rental fee for the equipment, which works out to roughly $120/month. I understand there are assistance programs promised by the article. Can someone in the space help me understand this pricing model? Seems high to me.
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?
> Can someone in the space help me understand this pricing model?
"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.
And breathalyzer interlocks, of course.
I’d be surprised if only 75% of suspended drivers continue to drive. I’d expect that to be 90% or more (at least for those aged 21-65).
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.
If your license plate is flagged as being associated with a suspended license, I suspect your rate of being stopped will increase significantly. In my area, the police blotter is filled with ALPR hits triggering traffic stops due to suspended license. Good!
The pricing is high for the same reason ignition interlock rental fees are high: because they have a captive market and nobody can stop them from charging whatever the hell they want. Once the first couple vendors are certified they lobby hard to make sure the state doesn't certify too many more, which would create competition, and result in reasonable prices.
I wish that people would just stop looking at their phones while driving.
If it's narrowly targeted at repeat super-speeders with some emergency override built in, it might strike a reasonable balance. Definitely feels like one of those "good idea, but needs extremely careful implementation" situations.
Why do we even need to think about emergency speeds, honestly?
I wonder if speeding is like other crimes, where a very small percentage of people cause a very large percentage of the problems. If so, seems like this could make a significant difference.
Starting off with superfluous agitprop... And ending with it. Hate for Trump is classic misdirection, it's amazing just how much propaganda is in even the most basic public policy articles.
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...
States can make laws all they like, but will car manufacturers actually implement this in any workable way?
I bet 90% of initial implementations will be resettable back to unlimited speed with a simple factory reset or similar.
All it takes is a simple law stating that if you circumvent the speed limiter you face far more serious penalties. Done and done. Literally no different than how we handle suspended licenses.
> Literally no different than how we handle suspended licenses.
The article points out that 75% of people with suspended licenses continue to drive.
Criminalising driving on a license suspended for a traffic offence (note: not expired or for financial reasons) seems like the easiest no brainer imaginable.
Driving to work sounds like a financial reason
> Driving to work sounds like a financial reason
Not a get out of jail free card.
In many states they'll still let you (drive for work, otherwise on restriction) for various offenses.
That just means the penalties are not strict enough. Even worse, we're afraid to impose real penalties (jail) so we rather just "fine" people (because it's more humane?), which will affect those most likely to drive without a license more than the regular folk. The regular folk will be scared shitless and will just get a lift with someone till their license issue is resolved.
The law mentioned in the article will allow judges to require a device to be installed at the defendant’s expense. It’s not about what is built into cars at the factory.
they want speed check in California, which is major market, and automakers likely will comply.
From my cold dead right foot
From the article :
"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.
https://www.zixty.com/how-do-car-insurance-apps-work/
Over the 15 years from 2008-2023, fatality rate per 100 million VMT has largely been stable, maybe increased some. I think that qualifies as not having recent wins.
The decades-long trend of increasing safety came to an end right as smartphones took off. I don’t think this is a coincidence.
It's probably more to do with the arrival of SUV's.
23 years ago is recent to you?
Americans are driving more than ever and fatalities per capita has been steadily rising again since the 2010s per the Wikipedia provided data. The goal should be fewer deaths overall, not fewer deaths per VMT.
another example of a problem that would not exist if there was urban planning (walkable cities) and public transport (trains/bus/etc)
I wonder if insurance would be a partial solution? Allow/encourage providers of liability insurance to raise rates on people with tickets, unless they are to the electronic limit.
In theory, yes. In practice typical insurance requirements are already far below realistic modern-day damages possible from vehicular collisions, and people still routinely drive without even that minimal insurance.
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.
Yeah, required liability coverage needs to go way up.
No, draconian punishment of uninsured drivers should go way up. I am already paying a lot of money to compensate for them; I shouldn't pay more. Auto insurance is extremely expensive already.
Serious accidents routinely exceed the minimum coverage. I carry extra insurance for myself for that situation. Why should I have to do that?
My point is the overall cost of any level of insurance is way higher than it should be because of uninsured drivers. Maybe, if we solved that, everybody should be able to afford a higher level of coverage to better account for serious accidents.
