Interesting that instead of addressing real problem - incompetence in driving, is solved by making world slower instead of forcing to learn to drive. In Germany it normal to drive way faster and noone has any problems
What I would give for an eyeroll emoji. Yeah, I'm sure that the story outlined in the article of a guy that killed 9 people in a single accident while on PCP and cocaine could have been avoided if he just had a few more drivers' ed courses...
I agree with your comment but otoh would a guy on pcp no be just as deadly at 90 mph?
If we doing this we should rather do automated reaction speed/sobriety tests. Had a friend almost die bc he drove the day after being drunk bc he fell asleep from being sleep deprived even if he was "sober" by then
Hard to quantify 'deadly' but kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared. 100mph has 23% more kinetic energy than 90mph and 56% more than 80mph.
It's just: I can go faster, if I want to (or for some reason need to).
I'm really not a fan of doing the Apple thing and to infantilize the user by disallowing sideloading because it's dangerous.
The discussion got dragged to compare force and impact but similarly to train tracks, highways are usually a place of motion. People don't walk around and cars are usually also fast.
We counter the emergency situation such as the infamous end of a traffic jam by adding brake assistants that warn the driver to brake and then hit the brake on their own. This kind of technology seems to reduce traffic incidents so that the most danger comes from older cars without this technology.
I completely agree, that we don't need hyper cars or racing cars on the road. But the 100 mph limit wouldn't help at all in cities. There are better ways like obstacles that force a driver to slow down or routing with curves instead of straight lines.
I really don't care for your analogy, speeding is a choice that puts others at risk and I think safety rules that protect everyone from each other, are far from infantilism.
But also, we shouldn't let perfect get in the way of good. Blocking 100mph+ may only improve safety on faster roads, but that's still a gross improvement. A few people a year are caught doing 150mph on 60mph single carriageways near me. Far more nationally, far more never caught, and exponentially more on superbikes.
If there's no legal reason to do 100mph on any road, why not just stop it being an option? Remove that temptation. It will save far more lives than it costs.
In the case in the article, when talking about geosensitive limiters, presumably they would have been limited to somewhere around the 35mph speed limit in the area.
In Germany the speed limit is frequently much lower that that, and driving faster than about 80 mph (130 kmph, called richtgeschwindigkeit) incurs increased liability even on the autobahn without any speed limits.
In my experience not many drivers cruise at speeds of 100 mph (160 kmph). The richtgeschwindigkeit is much more common.
I see that, too. It's not even 130 km/h it's often between 100 and 130 km/h. Depending on the speed limit, traffic, lanes available and routing I would say that there are about 5-10% of cars that go faster and maybe 20% that want to go faster but cannot because of traffic.
I would agree with a general speed limit of 160 km/h. If you drive around conurbation area "Ruhrpott" you rarely have the chance or aren't allowed to go faster than 100 km/h.
Personally I've set my car to alarm me on 200 km/h, just to remind me, that I'm about to do something stupid. When someone is with me, they are also alarmed because it's the usual cockpit beep that tells you, something important popped up like engine failure or tire pressure.
I once drove a Ford Focus with an electrical speed limit of 160 km/h in place because it was a company car. But because of this I ended up in a dangerous situation where I was overtaking a slower car that started accelerating. With enough engine power I could accelerate faster up to the point where the limit kicked in and we were at the same speed. As usually I've monitored the situation behind me and I've noticed that there were faster cars approaching.
In conclusion I was mislead by the engine to have enough power to handle the situation with ease but the electric limit just cut it of. My foot said: There's more available, but the car suddenly locked it away.
Stupid situation. yes. In driving school they teach not to accelerate when someone is overtaking you. Of course this rule changes a bit on the Autobahn, but in this case, speculative driving forced the cars behind me to hit the brakes which is weird when you think that everything will be fine because the slower car just accelerates and overtakes. Stopping the maneuver of all sudden and let the car on the right lane pass you again is is the worst outcome for everyone behind you.
That's why I suggest to not limit the car's acceleration curve so the driver notices that the engine is on its limit. Rather I would implement an audible signal at 160 km/h and a repeating signal for over 190 km/h. Because to be honest: It's rarely possible to drive that fast for just a minute.
