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Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders

fastcompany.com

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

#581

Post by shlant »

snowwrestler wrote: post #551

The Fast Company article says “Republicans in Virginia just passed a law to make it a punishment for repeated traffic violations.” But the Virginia legislature is currently controlled by the Democrats. And the delegate quoted in this local news story is a Democrat: https://wjla.com/news/local/anti-speeding-device-car-reckles... That story is probably more useful than the Fast Company one. It clarifies that the new la…

lol I had shared the original article to a group with the comment "rare republican policy win" and then had to immediately retract that after reading your comment

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

#582

Post by ryao »

acdha wrote: post #574
ryao wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no reason in the world to assume that US drivers have the same level of driving skill as German drivers. That is a very typical response, yet the notion of Germans being intrinsically superior to others has long been debunked.

That’s a straw man. Nobody is saying Germans have some “safe driving” gene, but rather that German culture has higher standards for driver training and enforcement. I’m sure that if the United States would see incident rates decline significantly if we made drivers licenses harder to get and easier to lose before a fatality, or simply ended our effective trillion-dollar annual subsidy of driving and required people t…

The way he worded his reply suggested some sort of intrinsic superiority that by definition could not be replicated anywhere else.

That said, if we can replicate Germany’s success in vehicle safety in the U.S., we should, yet discussion on vehicle safety seems to justify increasingly draconian bandaids on the status quo rather than just mimicking what the Germans do. It is also easy to say that they have higher standards, yet no one has stated precisely what these standards are.

In NYS, we have annual mandatory vehicle inspections. Driving an uninspected vehicle is illegal and you cannot get the inspection certificate for your windshield unless your vehicle passes. The state requires a driving test to get a license and effectively forces everyone to take driver education courses every 3 years by raising insurance rates if they do not. It is unclear to me what is done in Germany that is not already done in NYS as far as driver education and vehicle road worthiness are concerned. NYS might even be ahead of Germany if Germany does not have any incentive for regular driver education.

> I’m sure that if the United States would see incident rates decline significantly if we made drivers licenses harder to get and easier to lose before a fatality, or simply ended our effective trillion-dollar annual subsidy of driving and required people to carry insurance coverage sufficient to actually compensate the other parties.

You just described NYS. It has some of the highest insurance coverage requirements in the U.S.:

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/minimum-car-ins...

Losing your license is fairly easy to do here. There is a points system. Reach 11 points, and you lose your license. Reaching 11 points is fairly easy to do. Having any points on your license increases insurance rates, so there is a strong incentive to avoid it.

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

#583

Post by chippiewill »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #277
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…

> 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…

> my personal opinion is that speeding police cars probably don't create a net benefit for public safety either.

100%. The UK police will happily abandon a pursuit these days, it's been shown all too often that it causes far more damage and harm than it prevents. It's usually easy enough to track fleeing vehicles in other ways (helicopter, traffic cameras, static observations) that it's simply not proportionate.

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

#584

Post by pc86 »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #566
marketneutral wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that we should aim to solve it without surveillance / sacrificing rights. So in this case, increasing the fines / jail time is at least one alternative.

Not sure in how incarceration can be considered a smaller sacrifice of rights than vehicle tracking.

Not sure how incarcerating people who are guilty of a crime is unconscionable but monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately is totally fine and no problem whatsoever.

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

#585

Post by lesuorac »

lupusreal wrote: post #456
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you raise the limits just because drivers are going faster, then the drivers will just increase their speeds until again No. Most people who drive significantly faster than the limit are disregarding the limit and are driving at the speed they feel to be safe. They aren't considering the limit and blindly choosing to drive X over it, such that they'd drive X even faster even if the posted limit were raised by X.…

> The reason I know this to be true is because the proportion of drivers who speed on any given road varies wildly with the road.

Another way to arrive at this conclusion is that if the speed limit is both 65 for trucks and cars its trivially not the limit of how fast one can safely drive. And as expected, you see trucks going 65 while cars speed around them at 70+.

And also the inability for people to use the pedal and the steering wheel at the same time resulting in large 15+ mph speed drops around a highly visible curve.

