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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

#761

Post by akaru »

austin-cheney wrote: post #720
topherPedersen wrote: post #703

Thank God. People on the roads are extremely reckless and we don't do anything about it. Our highways are lawless for the most part. People can drive however they feel like it. You literally have to kill someone AND be drunk before you actually get in trouble and are locked up. If you kill someone sober though, it's totally fine under our current system. In my opinion, if you get caught driving recklessly, the punish…

This sounds like high anxiety nonsense to mommy the rest of us. Our highways are not lawless. They are among the most regulated areas of daily human life in the US after accounting for both criminal and civil penalties. Whether people abide by those regulations is a different matter, but to say its lawless is a wild fantasy of people who probably shouldn't be on the roads in the first place.

We speak of the Wild West as “lawless”. I assure you there were very much laws against murder and theft then. They just had sporadic enforcement. Much as roads and highways are in many parts of the country. In California I see racing, 100mph driving, weaving like mad. In the ride home from the airport I watched teenagers race and crash. Drunk driving all over wine country. Never once saw anyone like this pulled over.

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

#762

Post by ryao »

Xylakant wrote: post #567
ryao wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the German autobahn suggests that the fallacy is the reasoning that highways even need speed limits. The autobahn is safer without speed limits than every single innovation we have had in setting speed limits. Perhaps it is time to stop blaming drivers and blame highway speed limits for causing safety issues.

The german autobahn demonstrates exactly the opposite. Everywhere that speed limits are introduced, the number of accidents drop. Less injured people, less fatalities. One example is the A24 https://www.geo.de/wissen/vergleich-auf-a24-weniger-verletzt... where the number of fatal accidents dropped by 50%.

This is a relative matter. The autobahn, without speed limits, is safer than US high ways with speed limits. The speed limit being suggested there is also a higher speed than the speeds reached on most US highways, which were a clone of the autobahn. Research into this matter has long suggested that there is an optimal limit at the 85th percentile and setting a speed limit above or below it harms safety. The autobahn demonstrates the optimal limit is well above the limits that are used in the U.S., which coincidentally are well below the 85th percentile.

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

#763

Post by potato3732842 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #230
nahkoots wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone who's jailed for driving on a suspended license because it's the only way they can get to their job probably isn't going to discontinue that behavior upon their release. I don't want my tax dollars being spent on a punishment that's just going to exacerbate the problem, especially when the crime isn't particularly odious in the first place (whatever they did to get their license suspended probably was, but on…

> when the crime isn't particularly odious in the first place “A significant association was found between all reasons for DWVL and the risk of causing a road crash. This association was particularly high for drivers with a suspended license and drivers who had never obtained a license. In these subgroups of drivers, the proportion of the relationship explained by high-risk driving behaviors is high” [1]. If the lice…

>“A significant association was found between all reasons for DWVL and the risk of causing a road crash. This association was particularly high for drivers with a suspended license and drivers who had never obtained a license. In these subgroups of drivers, the proportion of the relationship explained by high-risk driving behaviors is high” [1].

"Among church attendees, those attending church services in a prison were more likely to be convicted of a crime in the future than the average"

I too can mislead with sampling bias.

Nobody with a double digit number of brain cells is going to be impressed that a group that includes a lot of people who lost their licenses is going to be more crashy than the average. The average has a lot more people in it to water down the statistical effect of those people. But that doesn't mean that a lot of people in your "bad" group are actually bad on an individual level rather than a statistical one.

Pretty much every license suspension is for financial reasons at the end of the day because people who can afford lawyers and fines and whatnot are much more able to avoid the suspensions.

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

#764

Post by austin-cheney »

akaru wrote: post #761
austin-cheney wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like high anxiety nonsense to mommy the rest of us. Our highways are not lawless. They are among the most regulated areas of daily human life in the US after accounting for both criminal and civil penalties. Whether people abide by those regulations is a different matter, but to say its lawless is a wild fantasy of people who probably shouldn't be on the roads in the first place.

We speak of the Wild West as “lawless”. I assure you there were very much laws against murder and theft then. They just had sporadic enforcement. Much as roads and highways are in many parts of the country. In California I see racing, 100mph driving, weaving like mad. In the ride home from the airport I watched teenagers race and crash. Drunk driving all over wine country. Never once saw anyone like this pulled over.

The wild west is as equally misunderstood. There were far far fewer guns carried by people then compared to now and laws were well enforced even in sporadically populated areas. The exceptions were boom towns, like gold rushes, where the populations grew faster than norms could be established.

