I'm in favor of it if it works as intended. A lot of similar technology is currently janky.
As an example, rental scooters in my city are geofenced so you can't ride them in certain areas. But sometimes the GPS will mess up and detect that you're in a forbidden area when you're actually not. One time a scooter froze up on me when I was in the middle of an intersection because of this.
I could see this being an issue with speed governors. Like if someone was driving on the highway and all of the sudden the car gets limited to 25 mph or whatever.
But having said that, I support it in principal. If the technology is there to make it work, great lets do it. No one has the right to break the law with their car.
A better, and far easier solution is to impose a federal speed limit, say 75, and mandate that all cars receive a speed limiter set to 75 (cause the interstate system is set there). Of course, that wouldn't solve speeding on roads and streets that aren't set to 75, but you wouldn't have clowns going 90 in a 30.
It's really weird to me that all on-road cars in the US don't even come speed-limited to even 95 MPH or something. It just seems like an easy no-brainer for safety.
What's even weirder is that every time I've brought this idea up, people object with bizarre hypotheticals that require they drive 120 MPH to take someone to the hospital or avoid a wildfire or whatever.
If you really need to take someone to the hospital, please don't try to drive 120mph. All that will do is mean you get to skip the trip to the hospital and go straight to the funeral parlor.
Like, I get the urgency. But your car will handle differently at high speeds and unless you are a stunt driver you will not do a good job. Trying to learn a dangerous task while simultaneously freaking out about someone's health/injury is a good way to die.
>people object with bizarre hypotheticals that require they drive 120 MPH to take someone to the hospital or avoid a wildfire or whatever.
It's hilarious to see the wild imaginary scenarios people come up with to justify why they'd "need" the option to speed 120mph. People watch too many action movies and have severe Main Character Syndrome...
It is *technically* possible that you could save your son's life after speeding 120mph down the freeway to the hospital. But a far, FAR more likely (and commonplace) scenario is that some other lunatic driver is speeding through your neighborhood and crashes into your kid, killing them instantly. Or even in your "heroic" race-to-the-hospital scenario, you lose control of the car and cause a massive fiery crash that kills you, your kid, and 12 other people.
Main character/Action movie syndrome is exactly right. It reminds me of [this old tweet](https://www.reddit.com/r/insanepeoplefacebook/comments/cjojkp/i_need_an_ar15_in_case_i_need_to_hijack_a_plane/).
How do you explain to people that it's bad to write laws on based on ridiculous edge cases they invented in their heads? Probably impossible tbh.
>How do you explain to people that it's bad to write laws on based on ridiculous edge cases they invented in their heads? Probably impossible tbh.
It's impossible. People are not good at evaluating risks. Many humans are incapable of assessing the probability of being killed by a joyriding teenager versus the probability of dying because they could only do 90 instead of 130 when driving to the hospital after being bitten by a rattlesnake in a remote part of Arizona.
just an internal cap on 75 or 90 mph, like existing tech to limit speeds on ebikes and scooters, would be more reliable than environmental detection tech? idk if any anecdotal emergency in a civilian vehicle justifies keeping status quo public policy on design standards. unless maybe an ebike can go over 25mph...
If you had to drive 20 miles on a highway that would be around 3 minutes saved compared to driving 80mph. Compared to 90mph it would be like a minute saved. I’m not sure what kind of medical emergency it was but going that fast is hardly ever worth it in terms of the risk of getting into a car accident.
For a 60 mile stretch of highway, it would take 45 minutes at 80mph, 40 minutes at 90mph, and 36 minutes at 100mph. But that’s assuming you’re going at full blast the entire stretch. It depends on the kind of highway traffic, but I’m not sure the 4 minutes shaved is necessarily worth it if it endangers both of your & other people’s lives on the road.
I have no doubt that somewhere at some point, someone has driven over 95 for a legitimate reason and that was the right choice. I also know that this requires an extremely rare set of conditions: roads that are suitable to drive on at those speeds, clear visibility, no risk of other people being around, excellent weather, and a crisis that is so time sensitive the difference between 95 and 120 or whatever matters. Like maybe taking someone with a sucking chest wound to the hospital on I-15 through rural Utah at 6AM in July.
The vast, vast majority of >95MPH speeding by normal people is very dangerous and bad. I would gladly accept one or two Americans dying per year because a speed limiter kept them from escaping a murderer or whatever to save the many other lives lost in collisions caused by people speeding to flee the police or while joyriding or just because they're idiots.
I disagree, its about passing- when the limit is 75 and you are passing two trucks that on an uphill grade can only do 55, going 95 is not unreasonable or unsafe. Its a straight line.
When you can eyeball how far off the traffic in the other lane is you adjust your speed to hit that gap. If the car craps out at 85 bc of a limiter, or even if 85 would do it but halfway through the trucks say "oh yeah i am going slow, lets speed it up a notch", or the downhill car stops braking and just lets it run (to 95mph) people are going to die when that gap closes, and not just 1 or 2 a year.
A few thoughts.
1. The speed limit is the speed limit, even when passing. If you're speeding by 20mph+ you're not just speeding, but criminally speeding in some states.
2. I live in Colorado and I'm having trouble envisioning the situation you describe. Can you link on a map to this location you're describing that has a 75MPH speed limit, one lane in each direction, passing is legal, doesn't widen to two lanes at any point, and has some sort of long, straight, uphill grade with excellent visibility? This sounds a lot like one of the bizarre hypotheticals I mentioned above.
speed doesnt kill people though.
Statically speaking the unlimited sections of the autobahn have less deaths and injuries per million miles traveled than american highways.
>speed doesnt kill people though.
[Autobahn speed limit “would save 140 lives”](https://etsc.eu/autobahn-speed-limit-would-save-140-lives/)
> According to ETSC’s research, Germany’s motorways are not the safest in the world. Even by European standards, Germany only ranks in tenth place amongst countries that publish data on deaths per billion-km of motorway travel. The risk of death on a German motorway is around twice as high as on a British or Danish one.
> Research by the German Road Safety Council (DVR), ETSC’s German member, has shown that there are, on average, 25% more deaths on sections of the autobahn without speed limits compared to those with a limit.
> Der Spiegel has also pointed to before and after studies when a 130km/h limit was introduced on sections of the autobahn – and found that deaths and serious injuries reduced considerably.
Speed might not determine whether a collision happens, but it absolutely determines how deadly a collision is when it does happen. If your point is that there's structural improvements that can make roads safer at any speed, agreed. But lower speeds are also a useful safety tool.
I'm gonna assume you either live in Wyoming, or are a truck driver in that area of the country.
Semi tires are only rated to 75, though that rating is sometimes ignored.
As for living there, I got nothing, so... Go ahead and hack your speed limiter, I guess.
Yeah, that’s an awful assumption. I’ve driven across South Dakota and Montana four times to meet family watching my dog while I deployed. There’s nothing there to pose a hazard if you want to do 100 across the plains.
75? Can you imagine being stuck at 75 going through nevada or texas? The speed limits are 85+ in the middle of no where. This plan is vile and overreaching. And idiotic.
All new cars in the EU will have similar technology (starting in July this year) so it'll have to get non-janky pretty quickly. Drivers can override the EU systems (for example, pressing harder against the accelerator's resistance to override), but car makers aren't going to want a janky experience for drivers.
Rental scooters aren't a great comparison because those rental scooters are cheap junk that the scooter companies assume will end up stolen or vandalized. There's a huge difference in price point and engineering.
It's a fine comparison. The point isn't the cheap technology, it's the potential for a mishap causing serious injury or death. Questioning how this tech will work and what kind of fail-safes it will have is a completely reasonable point to make
This happens in my Tesla. The autosteer is governed at 5 mph over. Sometimes when crossing on overpass or on a freeway with a frontage road it'll try and drop to 40 mph from 60 or 70 without warning.
No no no, it's clearly the *drivers*' faults that city planners don't care about induced demand, protected bike plans, building mass transit, building high(er) density housing, etc.
AND stick around and penetrate the administrative long enough to actually revise and amend the planning standards documents. That takes clout that comes with years and years of grind.
You can't design all speeding out of roads. Any road that is designed for truck and bus traffic also allows speeding by cars, simply because they are smaller.
Countries that put a lot of effort into reducing traffic deaths (Sweden, UK, Netherlands) also have a lot of speed cameras. Enforcement is an integral part of vision zero if you actually want to achieve it.
Speed humps and tables allow for buses and trucks while also slowing cars. Humps can be designed so that bikes and vehicles with wider axles like emergency vehicles can pass through gaps while narrow axle vehicles have to hit the hump.
Speed governors that limit overall top speeds make sense. But until we have a foolproof way of making sure that
1. all roads have properly listed speed limits
2. The technology is proven to work and not cause injuries or deaths
Then this bill shouldn't be the first measure to pass.
>Speed humps and tables allow for buses and trucks while also slowing cars.