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

#586

Post by K0balt »

ryao wrote: post #576
K0balt wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example of a system that works well is usually the target of low-fidelity attempts to copy without understanding the fundamental principles that make it possible, I.e. copying the obvious form, but ignoring the cultural underpinnings. Also, muh freedoms. And I don’t need no edumacation, I ken drive jest fine. Unfortunately, the USA has a weird version of the noble savage mythos that enshrines ignorance.

The Germans avoided speed limits on the autobahn specifically because they viewed it as a form of freedom. Your remarks about ignoring cultural underpinnings seem misplaced. That said, I am not convinced that any of what you said is necessarily true. The annual vehicle inspection that NYS mandates generally ensures a minimum level of quality. In NYS, you need to pass a test that shows a minimum level of competency be…

It sounds like NYS is very progressive. My exposure is anecdotal, but I don’t think that level of vigilance is the norm across the expanse of the interstate system.

I’m with you on freedom and how it ideally translates into responsibility.. but I think that there is a substantial block of US drivers that fail to grasp the intersection of those tightly entangled concepts.

In short, Freedom != freedom from consequences.

Hopefully, my view on the prospect of improving the situation is overly pessimistic. I like your version better, but my faith in cultural progress during what seems to me a significant retrograde slide over the last half century is pretty low.

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

#587

Post by dathinab »

ryao wrote: post #553
K0balt wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The german driving culture is largely responsible for the lack of spectacular fatalities on the autobahn. In general, German culture has more respect for the “correct” way to do things, cars tend to be better maintained, and there is a much higher level of driver education going on. Comparatively, American drivers are a bunch of filthy savages. (I say that as an American driver, currently driving in a country where t…

Then instead of doing all of these increasingly draconian measures, perhaps we should try to copy the Germans. The interstate highway system itself was a copy of the German autobahn system. We should have copied it in all of its aspects. It is never too late to do this.

It's actually not possible in the US.

The US is too car dependent and as such it's practically non-viable to

- put high (skill/knowledge) requirements on drivers (especially given that this normally entails increased monetary requirements)

- put high car maintenance/road safety requirements on cars

and in generally fundamentally changing driving rules is hard in general and also a safety hazard during transition. I.e. it is very much too late to do this.

Like one of the many benefits of not having a hyper car dependent society is you can say "no more driving for you" to people who can't show to safely drive a car (or have repeatedly shown to not keep with the laws (at lest the safety related ones)). Or say "no more driving" to not well enough maintained cars (until fixed).

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

#588

Post by chippiewill »

SnazzyUncle wrote: post #570
jakelazaroff wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren’t mutually exclusive. What reason is there ever for a car to go 110?

You don't seem to have ever driven on a long, empty, well lit 4 lane carriage way at 4am in he morning. If I am going 70MPH (UK Motorway speed limit) or 120MPH in such a situation makes no difference in terms safety. 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…

Except the average person isn't a highways engineer and isn't aware of the road design limits which means 120mph can be unsafe even on a visually empty road.

Even the German autobahns are only unrestricted in specific stretches where someone will have done the legwork to demonstrate safety at those speeds.

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

#589

Post by pc86 »

hermannj314 wrote: post #535
dabeeeenster wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using a highly regulated piece of equipment that kills over 40,000 people in America annually. What do you feel is the appropriate balance? How is this different to driving around with a mobile phone on?

I think my concern is that we are being lied to. My opinion is irrelevent as I do not live in Virginia and am not a lawmaker, but I would want this to be tied to a vehicle telematic privacy bill that restricted how cars use telemetry data and gives consumers rights to control what is logged and who sees it and who it can be sold to. Until we own the data our cars generate, I don't want active speed and acceleration c…

The problem is even if you got the legislature to pass that privacy bill (they never would, at least not without 1,000 exemptions that every large company would qualify for multiple times over), it would just get repealed a year or two later with little fanfare.

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.

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

#590

Post by shlant »

pc86 wrote: post #584
_Algernon_ wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure in how incarceration can be considered a smaller sacrifice of rights than vehicle tracking.

Not sure how incarcerating people who are guilty of a crime is unconscionable but monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately is totally fine and no problem whatsoever.

> monitoring everyone all the time and eliminating the ability to move from Point A to Point B privately is totally fine and no problem whatsoever.

Is that what the bill proposes? everyone's vehicle is now monitored all the time?

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