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Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

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Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Even in that situation, hitting the brakes and aborting the overtake maneuver is the safer option. I'm sure you can imagine a scenario where it's impossible to abort - the vehicle incoming is a 40 tonne truck, they won't stop in time to not hit you, you can't merge back into your lane, and there is no room on the other side to escape to - your only option is to accelerate and hope for a tight squeeze. >>If you push…

This is dumb. I can’t really imagine a situation where the slot I the traffic I just left to overtake isn’t still available. The truck you’ve overtaking would have to be 100m long for slowing down to be a worse option.

>> can’t really imagine a situation where the slot I the traffic I just left to overtake isn’t still available

Well, I can't help with that. Either you can choose to believe me that this can and does happen, or you can choose to believe that it's a fantasy scenario that doesn't exist.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#392
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5 under without good reason is actually hazardous No it's not. It's annoying, not hazardous. > you're actively impeding traffic that wants to be going ~13mph faster than you are. You DON'T break speed limits because the guy behind you wants to break speed limits. That's a terrible reason to break a speed limit. And if you're the guy breaking speed limit and pressuring the drivers in front of you to do the same, you…

It's not "the guy behind you" in most states I've driven in, it's literally half the people on the road. If you aren't driving the same speed as the people around you out of some misguided sense of self-righteousness you are actively impeding traffic. I've literally been pulled over and told off (using much the same words I'm using now) for going too slowly on a freeway. I was religiously driving the speed limit and…

A cop told you to drive above the speed limit? I seriously doubt that. If that’s true, it’s a trap.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#394
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "the guy behind you" in most states I've driven in, it's literally half the people on the road. If you aren't driving the same speed as the people around you out of some misguided sense of self-righteousness you are actively impeding traffic. I've literally been pulled over and told off (using much the same words I'm using now) for going too slowly on a freeway. I was religiously driving the speed limit and…

A cop told you to drive above the speed limit? I seriously doubt that. If that’s true, it’s a trap.

Doubt away, but I got a thorough telling off and started going 5-10 over like the rest of the freeway and haven't been pulled over since. Maybe your state is different?

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#395

Or, just add speed bumps, curves, narrowings in the road, etc, to naturally bring the speed down. Then it works on everyone, whether they have the nanny tech or not, and you avoid the difficult problem of determining the speed limit accurately 100% of the time across every segment of road everywhere. This is kind of like the (apocryphal) "NASA spent millions on a pen that would work without gravity; russians just use…

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Urban design is a much more effective approach to saving lives (a large fraction of speeding deaths are pedestrians) with the bonus of giving large areas of the city back to pedestrians. "Traffic calming" is a well established evidence based field. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

Especially considering the top 5 threads on this article are all complaining about how speed limiting and speed limit recognition technology sucks. That's why I thought this was the most logical response.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because bad people exist and there are imminent dangers? There are legitimately good uses of people shooting people all the time. Hostage situations being the painfully obvious example. What even is this question?

Well obviously the police would have access to other kinds of guns, but if civilian guns were only capable of shooting deer then that would be a definite plus

[dead]

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Correct, it's a problem that exists, and it's a problem that is made worse by this legislation. Sorry, how? You keep claiming this is a privacy concern, but so far, I see no evidence whatsoever that implementation of this anti-speeding regulation requires violations of privacy rights, or is planned to include violations of privacy rights. It's beginning to sound like you just want to speed and are trying to justify…

Brother, I don't even currently own a car. I couldn't care less about speeding. I re-wrote this to the top to try and find common ground between us, rather than just bickering: I think that what would immediately dissolve any difference in opinion that you and I have would be this: legislation is also passed that expressly defines privacy-preserving requirements that car manufacturers (and the government) need to obe…

> Brother, I don't even currently own a car. I couldn't care less about speeding.

And that's a problem: car accidents are the #1 killer of people under 40 in the US and speeding is one of the top 3 reasons for that (the other two being drunk driving and distracted driving).

> Constantly adding ever more invasive mandates to enforce laws just takes us further and further down the path of privacy violations. You say that there's no evidence that this regulation requires violating privacy rights, but when the legislation doesn't expressly account for preserving privacy, than it's a safe bet that privacy will not be protected, and will (eventually) be abused.

Wouldn't it be easier to simply have blanket laws regulating what data can be collected by companies and law enforcement, and what data can be sent to law enforcement, not specific to speed limiters?

To be clear, I'm a personal privacy absolutist: I share your concerns with privacy, but I don't think the approach you're suggesting, of having privacy baked into every individual law, is particularly effective for a few reasons:

1. It dissipates the fight for privacy across a million different small laws, spreading resources being used to fight for privacy rights too thin.

2. It pits privacy against a bunch of other legitimate causes: if you hold up this law because of privacy concerns, you're making privacy the enemy of car safety advocacy. That's obviously not your intent, but car safety advocates are going to view it that way. If you hold up a law forcing insurance companies to pay for gene therapy because there are genetic privacy concerns, you're now making enemies of families of people with genetic diseases. If you hold up a law forcing employers to give sick leave because there are medical privacy concerns, you make an enemy of workers rights advocates. Spread across a bunch of different political issues, this create a ton of political enemies for privacy, and adds real grassroots support to the anti-privacy movement.

3. It's ineffective in actually enforcing privacy, because it isn't at a high enough level. Invaders of privacy need only find a loophole in one law and then collect all the data they want in that context, or even collect that data in a context where it's illegal and then pretend it was collected in a context where it's legal (i.e. parallel construction[1]).

