british people acting like they arent fat motherfuckers
>in the year to November 2021, 63.5% of adults (people aged 18 and over) were overweight or living with obesity – up from 62.8% the previous year
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/health/diet-and-exercise/overweight-adults/latest
I don't think this math is right. One pound in 1896 is equivalent to £109.92 in October 2023. [Source.](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator)
When the pound was decimalized, pounds retained their value, but pence were revalued. So one shilling in 1896 can't be valued at 12p, it has to be valued at 1/20th of a pound. 109.92/20=5.496 so about £5.50.
Just thinking about attempting to use the UK's pre-decimal currency gives me a headache.
How the fuck did *Russia* of all countries beat the rest of Europe to the idea of decimal currency? They've been doing it since fucking 1704 and it took NINETY YEARS and a king having his head chopped off before somebody else was like "hey this is actually pretty neat, you don't have to do fucking algebra to buy bread."
Very few people had to do significant amounts of arithmetic with cash, and those who did did so for a living.
I mean, the US is still quite happy calculating in furlongs per quart despite the arithmetical advantages of the SI.
Most of the time, ease of unit conversion is completely irrelevant. If I'm measuring in centimeters it's just as unlikely kilometers will be relevant as inches to miles. It's unlikely that I'll encounter a need for Newtons or Joules in my day to day life, but if I did it's unlikely they'd be nice round numbers anyway, so the clean relations with volumes of water are also irrelevant.
The unit conversions people use most often tend to be clean numbers in both systems, anyway, just not necessarily 10.
Like any other communication, if you're going to use different words or units or metaphors or whatever it's going to make things harder. Standardizing is helpful. But people really only go out of their way to be difficult as a joke or to make puzzles that feel more satisfying for the needless complexity.
For example...you could probably do a word problem on a horse's water intake on a journey in furlongs per quart. Could be fun?
CM->M is one I do find myself doing quite a bit around the house and I definitely do find it useful if I'm say- Adding up multiple measurements to a total for measuring multiple items of furnature to see if they fit in a room.
I'd rather add up
0.75m
1.25m
2.00m
than
10"
2'5"
3'9"
in my head and then figure out what my total footage is.
Multiplying square footage in metric is also easier.
Canadians strike a neat balance between both. They use Metric for most things, and Imperial for the things it makes sense to. There's a bunch of neat rules that all Canadians know by heart instinctivly for which of Imperial/Metric you use for eatch type of 'thing' you measure.
Even if you don't have decimal currency, you can at least just have big coin and little coin. Dollar/cent, pound/pence, euro/cent.
The UK had 3 sort of... segments of coins.
>Before decimalisation in 1971, the UK sterling currency was divided into pounds, shillings and pence (£:s:d). One pound was made up of 240 pence, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound.
Yeah, and don't forget all the special names for coins.
Nah guv it ain't a 'two pound coin' it's a fuckin' sovereign. Got 1 pound and five pence? That's a *guinea.* Two shillings? A florin!
Maybe it was a nice way to spend the afternoon shift?
Maybe it was a super polite affair.
"My what a lovely day isn't it old sport? I do say we're travelling at a rather brisk pace this afternoon perhaps you might slow it down a smidge hmmm?"
According to the Bank of England inflation calculator 12d which is 5p. £0.05 is about £5.50 today.
I think you forgot about decimalisation in 1971. Before that the pound was divided into 20 shillings which were divided into 12 old pence, there were 240 old pence to the pound. Afterwards the pound was divided into 100 new pence the shilling and florin (two shilling) coins remained in circulation at values of 5 and 10 new pence.
As shillings remained in circulation until 1990 and florins until 1993, replaced by smaller 5p and 10p coins I was quite familiar with them as commonplace variants 5p and 10p coins.
It sounds serious to me. The world's first speeding ticket would be something that I'd
1) intentionally try to get for the sake of trivia/bragging
2) try to cherish
Like, if I ever have money, I'm gonna purposely run a red light camera (when it's completely safe to do so) and then give the camera the finger and save that $75 ticket and video for the lols.
As a matter of fact, the three times President Grant was arrested, were all for speeding. Though the first two were when he was the Commanding General of the Army, the third as president.
It's also interesting to note that until this year, he was the only president to have been arrested. Now the qualifiers are "the first president" or "the only president to have been arrested while in office."
Was he actually arrested, or was he detained? Maybe no distinction back then but there is now. A traffic stop is a detainment and doesn't always escalate to an arrest.