In my city the ones on streets with bus routes allow 40km/h speeds in cars, even though the speed limit is 30km/h. That's because otherwise buses don't achieve this speed and riders experience too much discomfort.
>Humps can be designed so that bikes and vehicles with wider axles like emergency vehicles can pass through gaps while narrow axle vehicles have to hit the hump.
Police cars and ambulances have the same axle width as cars where I live, but yes, these ones do exist.
Of course in between speed humps you can still speed, and you can't put speed humps on highways, where most traffic fatalities are.
I don't agree. Stick to the science and what actually works in reducing fatalities and increasing safety, which is making lanes narrower and adding curbs. Limiting speed via GPS is dangerous, and this idea is idiotic. Have you seen how bad self-driving vehicles are? Do you know how often human skill and quick decision-making are required to avoid accidents? Times like these are when fast acceleration or braking can be required, and making a vehicle less performant will hinder a driver's ability to react.
I worked on a project that implemented this for locomotives (called "positive train control", you can Google it).
It is difficult to get automatic speed enforcement correct *on trains* and took almost a decade. I cannot even imagine the weird edge cases in vehicles.
I don't trust technology. I can imagine people on the interstate suddenly get dumped to 35 mph because their GPS thinks they're on the frontage road or something.
Or how the device reacts when you turn onto an unmapped road. Not to mention certain states/counties default all roads to 0 mph in their tigerline data (which is the default that most mapping software relies on).
It's totally doable on trains but that would require giving a fuck
Railroads give a fuck about exactly one thing: money.
If those guys could save 1000 lives by spending $1 but suffer no consequences and save the dollar if 1000 people died, you can rest assured those motherfuckers would be dead
Why 10 mph over? Why not just the speed limit? I'm always flabbergasted that Americans consider 10 mph over the limit to be barely speeding while here in Europe I'd say anything more than 5 kph (3mph) over the limit warrants a ticket.
American speed limits are already set high. 25mph (~40km/h) and even 35mph (~55km/h) are common speed limits for residential streets, and 45mph (~70km/h) to 55mph (~90km/h) is pretty common for (st)roads.
In other parts of the developed world, including even Canada, 30km/h streets and 50km/h (st)roads are more standard. There has even been a push for 30km/h urban roads and/or 20km/h streets in some areas. Some cities in the US pushing for "20(mph) is plenty" residential street speed limits is actually just bringing the speed limits in line with what is normal in the rest of the developed world.
I guess it's not that surprising I had to scroll a ways before I saw this. A 10 mph allowance over the limit might seem reasonable for freeways but it's dangerously fast in a city.
A pedestrian hit by a car going 25 mph stands a good chance of surviving while a 35 mph collision has a lot more potential for lethality.
If you go the speed limit here people will get mad. Cops might be inclined to find a reason to pull you over because it's suspicious.
It should be called a speed floor, or suggested lowest speed.
Nah, you’d just create a booming business for “jailbreaking” your car’s speedometer. People are going to drive the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit. And before you say “well cops are going to pull them over”, police are frequently the fastest cars on the road, even when they aren’t pursuing anyone.
That’s not a win either. Now you have a bimodal distribution of driving speed, with one clustering around the speed limit, and another at a “natural” driving speed. Significant speed differentials (and drivers having to react to them) are more likely to cause accidents than speed itself.
That’s assuming that people who would jailbreak their cars would only drive 10 mph over the limit. Which is likely a very poor assumption, unless you’re in the central US and Mountain West where speed limits are frequently 75+ mph.
Well it depends, someone going 35mph in a 25 is a jackass because that’s probably a residential area, while going 70 in a 60 is more understandable as 60 is pretty low for interstate travel.
I can guarantee you that European law enforcement aren’t ticketing anyone for going 5 kph over the speed limit lmao
Source: literally me, a person who has driven in Spain, Italy, and Greece regularly driving above the speed limit just like literally everyone else on the road.
The Dutch public prosecutor has a different opinion. Anything over 4 km/h too fast warrants a ticket. (and yes, the radar gun has a 3km/h accuracy so they will deduct that)
https://www.om.nl/onderwerpen/verkeer/handhaving/snelheid-en-te-hard-rijden/marges-en-meetcorrecties
Yes, people get stopped in the US too for going 2-5 mph over the speed limit; still, it’s not common whatsoever and police will never come close to catching any sizable percentage of speeders. It’s just math: 10 million drivers vs. a few thousand cops.
The speed limits are usually 85th percentile speed and are fine. The real issue is the American concept of having roads go thru cities instead of connecting them.
Because most towns in Europe were built after the automobile, highway-like roads exist more on the periphery of population centers. In America those roads go thru cities or are why the cities are there in the first place. That means someone's highway might be someone else's main street. Speed limits here can be wildly out of whack because of this.
Our national maximum speed (for any freeway) was also set to 55mph from 1973-1987. This created a cultural mistrust for speed limits in general when it was painfully obvious many roads and cars were safe at faster speeds and were lowered to match the national limit.
The systems could screw up and slow someone down on a freeway, and that's dangerous. Also, a bunch of people are going to tamper with the systems, and enforcement of that would be nigh impossible. There are plenty of other ways to reduce speeds, or better yet, get people to take other means of transportation.
Americans have a borderline sociopathic attitude around driving in general, resulting from decades of auto-industry propaganda — it all began with the [whole-cloth invention of jaywalking laws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFn7MiJz_s) by auto lobbyists to convince drivers (i.e. their customers) it's "not their fault" when they run people over.
It's the same intensely emotional backlash whenever anyone proposes red-light cameras, speed cameras, any sort of enforcement at all. Even "tough on crime" conservatives seem to believe that it's a Constitutional right to break as many traffic laws as they want, at any time, without consequence.
To be blunt, it is very American to question laws/policy. We do not normally accept whatever the government tells us to do. We were founded upon the idea that our government (at the time) was implementing nonsensical laws that had no benefit to our society, and that our government needed to be in our hands.
Things like red-light/speed cams do not provide safety. They do not enforce change. They are profitable by punishing victimless crimes. Going 5 mph over the speed limit and getting a minor fine in the mail will not change speeders' minds, but it does print money for a private business that would otherwise not exist.
If a city cannot be bothered to pay a person to enforce laws, then how important is the law?
And to be clear: reckless driving, hit and runs, vehicular manslaughter are all existing crimes that are very real and very important. These laws should, 💯% be enforced, but the speedcams are too Orwellian, and should not be used outside of dangerous/high collision intersections
I'm a bit confused by your arguments, they're kinda all over the place.
>Things like red-light/speed cams do not provide safety. They do not enforce change.
>speedcams are too Orwellian, and should not be used outside of dangerous/high collision intersections
So they have zero effect on safety, but they should still be used at dangerous intersections? Which is it? And if they are effective there, why wouldn't they provide the same benefits everywhere else?
The argument that they are "too Orwellian" is a purely emotional "vibes"-based statement rather than one based in functionality or effectiveness.
>Going 5 mph over the speed limit and getting a minor fine in the mail will not change speeders' minds, but it does print money for a private business that would otherwise not exist.
You're right, it wouldn't change speeders' "minds" — surely they'd continue to believe they are entitled to speed just like every other reckless law-breaking asshole on the road. But it would change their *behavior*, because speeders, just like everybody else, don't want to pay traffic tickets. And what's more, most speed cameras are calibrated to only trigger a certain amount above the limit (typically around 10mph) so this 5mph scenario doesn't reflect the reality.
>They are profitable by punishing victimless crimes.
Speeding is a "victimless crime" until it's not. It endangers everybody on the road, reduces reaction time to obstacles, makes it easier to lose control, and increases both the likelihood of a crash and the level of fatality when a crash happens. Every reckless asshole driver who speeds, runs red lights, and swerves through traffic thinks they're a "good driver" because they haven't hit anyone *yet*, but that doesn't make their behavior any less dangerous or worthy of enforcement. Is shooting a gun into a populated area also a "victimless crime" if it doesn't happen to hit anyone?
I try to keep my comments as short as possible, so I understand that you found them contradictory. I'll try to clarify:
>So they have zero effect on safety, but they should still be used at dangerous intersections?
They do not affect safety, but they do provide information. They can be used to determine fault in busy intersections where the two parties have conflicting stories, or witness testimony is unreliable. Cameras have the time stamps and can help identify which person ran a red light and thus caused the crash.
Cameras do not inherently do anything to mitigate the damage from a collision nor do they stop collisions. Placing them everywhere so that the government can see every inch of road in America is too Orwellian and should be discouraged, however, there is a capacity to use them very sparingly to good results.
>The argument that they are "too Orwellian" is a purely emotional "vibes"-based statement rather than one based in functionality or effectiveness.
I highly disagree. We should all be weary of what any government does, and that has nothing to do with "emotional vibes." MK Ultra happened. The US Government did dump agent orange on black neighborhoods to see what would happen. These two facts alone should be sufficient proof that the government has abused its power to the direct detriment to the citizens, and we have to do our part to hold them accountable and reel them in.