You could require new cars to take some kind of electric proof of insurance (and license) to operate :)
Just put it in yearly registration fee, like most modern countries do.
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.
Then you'll have people not registering their cars. Which already happens a lot. They steal a plate or renewal sticker from another car or just drive with it expired.
Any cop car with LPR would instantly stop and ticket them tho.
When you say a lot, by how much really? I suspect it's tiny.
Maybe. I see cars driving around without any visible plates at all sometimes, and they don't seem to get pulled over. Traffic violations seem to be the lowest priority for cops the past few years.
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.
Unfortunately the main effect of this would most likely be a massive increase in the percentage of drivers who are uninsured.
If people still drive with a suspended or revoked license, what’s to say they won’t still drive without insurance?
Agreed. I don't want more uninsured drivers on the road.
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.
Isn't that already how insurance works?
> The safety argument against speeding is ironclad. Blazing-fast vehicles take longer to brake and exert more force in a crash, thereby endangering everyone else on the roadway.
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.
Can we all stop equating speed with being unsafe? I've heard this BS stat that speed is a factor in car deaths. If speed were really so dangerous, then planes would be one of the least safe methods of travel.
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.
Maybe this has already been discussed elsewhere on hn but surely this is the scariest part:
> 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.
This is a half truth. This is what I found.
"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.
I did actually look a bit harder before I commented, I'm aware of how the media works. "Unleashing American Energy" pauses (cancels) all the "Green New Deal" programs as stated in the article. There was supposedly federal funding for a lot of new public transit projects that's now gone. Maybe it'll come back later, reframed as new projects... but I think that's extremely unlikely for a lot of this. The focus is now elsewhere.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unle...
My uncle has a country place That no one knows about He says it used to be a farm Before the Motor Law
An interesting thing is that I've observed a lot less speeding over the years, as more cars acquire active cruise control. Correlation or causation? Who knows. I don't think enforcement has changed.
I don't know where you are but that is not my observation. More cars are going 15+ over the limit than I can ever remember. I drive on Chicago expressways a few times a year and that is especially insane. Everyone is already driving 15+ over the limit, and then there are those in Chargers, Challengers, or tuned BMW or Mercedes just weaving from lane to lane through the slightest gaps at 90+
No cops ever to be seen. I have not seen anyone pulled over on a Chicago expressway since before the pandemic.
I don't know what happened, but since the pandemic it also feels like traffic enforcement is as lax as it's ever been here in Southern Ontario. And not just for speeding - I've seen more people run red lights in the last few years than in the 20 years before that.
Like actually run reds or sneak through as a yellow turns red?
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.
Literally had the same experience this past weekend driving out to the Chicago suburbs. Doesn't matter if general traffic is going 15 over, you're still going to have a handful of unsatisfied daredevils just blowing past at 30 or more over as they weave between those "slower" cars.
Due to local law changes, my 50k population town has had 10 weed shops open up in the past 6 months. Previous to that, the closest store was 4 hours away in another state.
No idea if it's just a coincidence, but people seem to be driving way slower on average compared to last year.
A drunk driver will blow through a stop sign, while a stoned driver will wait for it to turn green
I think it's causal. The cruise control on my car is busted and I don't really feel like shelling out four figures to fix it, so I drive without. I also speed probably 10-15 over pretty often when I'm on long stretches of highway. Of course, I'm also in Texas where this is fairly common and poses less of a risk than eg in Virginia.
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.
Going from static to adaptive speed control has been night and day. I never really enjoyed driving, but adaptive has made it a lot more pleasant.
The speed of most traffic on the interstate I travel on most frequently was 67ish when I was driving home from college in the early 00s. I drove on the same road yesterday, and the average speed is easily 75, with many going much faster.
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!
The biggest change for me I've noticed is I'm vastly less likely to speed with a digital speedometer than with a dial spedometer. Adaptive cruise control also helps a lot
(I was never particularly a speed demon in the first place though)
I think a partial reason for that is a ton of cars put 80 in the middle of the dial speedometer. So, it's bizarrely easier to see your speed accurately if you're going over the speed limit.