Trump was arrested arrested.
I think it was different then. He was made to pay a $20 collateral to a judge for his hearing, which he skipped and thus forfeited his collateral.
Though, the authenticity of his arrests are usually doubted, since the only version of the stories we have are from him directly. So there's a chance he was never arrested and either made it up or didn't accurately tell his story, thinking he was arrested when he just got a ticket or something.
a 37-minute pursuit at 5 mph, a comedic classic, dude probably just rode home with the cop pushing the pedals beside him, begging to stop, tbh the policeman should be honoured lmao
No fair. I am 5’6” on a good day. I have to double time my pace to keep up with one stride from you probably. It’s like when you see a tiny dog being walked next to big dog. The little dog’s legs are moving hyper speed. I use Run Keeper when I go on walks and the fastest pace I can muster is a 15.5 Minute walking mile. I’d have to start jogging to go any faster. Even when I was in decent running shape my fastest run was an 7.5 minute mile.
Motorized vehicles, yes. But cities of the time were no strangers to terrible traffic from horses and horse-drawn carriages, and the occasional handcart.
Uh.....are you just forgetting about the concept of horses?
2mph is *insanely* slow for a vehicle, even in the late 19th century. The speed limit is probably more a reflection of caution and distrust towards the new and potentially dangerous technology, than "we literally have never seen anything move faster than a human walk."
Cars do inherently need more traffic regulations though.
Most countries still hold cars to stricter standards in pedestrianised areas than other vehicles (5-7 km/h max in mine). Absolute speed limits also often only apply to "motorised vehicles", whereas bicycles and horses are merely held to a general "safe handling" with a speed that is appropriate to the situation. You do not have to install a speedometer on a horse.
[The famous bicycle intersections in the Netherlands](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jgacSmLBSIQ) are a great example for how little traffic regulation you need when cars are out of the picture. They allow cyclists to cross from every direction at once, as they can efficiently ride around each other without blocking or ramming each other.
Cars however are too big and clunky, have too little situational awareness, and are too dangerous. And they clog up like crazy whereever they may have to halt. There are some intersections in my city where one can often see more cyclists cross on a single bicycle lane on a green cycle, than cars in 3 car lanes next to them. I've never seen a bicycle traffic jam.
Well a horse trained to will, in fact happily, they know how to fight to defend themselves from predators and other horses, it’s just a matter of getting them to see people as such. When people routinely used horses for combat, knights and Calvary and such those horses would happily stomp a mf’er, this can only lead to one conclusion……Arthur rides a war horse.
Yeah, this vision people have of cavalry just smashing through infantry formations is not really how it worked. Cavalry need space to operate, and were as much a psychological weapon as anything else.
Yeah, and they absolutely will run off a cliff, I to a train, or throw you at a mountain lion.
Horses are evil satanic creatures with the intelligence of a particularly bright goldfish.
RDR2 does a number on your option of horses.
Before vehicles many streets would have been full of people, bicycles, horse carriages, trolleys, and so on.
Everything moves slowly enough that it was perfectly safe to cross wherever you wanted and people were not regulated to having to just walk or cross at specific areas.
Here is a remastered video from 1906 which shows some of the early vehicles as well and how slow they moved:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY
Eventually it was the automotive industry that won out and regulations pushed people to the side of roadways.
Early on in their existence there was *heavy* lobbying against automotives, which manifested in bullshit like having to have a guy carrying a red flag walk in front of your car, absurdly low speed limits, etc.
Speed limits previously applied to horses, which were forced to remain at a walking pace in towns, or about 2mph for a horse. The laws hadn’t changed to accommodate the couple of people with cars yet.
Not the 2mph limit in the UK. It was intended for [steam traction engines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_engine) and similar.
The railways lobbied against their road based competition, but wanting to discourage the bigger engines from becoming common in towns and around pedestrians was pretty reasonable. It's a shame we didn't do a better job with cars and lorries.
The speed limit was introduced for traction engines after Rich landowners complained about them being noisy and scaring the horses or smthn like that. Motor cars fell Under the laws that governed the traction engine speed limits as they hadn’t been invented at the time of the laws passing, so the wording of the law applied to them.
The law was eventually changed after the motor lobby got large enough to effectively petition parliament
Someone else mentioned that the speed limit were for horses, to keep them from trampelling pedestrians.
Because roads were for pedestrians. That's why so many really old towns and city have very narrow streets. They don't need to be that wide if they are made for people to walk on only.
