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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<< 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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".
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
> take more advanced actions
that makes such a person unpredictable, and a road danger.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not comparing the relative utility of cars and guns, but questioning the claim that the utility of gun ownership is small.
Yeah but it's about utility of cars but speeding in cars.
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.
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.
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.
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
What do you mean by "when conditions are right"?
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.
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? 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.
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.
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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 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...
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.
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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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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/...
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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!
> 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 tricky part is definitely enforcement - as you said, if people can mod around it, it risks becoming another "only the responsible people obey" situation
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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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.
> 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 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.
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".
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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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
The challenge, I guess, would be infrastructure and regulations
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).
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 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 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.
Fairly simple solution - catch someone driving with taken license - 364 days in jail.
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.
another example of a problem that would not exist if there was urban planning (walkable cities) and public transport (trains/bus/etc)
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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...
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish that people would just stop looking at their phones while driving.
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.
they want speed check in California, which is major market, and automakers likely will comply.
My uncle has a country place That no one knows about He says it used to be a farm Before the Motor Law
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?