Personally, I tend to get irritated when someone swings 10-15 mph over/under the current speed limit. I often have to speed around them to avoid them. I probably would care less if the car just followed their erratic behavior for me.
I am thinking a Black Mirror-like scenario, that in the peak of the episode, someone's life is at risk, and they got the speed-limiter to 10km/h (due to past offenses) and the baddie can run fast, catch them, kill them. (kinda like 15MM or Nosedive but for driving speed)
Another half-measure that will be disabled by aftermarket kits. If people want to go fast, they will.
> will be disabled by aftermarket kits
The presence of which demonstrates wilful intent, turning another ticket into jail time and a criminal record.
And how long until having a 500 HP muscle car is a demonstration of willful intent to speed? It's a slippery argument.
If its court mandated, basically its pretty much up to you to get the device and plug it in. https://lifesaferisa.com/court-mandated/
This is like, "lock your doors? Nah bro, it's entirely possible to get through any lock, therefore locking is pointless."
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.
>Most of these people are just generally reckless
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.
Even a license suspension doesn’t necessarily change behavior: A federally funded study found that 75% of people with suspended licenses continued to drive.
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.
True, but my understanding is that you can get an exception for driving to work and those other kinds of things.
I hope my point was clear. We shouldn't let dangerous drivers back on the road because it would otherwise be inconvenient for them.
Designing walkable cities has benefits beyond the obvious, including keeping criminals off the streets.
Ah, yes. I totally agree with that. I live somewhere that you could be just fine without a car. That's the exception in my experience.
Good, now how about red light cameras?
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.
Virginia has required yearly safety inspections
Better street designs is a better approach. Narrower lanes, physical barriers for pedestrians, roundabouts, etc
Let's do both! In neighborhoods, street design is going to be far more effective than things like electronic speed limiting, speed cameras, etc. But for dedicated rights of way for high throughout vehicle traffic, limiting speeds to engineering-based safe limits seems pretty reasonable as well.
Pretty sure the shithead that killed a family in King County two years ago, while doing 110 in a 40 zone (after already wrecking two cars) didn't give two figs about street design.
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.
A clear outlier case. Policy should not be made based on the 1 in 1000000 case that's going to be tragic no matter what's put in place.
> A clear outlier case.
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.
At least in WA State there's not-reckless speeding, which is something like 1-14 mph over the posted limit (I argue it should be more like a _percent_ E.G. going 40 mph in a 25 is WAY worse than going 75 on a 60 mph freeway).
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.
The problem is that the speed limit itself has nothing to do with safety. To take your example of Seattle, there are 4 lane main roads with a 25 mph speed limit that in any other city would be 35 to 45. And everybody drives 40-45 on the anyway.
Those are the worst, because there's always a huge speed differential between the "law-abiders" who stay at 25, and the others who drive the speed the road was obviously designed for (40). Felt a lot safer when the limit on them was actually 40 and everyone was more or less going the same speed.
> My argument is that tracking, inhibitors, etc should be too far for the other cases,
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?
Slippery slope. It'd be assigned in way more cases because they can, because the _perceived_ impact is lower to someone else. Because it can be handled like yet another tax on offenders, including the poor. Because the companies selling it to the government would continue to lobby to sell it more often for more classes of offense.
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.
This is... a regressive tax on... Reckless drivers who, after multiple convictions keep putting the lives on the public in deadly danger? Do people stumble into that kind of criminal history by accident, or something? How many times do they have to be hauled before a judge before they knock it off? Are these Jean Valjean crimes of necessity, or something?
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?
Again, slippery slope. As use of this tool expands to _any_ driving related offense. As it applies only to those who must themselves drive.
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.
Last I checked, breathalysers have found solid purchase on this slippery slope.
> Again, slippery slope. As use of this tool expands to _any_ driving related offense.
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?)
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
But doesn't "better street engineering" passively reduce speed because the road is full of bends that's difficult to negotiate at high speed and/or will make you much likely to crash into bollards/tree/stationary cars and/or will wreck your suspension with speed bumps ?
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.