I would also suggest to get these street legal racing machines like Audi RS-models off the road. There's absolutely no sane use for such overpowered cars on public roads.
And finally: Company cars should be limited or regulated in some way. Most aggressive and fast drivers seem to be representatives. They don't pay the high prices for fuel and don't care about wear of the car (especially brakes).
There is car manufacturers and petrol heads lobby to not touch the unrestricted speed limits on the autobahn but there are also people who lobby for sensible speed limits as most people drive at about the speed a speed limit would be at anyway (120-130km/h) and the added energy used at speed along with dangerous situations coming from very high speed deltas are not good. A truck is always going to be 90-100 km/h and when a thrill seeker whizzes past them at 250 then the reaction time available and potential energy is killer.
Almost like speed is only one factor in road safety.
Autobahns are designed for faster traffic with various features and rules to avoid common collisions. It may be possible to upgrade all the highways designed for 60-70mph to the same specs, but that does seem unrealistic. Just maintaining the surface condition is a common problem in the UK and US.
You could lock it away so people start messing with their cars to unlock it again. Yes.
I wish people would realize how dangerous it is to be so much faster than the adjacent lane.
people only drive 120/130 now because that's what seems right. have this conversation 50 years ago and 60/70km/h seems right. oops we'll never increase it and now everyone speeds anywhere because there's clearly no research put into it.
trucks are limited purely on economics €/kmh we do not want the industry racing to use more fuel.
I think it’s a weird issue. On one hand the governments probably shouldn’t do this, on the other hand we had 1902 vehicles permanently confiscated by our government between 1. April 2001 and 20. March 2023 for our “Insane Driving” (vanvidsbilisme) law here in Denmark, so it would also sort of make sense to find a limit a little above our maximum speed limit.
In one “hilarious” case some Norwegian rich guy went to Germany to buy a Lamborghini (or maybe it was some other super car, but I think it was a Lamborghini) and then proceeded to drive through Denmark at 100 km/h above the highest speed limit we have. Then got caught and lost his brand new car before he reached the ferry to Norway.
Of course a maximum speed limit in your car also wouldn’t solve the most dangerous of these cases. Since they occur when people drive more than 100 km/h through cities, and since our speed limit on the highways goes up to 130 km/h a car limit would probably need to be around 140-150 km/h. I’m Which wouldn’t solve the dangerous driving in cities at all. So unless you can regulate the top speed by location, it won’t save that many lives.
It would be sort of cool if you could regulate car top speed by location, but I’m not sure that’s really feasible. I think it’s far more likely that we’ll do it through mass surveillance. We’re already doing that with the diesel cars that are now illegal in certain city zones, where you’ll automatically get a ticket when your plate is registered by the city surveillance cameras. Once they can monitor speed, and the legalisation moves forward we’ll absolutely start doing this with speeding drivers. I’m not really a fan of the increased surveillance, but it’s not really like it’s going to stop.
Getting a driver's license in Germany costs well over an order of magnitude more than in the US and takes quite a few weeks. And speed limits are much more enforced in the Germany compared to the US.
Then there’s the time-honored tradition of car mods and the legacy / grandfathering problem. Plenty of cars out there today can hit 160mph or more easily, even pretty modest vehicles like a V6 Honda Accord. Is a 6000# Tesla limited to 100mph much safer than an Accord that weighs a little more than half as much going 160?
It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but the problem is much bigger than what limiting vmax on new vehicles will solve. 100mph is still many tons of force depending on vehicle weight, very much enough to do a lot of damage. Politicians love fixing the easy problem instead of addressing the cultural issues at play here in our society. Listen for how many cat-less exhausts you hear in California as evidence of how effective CARB and inspections have been. Again, it’s not that it’s a bad idea, just that there are too many ways around it and too much will to avoid the law. The best laws are the ones people want to follow. How do we steer society to a place where reckless driving isn’t so appealing?
Regulations already mandate things like seatbelts, airbags, and backup cams in cars. I fail to see how "your car should not be able to go over 100 MPH" is significantly different.
