But you might. Remember, everyone is a potential terrorist. /s

Your scooter wouldn’t even clear the snow here, let alone stay upright on the ice.

I think some folks need to realize the world is a big place that doesn’t always look like their local area.

There is no way 1.5 to 4yo can play unsupervised, as in grabbing distance from adults, in areas close to traffic? Maybe 4yo can do with yelling distance from adults.

Like, if people wouldn't care so much as they do, I would guess there would be a lot of fatalities.

How far will you let your kid walk from home alone?

Anyway my point is just that pedestrian deaths have gone up even as the number of miles walked and biked (_especially_ by kids - the modeshare for biking to school has absolutely plummetted) goes down.

I remember vividly when I was a kid and we were biking on the street and someone drove too fast, dad went out in the road and yelled him down, which was reasonable.

I guess if you don't see it then it must never happen to anybody ever. That isn't valid data.

This is because there is a perception among many of lower socioeconomic status that "spending more will raise my taxes, and I already can't afford car insurance", and that public transit projects will not be built to their benefit.

It's a huge issue which warrants radical steps.

Slippery slope fallacy. Why don't you refute the central point of what I suggested?

It encompass people who are going 60/65/75 (depending on state) in a 55 on the interstate that's actually a 45 because of an inactive construction zone and also people who are going 60mph on 30mph city streets (probably genuinely reckless per common usage of the word). They're two very different degrees of misconduct and the former vastly outnumbers the latter and everyone knows it and political will for penalties is based off this.

You wanna see reckless driving taken seriously the first step is to stop advocating for definitions of reckless that include behavior the general public doesn't see as reckless.

For example: one of my neighbors speeds like an idiot through our neighborhood — easily doing 60 mph and often blowing right through the stop sign at the end of the block. He’s a real danger.

The neighborhood complained to city hall. Their solution? They lowered the speed limit from 30 mph to 20 mph. It changed nothing. He still speeds. He still blows stop signs. He doesn’t get caught — there usually aren't any cops hanging around our sleepy end of town.

Meanwhile, I have seen people get pulled over for doing the previously legal, entirely reasonable, 30 mph — which is still the limit for most of the city.

Now, at 71 mph, you officially trigger the 15+mph rule mentioned to be a super speeder. Based on anecdotal experience from numerous trips between NY and Ohio, I would estimate that minimum 1 in 5 cars are doing 80+ in a 65. So, at least 20% by my obviously flawed and biased observations. For an actual estimate, in 1988 during the national 55mph speed limit era, an observed 85% of drivers in NY were above the speed limit.

For more context, I have paced many law enforcement vehicles (usually state troopers) doing 10 over with regular traffic.

In comparison in Poland we have way more speed related accidents on our highways even though there is a speed limit. It's because we have a lot of very bad drivers who go too fast.

It's not enough to look at the speed limit. You would need to look at actual speed.

Traveling by train ... is it some sarcasm or you've never been to Germany?

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.

In the UK we have variable speed limit roads. When they are busy/obstructions the speed limit is lowered. It is put back to 70mph when the traffic is light / no safety issues.

The safe speed on a road is dependant on the road and the conditions. I've been in situations where driving at faster than 10mph would be dangerous and I've been on the same road and doing 40mph was safe.

But why? If people, including law enforcement are comfortable with doing 70mph on 65mph roads, why not make the speed limit 70mph? Why is there an official and an unofficial speed limit? I heard even self driving cars are programmed to go at the "unofficial" speed limit.

For the context, I live in France. We have a lot of automatic speed traps that will systematically fine you for going 5 km/h above the speed limit, which isn't a wide margin. It means that either you are speeding, or you are driving at the posted speed limit, there is no "speed limit + tip".

If safety were your overriding concern, you'd set the speed limit at 20 mph. Or better yet, 5.

Governments setting policies on cars is just the transportation version of global mass surveillance and control. It's not your car anymore, and it's not you who's driving. The computer is controlling everything, and it's not your computer, it's theirs. If they can set speed limits, they can easily do a lot more than that, it's literally one mandatory over the air software update away.

The only question is: are you gonna sacrifice your freedom for security? The so called "anti-government people" made their choice. It seems you have made yours. The consequences will be felt either way.

    > it was disgustingly accurate

Performance mods are surprisingly affordable if you do all the labor yourself.

Recently I got into an accident. A car changed into my lane completely unannounced, and I was blinded by a car in my front diagonal. The car "jumped" into my vision, I braked and hit them relatively slowly. Being slow, uphill and on a wet road helped all of us (the car took some of the damage by sliding).

Consider this in a freeway at speed limit. We'd be hurt. Consider this at 1.5x speed limit, because everyone speeds, and we would be dead.