Honestly that just seems more of a case that 18 year olds shouldn't be allowed to drive. If you're not old enough to smoke or drink alcohol, you're not old enough to operate heavy machinery that can kill people.
Might as well decorate their cars with warnings as well, like learners, e.g. "Warning, irresponsible driver".
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.
Seems like an over engineered solution. Revoking drivers license and seizing the car would be cheaper and easier to implement. We don't tolerate repeat offenders in most other circumstances. So why is it that you can keep breaking traffic laws without ever really being stopped from driving?
You don't want to devastate a person's livelihood if you can avoid it. I'd rather have an asshole with a nerfed car and a job than an asshole with no car, no job and way too much time on his hands.
you don't want to devastate a person's livelihood so you let them continue driving and causing crashes?
Simples solution for repeated offenders is exponential jail sentences after certain number of infractions. Remove them from society.
For driving offenses, it's exponentially cheaper and easier to revoke driving privilege than to imprison the offender. Of course if someone ignores the ban and continues driving without a license, consequences would then need to escalate.
I think most cars in Singapore have had governors preventing people from going over highway speeds.
Because revoking a license doesn't stop someone from driving, and seizing the car doesn't stop a person from driving someone elses car.
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)
>doesn't stop a person from driving someone elses car
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.
People who get their licenses taken don't stop driving. That's just how it is.
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.
They stop driving in places with stiff penalties for driving without a license. I used to live in a state that made driving with suspended or revoked license punishable by up to 3 months in jail. Repeat offenders would have their vehicle taken off of them. Taken off as in seized; it is no longer yours. It becomes a rather burdensome crime when the car they seized has a bank not attached to it. Having a car seized doesn't end your obligation to pay off the loan.
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.
The article says that 75% of people with revoked licenses continue to drive anyway. So yes… you’re completely right. But if you don’t take away their car, then that’s the car they are most likely to use (there is no excuse to borrow someone else’s car). So maybe this is a better punishment.
Because revoking a license doesn't stop someone from driving, and seizing the car doesn't stop a person from driving someone elses car.
same, with this law :)
Turn the car into scrap. They'll learn fast enough.
?? Yes it does. You presumably go to jail if you get caught driving without a license. Or do they not have legal penalties for driving without a license in virginia? If so, then it sounds like the problem is whatever dumb laws keep people that are driving illegally from going to jail.
Driving without a license will rarely land someone in jail. It just racks up fines and then the person can never get their license back.
It's why a lot of states will occasionally do license fine forgiveness.
Does anyone know why Virginia has always been so notoriously draconian about speeding? Is it DC-adjacent policy wonks outsized faith in the effectiveness of top-down prescriptions, lots of DC politicians flagrantly violating the law, culture clash between stuffy suburbanites and yokels (Virginia was the first place I ever saw a trans truck), or what?
Virginia also has the shameful distinction of being the only state in the USA to outlaw radar detectors (I think they are also outlawed in DC). Totally ridiculous and draconian. Anyone should be allowed to observe RF or lack of RF that gets broadcast to them.
It's a massive source of state and local revenue. They have laws on the books (improper driving) which exist solely to negotiate down to.
Virginia is like this in many ways. It’s a police state.
The yankees' roads are all really bad. Old, narrow, sharp turns, and often crowded. I hate driving up there.
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.
Texas has an above average rate of road deaths per capita. Virginia is below average.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_road_...
Is it common to refer to Virginians as being Yankees? Growing up in New England I would have assumed they’d avoid the term by being in the Confederacy
No, they're both south of the Mason-Dixon line and Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. Texas is considered less South, culturally, than Virginia.
Per E.B. White:
"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."
No. Outside DC metro, VA is the south (or Appalachian, which can be similar, but is distinct).
These days, it’s not really about the Confederacy, just culturally.
Yeah, I don't really consider virginia part of the south, culturally. Maybe it was different in the past but proximity to DC has rotted any of that away.
I can see parts of Virginia not feeling culturally like a lot of the rest of the south but I’m still intrigued by the use of yankee. Like is someone from Wyoming a yankee because they aren’t from the south or is it more cultural to you?
Nope, yankeedom as I see it is Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.