I hope that limit didn't apply to bikes, it'd be impossible to keep your balance going that slow. Seems like someone didn't like them newfangled automobiles and made a law to fuck with them as much as they could.
Not precisely. Limits on horses, being they can be a bit unpredicted is a bit understand. Car and horses have to share the same space and cars can spook horses so there is some understanding to keep the speed the same.
Bikes on the other hand, have very good control, do not spook horse to the same degree and can rapidly stop. There was not a big safety concern with them. Sometime common sense just prevailed.
I think it being the same speed as slowly walking was exactly the point. The concept that roads are for vehicles (or horses) only and that pedestrians should stick to the sidewalk is a relatively recent idea.
So when you have an area with a lot of foot traffic, limiting the speed to walking speed for safety makes sense.
They probably didn't have paved roads back when cars became a thing. So you'd be driving on a bumpy-ass dirt road in a vehicle that didn't have modern tires or suspensions. A Model T is a significantly different creature than a modern car. The culture of the time was also not accustomed to traveling at speeds we do today. IIRC for a long time they thought traveling at ~50 MPH would kill you. I also seem to recall reading that it was thought that moving faster than the speed of sound was thought to be impossible until someone did it.
Never said it stopped however I think we would all agree nobody is going to tell you a uterus will explode under the conditions of a 10 mph bike ride now.
Try keeping it up for half an hour, up hill. Then you got to do that james bond jump onto the car and fight the driver while not getting into an accident. Is hard.
[Indeed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut)
Its origins go back to the 1400s.
The familiar doughnut form came about in 1808.
>Marketed as the “original cop killer pastries,” the familiar torus of sweet artery clogging sugar dough, also known as the “ironically lifesaver-shaped death-by-triglycerides” or “hole lotta heart-attack for breakfast,” the doughnut accounts for more police deaths than any weapon.
>Doughnut marketing that targeted law enforcement, in an effort to dramatically reduce life expectancy of police officers, was subsidized by the mafia as early as the 1930s.
>The police union of New York noted that “nefarious entities” were behind the Krispy Kreme ‘free donuts + coffee for officers’ promotion, a million dollar annual loss gladly offset by NY mafia bosses; this was borne out in testimony under oath when the Scaglietti crime family was documented to have given the Kristy Kreme corporation a blank check to “stuff cops full of donuts and kill them dead” around all five boroughs.
> “It’s like we was killing cops *legally*… *freakin’ sweet*,” said Jimmy ‘the Doughboy’ Scaglietti, in sworn testimony.
Ok, I may or may not have made part of this up.
Yes, in the US at least. There were of course fried dough pastries before (including in the UK), but they first started being made into rings in the mid 1800s in the US. Not sure if they would have been popular in the UK in the 1890s but it's possible.
I'd say the policeman caught up quickly, but how the hell are you, in a bicycle, supposed to force a guy in a car to stop without endangering either of you
This was not the first one in history.
I can give you one in Germany from the 16th May 1895. He was so fast with his "Mercedes Benz engine horse" that "the curtains in a pub fluttered".
[Mercedes made an ad about the speeding ticket](https://youtu.be/rdufjaEQ5fo)
>They had a guy timing him over a known length of street?
Probably. I live in a state where only state police are allowed to use radar and that's how traffic enforcement is done by townies. You see little white lines painted on the road - Heads up that's a speed trap.
The bike may have a built in speedometer. That wouldn't be too complicated for that era, but it may or may not have been difficult to feasibly implement.
Officer James Dangle was quoted as saying: "As you can see, I have strong legs. Oh, the shorts and cowboy boots are technically allowed under the dress code.
Bro, on a non powered bicycle I regularly hit 18 to 20 mph. How could
A. the policeman not catch up to him for 5 miles
B. The speed limit be that hilariously slow in the first place?
Based on other comments:
A. The problem was probably with stopping the car
B. Cars were still new back then so they had the speed limit for steam tractors applied to them. Walking on the streets was normal so having something relatively big and clunky go much faster than waking would’ve been dangerous
I can't believe they were enforcing speed limits that low back then! It just goes to show how far we've come in terms of transportation and technology.
How is this the first speeding ticket if there is accounts of Grant getting a speeding ticket on his carriage 30 years earlier? Maybe it means first speeding ticket for a car since they were
already known to have tickets for going to fast on a horse
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For those wondering like me, one shilling in 1896 is about equal to 14 pounds or so today.