Another reason I find so many of these knee-jerk, vapid "muh freedom" responses so annoying is because I think there is valid concern over how this would be implemented, e.g. by using GPS to vary the limit as mentioned in the article.
just to add to that: what percentage of accidents would be prevented if your car could only go up to 99? I didn't find that in the article. I didn't see the article mention that a speed of 99 would have prevented or lessened that minivan accident either.
So we don't know. But we do know that once this tech is mandated, politicians will start demagogueing for lower and lower speeds. Slower speeds wouldn't bother me much because I'm a slow driver, but I could easily see this being turned into disabling cars during lock-downs, snowstorms, curfews, martial law in some countries, owing taxes etc, etc, etc.
> But we do know that once this tech is mandated, politicians will start demagogueing for lower and lower speeds.
No, we don't. I don't buy this slippery slope argument at all. Right down the road from me is a highway where the speed limit is 85 MPH, so it's not like politicians have been clamoring to lower speed limits just because we have one.
This is the same argument that has occurred with gun control (i.e., if we give an inch to any sort of reasonable regulations of guns that it means we'll be letting the government take all of our guns!) that has not been born out by history.
This is interesting, but if not done well it could have considerable safety and security implications:
1. If the databases are not kept up to date well, there would be a lag when highway authorities change the speed limit in an area, which could lead to traffic traveling at mixed speeds, which is a common cause of car crashes.
2. For an attacker this presents a juicy and new DoS vector: You could break into an automaker and set the speed limit to something low and hold the automaker's customers hostage. This vector already exists for automakers who do OTAs of their vehicles.
3. The above DoS vector could be more subtly used to target individual vehicles in furtherance of other crimes.
4. Theres also the unanswered question of road cars which are also used in various types of races. A friend of mine uses her primary car in rally races, would the restrictions be lifted on private property? Would the databases be updated properly when a public road is used as a race circuit?
I'd be far less charitable and say that even if it's done well (Which let's be real, it wouldn't), it would still be useless in preventing reckless speeding. You could simply disable one or both of the internet / GPS connections and the car would function as normal ("oh no! My GPS module recieved some water damage, how inconvenient!").
The article also links to a ford article that claims "Speed limit signs may be a thing of the past", as if they plan to enforce having every single car in the US to be made post 2024 and have a mandatory always on internet DRM determining exactly how fast you're allowed to go. Ridiculous idea.
It always starts out with a “noble cause”. Maybe tracking AMBER alert vehicles. Then a few years more and suddenly your car won’t start because you posted non-sanctioned views on meta-threads and now your Google or Apple car refuses to “do business with you”. Or perhaps few own cars relying on self driving taxis who won’t let you access the Uber-Tesla app.
How about a kinetic energy limiter so if you want to drive a 9000 lb Hummer EV it’s not able to drive as fast as a 3000 lb Corolla?
If I’m remembering my math right, the Corolla gets to go sqrt(3) times as fast, about 1.73x
So if you limit the Corolla at say 110 mph, a Hummer would be allowed to go 64.
Edit - a question for the physicists, would kinetic energy or momentum be the better metric for how deadly a projectile a vehicle is? If it’s a momentum limit then the Corolla would be allowed 3x the top speed for its 1/3 weight.
Seems like a pretty good idea. Why do you need to go over 100mph? Really no possible reason.
Geo-located speed limits seem a bit iffy. Fine if they work correctly, but I can see it being pretty annoying if it isn't perfect. And it seems like a potentially complicated thing for the government to run well.
If you're opposed: just remember this would probably dramatically decrease your insurance costs, especially if you are a young male or have a teenage son.
You just witnessed a significant crime. Someone's chasing you to mop up loose ends.
It's a somewhat contrived case, but being chased happens. A car that automatically tickets you would be one where this would perhaps be the only reason you'd go this fast, but would still prevent a scenario in which your car potentially decides to turn you over to someone who would kill you.
Not that I'd love seeing either option -- but I'm much more for leaving room for extenuating circumstances than I am for locking people out of functionality without due process.
That’s nobody then, because we have a lot of rules you can classify this way, and for the most part they are very widely supported.
Do people in favour of food safety standards deserve neither liberty nor safety? What about my liberty to sell ‘meat’ tacos without government interference?
It’s a very grey area in modern societies, you can’t really blanket-apply statements about freedom like that, to something that’s really an incremental change.