There is another, semi-derisive, use in which it means any non-southerner. But that is less common and context-dependent.
We're talking about interstates though. And from my New Englander perspective traffic mostly self regulates without draconian speed limit enforcement, it's the slow end of the distribution that is far more scattered and worse for road safety.
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 really like the grids for cities. Say what you want about traffic in Houston or Dallas but, though they move tons of people, driving their is way, way better than e.g. Boston.
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.
Does nobody else see the pattern? Speed governers are dead-simple to install. They could be in all new cars within days through software. But they dont want simple. They want a system that needs to be installed by a contractor. Id bet good money that the people supporting these bills are the same ones who want the monopoly on the state-mandated service. If you have ever dealt with ankle monitoring companies, or those who install court-mandated breathalizers in cars, you know they are scum. They bid for/buy a state monopoly then set about milking people who have no other choices. Rather than simple software, they will want a byzantine system of install, monitoring and removal fees, preferably attached to every car in someone's household.
Yet another regulation to control people. Taking your freedom away one law at a time...
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 pretty clear at this point that people want this kind of control implemented, its in the ”zeitgeist”. I have not figured out why, but it does seem that people are more scared then ever.
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!”
The inspector will be AI btw :) (and the year 203x..)
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
I agree. What's next? Controlling where, and when we can drive? The groups lobbying for this bill already say that they want mandatory, automatic, remotely-controllable speed restrictions on everyone's car - they will publicly tell you as much - from there, any further erosion of our liberties is just a software update away.
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.
> The 1/3 of annual traffic deaths caused by speeding
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
The main thing I would call attention to is: There are other governments around the world who have similar technologies required on their cars, and who have distributed that technology without much negative impact to their people. I might, if I were a Japanese citizen, trust the Japanese government to handle a technology like this with the care and respect it deserves; but we are not Japan. Do you trust the current American government to do the same?
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 dont trust the American government (or people) to operate anything.
Franklin was born 200 years before the automobile and more than 300 years ago today. I doubt driving a giant metal box around at 100mph was what he had in mind for essential liberties.
That's why I just said it, not Franklin. Did you think that Franklin posted that comment? He's been dead for like 300 years bro. Last I checked I am fully aware of the benefits and risks of driving giant metal boxes around at 100mph, I live with it every day.
Kinda begs the question why cars can go over 100mph in the first place.
Also what the heck is with Newsom vetoing the passive ISA bill?
Because engines aren't designed to be run at max output. The fact that an engine can do 150 means it's a lot nicer to drive at 75. I've driven a car that has a top speed of 85 on a good day, with a tailwind and going downhill, and it sucked. Fine for city streets but in my state we have bits of highway that have posted speeds as high as 85 and realistically most people do 9-10 over on long roads outside cities.
Sure but electronically limiting that car to 80mph retains the “nice at highway speed” aspects while blocking the ability to go 120mph down I-95.
Well 80 would be a bad limit; there are roads in Texas posted 85 which means you can do 94 without even state troopers hassling you. I don't want a static limit because I can't go race, and I don't want a dynamic limit because 1. it's not perfect and I'd really chafe against being limited to 65 or 75 as a fallback, and 2. I don't trust the government that once tried to put in a nationwide 55mph speed limit for non-safety-related reasons, and 3. I hate prior restraint. I believe it's generally wrong to limit normal, law-abiding people because of bad actors. So, if your argument is "this might be practical to reduce collision deaths", I'm not going to agree with you on that, because "reducing collision deaths" isn't as important as my values.
This law isn’t prior restraint - the state is trying to g to install these in repeat offenders’ cars.
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 have less of an issue installing these in the vehicles of repeat offenders but much of the conversation here has been around more general installation or mandating of governors.
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.
And out in the country, excessive speeding is less a problem. Fewer people to main and kill. Less density, so less chance hitting somebody’s stuff. Here in suburbia, designing it to be more walkable (or bus able) would give repeat offenders (speeding, DUI, whatever) another option vs driving.
Not seeing any argument for allowing the car to exceed 100mph on public roads regardless of what the powertrain is capable of.
People who want to go faster can trailer their race cars to a track.