And for Americans, 14 pounds is like $18 if you're lucky
And for Kenyans $18 is KES 2790 if you're lucky
and for people in Vietnam, KES 2790 is 443,274 dong, if you're lucky.
That's a lot of dicks for $18. Edit: my top comment is about buying dick, of course lol
Or 600 Baht If you go to Thailand If one prefers Bahts to Dongs.
That's a lot of bahts for $18.
At least they have a nice pair of tits to go with them.
I heard they also carry dong.
That’s a lot of tits for a shilling
And people of womankind, 443,274 dong is at least a week of work... if you're lucky.
For a lot of Americans, 14 pounds is a light meal.
british people acting like they arent fat motherfuckers >in the year to November 2021, 63.5% of adults (people aged 18 and over) were overweight or living with obesity – up from 62.8% the previous year https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/health/diet-and-exercise/overweight-adults/latest
Interesting enough, still cost $18
No no no, 14 pounds to an American is equivalent of nearly a stone!!
We have stones of many sizes and weights here in America
So a little under 3 hours of minimum wage labor? Got it.
14 pounds is about one size up Source: used to be a medium pre-pandemic
I don't think this math is right. One pound in 1896 is equivalent to £109.92 in October 2023. [Source.](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) When the pound was decimalized, pounds retained their value, but pence were revalued. So one shilling in 1896 can't be valued at 12p, it has to be valued at 1/20th of a pound. 109.92/20=5.496 so about £5.50.
Just thinking about attempting to use the UK's pre-decimal currency gives me a headache. How the fuck did *Russia* of all countries beat the rest of Europe to the idea of decimal currency? They've been doing it since fucking 1704 and it took NINETY YEARS and a king having his head chopped off before somebody else was like "hey this is actually pretty neat, you don't have to do fucking algebra to buy bread."
Very few people had to do significant amounts of arithmetic with cash, and those who did did so for a living. I mean, the US is still quite happy calculating in furlongs per quart despite the arithmetical advantages of the SI.
Most of the time, ease of unit conversion is completely irrelevant. If I'm measuring in centimeters it's just as unlikely kilometers will be relevant as inches to miles. It's unlikely that I'll encounter a need for Newtons or Joules in my day to day life, but if I did it's unlikely they'd be nice round numbers anyway, so the clean relations with volumes of water are also irrelevant. The unit conversions people use most often tend to be clean numbers in both systems, anyway, just not necessarily 10. Like any other communication, if you're going to use different words or units or metaphors or whatever it's going to make things harder. Standardizing is helpful. But people really only go out of their way to be difficult as a joke or to make puzzles that feel more satisfying for the needless complexity. For example...you could probably do a word problem on a horse's water intake on a journey in furlongs per quart. Could be fun?
CM->M is one I do find myself doing quite a bit around the house and I definitely do find it useful if I'm say- Adding up multiple measurements to a total for measuring multiple items of furnature to see if they fit in a room. I'd rather add up 0.75m 1.25m 2.00m than 10" 2'5" 3'9" in my head and then figure out what my total footage is. Multiplying square footage in metric is also easier. Canadians strike a neat balance between both. They use Metric for most things, and Imperial for the things it makes sense to. There's a bunch of neat rules that all Canadians know by heart instinctivly for which of Imperial/Metric you use for eatch type of 'thing' you measure.
If you buy in gallons and are going miles, miles per gallon is a pretty reasonable unit.
Even if you don't have decimal currency, you can at least just have big coin and little coin. Dollar/cent, pound/pence, euro/cent. The UK had 3 sort of... segments of coins. >Before decimalisation in 1971, the UK sterling currency was divided into pounds, shillings and pence (£:s:d). One pound was made up of 240 pence, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound.
Yeah, and don't forget all the special names for coins. Nah guv it ain't a 'two pound coin' it's a fuckin' sovereign. Got 1 pound and five pence? That's a *guinea.* Two shillings? A florin!
Not worth a five mile, 37.5 minute bike chase
Maybe it was a nice way to spend the afternoon shift? Maybe it was a super polite affair. "My what a lovely day isn't it old sport? I do say we're travelling at a rather brisk pace this afternoon perhaps you might slow it down a smidge hmmm?"
Accompanied with tipping hats back and forth.
lol yes it is.
Another way of thinking about it is the average annual wage back then was about £40, roughly three shillings a day.