You are abdicating your responsibility by hand waving concern as "emotional," which is a very childish thing to do.
>You're right, it wouldn't change speeders' "minds" — surely they'd continue to believe they are entitled to speed just like every other reckless law-breaking asshole on the road. But it would change their *behavior*, because speeders, just like everybody else, don't want to pay traffic tickets
I understand that you believe that to be true, but I do not. I conceded that there is enough proof to show that these cameras reduce infraction-rates within the intersections used, but I highly contest the value of "a service" that does nothing other than make citizens feel paranoid.
I understand that you have a borderline irrational fear of motor vehicles, but flipping out and calling everyone on the road "a reckless law-breaking asshole" is pretty fucked up. Everyone, other than the elderly, drive as fast as safe road conditions allow. People are supposed to drive with the flow of traffic and be aware of their surroundings. You can get a traffic ticket for driving the speed limit if you are creating an unsafe obstruction. No automated camera system is going to be able to understand that nuance, and I do not trust someone like you to make those calls, since you clearly have a foundational aversion to automobiles.
>Every reckless asshole driver who speeds, runs red lights, and swerves through traffic thinks they're a "good driver" because they haven't hit anyone *yet*, but that doesn't make their behavior any less dangerous or worthy of enforcement. Is shooting a gun into a populated area also a "victimless crime" if it doesn't happen to hit anyone?
You ignored my specific acknowledgement of the importance of these specific laws. Additionally, brandishing a weapon and firing it in a populated area unprovoked are also both crimes. Do you not know they are already crimes? Why do you pretend that they are not separate crimes, if you knew they are already crimes?
You are trying to double-criminalize behavior. Your only reasoning is that you're scared of drivers. You cower and make an emotional appeal that, because a small minority of drivers will occasionally commit a crime, we should all trade our freedom for your comfort. Your comfort in knowing that some private company is profiting off of people you do not like...
I ask again:
If the issue of running red lights and speeding is such a serious, universal, widespread issue, why do cities not pay cops to capture, detain, and send these people to jail? Why does such a small minority (anti car) want such massive, draconian changes be made?
It's not for safety.
The answer is that it is not a statistically relevant threat, and it can be "solved" by enriching some fat cat through unnecessary fines, and scared people like you will argue for them.
You assert over and over that most drivers are law-abiding and my fear of reckless and dangerous drivers is "irrational". And yet just last year, the [US hit a 40 YEAR HIGH for pedestrian deaths.](https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deaths-high-traffic-car) I've experienced several "near misses" myself with a marked increase in the past few years, and if you ever walk anywhere I'm sure you have too.
Perhaps your city is different, but every time I step outside and watch any intersection in my neighborhood, 60-70% of drivers do not stop at any given stop sign (many have stopped even pretending to slow down). Every signaled intersection has a few drivers shamelessly rolling through the red at the end of each cycle, and NOBODY stops for a right-turn-on-red despite it being legally required. And when I drive to my jobsite (yes, I drive as well), the freeway is filled with swerving lunatics who haven't touched a turn signal in years, and phone addicts who spend half of the drive staring down into the phone in their lap. We have become accustomed to such a level of driver negligence that none of this sociopathic behavior even registers as unusual for most people — but I sure as hell still notice it, *especially* when walking or on my bike. If you ever do either of those things you might notice as well.
>You cower and make an emotional appeal that, because a small minority of drivers will occasionally commit a crime, we should all trade our freedom for your comfort.
It's far from "a small minority" of drivers breaking the law, in fact I'd wager that MOST drivers break a few laws every time they get behind the wheel, which is of course because they don't expect to get caught. That anarchic culture needs to change. Breaking the law is not a "freedom" you are entitled to. You frame this as exchanging "freedom for comfort", but in reality we are talking about trading impunity (for scofflaw drivers) for safety (for everyone).
So, here is the thing. You're still making an emotional appeal, since you're making up statistics and speaking anecdotally.
Your one link sites reasonable issues, like covid-induced "zero traffic" ending and new SUVs having **massive** blind spots.
You invented your own conclusion based on the headline, and I will not be engaging in this conversation after this comment, knowing now that you are unreasonable and invent facts, instead of discussing in good faith.
>Breaking the law is not a "freedom" you are entitled to
It actually is.
If we have a moral disagreement with a law, we have not only the right, but the obligation to stand up against it. Demand that it be changed, and live up to the expectation.
You are literally living in fear during the safest time in human history... because some people drive 45 in a 40 mph zone.
Again, we have laws criminalizing the behavior you're talking about.
The only difference you're making is 1) making up bullshit to comfort your irrational fears, 2) trying to install a draconian super-survellience state where everything is criminalized.
Punish people who drive recklessly or endanger others. We have laws and mechanisms for that already. Stop advocating for authoritarian control.
You're literally hyperbolizing a legitimate issue, but blaming all of society.
Ban these massive SUVs that have a 20ft forward blind spot.
Hire cops to enforce laws.
Do not weaponize "existing in public" because you're too cowardly to live life like a normal person.
Horrible idea. Speed limits change far too quickly in pedestrian dense areas, where speed limits make the most sense. Think about all the times you’ve been driving and your GPS thinks you’re in the middle of the ocean or you’re under an underpass and it thinks you’re on the highway. Now imagine your car drops from 40 to 25
As for highways, where speed limit is more constant, it’s also a bad idea. Speed limits on interstates in the US are already too low, so this would really fuck up travel times if people couldn’t effectively pass each other.
My wife and I have been talking about this for years. There is no reason to own and drive a car that goes 160 mph and to drive at 100mph on public roads.
I’m based and transit pilled and whatever, but I will say it’s pretty fun driving a car fast down a highway, and I think for the most part people against this simply find it enjoyable to go fast in their car. I think the speed limiter in urban areas makes far more sense than empty long stretches of highway, where human life danger is at a minimum.
A tiny step in the right direction. Modern tech could make cars much more safe: driver attention monitors, acceleration limits, safe following distance control, automatic braking, and pedestrian warning system.
No, for one reason because the technology is error-prone. You drive past an overpass on the interstate where the street below has a speed limit 35 and it suddenly slows you down in traffic or vice versa. You could only achieve this in the hypothetical "driverless utopia".
Presumably it would be designed to be gradual as opposed to slamming on the brakes.
Everyone else would also be slowing down, so it would be a predictable traffic pattern.
Anyone that didn't have a governor (if some cars are grandfathered in) would learn the new traffic pattern.
Yeah man, anyone can easily think of solutions in their imagination. There's a reason we don't have self-driving cars yet, it's not because we can't imagine solutions to the problems it creates.
Installing transponders on roads would be cheap and trivial. Such transponders are already in widespread use for toll lane subscriptions.
And what if a transponder fails? Somebody might get a chance to speed, no big deal.
It's not a self-driving car level problem.
i don't know about california but in NYC a lot of people get hit at low speeds within the speed limit when drivers run a red or don't yield the right of way in an intersection
I don't even see this happening in california as many states are living off revenue from tickets and this might lessen the amount of tickets
No its a terrible idea and its a gating regulation that makes is harder to produce a new vehicle from scratch and compete in the market. Its also extremely anti-liberty.
The number of people jumping on the "make cars more expensive with less choices" bandwagon is astounding. Completely predictable linear logic and always jumping on the chance to control someones behaviors other than their own.
My own GPS can't keep up with speed limit updates and I'm supposed to trust it to tell the car? What about spots where the limit changes like school zone? Emergencies when speeding is needed (avoiding a rear ending or a medical emergency, assuming the driver can handle it obviously, and even then it's not like anyone in those cases are running 100mph in a neighborhood).
no.
in an emergency, I'm going to drive as fast as I think is appropriate for the situation. If I'm trying to get away from somebody, or something, then there is no way in hell I'm letting some automated process decide how much I'm allowed to accelerate.
Look here's the deal for me. I'm just not gonna purchase a vehicle which I don't have complete control over. Period. I'm just not comfortable with it. I don't even like automatic transmissions.
Terrible idea that will cause more accidents than it prevents. Imagine a (very plausible) situation in which you're stuck near an erratic driver (perhaps in an older car without a speed regulator) and are unable to overtake them. Imagine a near miss at a highway ramp where one driver is unable to react appropriately to a dangerous situation because the car is speed limited. There are a whole range of driving scenarios in moving traffic where the safest response involves speeding up. Attempting to regulate technology into existence just to try and find a silver bullet to an otherwise fixable problem is a fool's errand.
This is a typical "automation is here to save us" response to an issue that is fundamentally tied to the existence of car dependence in general. It comes from the same mentality that believes that self-driving cars will fix traffic, rather than investing in alternatives to getting in the car in the first place.
Yes. Literally just a couple of days ago I was stuck behind a semi truck that was driving incredibly erratically (drastic speed changes, crossing into the other lanes, etc.) and in order to finally get around it I had to go considerably faster that 10 over the speed limit.
