441–450 of 525 posts
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Flashing my lights to warn another driver about a speed trap makes me feel like I’m part of some underground resistance
Resistance to government by rule of law?
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Its the "one size fits all" rule which annoys me. My car will comfortably sit at 110mph all day long, if I'm alone on a motorway in the early hours who am i hurting or endangering? It certainly isn't about safety because that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
At 110mph fuel consumption per mile of most cars is ~3x that at 55mph: http://mpgforspeed.com/ And so is its "carbon footprint" 3x greater. To answer your question: You're hurting everything that's alive on the planet.
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> very car should have a chip. Once you are in a speed limit - your car can't go faster. This is actually dangerous because people need the ability to use discretion. Suppose you're transporting a part to repair a machine which is causing a fatality every five seconds as long as it's offline. Getting there 20 seconds faster saves four lives. Do you still want a chip that prevents you from exceeding the speed limit? >…
Is that Homo Economicus driving the delivery truck? You'd expect a machine that saves a life every 5 seconds to have some kind of investment in redundancy. Either is spread over more machines or the wonder device has spare parts that are kept stocked. And if not, I'm sure parliament could pass a law to clear the streets for the day.
Is it too far of a leap to expect that someone who knows they're doing something where lives are at risk and time is of the essence will rightly estimate that the optimal travel speed is in excess of the ordinary speed at which accountants commute to their office buildings?
> You'd expect a machine that saves a life every 5 seconds to have some kind of investment in redundancy. Either is spread over more machines or the wonder device has spare parts that are kept stocked.
You might think that, but in reality, humans are fallible and don't always have perfect foresight.
Maybe they had a spare on site, but the spare was defective, or was the wrong revision number and incompatible. Maybe the part is a filter, but the problem is that there are a hundred times more pollutants than normal, so they already used all their spare filters and need twenty more ASAP. Maybe the machine is the backup generator for a hospital, which was damaged by the same lightning strike that caused the power outage.
> And if not, I'm sure parliament could pass a law to clear the streets for the day.
The scenario is the machine goes offline so the company immediately calls the shop with the part who immediately leaves to deliver it. It's a five minute drive at the speed limit, but meaningfully less if you exceed it.
The police response time is six minutes, they can't help you. Your suggestion is for parliament to enact legislation in that amount of time?
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I'm for automated speed enforcement (even as someone who speeds), but attaching it to a human undoes a lot of the good. Nothing is stopping the cop for going to a place with a certain demographic and setting up shop.
Shouldn't that be entire point of enforcing speed limits. Setting them up in dangerous locations where demographic in general is speeding?
Widespread speed enforcement needs to be almost algorithmic in it's spread. And that algorithm would have to be closely watched. Saying "put a speed camera at every stop light" would heavily police urban centers for example, but essentially exclude wealthy communities that sprawl out with miles of stop signs between multi-acre properties
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>The government can aggregate this data and build movement patterns on all citizens. Yes. So? Sounds useful. Sounds like the Google maps data that people used to track lockdowns. Now you don't need to pay for traffic censuses.
Ask someone in China how they're feeling about being constantly monitored in every concieveable way. You'll of course think "Well that's China, we don't have that kind of mass surveillance here". And then one bill after another you're right there in the boat with them.
You could ask the victims of the FBI's 'Highway Serial Killings' initiative how they'd feel about it. But they're dead.
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Speed limits are important for non-cars. As a cyclist, I don't want people overtaking me 100km/h with a 1m gap. As a pedestrian trying to cross a small city or town street without dedicated crossing, I don't want drivers to suddenly appear with 100km/h from a small curve. I'd argue that 50km/h in a city is still too much. 30km/h should be the limit.
As a pedestrian, I'm not ok with someone overtaking me at 30km/h with a 0.5m gap. See? It's all discretionary. As should speed limits be (at the discretion of the driver, based on the current road conditions). The problems you mention have other, better, actual solutions (e.g. cycling lanes, speed bumps before road crossings, ...).
Doesn't the cyclist get a say? Or the pedestrian? Why should just the driver get to decide how much risk to impose on everyone else?
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Ironically you can pretty much only get caught by the irregular ones if you’re on a quiet road too - otherwise someone will flash you as you approach to let you know. At least in some places anyway.
I sometimes flash people on roads where there are no speed traps. This way I achieve two things: defeating the usefulness of flashing people as a warning and also possibly making people drive slower than they would.
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> I'm alone on a motorway in the early hours who am i hurting or endangering? - your loved ones - the emergency services that have to clean your body off the road - subsequent road users -- when the road is closed -- to clean your body off the road
Fact is that people drive that speed regularly on German autobahns without any widespread carnage. Driving aggressively when below the speed limit, or being distracted, is far more dangerous than just driving quickly on a clear road. The emphasis on speed is mainly because it’s easy to measure and enforce. There’s standard etiquette there to slow down when there are vehicles in the distance ahead or curves or imperfe…
Germany has quite a high rate of road traffic deaths compared to other European countries.
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> I'm alone on a motorway in the early hours who am i hurting or endangering? - your loved ones - the emergency services that have to clean your body off the road - subsequent road users -- when the road is closed -- to clean your body off the road
These are reasons to ban driving. Anybody can have an accident at any speed that could lead to a fatality.
Sure, but do you really think the risk of having an accident, and if so, the risk of it resulting in a fatality, has no relationship to the speed involved?
We accept that virtually every activity carries some risk, but we also choose (as a society, whether you as an individual agree or not) to set some rules to help limit the level of that risk.
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I sometimes flash people on roads where there are no speed traps. This way I achieve two things: defeating the usefulness of flashing people as a warning and also possibly making people drive slower than they would.
Bravo. I'm going to do this when I start driving again.