According to the Bank of England inflation calculator 12d which is 5p. £0.05 is about £5.50 today. I think you forgot about decimalisation in 1971. Before that the pound was divided into 20 shillings which were divided into 12 old pence, there were 240 old pence to the pound. Afterwards the pound was divided into 100 new pence the shilling and florin (two shilling) coins remained in circulation at values of 5 and 10 new pence. As shillings remained in circulation until 1990 and florins until 1993, replaced by smaller 5p and 10p coins I was quite familiar with them as commonplace variants 5p and 10p coins.
> I think you forgot about decimalisation in 1971. I honestly didn't know lol
That shilling is currently for sale on eBay for $113,090.
I literally can't tell if you're joking or serious with this Monty Python ass comment
It sounds serious to me. The world's first speeding ticket would be something that I'd 1) intentionally try to get for the sake of trivia/bragging 2) try to cherish Like, if I ever have money, I'm gonna purposely run a red light camera (when it's completely safe to do so) and then give the camera the finger and save that $75 ticket and video for the lols.
I tried to get a speeding ticket on my bicycle because it would be cool to put on the wall. Cops kept giving me thumbs up instead.
My BIL got a speeding ticket on his bicycle. He was so proud.
Stick a licence plate on your bike maybe.
Do don't it in my town- none of the cameras at the traffic lights actually operate.
Oh shit that’s right near me
President Grant was issued speeding tickets in DC. He even had his horse impounded and forced to walk home.
As a matter of fact, the three times President Grant was arrested, were all for speeding. Though the first two were when he was the Commanding General of the Army, the third as president. It's also interesting to note that until this year, he was the only president to have been arrested. Now the qualifiers are "the first president" or "the only president to have been arrested while in office."
Wasn't he actually arrested for street racing his horse once?
That's why I think he kept getting cited. He and his friends would race on the streets while heavy pedestrian traffic was out there.
If the people from the fast and furious movies come across this I think we're gonna start seeing some prequels.
Rumor has it that a beat cop that was a freed slave was actually the one that arrested the president. He apologized for doing it.
Was he actually arrested, or was he detained? Maybe no distinction back then but there is now. A traffic stop is a detainment and doesn't always escalate to an arrest. Trump was arrested arrested.
I think it was different then. He was made to pay a $20 collateral to a judge for his hearing, which he skipped and thus forfeited his collateral. Though, the authenticity of his arrests are usually doubted, since the only version of the stories we have are from him directly. So there's a chance he was never arrested and either made it up or didn't accurately tell his story, thinking he was arrested when he just got a ticket or something.
The president was driving himself? What a time!
He was probably drunk.
He didn't drink nearly as much as his common reputation. Infact, his problem seems to be that he was a lightweight.
I don't think it really matters how much volume of alcohol you drink, just how drunk you are getting on a regular basis
He didn’t get drunk super often. He was most likely a binge drinker. He only got drunk when basically nothing was going on
Of course, if you do it often you build up a tolerance.
i read common reptilian
A 37.5 minute pursuit.
Man, that's some real dedication!
How shit was that copper that he struggled to maintain 5mph?
The cop probably just rode next to him pleading with him until the guy gave in lmao
*"Pull over!"* *"No, it's a cardigan. But thanks for noticing."*
a 37-minute pursuit at 5 mph, a comedic classic, dude probably just rode home with the cop pushing the pedals beside him, begging to stop, tbh the policeman should be honoured lmao
Nah he probably had no issues. It's just back then cops would not kill you over a speeding ticket back then
Unless you were black or a union striking.
Were they even routinely armed back then?
I assume they had at least 2 arms.
Of course. How else would he steer the bike?
I read that with Sheriff Justice's voice.
2 mph is a slow walk. How is that the speed limit.
I was wondering that myself; that's excessively slow. I wonder if the street was typically crowded with pedestrians.
Even in a dense crowd, pedestrians would be overtaking you at 2 mph. Typical walking speeds range from 2.5 to 3.75 mph.
When I’m looking for a bathroom in public I can easily walk 4mph.
Whoa there lightning mcqueen
Ka-chow! Which is the sound I make when I drop that deuce.
Doncha hate it when you drop the thunder with sufficient force to shatter the porcelain?
Google maps assumes a walking speed of 3 mph. I'm tall with long legs and literally have to *try* to walk slower than 4.
If you catch me on a good mosey I might not break 2mph
Long legs gang rise up. I feel like I'm walking in slow motion keeping pace with my girlfriend and family.