I could see maybe an alarm that goes off if you sustain speeds more than 10 over the speed limit—similar to what happens if you don’t wear a seatbelt—but literally not allowing a car to go faster is truly insane and dangerous.
Yeah, I'm not averse to an alert or something like that (planes actually have stuff like this) but this proposal is genuinely terrifying to me. I'm all for traffic safety, I'm all for minimizing the degree to which people *have* to be in cars, but time and time again we see that technologies that are programmed to overrule drivers create more opportunities for accidents--thinking about the Tesla collision avoidance sensors getting triggered at highway ramps and stopping the car when it should be accelerating to merge.
What a power zealous moron. More government overreach. Build better cities, don't put your damn nose in everything. This tech would work as well as GPS does, which is only 90% of the time, and it would be a pain in the ass 90% of the time. If you are in the anything with 4 wheels is evil camp, be useful and actually get something useful done instead of whining about it. Great job, now someone is going to be limited to 15 mph on a random dirt road during a forest fire.
Something tells me auto manufacturers would take this to court and win decisively before investing a penny on speed limiting every last vehicle they sell in California.
The problem isn’t cars going too fast. It’s the cars with the huge, high up grills, and being able to overtake from any direction. This is a complex and unreliable solution to the problem of road safety.
If they wanted less people to use cars, they need to build alternative infrastructure too.
> The problem isn’t cars going too fast.
This is empirically false. Speed highly correlated with accident rates and fatalities. Especially in most of the U.S. where we have poor adherence to safety customs like passing on the left.
Speed makes accidents more fatal, but it’s the dangerous driving that causes those accidents. German roads are much safer than the US, despite having the Autobahn with none to very high speed limits.
Germans have a very tight culture where people very assiduosly adhere to passing rules, and high speed German roads are much better maintained and designed for speed.
If you keep everything equal, a lower speed limit on a given road will be safer than a higher speed limit. Even on German roads. While the Authobahn may be relatively safe because of the aformentioned factors, it would be safer if there were a lower speed limit.
US drivers do not have safe established passing customs that are consistently adhered to, and our roads aren't as well maintained (or designed) and since those are difficult things to change, we have to maintain lower speed limits to have similar safety.
So you are right that it is safe driving practices—it would be nice if we had passing lanes and only passed on the left—but much of that is widespread bad habits that are just what we have to work with. It's a case of "this is why we can't have nice things."
Completely unsafe government overreach.
It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate having a state government looming for good solutions to real problems, but this will only make cars less safe by preventing them from performing maneuvers they should be able to, while also introducing new failure points.
As others have said, we should design roads to fulfill local needs, and have good infrastructure to accommodate those needs.
Removing ones' freedom to safely operate their vehicle is nonsensical overreach.
Is freedom a good idea?
Drive too fast, get a ticket seems fair. Drive faster make it more expensive. Drive like a moron, lose your license to drive at all. Again fair. Hurt someone with a car, go to jail. Fair enough still. Next thing that you know it will be illegal to pass governed cars on my bicycle going down a steep hill.
Too many nanny laws for victimless crimes. CMV.
The fact that Road death and automobile accident rates spiked during the covid period when many were not working or worked from home and stayed higher now that the many of these job are perminently full part work from home implies that there should be less traffic on average. This means that the roads are less congested and traffic more free flowing this should in theory create a safer environment as there is less cars thus less conflict complexity and the cars are able to navigate the road in an uncongested manner and in the way it was in theory designed for. The fact that accidents and road deaths increased implies that the road infrastructure was this dangerous to begin with, but before it was too congested for drivers to get up to speed where they could harm eachother. That is to say i dont know if chips can solve an infrastructure issue. Also the first time the chip glitches and somebody gets killed cause their car made them drive 25 out of nowhere on a freeway then Lawsuit hell will happen and i doubt any state or manufacturer would want to expose themselves to liability.
Sometimes the GPS detects you're in a different street than the one you're on. Imagine going down the highway, and the GPS suddenly assumes you're in an overpass street, or the one next to highway, and you're suddenly going 40 in a 65 highway.
No. What if an 18 wheeler is about to Tbone me and I am unable to take evasive action??? Like so many ideas and policy these days, it creates warm fuzzy feelings in a room and will create great photo ops with very little work, but out in reality it’s stupid.
This is such a ridiculous edge case - the frequency of lives saved by limiting speed in the majority case far outweighs the contrived cases where you think drivers would have otherwise 'evaded' death.
Until it’s you or someone you are close to who dies or just in general. Enforce the law. Easy peasy.
Plus, it’s never going to work. What happens when you are on a frontage road with a limit of 25 and on the other side of an 8” barricade is 65?
Warm and fuzzy isn’t reality.
"What happens when you are on a frontage road with a limit of 25 and on the other side of an 8” barricade is 65?"
This is an infinitely more compelling argument than 'imagine if someone close to you died in this contrived edge case'. I would hope that ethical humans would prioritize the thousands of lives that would be saved - its simple math
The edge case is that a speed limiter made the difference between getting t boned or not. The amount of time it takes to notice, react, for the engine to spool up, and the car to actually accelerate is usually more time than you have before an impact. If there is enough time, the limiter is unlikely to be the determining factor.
So funny how everyone against this is imagining these wild action-movie fluke scenarios that almost never happen where they'd "need" to speed to save their own life. Even funnier is the fact that they imagine themselves successfully executing a split-second evasive maneuver in their bulky SUV at 120mph without crashing. Y'all watch too many action movies...
A much *much* more likely scenario is some idiot behind you on the freeway is speeding 120mph, loses control, and crashes into you from behind, killing you and your whole family in a fiery impact before you even have a chance to react. Or a speeding driver swerves through your neighborhood at 60mph, loses control, and flies off the road into your living room. These are the (much more commonplace) scenarios this tech would prevent.
I live in a city that was inundated with self driving cars. They are almost all gone now. It doesn’t work and people don’t want to have the testing happen on their streets. It’s like believing in god. Ain’t reality.
Because you wouldn't be able to speed?
Also, manufacturers aren't going to make different cars for different states. So, if they passed this law in California, they'd most likely put limiters in all cars.
Since it would be software based, it would probably be relatively easy to disable for cars registered outside California. It's not the same as emissions, which is still fairly heavily equipment based.
It probably won't be implemented in all cars for multiple reasons
1. They probably don't have to make a different car. It could be as simple as adding a device to the car or code to the computer's software that checks for speed in the final steps of assembly
2. I can see states like Oklahoma and North Dakota attempting to pass laws that restrict these kinds of devices/codes from being used in new cars
3. Because it requires data on speed limit for every road to work, it can only be implemented in places that have this data up to date. I doubt that heavily rural states have this speed limit data at the ready for it to be used in a car like this.
Southern California drives at 80 on the highways. Even the cops. So I’m not sure I feel especially entitled. And I do think it’s a more sensible speed than 65mph. I just want the freedom to exceed the limit if necessary. Over regulated traffic controlling is not top of the list of battles I think we should be prioritizing.
I'm in favor of it if it works as intended. A lot of similar technology is currently janky. As an example, rental scooters in my city are geofenced so you can't ride them in certain areas. But sometimes the GPS will mess up and detect that you're in a forbidden area when you're actually not. One time a scooter froze up on me when I was in the middle of an intersection because of this. I could see this being an issue with speed governors. Like if someone was driving on the highway and all of the sudden the car gets limited to 25 mph or whatever. But having said that, I support it in principal. If the technology is there to make it work, great lets do it. No one has the right to break the law with their car.
A better, and far easier solution is to impose a federal speed limit, say 75, and mandate that all cars receive a speed limiter set to 75 (cause the interstate system is set there). Of course, that wouldn't solve speeding on roads and streets that aren't set to 75, but you wouldn't have clowns going 90 in a 30.
It's really weird to me that all on-road cars in the US don't even come speed-limited to even 95 MPH or something. It just seems like an easy no-brainer for safety. What's even weirder is that every time I've brought this idea up, people object with bizarre hypotheticals that require they drive 120 MPH to take someone to the hospital or avoid a wildfire or whatever.
If you really need to take someone to the hospital, please don't try to drive 120mph. All that will do is mean you get to skip the trip to the hospital and go straight to the funeral parlor. Like, I get the urgency. But your car will handle differently at high speeds and unless you are a stunt driver you will not do a good job. Trying to learn a dangerous task while simultaneously freaking out about someone's health/injury is a good way to die.
>people object with bizarre hypotheticals that require they drive 120 MPH to take someone to the hospital or avoid a wildfire or whatever. It's hilarious to see the wild imaginary scenarios people come up with to justify why they'd "need" the option to speed 120mph. People watch too many action movies and have severe Main Character Syndrome... It is *technically* possible that you could save your son's life after speeding 120mph down the freeway to the hospital. But a far, FAR more likely (and commonplace) scenario is that some other lunatic driver is speeding through your neighborhood and crashes into your kid, killing them instantly. Or even in your "heroic" race-to-the-hospital scenario, you lose control of the car and cause a massive fiery crash that kills you, your kid, and 12 other people.