In 2022 in Germany -no speed limit in the autobahn- there were 2778 deaths in traffic collisions [0]. This is around 8 a day, while the population of Germany is 80M. If the proportion of deaths by collisions was the same as in US one would expect 40 deaths per day. Maybe the problem is not speed limit.
What if you control for the amount of driving done? Certainly I recognize it's still higher in the US, but people here do drive a lot more I would suspect.
Even per distance driven the fatality rate is close to twice that of Germany.
My first thought when reading about that accident was "why was it even possible to go 100mph there?".
The infrastructure should prevent speeding as well as penalties and countries which implemented such measures have generally better outcomes.
In that case I would see that intersection turned into a roundabout.
Sometimes more drastic measures are required: in my neighbourhood speed bumps were introduced on a two lane road because people kept overtaking on the intersection there and of course hitting pedestrians this way.
This effort feels like another example of the government's desire to push law enforcement into the private sector. Mandate speed limiters > car companies have to pay for it > cars get more expensive > consumers have to pay for it. That's been the USG's go-to for years now, and its frankly unsustainable.
California has issued 3,000 speeding tickets to drivers going over 100mph, per month. Do these people still have their license? Why?
I think there's so many perverse incentives in speeding tickets that its hard to have an objective discussion about it. Speeding tickets represent a massive portion of county budgets in rural areas of the country; they're not going to be happy automating that income away. Its also interesting to think about how this impacts punishment today; they can't make the punishment too high, because then their revenue is impacted. Nationally, we can't set punishments at levels which actually impact behavior because we're too dependent on cars, and removing peoples' access to them is, reasonably, a cruel punishment.
Almost certainly adding a speed limiter to a modern car would cost effectively $0. This is a dumb regulation, but “regulation always makes products more expensive” trope is silly, too.
I don't feel that mechanically, or even electronically, affecting the engine behavior by installing a general purpose computer that is capable of reading from a centralized database of geolocated speed limits would cost, effectively, $0. Also, no one asserted that regulation always makes products more expensive.
Many many cars already have something similar as a table stakes feature: they show the current speed limit that you are driving on, either via some of sort database and/or sign recognition.
Adding a few lines of code to limit the speed to that +20mph or whatever would be almost zero cost
Car regulations have, almost universally, increased the cost of automobiles. The typical counter-argument to this is that it reduces the national cost-burden of an automobile-ized society by reducing the number of collisions and deaths; events of objective destruction that destroy value. Its a reasonable first-order argument, but it also feels too shallow to take entirely at face value, as it fails to consider the aggregate depreciation-value of the increased cost of automobiles after they're produced.
Why would it cost $0? It had to be designed, tested, manufacturing lines have to be modified to install it, it has to go through whatever approval process to make sure it complies with the law. What part of this sounds like it costs $0?
The median new car price in the US was $46k. The amortized cost of such a component would be a rounding error.
Not only that, as another commenter and TFA point out, cars already have software limiters installed to prevent engine damage. Seemingly lowering the number is even cheaper than adding an entirely new component would be anyway.
It’s bad regulation because it’s ineffective at solving the actual issue, which is reckless and impaired driving.
Also as TFA pointed out, simply changing the setting of the existing limiter is not what they’re proposing:
> NTSB’s proposed solution: Adopting Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA), a modern and techier version of the speed governors that Cincinnati considered a century ago. Rather than preventing a vehicle from ever exceeding a given threshold, ISA uses geolocation to automatically reflect the legal limit on a given street or highway.
Someone has to compile this database of geolocations of every speed limit in the country and write software to fetch it and adjust the governor on the fly. That doesn’t cost $0.
That database already exists and many new cars have it anyway. My mid range Honda from 2018 has it, for example. Clearly, Honda and Acura wouldn’t need to develop such a thing, and I’m guessing neither would virtually any other manufacturer.
Money isn’t the problem. If you ask people “should we increase the average cost of a car by $10 so that 15k fewer people die every year” most people will (correctly) answer yes. The issue is that it won’t save that many people, and it doesn’t do anything to solve the actual issue.
There is still all the software to control the speed. It’s pretty astonishing that people here are naive enough to think that at any organization with the level of bureaucracy of the average car company this would cost $0. This isn’t your weekend side project where you change a few lines of code and push it to GitHub and it’s done. The meetings to begin to consider the change would probably cost a million dollars.