Do not forget, the police found out that I had no wrongdoing and blame. It was impossible to see them, and they neglected to check their mirrors and signal a lane change, plus I had some distance to them and braked as hard as I could the moment I saw them, and I was going 50KM/h to begin with.

The kinetic energy of an 1800 kg car traveling at 30 km/h is about 62.5 kJ

The kinetic energy of an 1800 kg car traveling at 50 km/h is about 173.6 kJ

The kinetic energy of an 1800 kg car traveling at 70 km/h is about 340.1 kJ...

If your only consideration is getting to your destination very few minutes sooner with complete disregard for other peoples health it makes perfect sense, but cars are dangerous and at anything but completely isolated roads it makes sense to lower speed limits since the average speed wouldn't drop significantly while improving safety for everyone.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=85th+percentile+speed

Setting the limit at the 85th percentile and having most drivers drive at it creates uniformity of speed, which is known to increase safety.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#Operating_speed

There are advantages and disadvantages as with everything.

As it is, speed limits are rarely set to the individual roads specific circumstance according to some sort of scientific or engineering method, instead most speed limits are set to a default speed used for that class of road across the state. As such, it is silly to act like extant speed limits are all correct even when nearly everybody is ignoring the limit on a specific road, evaluating that road's condition for themselves and choosing to drive at another speed.

If you are doing 45 on a California freeway, YOU are the danger. Not the car going 75. You.

[Edit: Interesting that there are multiple effects, e.g. the sibling comment, that refer to similar but distinct phenomena!]

Preemptively restricting the space of possible (or likely) situations is the cornerstone of designing safe systems.

that makes such a person unpredictable, and a road danger.

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.

>>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.

For you.

Then, guns aren't the cause of suicides and it's disingenous to count those as gun deaths.

To be clear, I'm not for gun rights and live in a place where they don't exist.

Yes, we have laws that exist to control people's behavior. We have systems which exist to control people's behavior. This is intended and completely necessary to live in a society with other people. For an example that causes no controversy to anyone on this board - we have laws that control people's ability to take open-source code and use it without sharing.

You're pretending like this is completely crazy by inventing a position nobody has taken, claiming "speed limiters in cars for repeat speed offenders" is the same as that insane position you just invented, and then pretending to be an idiot so that you don't have to do the work of actually justifying yourself. You should try practicing some actual thinking instead of resorting to pretending the people you disagree with are stupid.

If you're caught once, then a fine and a slap on the wrist should be enough to make you pay more attention. Twice - bigger fine & harder slap. If you're caught N times, then lose your license.

Something like "ignorance is not an excuse in the eyes of the law".

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.

Cobblestone is an old technology, though. How does "state of the art" differ from what we can see on this street view?

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.

And the maps are continuously outdated so lots of smaller roads simply do not work properly.

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/

Can you describe such a situation?

I can't think of anything other than completely unrealistic action movie scenarios.

Where are these emergency situations you describe? Not only have I never needed to speed for some emergency situation, I don't even think I know a single person who has had to do this. How often is "this person would have died if they got to the hospital five minutes later but the highway was clear and somebody drove them there 30mph over the limit and got there in time?"

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.

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.

The only answer is to make this kind of thing illegal at the level of the state constitution and/or federal case law, at least until we bring back tarring and feathering government officials who violate their oaths.

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.

"GPS-based speed limiters are too draconian. We should throw more people in prison."

If the cars move faster, they will get off the road faster. This means fewer vehicles on the road and the distances between the vehicles will increase. It is a linear effect if you adapt a flow equation to vehicles. Here is the equation off the top of my head:

V1*D1*L1 = V2*D2*L2

V is the average speed, D is the linear density, L is the number of lanes. If you care about safety, you want D to be as big as possible so that vehicles do not have distances between them reach 0. That implies higher speeds (or more lanes, but that is harder to do).

Finally, the gun analogy is inappropriate. It is essentially saying “the data contradicts our conclusions, so let’s shutdown any rational thought that might question our conclusions”. This kind of thinking is backward and should easily lead to nonsense such as the rationalization of square wheels to give an example of the absurdity it allows. Interestingly, much of what you said could also be said in defense of the forced adoption of square wheels.

Should I go to jail?

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.

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."

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.

The 85% rule is and has always been bullshit.

There is no need for this condescending attitude. The average citizen has virtually no say on these things and our infrastructure was decided decades before most of us were born. Major cities are investing in transit improvements but the nature of these projects means they will take over a decade to reach fruition. We aren’t doing nothing.

No.

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.

I've never in my life seen anyone just full send it at a red light that's been red long enough the other side could have green but you see it in videos online so it must happen somewhere.

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.

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.

It's why a lot of states will occasionally do license fine forgiveness.

"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."

These days, it’s not really about the Confederacy, just culturally.

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.

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.

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…

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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave

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".