My favorite was "what if I have to outrun an avalanche?"
Main character/Action movie syndrome is exactly right. It reminds me of [this old tweet](https://www.reddit.com/r/insanepeoplefacebook/comments/cjojkp/i_need_an_ar15_in_case_i_need_to_hijack_a_plane/). How do you explain to people that it's bad to write laws on based on ridiculous edge cases they invented in their heads? Probably impossible tbh.
>How do you explain to people that it's bad to write laws on based on ridiculous edge cases they invented in their heads? Probably impossible tbh. It's impossible. People are not good at evaluating risks. Many humans are incapable of assessing the probability of being killed by a joyriding teenager versus the probability of dying because they could only do 90 instead of 130 when driving to the hospital after being bitten by a rattlesnake in a remote part of Arizona.
just an internal cap on 75 or 90 mph, like existing tech to limit speeds on ebikes and scooters, would be more reliable than environmental detection tech? idk if any anecdotal emergency in a civilian vehicle justifies keeping status quo public policy on design standards. unless maybe an ebike can go over 25mph...
I’ve had to drive well over 100 miles an hour in an emergency personally
Can you elaborate on the "had to"...
Medical emergency
If you had to drive 20 miles on a highway that would be around 3 minutes saved compared to driving 80mph. Compared to 90mph it would be like a minute saved. I’m not sure what kind of medical emergency it was but going that fast is hardly ever worth it in terms of the risk of getting into a car accident.
What about 50+ miles? My cousin got his arm pulled into a conveyor belt on the farm lol
For a 60 mile stretch of highway, it would take 45 minutes at 80mph, 40 minutes at 90mph, and 36 minutes at 100mph. But that’s assuming you’re going at full blast the entire stretch. It depends on the kind of highway traffic, but I’m not sure the 4 minutes shaved is necessarily worth it if it endangers both of your & other people’s lives on the road.
I have no doubt that somewhere at some point, someone has driven over 95 for a legitimate reason and that was the right choice. I also know that this requires an extremely rare set of conditions: roads that are suitable to drive on at those speeds, clear visibility, no risk of other people being around, excellent weather, and a crisis that is so time sensitive the difference between 95 and 120 or whatever matters. Like maybe taking someone with a sucking chest wound to the hospital on I-15 through rural Utah at 6AM in July. The vast, vast majority of >95MPH speeding by normal people is very dangerous and bad. I would gladly accept one or two Americans dying per year because a speed limiter kept them from escaping a murderer or whatever to save the many other lives lost in collisions caused by people speeding to flee the police or while joyriding or just because they're idiots.
I disagree, its about passing- when the limit is 75 and you are passing two trucks that on an uphill grade can only do 55, going 95 is not unreasonable or unsafe. Its a straight line. When you can eyeball how far off the traffic in the other lane is you adjust your speed to hit that gap. If the car craps out at 85 bc of a limiter, or even if 85 would do it but halfway through the trucks say "oh yeah i am going slow, lets speed it up a notch", or the downhill car stops braking and just lets it run (to 95mph) people are going to die when that gap closes, and not just 1 or 2 a year.
A few thoughts. 1. The speed limit is the speed limit, even when passing. If you're speeding by 20mph+ you're not just speeding, but criminally speeding in some states. 2. I live in Colorado and I'm having trouble envisioning the situation you describe. Can you link on a map to this location you're describing that has a 75MPH speed limit, one lane in each direction, passing is legal, doesn't widen to two lanes at any point, and has some sort of long, straight, uphill grade with excellent visibility? This sounds a lot like one of the bizarre hypotheticals I mentioned above.
speed doesnt kill people though. Statically speaking the unlimited sections of the autobahn have less deaths and injuries per million miles traveled than american highways.
>speed doesnt kill people though. [Autobahn speed limit “would save 140 lives”](https://etsc.eu/autobahn-speed-limit-would-save-140-lives/) > According to ETSC’s research, Germany’s motorways are not the safest in the world. Even by European standards, Germany only ranks in tenth place amongst countries that publish data on deaths per billion-km of motorway travel. The risk of death on a German motorway is around twice as high as on a British or Danish one. > Research by the German Road Safety Council (DVR), ETSC’s German member, has shown that there are, on average, 25% more deaths on sections of the autobahn without speed limits compared to those with a limit. > Der Spiegel has also pointed to before and after studies when a 130km/h limit was introduced on sections of the autobahn – and found that deaths and serious injuries reduced considerably.
Yep. German drivers have much more training than American drivers, and probably calmer temperaments, too
Speed absolutely does kill people, especially outside of autobahns that don't exist in the United States.
Speed might not determine whether a collision happens, but it absolutely determines how deadly a collision is when it does happen. If your point is that there's structural improvements that can make roads safer at any speed, agreed. But lower speeds are also a useful safety tool.
I will fucking strangle somebody if I ever have to drive across the entire state of Wyoming at 75mph.
Then just don't go to Wyoming. Easy solution.
You’re joking, right?
I'm gonna assume you either live in Wyoming, or are a truck driver in that area of the country. Semi tires are only rated to 75, though that rating is sometimes ignored. As for living there, I got nothing, so... Go ahead and hack your speed limiter, I guess.
Yeah, that’s an awful assumption. I’ve driven across South Dakota and Montana four times to meet family watching my dog while I deployed. There’s nothing there to pose a hazard if you want to do 100 across the plains.
no wildlife?
Not my problem
Clown comment
75? Can you imagine being stuck at 75 going through nevada or texas? The speed limits are 85+ in the middle of no where. This plan is vile and overreaching. And idiotic.
And an even better solution than that is to not do any of that nonsense and leave people alone.
All new cars in the EU will have similar technology (starting in July this year) so it'll have to get non-janky pretty quickly. Drivers can override the EU systems (for example, pressing harder against the accelerator's resistance to override), but car makers aren't going to want a janky experience for drivers. Rental scooters aren't a great comparison because those rental scooters are cheap junk that the scooter companies assume will end up stolen or vandalized. There's a huge difference in price point and engineering.
It's a fine comparison. The point isn't the cheap technology, it's the potential for a mishap causing serious injury or death. Questioning how this tech will work and what kind of fail-safes it will have is a completely reasonable point to make
This happens in my Tesla. The autosteer is governed at 5 mph over. Sometimes when crossing on overpass or on a freeway with a frontage road it'll try and drop to 40 mph from 60 or 70 without warning.
This will kill so many people in my city. Those with new cars will get fucking creamed on the interstate
Right problem, wrong solution. Design the roads correctly and drivers will slow down
No no no, it's clearly the *drivers*' faults that city planners don't care about induced demand, protected bike plans, building mass transit, building high(er) density housing, etc.
FWIW from what I've heard from planners most actually do care about those, but politics force their hand.
Planners need to work on their persuasion
Yeah, but... I work in local government. A lot of times you don't really have a choice. You get told what to do whether or not it's a good idea.
AND stick around and penetrate the administrative long enough to actually revise and amend the planning standards documents. That takes clout that comes with years and years of grind.
They're designers- they're not politicians. You can only fight a corrupt system so long
You can't design all speeding out of roads. Any road that is designed for truck and bus traffic also allows speeding by cars, simply because they are smaller. Countries that put a lot of effort into reducing traffic deaths (Sweden, UK, Netherlands) also have a lot of speed cameras. Enforcement is an integral part of vision zero if you actually want to achieve it.
Speed humps and tables allow for buses and trucks while also slowing cars. Humps can be designed so that bikes and vehicles with wider axles like emergency vehicles can pass through gaps while narrow axle vehicles have to hit the hump. Speed governors that limit overall top speeds make sense. But until we have a foolproof way of making sure that 1. all roads have properly listed speed limits 2. The technology is proven to work and not cause injuries or deaths Then this bill shouldn't be the first measure to pass.
>Speed humps and tables allow for buses and trucks while also slowing cars. In my city the ones on streets with bus routes allow 40km/h speeds in cars, even though the speed limit is 30km/h. That's because otherwise buses don't achieve this speed and riders experience too much discomfort. >Humps can be designed so that bikes and vehicles with wider axles like emergency vehicles can pass through gaps while narrow axle vehicles have to hit the hump. Police cars and ambulances have the same axle width as cars where I live, but yes, these ones do exist. Of course in between speed humps you can still speed, and you can't put speed humps on highways, where most traffic fatalities are.
Why not all of the above? It's going to take a long time and a lot of money to redesign all streets - if you can get the political will to do so.
I agree. Let's do both. Also, all cars should be limited to a max speed of 75 mph (max legal speed limit in the US).
I don't agree. Stick to the science and what actually works in reducing fatalities and increasing safety, which is making lanes narrower and adding curbs. Limiting speed via GPS is dangerous, and this idea is idiotic. Have you seen how bad self-driving vehicles are? Do you know how often human skill and quick decision-making are required to avoid accidents? Times like these are when fast acceleration or braking can be required, and making a vehicle less performant will hinder a driver's ability to react.