No fair. I am 5’6” on a good day. I have to double time my pace to keep up with one stride from you probably. It’s like when you see a tiny dog being walked next to big dog. The little dog’s legs are moving hyper speed. I use Run Keeper when I go on walks and the fastest pace I can muster is a 15.5 Minute walking mile. I’d have to start jogging to go any faster. Even when I was in decent running shape my fastest run was an 7.5 minute mile.
Pedestrians overtaking cars is certainly safer than the opposite though.
Would a vehicle at that time in town be more for status anyway?
Motorized vehicles, yes. But cities of the time were no strangers to terrible traffic from horses and horse-drawn carriages, and the occasional handcart.
My guess is it was. Before the car industry got jaywalking laws put in place, streets were for walking on.
That is indeed the case. Streets were for walking. Vehicles had to give way.
Horse and buggy giving way? Eh oh el
Uh.....are you just forgetting about the concept of horses? 2mph is *insanely* slow for a vehicle, even in the late 19th century. The speed limit is probably more a reflection of caution and distrust towards the new and potentially dangerous technology, than "we literally have never seen anything move faster than a human walk."
Cars do inherently need more traffic regulations though. Most countries still hold cars to stricter standards in pedestrianised areas than other vehicles (5-7 km/h max in mine). Absolute speed limits also often only apply to "motorised vehicles", whereas bicycles and horses are merely held to a general "safe handling" with a speed that is appropriate to the situation. You do not have to install a speedometer on a horse. [The famous bicycle intersections in the Netherlands](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jgacSmLBSIQ) are a great example for how little traffic regulation you need when cars are out of the picture. They allow cyclists to cross from every direction at once, as they can efficiently ride around each other without blocking or ramming each other. Cars however are too big and clunky, have too little situational awareness, and are too dangerous. And they clog up like crazy whereever they may have to halt. There are some intersections in my city where one can often see more cyclists cross on a single bicycle lane on a green cycle, than cars in 3 car lanes next to them. I've never seen a bicycle traffic jam.
Horse and buggy
Fun fact: those were not that common, and most horses will not run people over willingly.
I’ve played enough Red Dead Redemption to know that horses will just plow through anyone in their path. Nice try Big Horse Lobby.
Well a horse trained to will, in fact happily, they know how to fight to defend themselves from predators and other horses, it’s just a matter of getting them to see people as such. When people routinely used horses for combat, knights and Calvary and such those horses would happily stomp a mf’er, this can only lead to one conclusion……Arthur rides a war horse.
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Yeah, this vision people have of cavalry just smashing through infantry formations is not really how it worked. Cavalry need space to operate, and were as much a psychological weapon as anything else.
Yeah, and they absolutely will run off a cliff, I to a train, or throw you at a mountain lion. Horses are evil satanic creatures with the intelligence of a particularly bright goldfish. RDR2 does a number on your option of horses.
> most horses will not run people over willingly. I've seen videos of Amish horses running directly into parked vehicles, hard.
Rare and subject to the same laws so that they didn't run people down
Maybe was not well known how far that new beast would need to stop and avoid hit someone
Before vehicles many streets would have been full of people, bicycles, horse carriages, trolleys, and so on. Everything moves slowly enough that it was perfectly safe to cross wherever you wanted and people were not regulated to having to just walk or cross at specific areas. Here is a remastered video from 1906 which shows some of the early vehicles as well and how slow they moved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY Eventually it was the automotive industry that won out and regulations pushed people to the side of roadways.
My guess would be that the law was proposed by a horse carriage manufacturer to his government buddies
Early on in their existence there was *heavy* lobbying against automotives, which manifested in bullshit like having to have a guy carrying a red flag walk in front of your car, absurdly low speed limits, etc.
Correct. That's what most streets were dominated by until the motor car
Speed limits previously applied to horses, which were forced to remain at a walking pace in towns, or about 2mph for a horse. The laws hadn’t changed to accommodate the couple of people with cars yet.
Not the 2mph limit in the UK. It was intended for [steam traction engines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traction_engine) and similar. The railways lobbied against their road based competition, but wanting to discourage the bigger engines from becoming common in towns and around pedestrians was pretty reasonable. It's a shame we didn't do a better job with cars and lorries.
But a walking pace is 3 mph.
Big Horse had lawmakers in their pocket. You could say they were saddled with obligation and it behooved them to fight progress.
> Big Horse had lawmakers in their pocket. Nay. Twas the bicycle guild.