VW and Audi MEB vehicles have an interesting difference: the ID.4 is limited to 100mph, while the Audi version with the same motors and platform is not limited to said speed.
From Newsome - "Federal law, as implemented by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), already regulates vehicle safety standards, and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations that undermines this longstanding federal framework. NHTSA is also actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal assessments."
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.
> adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations that undermines this longstanding federal framework
Which is exactly what California has been doing for decades.
That arguement doesn’t make sense. We (VA) already require ignition interlocks on DUI’s cars. This isn’t much different.
The vetoed California law would have required passive ISA, I.e. a dashboard light that comes on when it detects speeding, on all new vehicles sold in California.
High speeds are not an added feature of these vehicles. The power output required for practical acceleration also affords sustained high speeds. To prevent those speeds, manufacturers would have to add speed governors, which Americans would not be delighted to pay for (paying to have their freedoms restricted by bureaucrats, of course). Even if they came standard, speed demons could easily remove a governor.
My understanding is that vehicles already have speed governors that constrain them to the max speed rating of their tires.
(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)
I think a general speed limit for all vehicles would be a good idea. If you want it removed then your vehicle can't travel public roads, any kind of modification of it in secret would be a crime.
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.
EU includes Germany with its no-limit Autobahns. Left lane usually does around 180km/h, with occasional vehicles going way past 200km/h. Even 300km/h is not unheard of.
I kind of hoped more EU would become like that, not the other way round.
I am convinced after having spent time in Germany that for Autobahns to work in other countries, you'd need to import Germans to exclusively drive on them. If you are used to driving in the US or in the central/South America, the German driver is basically an incredibly superior species from another planet.
When I visited, Autobahn left lane traffic seemed to be about 50% people in black Audis and BMWs tailgating and flashing their lights at other drivers who dare to only drive at 90MPH.
To be fair, they should move to the right if they aren't passing.
I grew up in Texas, but have spent most of my adult life in Germany. It's not that Germans are innately better drivers, it's that there's not the same level of cultural entitlement to a driver's license. Driving is a privilege, not a right. This causes them to take it more seriously.
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.
more people have driver license in los angeles metro area than entire country of germany :)
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…
It really is so obviously reasonable it makes you wonder why this isn't already in place. For instance e-bikes are all speed and power limited, why aren't cars?
I think this is a valid comparison. I believe eBikes are limited for safety of the rider and other cyclists they share the bike lane with, otherwise they would practically be a different class of vehicle and a menace. The exact same logic would apply to cars.
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.
No, they aren’t. The big brands’ sell limited e-bikes, but there’s a massive market for unlimited e-bikes that are basically electric motorbikes with nominal pedals to try and pass as bikes.
Well I mean, in Canada, Europe and the US these would be illegal if they're able to go more than 32, 25, and 40 km/h respectively. That doesn't mean there aren't illegal ebikes out there but I think the vast majority of e-bikes on the road comply with the legal limits.
40kmh? What’s that in Freedom Units? (j/k)
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.
Combine this with a -/- 10 km/h per speeding ticket for a year or two and you’ve got a pretty optimal situation!
In my younger years groups of friends would rent time on racing tracks in Ontario and Quebec. Mecaglisse and Shannonville tracks were a couple that I drove on, at speeds of over 220kph.
This would be incredibly annoying. You what, have to tow your car to a track if you want to race? So now you need two vehicles?
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.
I don't know how much racing you do, but as far as I've seen, racers do tow their race cars to the track. They rent or own tow trailers and transporters.
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.
You are talking about serious people not street racers. This is not the demographic who's going down my street five nights a week at a hundred mph in clapped out mitsubishi.
It's a spectrum. If you're really serious you buy a trailer and all that. But people do bring their street legal cars to the track all the time. Either because they go to the track as an occasional hobby or they don't have the money to shell out for a second car just for racing (i.e. they're young).
Towing your racecar to the track is an incredibly common thing. You're going to be using your vehicle to its limits, things can go massively wrong. You don't want your only way home to break on the racetrack. Plus you probably have some amount of supporting equipment.
You seem to assume this particular demographic you speak of only does so in venues:
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.