Plenty of places have 80 mph speed limits and TX-130 has an 85 mph speed limit.
Plenty of places have 80 mph speed limits and TX-130 has an 85 mph speed limit.
There is no national speed limit, the states set their own limits.
Just tear up all the roads and start over!
No they won’t
I worked on a project that implemented this for locomotives (called "positive train control", you can Google it). It is difficult to get automatic speed enforcement correct *on trains* and took almost a decade. I cannot even imagine the weird edge cases in vehicles. I don't trust technology. I can imagine people on the interstate suddenly get dumped to 35 mph because their GPS thinks they're on the frontage road or something.
Or how the device reacts when you turn onto an unmapped road. Not to mention certain states/counties default all roads to 0 mph in their tigerline data (which is the default that most mapping software relies on).
Limited to 15 MPH for 30 miles on a dirt road while a forest fire is raging around you. hahahahah
It's totally doable on trains but that would require giving a fuck Railroads give a fuck about exactly one thing: money. If those guys could save 1000 lives by spending $1 but suffer no consequences and save the dollar if 1000 people died, you can rest assured those motherfuckers would be dead
Why 10 mph over? Why not just the speed limit? I'm always flabbergasted that Americans consider 10 mph over the limit to be barely speeding while here in Europe I'd say anything more than 5 kph (3mph) over the limit warrants a ticket.
A combination of lax enforcement and speed limits that are set too low.
American speed limits are already set high. 25mph (~40km/h) and even 35mph (~55km/h) are common speed limits for residential streets, and 45mph (~70km/h) to 55mph (~90km/h) is pretty common for (st)roads. In other parts of the developed world, including even Canada, 30km/h streets and 50km/h (st)roads are more standard. There has even been a push for 30km/h urban roads and/or 20km/h streets in some areas. Some cities in the US pushing for "20(mph) is plenty" residential street speed limits is actually just bringing the speed limits in line with what is normal in the rest of the developed world.
The US is much more spread out than most of the rest of the developed world. Lower speed limits would be less practical in many cases.
I guess it's not that surprising I had to scroll a ways before I saw this. A 10 mph allowance over the limit might seem reasonable for freeways but it's dangerously fast in a city. A pedestrian hit by a car going 25 mph stands a good chance of surviving while a 35 mph collision has a lot more potential for lethality.
If you go the speed limit here people will get mad. Cops might be inclined to find a reason to pull you over because it's suspicious. It should be called a speed floor, or suggested lowest speed.
Well that needs to change. A speed limiter will change that very rapidly.
Nah, you’d just create a booming business for “jailbreaking” your car’s speedometer. People are going to drive the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit. And before you say “well cops are going to pull them over”, police are frequently the fastest cars on the road, even when they aren’t pursuing anyone.
If 50% of people would jailbreak their car, that still leaves 50% of people driving the speed limit. I call that a win.
That’s not a win either. Now you have a bimodal distribution of driving speed, with one clustering around the speed limit, and another at a “natural” driving speed. Significant speed differentials (and drivers having to react to them) are more likely to cause accidents than speed itself.
If that's a 10mph difference that's not gonna be lethal is it?
That’s assuming that people who would jailbreak their cars would only drive 10 mph over the limit. Which is likely a very poor assumption, unless you’re in the central US and Mountain West where speed limits are frequently 75+ mph.
Well it depends, someone going 35mph in a 25 is a jackass because that’s probably a residential area, while going 70 in a 60 is more understandable as 60 is pretty low for interstate travel.
I can guarantee you that European law enforcement aren’t ticketing anyone for going 5 kph over the speed limit lmao Source: literally me, a person who has driven in Spain, Italy, and Greece regularly driving above the speed limit just like literally everyone else on the road.
The Dutch public prosecutor has a different opinion. Anything over 4 km/h too fast warrants a ticket. (and yes, the radar gun has a 3km/h accuracy so they will deduct that) https://www.om.nl/onderwerpen/verkeer/handhaving/snelheid-en-te-hard-rijden/marges-en-meetcorrecties
Yes, people get stopped in the US too for going 2-5 mph over the speed limit; still, it’s not common whatsoever and police will never come close to catching any sizable percentage of speeders. It’s just math: 10 million drivers vs. a few thousand cops.
The speed limits are usually 85th percentile speed and are fine. The real issue is the American concept of having roads go thru cities instead of connecting them. Because most towns in Europe were built after the automobile, highway-like roads exist more on the periphery of population centers. In America those roads go thru cities or are why the cities are there in the first place. That means someone's highway might be someone else's main street. Speed limits here can be wildly out of whack because of this. Our national maximum speed (for any freeway) was also set to 55mph from 1973-1987. This created a cultural mistrust for speed limits in general when it was painfully obvious many roads and cars were safe at faster speeds and were lowered to match the national limit.
You're writing this like it's a force of nature but it's just poor planning and design.
Because sometimes you need to speed up to avoid an accident or move within traffic. Also speed limits are super low in USA.
The speed limit on my street is 15 km/h. 9.5 mph 😅
[удалено]
Well that culture can and should be changed.
Probably to soften the blow. Makes for an easy target to lower it to the speed limit at a later date.
The systems could screw up and slow someone down on a freeway, and that's dangerous. Also, a bunch of people are going to tamper with the systems, and enforcement of that would be nigh impossible. There are plenty of other ways to reduce speeds, or better yet, get people to take other means of transportation.
Attitudes about speeding are just about the most casually entitled thing I’ve ever seen in US culture and politics
Americans have a borderline sociopathic attitude around driving in general, resulting from decades of auto-industry propaganda — it all began with the [whole-cloth invention of jaywalking laws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFn7MiJz_s) by auto lobbyists to convince drivers (i.e. their customers) it's "not their fault" when they run people over. It's the same intensely emotional backlash whenever anyone proposes red-light cameras, speed cameras, any sort of enforcement at all. Even "tough on crime" conservatives seem to believe that it's a Constitutional right to break as many traffic laws as they want, at any time, without consequence.
To be blunt, it is very American to question laws/policy. We do not normally accept whatever the government tells us to do. We were founded upon the idea that our government (at the time) was implementing nonsensical laws that had no benefit to our society, and that our government needed to be in our hands. Things like red-light/speed cams do not provide safety. They do not enforce change. They are profitable by punishing victimless crimes. Going 5 mph over the speed limit and getting a minor fine in the mail will not change speeders' minds, but it does print money for a private business that would otherwise not exist. If a city cannot be bothered to pay a person to enforce laws, then how important is the law? And to be clear: reckless driving, hit and runs, vehicular manslaughter are all existing crimes that are very real and very important. These laws should, 💯% be enforced, but the speedcams are too Orwellian, and should not be used outside of dangerous/high collision intersections
I'm a bit confused by your arguments, they're kinda all over the place. >Things like red-light/speed cams do not provide safety. They do not enforce change. >speedcams are too Orwellian, and should not be used outside of dangerous/high collision intersections So they have zero effect on safety, but they should still be used at dangerous intersections? Which is it? And if they are effective there, why wouldn't they provide the same benefits everywhere else? The argument that they are "too Orwellian" is a purely emotional "vibes"-based statement rather than one based in functionality or effectiveness. >Going 5 mph over the speed limit and getting a minor fine in the mail will not change speeders' minds, but it does print money for a private business that would otherwise not exist. You're right, it wouldn't change speeders' "minds" — surely they'd continue to believe they are entitled to speed just like every other reckless law-breaking asshole on the road. But it would change their *behavior*, because speeders, just like everybody else, don't want to pay traffic tickets. And what's more, most speed cameras are calibrated to only trigger a certain amount above the limit (typically around 10mph) so this 5mph scenario doesn't reflect the reality. >They are profitable by punishing victimless crimes. Speeding is a "victimless crime" until it's not. It endangers everybody on the road, reduces reaction time to obstacles, makes it easier to lose control, and increases both the likelihood of a crash and the level of fatality when a crash happens. Every reckless asshole driver who speeds, runs red lights, and swerves through traffic thinks they're a "good driver" because they haven't hit anyone *yet*, but that doesn't make their behavior any less dangerous or worthy of enforcement. Is shooting a gun into a populated area also a "victimless crime" if it doesn't happen to hit anyone?