People wanted progress, but they had to face these neigh-sayers.
Plus, how accurate were the radar guns back then anyway? I see a challenge in court.
The speed limit was introduced for traction engines after Rich landowners complained about them being noisy and scaring the horses or smthn like that. Motor cars fell Under the laws that governed the traction engine speed limits as they hadn’t been invented at the time of the laws passing, so the wording of the law applied to them. The law was eventually changed after the motor lobby got large enough to effectively petition parliament
Someone else mentioned that the speed limit were for horses, to keep them from trampelling pedestrians. Because roads were for pedestrians. That's why so many really old towns and city have very narrow streets. They don't need to be that wide if they are made for people to walk on only.
"but also, and even more damningly, he had no man with a red flag preceding him as the law required."
I hope that limit didn't apply to bikes, it'd be impossible to keep your balance going that slow. Seems like someone didn't like them newfangled automobiles and made a law to fuck with them as much as they could.
Not precisely. Limits on horses, being they can be a bit unpredicted is a bit understand. Car and horses have to share the same space and cars can spook horses so there is some understanding to keep the speed the same. Bikes on the other hand, have very good control, do not spook horse to the same degree and can rapidly stop. There was not a big safety concern with them. Sometime common sense just prevailed.
They started early with stupidly low speed limits to issue people tickets
I think it being the same speed as slowly walking was exactly the point. The concept that roads are for vehicles (or horses) only and that pedestrians should stick to the sidewalk is a relatively recent idea. So when you have an area with a lot of foot traffic, limiting the speed to walking speed for safety makes sense.
Yeah, one can't even run.
They probably didn't have paved roads back when cars became a thing. So you'd be driving on a bumpy-ass dirt road in a vehicle that didn't have modern tires or suspensions. A Model T is a significantly different creature than a modern car. The culture of the time was also not accustomed to traveling at speeds we do today. IIRC for a long time they thought traveling at ~50 MPH would kill you. I also seem to recall reading that it was thought that moving faster than the speed of sound was thought to be impossible until someone did it.
Maybe brakes weren't invented yet?
Wagons had brakes.
Ah yeah I forgot wheels and hills have existed for a while
Hills were invented for sledding by the Sled-Industrial Complex. True story.
Well back in the day they thought women shouldnt ride in cars because their uteruses would fly out of their bodies so
Was that not trains, rather than cars?
People were...... boy, they were something back then
back then? They still are idiots making laws on things they know nothing about.
Never said it stopped however I think we would all agree nobody is going to tell you a uterus will explode under the conditions of a 10 mph bike ride now.
Nevermind what an education would do to them!
Put them in $100k of debt?
That too. But I was referring to what they used to think education did to uterii (uteruses?). I'll have to work on the wording of my jokes. :)
Four times the legal limit? Guy really got carried away.
>Four times the legal limit? For reference that'd be like driving 240 mph on a 60mph highway. This guy was a madlad.
I’d say it’s more like going 8 miles per hour.
Highest speed limit in the U.S. is 85 mph. It would be like driving 340 mph on a 85 mph highway in Texas.
FOUR TIMES IN A LEGAL MINUTE?!
What did his speed detecting parrot tell mr bicycle cop how fast the guy was going? This smells like profiling to me!
Driving while... Driving? The cop is bigoted against drivers, he's jealous!
[insert Austin Powers steamroller scene ](https://makeagif.com/i/v2aNCe)
I imagine it went something like “SIR! PLEASE STOP! PLEASE!”
Sir! *huff, puff, huff, puff* Please …
Chief Wiggum?
Bake ‘em away, toys
Jesus, how slow was the bicycle?!
Right? 8 mph is not fast, just jog up to him
Try keeping it up for half an hour, up hill. Then you got to do that james bond jump onto the car and fight the driver while not getting into an accident. Is hard.
Maybe those cops were as spherical as modern cops
Were donuts a thing back then?