> Modern automobiles do use governors to limit engine damage, but the threshold is set absurdly high, often at 155 mph. Even safety-conscious Volvo allows its cars to reach 112 mph, 27 mph faster than the highest speed limit anywhere in the U.S.
It's already there. They just need to adjust from 150 down to 100. Sounds substantially similar to $0 to me.
> NTSB’s proposed solution: Adopting Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA), a modern and techier version of the speed governors that Cincinnati considered a century ago. Rather than preventing a vehicle from ever exceeding a given threshold, ISA uses geolocation to automatically reflect the legal limit on a given street or highway.
That's because they want to restrict notably lower than 100mph, which is location-dependent. But we can already restrict to 100 (or 90) without geolocation and extra costs.
It’s also incredibly stupid, like that US city that sold its parking meters to a private company and lost billions with a B.
Here in Australia, the speeding problem is essentially solved with speed cameras and the like; which makes the government SoMuchMoney. Not that I like this; it’s too much and is clearly revenue raising. Still, the point is that if you are a government, this is the way. It’s worked here anyway.
Oh they want to install a geo-locating tracking device in my car 'for the children'. Haha, how about not only 'no', but 'hell no'. I'd rather die free than live 'safe'.
You realize the government already does not recognize your freedom to drive at 100mph right? They will ticket you or throw in prison if they catch you. A speed limiter doesn't further restrict your freedoms, it just increases enforcement of existing restrictions on your freedoms.
> ISAs can be set to kick in a few miles above the posted speed limit, giving drivers the ability to go faster when, for instance, passing a vehicle in the slow lane.
What do you think is the ratio of lives saved by people going >> the speed limit (e.g. 20mph over) vs people killed by speeding drivers?
Also according to your logic we should never have concrete road medians because they prevent people from entering the opposing lane. And yet we do. Why do you think that is the case?
Let’s do semi trucks first for the “only allow a few mph above the speed limit” think. Driving down I-5 is infinitely more annoying with semis taking the left of two lanes to pass other semis because they want to to 65mph instead of their legally-mandated 55mph. Semis way a whole lot more than cars and have a lot more potential to cause a lot more damage, plus they’re professionals, so I’d love to see some accountability in this space while reducing the stop-and-go on I-5 that this stupid behavior causes.
I'm not stupid, esoterica. If you want to have a conversation, politeness is better.
Detailed traffic laws can never cover all circumstances (this is why we have judges and juries, not computer programs, to administer justice). I will break traffic laws if necessary to prevent a crash, and I'll accept the ticket if a cop would be so unreasonable as to write the ticket for it.
I bet you will, too.
In the 1960s, there was a public service ad about this - don't be dead right. I suppose I'm the only person who remembers that one.
I've had a couple conversations with bicycle activists. They told me that they'll stick to their road rights even if it results in a crash and they get seriously injured. They smiled that in such a case they'd get a big lawsuit award. I asked them how much is becoming a quadraplegic worth to them.
These people don't understand that The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what an individual finds acceptable (or safe) and what they don't. It's a guideline, not a guardrail. 2023 humans can't fathom driving safely at 100mph, but they fail to recognize that shortly after the invention of the automobile, they couldn't fathom driving faster than 30mph. Cars get faster and faster every year, and they also get safer and safer. The law, by definition, TRAILS that.
Imagine living somewhere so car dependent even the idea of crossing the street is foreign to you. Like living in a post apocalyptic wasteland where you can’t leave your bunker without a radiation suit.
The world changes, my friend, and the cemetary is full of people who had the right-of-way. You either act like physics applies to you, or you run a significantly higher chance of getting meat-crayoned across the asphalt. I know which one I'd choose - look both ways, every time, and stop. playing. in. the. road. Roads are for cars. Parks, sidewalks, and green open spaces of all kinds are for humans.
Why are you accusing me of ignoring physics? I’m literally advocating for slower cars because I understand the physics of being struck by a speeding car. America has a higher pedestrian kill rate than any other first world country despite having the same laws of physics as everywhere else. The problem is transportation policy that does not care about per safety. Pedestrian deaths are not inevitable.