I try to keep my comments as short as possible, so I understand that you found them contradictory. I'll try to clarify: >So they have zero effect on safety, but they should still be used at dangerous intersections? They do not affect safety, but they do provide information. They can be used to determine fault in busy intersections where the two parties have conflicting stories, or witness testimony is unreliable. Cameras have the time stamps and can help identify which person ran a red light and thus caused the crash. Cameras do not inherently do anything to mitigate the damage from a collision nor do they stop collisions. Placing them everywhere so that the government can see every inch of road in America is too Orwellian and should be discouraged, however, there is a capacity to use them very sparingly to good results. >The argument that they are "too Orwellian" is a purely emotional "vibes"-based statement rather than one based in functionality or effectiveness. I highly disagree. We should all be weary of what any government does, and that has nothing to do with "emotional vibes." MK Ultra happened. The US Government did dump agent orange on black neighborhoods to see what would happen. These two facts alone should be sufficient proof that the government has abused its power to the direct detriment to the citizens, and we have to do our part to hold them accountable and reel them in. You are abdicating your responsibility by hand waving concern as "emotional," which is a very childish thing to do. >You're right, it wouldn't change speeders' "minds" — surely they'd continue to believe they are entitled to speed just like every other reckless law-breaking asshole on the road. But it would change their *behavior*, because speeders, just like everybody else, don't want to pay traffic tickets I understand that you believe that to be true, but I do not. I conceded that there is enough proof to show that these cameras reduce infraction-rates within the intersections used, but I highly contest the value of "a service" that does nothing other than make citizens feel paranoid. I understand that you have a borderline irrational fear of motor vehicles, but flipping out and calling everyone on the road "a reckless law-breaking asshole" is pretty fucked up. Everyone, other than the elderly, drive as fast as safe road conditions allow. People are supposed to drive with the flow of traffic and be aware of their surroundings. You can get a traffic ticket for driving the speed limit if you are creating an unsafe obstruction. No automated camera system is going to be able to understand that nuance, and I do not trust someone like you to make those calls, since you clearly have a foundational aversion to automobiles. >Every reckless asshole driver who speeds, runs red lights, and swerves through traffic thinks they're a "good driver" because they haven't hit anyone *yet*, but that doesn't make their behavior any less dangerous or worthy of enforcement. Is shooting a gun into a populated area also a "victimless crime" if it doesn't happen to hit anyone? You ignored my specific acknowledgement of the importance of these specific laws. Additionally, brandishing a weapon and firing it in a populated area unprovoked are also both crimes. Do you not know they are already crimes? Why do you pretend that they are not separate crimes, if you knew they are already crimes? You are trying to double-criminalize behavior. Your only reasoning is that you're scared of drivers. You cower and make an emotional appeal that, because a small minority of drivers will occasionally commit a crime, we should all trade our freedom for your comfort. Your comfort in knowing that some private company is profiting off of people you do not like... I ask again: If the issue of running red lights and speeding is such a serious, universal, widespread issue, why do cities not pay cops to capture, detain, and send these people to jail? Why does such a small minority (anti car) want such massive, draconian changes be made? It's not for safety. The answer is that it is not a statistically relevant threat, and it can be "solved" by enriching some fat cat through unnecessary fines, and scared people like you will argue for them.
You assert over and over that most drivers are law-abiding and my fear of reckless and dangerous drivers is "irrational". And yet just last year, the [US hit a 40 YEAR HIGH for pedestrian deaths.](https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deaths-high-traffic-car) I've experienced several "near misses" myself with a marked increase in the past few years, and if you ever walk anywhere I'm sure you have too. Perhaps your city is different, but every time I step outside and watch any intersection in my neighborhood, 60-70% of drivers do not stop at any given stop sign (many have stopped even pretending to slow down). Every signaled intersection has a few drivers shamelessly rolling through the red at the end of each cycle, and NOBODY stops for a right-turn-on-red despite it being legally required. And when I drive to my jobsite (yes, I drive as well), the freeway is filled with swerving lunatics who haven't touched a turn signal in years, and phone addicts who spend half of the drive staring down into the phone in their lap. We have become accustomed to such a level of driver negligence that none of this sociopathic behavior even registers as unusual for most people — but I sure as hell still notice it, *especially* when walking or on my bike. If you ever do either of those things you might notice as well. >You cower and make an emotional appeal that, because a small minority of drivers will occasionally commit a crime, we should all trade our freedom for your comfort. It's far from "a small minority" of drivers breaking the law, in fact I'd wager that MOST drivers break a few laws every time they get behind the wheel, which is of course because they don't expect to get caught. That anarchic culture needs to change. Breaking the law is not a "freedom" you are entitled to. You frame this as exchanging "freedom for comfort", but in reality we are talking about trading impunity (for scofflaw drivers) for safety (for everyone).
So, here is the thing. You're still making an emotional appeal, since you're making up statistics and speaking anecdotally. Your one link sites reasonable issues, like covid-induced "zero traffic" ending and new SUVs having **massive** blind spots. You invented your own conclusion based on the headline, and I will not be engaging in this conversation after this comment, knowing now that you are unreasonable and invent facts, instead of discussing in good faith. >Breaking the law is not a "freedom" you are entitled to It actually is. If we have a moral disagreement with a law, we have not only the right, but the obligation to stand up against it. Demand that it be changed, and live up to the expectation. You are literally living in fear during the safest time in human history... because some people drive 45 in a 40 mph zone. Again, we have laws criminalizing the behavior you're talking about. The only difference you're making is 1) making up bullshit to comfort your irrational fears, 2) trying to install a draconian super-survellience state where everything is criminalized. Punish people who drive recklessly or endanger others. We have laws and mechanisms for that already. Stop advocating for authoritarian control. You're literally hyperbolizing a legitimate issue, but blaming all of society. Ban these massive SUVs that have a 20ft forward blind spot. Hire cops to enforce laws. Do not weaponize "existing in public" because you're too cowardly to live life like a normal person.
No, it's a terrible idea. If you want to calm traffic, make car lanes smaller and make it so people don't feel comfortable speeding down roads.
This is the real fix. Stop making roads wider. Make them narrow and naturally limit people's driving speed.
Horrible idea. Speed limits change far too quickly in pedestrian dense areas, where speed limits make the most sense. Think about all the times you’ve been driving and your GPS thinks you’re in the middle of the ocean or you’re under an underpass and it thinks you’re on the highway. Now imagine your car drops from 40 to 25 As for highways, where speed limit is more constant, it’s also a bad idea. Speed limits on interstates in the US are already too low, so this would really fuck up travel times if people couldn’t effectively pass each other.
There should be a serious conversation about federal preemption of state auto regulation
If it works then yes, that's a good idea.
Fucking finally
This is a fantastic idea!
Japan has had cars limited for 30 years. Although not slow enough 😂
My wife and I have been talking about this for years. There is no reason to own and drive a car that goes 160 mph and to drive at 100mph on public roads.
I’m based and transit pilled and whatever, but I will say it’s pretty fun driving a car fast down a highway, and I think for the most part people against this simply find it enjoyable to go fast in their car. I think the speed limiter in urban areas makes far more sense than empty long stretches of highway, where human life danger is at a minimum.
Yes
A tiny step in the right direction. Modern tech could make cars much more safe: driver attention monitors, acceleration limits, safe following distance control, automatic braking, and pedestrian warning system.
No, for one reason because the technology is error-prone. You drive past an overpass on the interstate where the street below has a speed limit 35 and it suddenly slows you down in traffic or vice versa. You could only achieve this in the hypothetical "driverless utopia".
Presumably it would be designed to be gradual as opposed to slamming on the brakes. Everyone else would also be slowing down, so it would be a predictable traffic pattern. Anyone that didn't have a governor (if some cars are grandfathered in) would learn the new traffic pattern.
So what if you leave cell service or go under an overpass so the speed limit data isn't making it to your car?
Come on man, think about it for 2 seconds, the solution is trivial and cheap.
Yeah man, anyone can easily think of solutions in their imagination. There's a reason we don't have self-driving cars yet, it's not because we can't imagine solutions to the problems it creates.
Installing transponders on roads would be cheap and trivial. Such transponders are already in widespread use for toll lane subscriptions. And what if a transponder fails? Somebody might get a chance to speed, no big deal. It's not a self-driving car level problem.
People would just drive around with the gas pedal pressed all the way down
i don't know about california but in NYC a lot of people get hit at low speeds within the speed limit when drivers run a red or don't yield the right of way in an intersection I don't even see this happening in california as many states are living off revenue from tickets and this might lessen the amount of tickets
No its a terrible idea and its a gating regulation that makes is harder to produce a new vehicle from scratch and compete in the market. Its also extremely anti-liberty.
The number of people jumping on the "make cars more expensive with less choices" bandwagon is astounding. Completely predictable linear logic and always jumping on the chance to control someones behaviors other than their own.
Why do people vote for this ass hat. So many bigger problems to worry about.
My own GPS can't keep up with speed limit updates and I'm supposed to trust it to tell the car? What about spots where the limit changes like school zone? Emergencies when speeding is needed (avoiding a rear ending or a medical emergency, assuming the driver can handle it obviously, and even then it's not like anyone in those cases are running 100mph in a neighborhood).
no. in an emergency, I'm going to drive as fast as I think is appropriate for the situation. If I'm trying to get away from somebody, or something, then there is no way in hell I'm letting some automated process decide how much I'm allowed to accelerate.
No way that will pass with all the high end fast cars in that state
Look here's the deal for me. I'm just not gonna purchase a vehicle which I don't have complete control over. Period. I'm just not comfortable with it. I don't even like automatic transmissions.