Privacy doesn't need to, and shouldn't, permeate every law that is made. Instead what we need is comprehensive privacy legislation that blanket prevents companies and law enforcement from collecting data on people and storing it in central repositories, and provides real penalties for violating that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The context being that you can't dismiss the argument of personal freedom purely on the basis that someone is creating risk for others. You can, in fact, dismiss the argument of personal freedom purely on the basis that someone is creating a life and death risk for others, though. You've presented no cogent argument otherwise. > The concept that a driver would sometimes be given the freedom to surpass the speed lim…

You're again straying from the topic, to instead go ad hominem and score rhetorical points against a strawman who simply enjoys speeding and doesn't want the government to stop him. As a reminder, I'm not arguing speeding should be legal. I'm arguing that mandating speed limiters in cars is not a good solution. And the onus would be on the one arguing for the institution of such a regulation to justify it, which you…

> As a reminder, I'm not arguing speeding should be legal. I'm arguing that mandating speed limiters in cars is not a good solution. And the onus would be on the one arguing for the institution of such a regulation to justify it, which you have not done.

I would think that the reason for having speed limiters is fairly obvious: people don't follow speed limits, law enforcement is ineffective and unequally applied, and the result is that car accidents are the number 1 killer of people under 40 in the US. If mass death isn't enough justification for you, I don't know what will be.

And to be specific: this is the only solution on the table which has a real chance of changing the above.

> Whatever happened to "obviously there's some tradeoffs involved" in the case of banning driving?

This is absurd. Banning driving clearly has massive negative effects which far outstrip the risks to others which driving causes. You know this.

> Either creating risk for others alone is sufficient justification for the removal of a freedom, or it isn't.

Alone, it is.

But in the case of banning driving completely, it's not alone, there are other factors. Which you know.

There aren't other issues present with speeding. There literally is no reason to speed.

Stop trying to present this as a black and white issue: the world is full of shades of grey and nuance.

> You have to also consider the cost of the solution, the real-world measurable benefits of the solution, inefficiencies and inaccuracies of the solution (e.g. missing or defaced signage, signage read incorrectly), the risk that the solution itself creates (e.g. a car is being followed closely. Now when the speed limit changes, slowing down automatically, rather than at the driver's own discretion, creates risk for this driver) and many other factors.

Cost of the solution: cheaper than the medical cost of treating millions of car accident injuries, the cost of road cleanup, etc., probably. And that's just in terms of dollars: surely we can agree that human life has some non-monetary value.

Real world measurable benefits: fewer speeding deaths, less inequitable police enforcement of speeding laws, less cost.

Inefficiencies and inaccuracies: you seem to be dismissing speed limiters outright without actually picking a solution so that you can wave your hands about inefficiencies and inaccuracies of a solution which isn't actually specific enough for anyone to tell you what the inefficiencies and inaccuracies of the solution is. It seems you're aware that the issues you bring up such as missing and defaced signage, are already addressed in the proposed legislation, so what solution are you actually objecting to?

Consider the following speed limiter solution: in the US, the highest speed limits I'm aware of are 80mph, and most states max out at 70mph. Would you be opposed to a governor which simply prevents cars from driving faster than 80mph? What are the inefficiencies and inaccuracies of not being able to drag race with factory cars on public highways?

> The rest of your post is focused on a point I made about how society (in general, at least where I live - I don't know where you live and I obviously can't speak for you personally) already does not view speeding as something that could reasonably be enforced by mechanical limiter (since there are many situations where drivers facing unusual or extenuating circumstances are given leniency by cops and judges, and society tends to view this favorably, and tends to view harsh enforcement very unfavorably. This stands in contrast to the treatment and attitude toward most other crimes, where no excuse or extenuating circumstance tends to warrant leniency, unless the person literally had no other choice.) If you disagree with society on that point, then that's something you should take up with society. Regardless, it was a tangential point. (It was only worth mentioning because, society are the ones who elect the lawmakers at the end of the day. So they are ultimately the benchmark of whether a given legal doctrine is considered controversial or not.)

Yeah, that's because societal opinion on whether this could be enforced by a mechanical limiter is not in evidence. You're claiming society backs you up on this, which is simply not proven. Your examples of anti-speed-trap legislation are practically unrelated non sequiturs which assume a nonsensical motivation for those laws.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are pretty easy examples of decreasing regulations, both in the US and in Europe. The US is particularly easy to come up with examples: the supreme court has banished many regulations, reverting to more laissez faire states, whether related to gun control, campaign finances, TV broadcast rules, rules on marriage, the scope of CDC's or EPA's power, etc. The tax system gets simplified every few decades, after it…

Gun control has gotten looser on state level. Federal seems to get worse every couple decades. It started with the NFA, then the GCA, then the hughes amendment. Finally everything became a felony so they just disarmed undesirable people and races that way.

Let me fix that for you:

Gun control has gotten worse on a state level

Federal seems to get better every couple decades

Happy to help!

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Even in that situation, hitting the brakes and aborting the overtake maneuver is the safer option. I'm sure you can imagine a scenario where it's impossible to abort - the vehicle incoming is a 40 tonne truck, they won't stop in time to not hit you, you can't merge back into your lane, and there is no room on the other side to escape to - your only option is to accelerate and hope for a tight squeeze. >>If you push…

This is dumb. I can’t really imagine a situation where the slot I the traffic I just left to overtake isn’t still available. The truck you’ve overtaking would have to be 100m long for slowing down to be a worse option.

I have attempted a pass before with the car behind me tailgating me also attempting the same pass at the same time. Very dangerous move on their part, but you would be potentially unable to merge back over in this case.
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