My point is precisely that. How can you hope to encourage people to move to tracks if you require them to find a pickup that can tow cars there? If you keep closing down more and more tracks?
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.
> How can you hope to encourage people to move to tracks if you require them to find a pickup that can tow cars there? If you keep closing down more and more tracks?
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?
You are allowed to use the state to restrict the freedom of people who are going 100 in a 50MPH zone. You don't get to use the state to restrict people with a theoretical capacity to go 100 in a 50.
> You don't get to use the state to restrict people with a theoretical capacity to go 100 in a 50.
Says who?
This isn't how I believe free societies should be constructed. It's morally wrong and I really don't care to share a society where people who believe otherwise get to vote, because it's an irreconcilable values break that has no place in America. Safetyists fit much better in places like Europe.
And can you believe it, they even make you wear a seatbelt when driving! Downright communist.
Not communist but this is basically at odds with how we should run. It's a great shibboleth for where people's values lie. I don't think I've ever driven a car without a seatbelt. It's stupid and has no benefit. But I am deeply opposed to any government that says someone must.
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.
Anthony Burgess in his novel "A Clockwork Orange"
I used to race cars. Driving a race car on the street is dumb AF. Rollcage will crush your skull if you aren’t helmeted and in the 6-point harness. Suspension is bone jarring (and expensive to maintain). The exhaust is not legal. And on and on.
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.
> Nobody races steeet legal cars.
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.
Ha! I cut my teeth on Spec RX-7. I drove it to the track for a season and it was a terrible idea. The car was nominally legal (catalyst in place, full exhaust). But it was loud AF, the rollcage was dangerous on the street, and getting 4 race wheels in the back with a jack, tools, tent, etc was an endeavor.
Most street racers have some illegal modifications, but the guy driving the riced-out kia isn't really safety-conscious. The hope is to use punishment to shove those people towards tracks (which more people might use if they hadn't been pushed out by noise complaints and such).
Is the guy in the riced out Covic or whatever really interested in the track? Actual racing would require most car prep, different insurance (or none), more effort overall. The generic car person is doing it for social reasons, not because they want competition.
He might capitulate and put up with it if tracks were more common and not pushed out everywhere and if punishments for specifically street racing were increased. Plenty of places "takeovers" should be addressed by bringing about a dozen cop cars and arresting everyone but aren't.
Sure. Or if you don't want to have to tow a non-street-legal vehicle to move it on public streets, we could probably include a provision for GPS/vision-based dynamic speed limiting, allowing you to make your vehicle automatically street legally-speed-limited on public streets where others are at risk, and unlimited off public streets. The technology already exists and is very reliable for this.
Another method for the state to collect tax dollars. Speed limits have a very low effect on “saving lives”. People will drive whatever speed they think is suitable for the road they’re on.
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).
I would bet against these devices seeing widespread deployment or requirement. There are hundreds of counties around the rural US where a huge portion of their income comes from speeding tickets on vehicles on the one state highway going through their jurisdiction. Money talks louder than a few pedestrian deaths every year.
A $100 GPS/LTE dongle in the Obd2 port could alert the nearest cop, or automatically write a ticket.
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.
Good. Karen in her shitty Chevy Tahoe ZR1 F-Series Canyonero needs to learn that the speed limit signs say 55, not 75-85.
Cops won’t do their bare minimum job we pay them to do, so it’s time for technology to close the gap.
This is a technological solution to a social problem, and will create more problems, instead of solving it.
There was a quote about this, but failed to find it now. Hmprhrf.
But... so many people are practically forced to exceed the limit just to keep up with the rest of the traffic that's already blowing past the limit. If you force a few people to go at the limit, that's frustrating for everyone behind them in the best case at best... and I imagine possibly even more dangerous in the worst case, no? If they're going to enforce then shouldn't they try to enforce it as widely as they can?
> that's frustrating for everyone behind them in the best case at best... and I imagine possibly even more dangerous in the worst case, no?
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.