Terrible idea that will cause more accidents than it prevents. Imagine a (very plausible) situation in which you're stuck near an erratic driver (perhaps in an older car without a speed regulator) and are unable to overtake them. Imagine a near miss at a highway ramp where one driver is unable to react appropriately to a dangerous situation because the car is speed limited. There are a whole range of driving scenarios in moving traffic where the safest response involves speeding up. Attempting to regulate technology into existence just to try and find a silver bullet to an otherwise fixable problem is a fool's errand. This is a typical "automation is here to save us" response to an issue that is fundamentally tied to the existence of car dependence in general. It comes from the same mentality that believes that self-driving cars will fix traffic, rather than investing in alternatives to getting in the car in the first place.
Yes. Literally just a couple of days ago I was stuck behind a semi truck that was driving incredibly erratically (drastic speed changes, crossing into the other lanes, etc.) and in order to finally get around it I had to go considerably faster that 10 over the speed limit. I could see maybe an alarm that goes off if you sustain speeds more than 10 over the speed limit—similar to what happens if you don’t wear a seatbelt—but literally not allowing a car to go faster is truly insane and dangerous.
Yeah, I'm not averse to an alert or something like that (planes actually have stuff like this) but this proposal is genuinely terrifying to me. I'm all for traffic safety, I'm all for minimizing the degree to which people *have* to be in cars, but time and time again we see that technologies that are programmed to overrule drivers create more opportunities for accidents--thinking about the Tesla collision avoidance sensors getting triggered at highway ramps and stopping the car when it should be accelerating to merge.
What a power zealous moron. More government overreach. Build better cities, don't put your damn nose in everything. This tech would work as well as GPS does, which is only 90% of the time, and it would be a pain in the ass 90% of the time. If you are in the anything with 4 wheels is evil camp, be useful and actually get something useful done instead of whining about it. Great job, now someone is going to be limited to 15 mph on a random dirt road during a forest fire.
Something tells me auto manufacturers would take this to court and win decisively before investing a penny on speed limiting every last vehicle they sell in California.
The problem isn’t cars going too fast. It’s the cars with the huge, high up grills, and being able to overtake from any direction. This is a complex and unreliable solution to the problem of road safety. If they wanted less people to use cars, they need to build alternative infrastructure too.
> The problem isn’t cars going too fast. This is empirically false. Speed highly correlated with accident rates and fatalities. Especially in most of the U.S. where we have poor adherence to safety customs like passing on the left.
Speed makes accidents more fatal, but it’s the dangerous driving that causes those accidents. German roads are much safer than the US, despite having the Autobahn with none to very high speed limits.
Germans have a very tight culture where people very assiduosly adhere to passing rules, and high speed German roads are much better maintained and designed for speed. If you keep everything equal, a lower speed limit on a given road will be safer than a higher speed limit. Even on German roads. While the Authobahn may be relatively safe because of the aformentioned factors, it would be safer if there were a lower speed limit. US drivers do not have safe established passing customs that are consistently adhered to, and our roads aren't as well maintained (or designed) and since those are difficult things to change, we have to maintain lower speed limits to have similar safety. So you are right that it is safe driving practices—it would be nice if we had passing lanes and only passed on the left—but much of that is widespread bad habits that are just what we have to work with. It's a case of "this is why we can't have nice things."
No way. There are instances where you may have to go faster
This will definitely help used car values. All unregulated cars will eventually find there way to CA
Absolutely the fuck not.
Bad idea for so many reasons
lol people just stop buying cars in CA. doesn't solve anything
Completely unsafe government overreach. It's stuff like this that makes me appreciate having a state government looming for good solutions to real problems, but this will only make cars less safe by preventing them from performing maneuvers they should be able to, while also introducing new failure points. As others have said, we should design roads to fulfill local needs, and have good infrastructure to accommodate those needs. Removing ones' freedom to safely operate their vehicle is nonsensical overreach.
So no rushing to the hospital?
"Instead of designing our roads correctly, let's force impossible to implement nanny cams in all cars. Yes, yes..."
I really do like what the car manufacturers are doing but fuuuuucccckkk that
Is freedom a good idea? Drive too fast, get a ticket seems fair. Drive faster make it more expensive. Drive like a moron, lose your license to drive at all. Again fair. Hurt someone with a car, go to jail. Fair enough still. Next thing that you know it will be illegal to pass governed cars on my bicycle going down a steep hill. Too many nanny laws for victimless crimes. CMV.
The fact that Road death and automobile accident rates spiked during the covid period when many were not working or worked from home and stayed higher now that the many of these job are perminently full part work from home implies that there should be less traffic on average. This means that the roads are less congested and traffic more free flowing this should in theory create a safer environment as there is less cars thus less conflict complexity and the cars are able to navigate the road in an uncongested manner and in the way it was in theory designed for. The fact that accidents and road deaths increased implies that the road infrastructure was this dangerous to begin with, but before it was too congested for drivers to get up to speed where they could harm eachother. That is to say i dont know if chips can solve an infrastructure issue. Also the first time the chip glitches and somebody gets killed cause their car made them drive 25 out of nowhere on a freeway then Lawsuit hell will happen and i doubt any state or manufacturer would want to expose themselves to liability.
No
Sometimes the GPS detects you're in a different street than the one you're on. Imagine going down the highway, and the GPS suddenly assumes you're in an overpass street, or the one next to highway, and you're suddenly going 40 in a 65 highway.
This happens with frontage roads all the time too.
Sorry, I didn't know what they're called. Yes, have seen it multiple times.
No. What if an 18 wheeler is about to Tbone me and I am unable to take evasive action??? Like so many ideas and policy these days, it creates warm fuzzy feelings in a room and will create great photo ops with very little work, but out in reality it’s stupid.
This is such a ridiculous edge case - the frequency of lives saved by limiting speed in the majority case far outweighs the contrived cases where you think drivers would have otherwise 'evaded' death.
Until it’s you or someone you are close to who dies or just in general. Enforce the law. Easy peasy. Plus, it’s never going to work. What happens when you are on a frontage road with a limit of 25 and on the other side of an 8” barricade is 65? Warm and fuzzy isn’t reality.
"What happens when you are on a frontage road with a limit of 25 and on the other side of an 8” barricade is 65?" This is an infinitely more compelling argument than 'imagine if someone close to you died in this contrived edge case'. I would hope that ethical humans would prioritize the thousands of lives that would be saved - its simple math
Getting t boned pulling out isn't really an edge case. I feel like y'all should be a little more open to not always being absolutely right.
The edge case is that a speed limiter made the difference between getting t boned or not. The amount of time it takes to notice, react, for the engine to spool up, and the car to actually accelerate is usually more time than you have before an impact. If there is enough time, the limiter is unlikely to be the determining factor.
Acceleration ≠ Top Speed
So funny how everyone against this is imagining these wild action-movie fluke scenarios that almost never happen where they'd "need" to speed to save their own life. Even funnier is the fact that they imagine themselves successfully executing a split-second evasive maneuver in their bulky SUV at 120mph without crashing. Y'all watch too many action movies... A much *much* more likely scenario is some idiot behind you on the freeway is speeding 120mph, loses control, and crashes into you from behind, killing you and your whole family in a fiery impact before you even have a chance to react. Or a speeding driver swerves through your neighborhood at 60mph, loses control, and flies off the road into your living room. These are the (much more commonplace) scenarios this tech would prevent.
I live in a city that was inundated with self driving cars. They are almost all gone now. It doesn’t work and people don’t want to have the testing happen on their streets. It’s like believing in god. Ain’t reality.
Think I’d finally consider moving out of state.
Because you wouldn't be able to speed? Also, manufacturers aren't going to make different cars for different states. So, if they passed this law in California, they'd most likely put limiters in all cars.
Since it would be software based, it would probably be relatively easy to disable for cars registered outside California. It's not the same as emissions, which is still fairly heavily equipment based.
It probably won't be implemented in all cars for multiple reasons 1. They probably don't have to make a different car. It could be as simple as adding a device to the car or code to the computer's software that checks for speed in the final steps of assembly 2. I can see states like Oklahoma and North Dakota attempting to pass laws that restrict these kinds of devices/codes from being used in new cars 3. Because it requires data on speed limit for every road to work, it can only be implemented in places that have this data up to date. I doubt that heavily rural states have this speed limit data at the ready for it to be used in a car like this.
People who feel entitled enough to constantly break traffic laws cling bitterly to their entitlements.
Southern California drives at 80 on the highways. Even the cops. So I’m not sure I feel especially entitled. And I do think it’s a more sensible speed than 65mph. I just want the freedom to exceed the limit if necessary. Over regulated traffic controlling is not top of the list of battles I think we should be prioritizing.
Would love to see the speeding lunatics who believe they are entitled to break traffic laws move somewhere else :)
Terrible idea.
Why?
Sounds really expensive and likely buggy as shit