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Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

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Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#321

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

bombcar wrote: post #293
rkagerer wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#322

Post by 20after4 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #305
gpm wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#323

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

spl757 wrote: post #288
Esophagus4 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 la…

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?

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#324

Post by tsimionescu »

spl757 wrote: post #288
Esophagus4 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 la…

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.

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?

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#325

Post by hwbehrens »

mizzao wrote: post #292
shermantanktop wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!]

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#326

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #172
Dylan16807 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 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.

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#327

Post by cryptoegorophy »

illiac786 wrote: post #320

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.

Yeah. That solves the problem. Repeat 3 times? Lifetime ban.

Full self driving can’t come soon enough.

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#328

Post by bluecalm »

allenrb wrote: post #224

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…

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.

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#329

Post by 20after4 »

WalterBright wrote: post #285
GuB-42 wrote: post #205

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…

> 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.

Re: Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

#330

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bdangubic wrote: post #222
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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/

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