[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/new-swiss-re-study-waymo
Your link is about Waymo. It doesn't imply the same is true for human drivers. When I search around whether driving too slowly is too dangerous, basically every source I see says it is. Random example:
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.
if slow driving wasn’t as dangerous (if not more), highways would not have minimum speed. would you personally choose cars driving 15mph on a highway you are on or 90mph? between those two choices, I’d choose 90mph any day of the week and twice on sunday
You must live somewhere warm. On Canadian highways 15 mph is just a fact of life a few times a year. I've never seen a Canadian highway with a minimum speed.
Of course! I did not mean that anyone should ever drive any speed that is too slow for given conditions, I have driven 5-10mph on higways with minimum speed of 45+mph during inclement weather.
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
Physics works the same whether you are Waymo or human.
What? Reaction times and situational awareness definitely don't...
How is the energy "exponentially lower"? Kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed.
No. No one is 'forced' to exceed the limit, not remotely, and there are plenty of drivers who, for a variety of reasons, drive at or under the speed limit (many large trucks, for example).
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.
You need to be glued to the right lane though, or be willing to speed while passing even slower traffic, or you will definitely mess up the flow.
What really messes up flow is traffic "waves"[1] and these are often caused by drivers hitting the brakes because they're following too closely or someone cuts in front of them aggressively.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
Yes. Once I realized this, I tried to put a higher priority on maintaining a more steady average speed, even though that usually means leaving a larger gap ahead of me.
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.
I blame automatic transmissions. Stop and go traffic is hell in a manual, so there's a bigger incentive to maintain a constant slow speed instead of zooming forward then slamming the brakes.
> No. No one is 'forced' to exceed the limit, not remotely,
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 left lane and being tailgated, then it's your fault, if there is no one in front of you.
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".
It's always the fault of the tailgater. There are other ways to ask someone to move over like flashing your high beams. Tailgating just creates a dangerous situation.
I'm talking about the right lane.
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.
In my experience, if someone is tailgating you in the right lane, then speeding up is not likely to make them tailgate you any less, because such a person is either not paying attention or intentionally being a jerk.
We need to discourage dangerous drivers.
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.
> I am hoping we get personal in-car police cameras.
What are you actually imagining this would look like?
Ok, in that case should we also explore ticketing drivers that are less skilled to a point they’re much more likely to cause an accident?
What about those that drive less safe cars for themselves/other drivers/pedestrians?
I have never understood the chronic war on travel velocity. Its like the war on drugs, but far more pointless.
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.
Keeping sufficient distance doesn’t account for other lanes, where people could be entering or exiting your lane. Keeping all cars moving within 20-30 mph of each other make everything else more predictable. Saying that speed is not related to probability is just false. You can mitigate risks at higher speeds to a point, but higher speed is more risky just by the fact of human reaction times and that roads are not a simplistic system where the only factor is distance to the car directly in front of you.
> Keeping sufficient distance doesn’t account for other lanes, where people could be entering or exiting your lane.
That is already accounted for in existing traffic laws, such as failure to yield or failure to signal.
You accept speed as a huge factor in the severity of an accident but cannot understand the war against speeding?
The speed limits are set artificially low to try to reduce fleet fuel consumption, yet are well known to increase the probability of accidents since they violate the 85th percentile principle. Attempts to enforce the artificially low speed limits cause more collisions while claiming to be intended to prevent collisions. Given that, it makes perfect sense why he cannot understand it. It is unfit for its stated purpose.
Even more severe than high speed is driving while sleepy, but nobody is proposing a law to regulate sleep. Also more severe than speed is the mass of vehicle. Severity is also far more impacted by vehicle mass, but I don't see any movement towards regulating vehicles be as heavy as possible.
I can come up with many more examples to illustrate the stupidity of focusing on severity and speed versus frequency and probability.
Limiting the speed of chronic speeders doesn't seem like it maximizes tax revenue, though.
> 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.
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.
High pedestrian traffic areas, such as school zones or city down town areas with one way traffic lanes enjoy the lowest speed limits because external factors are more important than the vehicle that is driving. These aren't areas where people are most frequently cited for speed violations, though, because those external factors are generally enough to enforce low speeds naturally.
Freeways, where drivers are overwhelmingly more likely to be cited for speed violations, are not high pedestrian areas.