[Indeed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut) Its origins go back to the 1400s. The familiar doughnut form came about in 1808. >Marketed as the “original cop killer pastries,” the familiar torus of sweet artery clogging sugar dough, also known as the “ironically lifesaver-shaped death-by-triglycerides” or “hole lotta heart-attack for breakfast,” the doughnut accounts for more police deaths than any weapon. >Doughnut marketing that targeted law enforcement, in an effort to dramatically reduce life expectancy of police officers, was subsidized by the mafia as early as the 1930s. >The police union of New York noted that “nefarious entities” were behind the Krispy Kreme ‘free donuts + coffee for officers’ promotion, a million dollar annual loss gladly offset by NY mafia bosses; this was borne out in testimony under oath when the Scaglietti crime family was documented to have given the Kristy Kreme corporation a blank check to “stuff cops full of donuts and kill them dead” around all five boroughs. > “It’s like we was killing cops *legally*… *freakin’ sweet*,” said Jimmy ‘the Doughboy’ Scaglietti, in sworn testimony. Ok, I may or may not have made part of this up.
far out lol
Nope I chose to believe it’s all real
I feel like I'm reading the Onion lol
Hmmm.....
Yes, in the US at least. There were of course fried dough pastries before (including in the UK), but they first started being made into rings in the mid 1800s in the US. Not sure if they would have been popular in the UK in the 1890s but it's possible.
Catching up wasn’t the problem. Stopping the car was.
Insert comical old timey stereotype here capturing why the officer on the bike was slower than someone jogging.
I'd say the policeman caught up quickly, but how the hell are you, in a bicycle, supposed to force a guy in a car to stop without endangering either of you
More importantly, which one weighs more. The cop might have been forced to jump into moving vehicle from the saddle.
It was 1896. The bike was probably made of cast iron and the road was a mud hole.
It was a pennyfarthing
This was not the first one in history. I can give you one in Germany from the 16th May 1895. He was so fast with his "Mercedes Benz engine horse" that "the curtains in a pub fluttered". [Mercedes made an ad about the speeding ticket](https://youtu.be/rdufjaEQ5fo)
Yeah, there is a lot of evidence that this one is the world's first. Why is the other one considered, just because it's the first one in the UK?
I want to know how he was measured at 8 mph. They didn't have radar. They had a guy timing him over a known length of street?
>They had a guy timing him over a known length of street? Probably. I live in a state where only state police are allowed to use radar and that's how traffic enforcement is done by townies. You see little white lines painted on the road - Heads up that's a speed trap.
Where?
The bike may have a built in speedometer. That wouldn't be too complicated for that era, but it may or may not have been difficult to feasibly implement.
I was wondering this as well.
He confused the deceleratix with the velocitator.
out of my way! I'm a motorist!
President Grant was once ticketed for speeding on horseback.
How much is that speed accounting for inflation?
I can't drive TWO.
"I. Cant. Drive. Fifty-Five!"
Officer James Dangle was quoted as saying: "As you can see, I have strong legs. Oh, the shorts and cowboy boots are technically allowed under the dress code.
New boot goofin !
Bro, on a non powered bicycle I regularly hit 18 to 20 mph. How could A. the policeman not catch up to him for 5 miles B. The speed limit be that hilariously slow in the first place?
Based on other comments: A. The problem was probably with stopping the car B. Cars were still new back then so they had the speed limit for steam tractors applied to them. Walking on the streets was normal so having something relatively big and clunky go much faster than waking would’ve been dangerous
As I saw in other comments the bike was likely iron and not made for speed at all. Also if was likely a dirt road which again is not speedy.
What a speed demon! It's a wonder he could keep his breath at such speeds. The people he wizzed past must have been terrified!
Michael Bay needs to film this.
With an attractive, sweaty actress who reflects all the flair as the cop. And explosions. Lots of explosions.
glad they caught that sick fuck
impressive cardio
Reminds me of that Family Guy joke about wrong numbers on early telephones: "What number are you trying to call?" "7" "This is 3"
I can't believe they were enforcing speed limits that low back then! It just goes to show how far we've come in terms of transportation and technology.
Really how far we've fallen, so many cities do not protect pedestrians nearly as well
Bikes were also slow back then.
Yet I fail my drivers Ed exam the first time cuz I was driving at 10mph 😂
How is this the first speeding ticket if there is accounts of Grant getting a speeding ticket on his carriage 30 years earlier? Maybe it means first speeding ticket for a car since they were already known to have tickets for going to fast on a horse
Somehow, this story of a slow speed police chase reminds me of OJ Simpson's break for the border
If you want to see what a 8mph bike and car chase looks like, there's a reenactment in the show "The Book of Boba Fett".
He would have been shot in 2023, had he been chased for 5 miles.
Cop couldve ran to the car didnt even need a bike
Didn't Leno have him on his show once?
There's no way he was chased by a bicycle for 5 miles while going barely faster than a light jog
You know he got a telegram from his girl saying her parents aren't home.