You didn’t address my point. Do you think we should rip out all the concrete road medians so that you have the ability to cross into oncoming traffic in an emergency? Should we also eliminate all grade separated sidewalks and let pedestrians walk next to cars separated by a painted line so you have the ability to drive on the sidewalk in an emergency?
Yeah, I did. I don't believe for a minute that you'd choose hitting the kid rather than break the law and swerve into an empty oncoming lane. I also expect a judge would find hitting the kid to avoid breaking the law with disfavor. The law is not a programming language.
How much above the speed limit will ISAs let you go? How will ISA enabled cars deal with non-ISA enabled cars? E.g., it isn't uncommon to see 80 in a 60 on one of the highways near me (which is WAY higher than people used drive pre-pandemic). ISA-enabled cars then present an additional danger to the flow of traffic, acknowledging that driving 80 in a 60 is also dangerous and legally, reckless driving.
Things external to the car, like road medians, are there for "everyone". Doesn't matter if you have a Delorian, where the speedometers are universally always "0" regardless of speed or a fancy Ford Malibu from 2024.
Ageee when Google, who has been in the maps and software game much longer and with many billions more invested than any car company, can’t even tell that I’m on US101 on the HOV ramp and not on a surface street under the highway for that ramp where that Tesla driver using Autopilot fatally crashed into the barrier in Mountain View ( https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/HWY18FH011.aspx ). When I drive there, Google Maps via CarPlay consistently tells me to make a U-turn, not knowing where I am, as if it doesn’t have access to accelerometers or speed data or vehicle heading information such that it could reasonably conclude instead that the GPS is a bit inaccurate and/or there are multiple ramps in an area and without reliable elevation data, the vehicle could be in a couple of different spots, so go with the most likely guess of “the vehicle did NOT jump over the barrier while traveling 65mph+ and end up on a surface street (supported by accelerometer and compass data) and is just on another ramp”. It blows my mind that they’ve had this bug for at least a decade. I actually keep a list of Google Maps bugs that they could fix and have been thinking of applying there specifically to go fix them, since somehow everyone else at Google seems unwilling or unable to address these for reasons that I can only assume are ~corporate complacency.
I get really mad about stuff like this, because it's so easy for bureaucrats to unilaterally decide that utilitarianism should trump deontology when that isn't how human morality works at all.
Things like this kill people and agency officials justify it to themselves with the comforting thought that it's okay because it's fewer people than would have died otherwise, never stopping to appreciate the difference between throwing the switch between trolley tracks and pushing a fat kid in front of the trolley.
Contrived and not a great idea in the slightest in an urban setting when you're not visibly an emergancy vehicles and not running lights and sirens.
Also stupid in the sense that not even EMT vehicles do this - they run at speeds that keep the patient alive (ie. stable vehicle, no rocking and rolling) and ..
FIRST!! You stop the bleeding. Clamp, strap, tourniquet, whatever.
Have you not taken a basic first aid course? Your friend is dead with you at the wheel.
So even if you had to drive 100 miles to the hospital, going at 100mph (the proposed limit) you are going to take an hour. Going at say 120mph you are going to get there just 10 minutes faster (50 minutes).
And this all assumes that there are no corners, no traffic lights, no other traffic etc - that you can just point your car directly at the hospital and hit 120mph and sit there for 50 minutes straight with no interruptions.
If you plan to average 120mph for 50 minutes of driving (to allow for corners, traffic, etc) then you are approaching Formula 1 car levels of speed (they average 138mph across a race), but in a non-F1 car, on a non-F1 surface/track, and a non-F1 skilled driver.
If you need to go less than 100 miles, say 10 or 20 miles then the time saving of going over 100 shrinks by orders of magnitude so the benefits of going over 100 shrink too.
This does not sound like a reasonable argument to me.
You still shouldn't be driving that fast. In your panic you're even more likely to make a mistake and end up killing yourself, your passenger and, potentially, another car full of people.
Emergency vehicles are involved in proportionally more accidents and they have trained drivers.
What? What is the problem with having a daily ride you take to the track on weekends?
Personally, I have no interest in this, but I know plenty of people who do. I don’t know many people that want more government intervention over what they can and can’t do.