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

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

#765

Post by 1970-01-01 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #234
1970-01-01 wrote: post #176

Another half-measure that will be disabled by aftermarket kits. If people want to go fast, they will.

> will be disabled by aftermarket kits The presence of which demonstrates wilful intent, turning another ticket into jail time and a criminal record.

And how long until having a 500 HP muscle car is a demonstration of willful intent to speed? It's a slippery argument.

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

#766

Post by potato3732842 »

tzs wrote: post #269
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed limits in the US have a particular problem. The speed limits are set too close to the speed people are expected to drive. If the typical traffic speed on some highway is 65 MPH and someone is driving 76 MPH, that... isn't much different. It's not some night and day distinction where you can objectively say that 65 is perfectly safe and 76 is recklessly dangerous. The variation in stopping distance between those…

> The normal way you resolve this sort of thing in the law is by setting a legal limit which is objectively reckless, e.g. by setting the speed limit to 125 MPH. Then you aren't actually expected to drive 124 MPH, you're still expected to drive around 65 MPH, but we can reasonably say that if you're caught doing 130 there you're deserving of some penalties. I can't think of any teenage boy I've ever known who would h…

Ok, now run the same thought experiment with a speed limit of 65, basically same results because teenagers gonna teenager.

I think 125 is absurd, but the limits should actually reflect what the overwhelming majority of people do.

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

#767

Post by hcurtiss »

jollyllama wrote: post #760
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…

> It does not require manufacturers to pre-install them, and it does not use the electronics built into the car. It sounds analogous to the breathalyzer devices that are an option for judges in some jurisdictions. There's already a law on the books requiring breathalyzers in all new cars by next year: https://live959.com/law-mandates-mass-cars-to-have-breathaly... Presumably, anti-speeding tech will be made mandatory…

Wait -- I have to pay for a breathalizer in my new vehicle because other people can't follow the law? That's BS. I don't drink alcohol and I hate everything about this.

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

#768

Post by mlhpdx »

ryao wrote: post #550
ChoGGi wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for one you have to take an actual driving test? Police that regularly enforce traffic violations. And really gruesome accidents.

I cannot speak for other states, but NY requires a driving test and has police regularly enforce traffic violations too. None of this supports the idea of setting highway speed limits below the 85th percentile or even having high way speed limits. It instead suggests that we should copy the Germans. As for gruesome accidents, there will always be Darwin Award recipients. Trying to prevent them from earning their rewa…

Let’s start by copying the German requirement that all new cars have intelligent speed assist systems.

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

#769

Post by sgarland »

ryao wrote: post #688
sgarland wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s great, good for New York. Now go get Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington to do the same. Also, remember that licensing reciprocity means that if I have a vehicle titled in South Carolina, nothing stops me from driving it into North Carolina. I think you missed the entire part of my post where I discussed how a significant…

> That’s great, good for New York. Now go get Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington to do the same. Also, remember that licensing reciprocity means that if I have a vehicle titled in South Carolina, nothing stops me from driving it into North Carolina. Germany is no different. There is licensing reciprocity with the rest of the EU…

> If a significant percentage of vehicles are deemed unsafe to drive because of this, then removing them from the road would be a good thing.

“Good” is not a binary state, and it’s also wildly subjective. If by removing 100,000 unsafe cars from the road, you prevented 10,000 vehicle collisions, but 20,000 people became impoverished, is that good? It depends on your point of view. New York State, being largely dominated by NYC, I assume has an above-average social safety net. Perhaps they really are able to have these stricter requirements, while also ensuring that the negative impact felt on their citizens is minimized. Mississippi neither has that nor wants it. Were they to implement strict vehicle safety standards, the ripple effects would be much larger than those felt by a state with a stronger desire (and the budget) to care for their citizens.

Re: sources, can you post some? I’m not trying to Sealion you here, but I have no idea what specific studies you’re thinking of, and I would prefer to be on equal footing.

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

#770

Post by [deleted] »

ty6853 wrote: post #557
ryao wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet the German autobahn suggests that the fallacy is the reasoning that highways even need speed limits. The autobahn is safer without speed limits than every single innovation we have had in setting speed limits. Perhaps it is time to stop blaming drivers and blame highway speed limits for causing safety issues.

This all seems like a moot point to me until there is actual consequences for people who ACTUALLY cause accidents. We all know someone (maybe ourselves) who had their car totaled, seriously damaged, or been harmed by people that hit and run, had no financially responsibility for their damage, intoxicated, etc. And jack shit happened to them. When an illegal hit my car and totalled my car (and then ran off), the polic…

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