In US a real problem is that people don't know how to drive... Not all obviously, but significant number and you have a lot of incompetent drivers mostly because if you don't drive you can't work, so nobody dares prevent them from driving, yet they are functionally not capable of driving.
Interestingly in Japan their manufacturers all voluntarily agreed to limit their domestically produced cars to 180km/h (112mph), which has been in place for decades now.
> The traffic signal on North Las Vegas’s North Commerce Street had been red for at least 29 seconds, but the Dodge Challenger did not slow down. Instead, it flew through the intersection with Cheyenne Avenue at 103 mph, almost three times the 35 mph speed limit. Carnage ensued
And what has this to do with 100mph ?
Put a radar there, and a policeman to check red lights violations.
9 people dying in an accident is rare, but not that unusual. This can happen when a freeway ices up and a major pileup occurs. Sometimes church vans drive very slowly into places they shouldn't be and then end up overturned, sometimes in water, and often killing or injuring most of the people on board. This happens way more often than people would expect.
Meanwhile, alcohol and drugs kill more people on the road than any other set of causes. Perhaps all vehicles should just have a breathalyzer interlock as a standard option? What other measures of condescending paternalism can we implement to "save lives?"
Until you get the numbers back and realize it had effectively zero impact on the problem.
> Bring on the “but what if my friend is bleeding out in the backseat” arguments.
The police have no duty to save you. They are completely entitled to stand back and watch you get hurt or die and you will have no standing to hold them responsible. So, why then, do you have a reciprocal duty to destroy your property rights to benefit them?
The old, some people are breaking the law, so we should restrict everyone else. Seems to be the trend of the nanny world we live in.
You could drink and drive, better put in breathalyzers.
You might be sleepy, better have eye scanners and steering wheel checks.
You might be in bad health, better have yearly medical exams submitted to the state.
Thats a never ending list, on any topic, to limit people. Bad trend to spiral towards the bottom of the nanny state. Whats next, telling people how they should talk, oh wait.
People driving cars blow right through stop signs too. It's a lot less dangerous when cyclists do it, typically. Lastly, I'm not at all seeing how that is relevant to this discussion.
One of the world’s most advanced economies has a huge highway network where a substantial fraction of has no upper speed limit. Fuck off with this nanny state bullshit.
I really have driven that fast on snow covered roads. I also attended most of the formula car racing schools in the US and One in Canada, I also have extensive skid pad and slidecar training and experience I have numerous wins in both dry and rain and I have beaten professional racing instructors... I was also offered a professional racing contract. So for me that was safe to do.
> evidence of PCP, alcohol, and cocaine. Robinson also had a history of reckless driving
... and the takeaway is that the automakers should add governors to their cars. For shame, mfgs. For shame. Not like you can pin this on some drug-addled, drunk, reckless driver.
I mean, he couldn't do what he did if cars (or oxygen) didn't exist, so let's everybody grab a pitchfork and start banning something
I really don't want to see this in my car, but if this person's car couldn't go 103 mph, and instead was limited to the 35mph speed limit of that street, I think it's a lot less likely that they would have killed those 9 people.
Statistically, at least one of those people would have died at 35 mph. ~70% would have "severe" injuries. The percentages go up with the pedestrians age and the size of the vehicle.
We have restrictions on the ownership and sale of plenty of dangerous substances. It's a lot easier for a troubled individual to cause mass carnage if you give them something capable of delivering thousands of Newtons of force, be it a gun, a car, or a thousand kilograms of fertilizer.
the point i was trying to make is that that this article totally ignores the personal responsibility of the idiot.
when something bad happens, everyone say "why did this happen? what could we do to prevent it?". while it's true that banning fast cars would have prevented this incident, it's wrong to even contemplate that unless it's the last and only option. it's equally true that banning any private cars would also have avoided the incident. just because an idiot uses a tool to do bad things does not make the tool problematic - it means the idiot needs to be smacked.
it's supposed to be a free country. before we start impinging on innocent peoples' rights, is there a solution that impinges on the rights of the guilty? in this case: yes. the idiot in question was violating two dozen laws and had a history of many moving violations. this was not a one-time event.
the issue is not fast cars. it's why this guy wasn't already in prison and why he owned or could use any car.
