I once saw speed cameras as "un-sporting" until travelling elsewhere in the world where they are commonplace.
In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit.
If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding. Yes, the bill goes to the car owner, but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes. It is reasonable to place requirements on the determination of speed-limits and camera-locations to prevent abuse. Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.
With no attack on the parent, this reminds me of the general driving attitude of South Africa where I am from. A combination of lack of road enforcement and public mistrust in the police have created an environment where the rule of law on the road, designed to protect lives, is treated merely as suggestions or guidelines, often ignored.
It’s extremely common to see drivers speeding from 10 to even 30 km/h above the speed limit, even on urban roads. Sometimes these drivers are so confident in their right (freedom?) that they’ll flash their lights at you from behind if you’re going too slow, even if you are a good citizen driving at the speed limit. And speeding is only one half of it...
When I came to Europe for the first time it was amazing to see how almost everyone respects the road rules (I know this isn’t the case everywhere) and it generally makes me feel much safer on the roads. Although it’s still scary as hell cycling in some cities without protected cycle lanes.
Depends on the state & locality. Places like Virginia where having a radar detector is illegal (and the police have detector-detectors) and going 20mph over (32kph) or faster than 80mph (128kph)[0], gets you charged with reckless driving which is a criminal offense punishable by time in jail. So only the foolhardy speed there.
In next-door North Carolina, going 9mph over (14kph) will only get you insurance points not license points (the state tracks them separately) so many drivers limit themselves to that on the interstates, and sometimes 5mph over (8kph) inside city limits.
[0] Highway SH-130 outside Austin Texas has the fastest speed limit in the US at 85mph (136kph). So what is safe & legal there can get you placed in handcuffs in Virginia.
This is part of my problem with speed cameras everywhere. I respect the idea, but speed limits many places are too low given that roads and vehicles have improved significantly and they have not changed much to keep up. I would be all for more appropriate speed limits and better enforcement of speeding - and congesting traffic by failure to yield to faster drivers behind you.
While car safety has improved[1], for places where people still walk regularly like NY and Boston, going way over the speed limit is dangerous to people that don't happen to be in cars.
Yes. Any conversation like this can be expanded, because limits are only one tool among many that need to work together, and changes in each location need to be evaluated case by case - where divided roads / freeways would be the primary beneficiaries. But that article indicated the larger problem even in the city was infrastructure design and people exceeding speed limits rather than the limits themselves.
In places where we now have a 25 mph speed limit, if modern tech proves able to reduce accidents by 95% because of accident intervention tech / fsd etc in 5-10 years, should we raise the speed limit to 35 even though the accidents would then be more dangerous to pedestrians? Surely the answer in some cases would be yes, and others no. Or since most people drive above 25 anyways right now, should we just increase the limit now and increase enforcement and penalties? These are the types of changes I am proposing, as well as reducing the incentive to speed due to frustrated drivers passing road hogs unsafely, etc by enforcing minimum speeds and requiring courtesy yields as well. Just because you are driving slow does not mean you are not part of the problem.
And I think SA is a whole other level of breaking laws.
Anecdotal: Coming from Northern Europe (Denmark), I found people in NYC, Boston, SF , and LA to drive very well-behaved compared to people back home. I had to take care to stop driving like a European, since it made my fellow American passengers cringe.
I lived and worked — and drove — in Belgium for almost eight years. I held my own in France and a Italy, too. When I moved back to the US, it took me a little while to accommodate, but not too long.
But to this day, when necessary, I can go back into Belgian mode, and drive like the other crazy-ass Texans here in Austin.
> but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera.
I understand they’ll take pictures of the front of the vehicle and check against who’s lives at the registered address. Not sure if it’s an infraction for the registered owner to refuse to identify the likely driver.
Source: my German car rental company didn’t auto-pay anything, they forwarded me a “ticket” from the police department asking me to pay 20 EUR to go away or they’ll try to identify the actual driver and try to charge them a higher fine.
While this is more work, I think it’s reasonable for us to expect law enforcement to identify the guilty and not just convict someone that’s easy to blame.
Even better: in Germany, the cameras black out the passenger's side of the car automatically for privacy reasons, so that only the driver is identified.
This was a problem in 2008 when a car with steering wheel on the right systematically got caught speeding. The driver knew full well what was going on an placed a muppet in the passeger's seat. The picture is fantastic:
This is funny, but in repeated cases the authorities would require the car owner to keep a driving log for that car. So this wouldn't work for very long.
At that time, British and Irish governments didn't share licence plate ownership data with their continental European counterparts. German authorities couldn't trace the owner of the car without a physical stop. Situation has changed in recent years and I understand that now the data is exchanged.
In Washington State they go one step further: cameras can only take pictures from the rear. They're not allowed to actually take a picture of the driver.
Yes (same in Ontario, Canada generally). The owner gets the civil fine, but there are no demerit points put on anyone's license.
If one is pulled over for speeding (or anything else), then the officer can identify the driver and they get points as well.
I think points are used as an (dis)incentive for people who would be otherwise be willing to just cut a cheque. Too many points and you start getting insurance problems.
German here. Indeed only the driver of a car is punished for speeding. The burdon is on the officials to determine the driver. But they will send an official inquiry to the car owner to name the driver of the car, if the identification is not obvious by a photo. There are cases where no one gets the ticket, because the driver is not named by the car owner, sometimes for very valid reason. With a larger group of people having access to that car, this can be true. As a consequence, sometimes people get off their ticket.
There is a catch however: while you might get out of a ticket once or twice, the authorities can order you to keep a drivers log in the car. That means, a written log of every single drive has to be kept. So that there is never any ambiguity of naming drivers going forward. And having to keep logs of all your drives going forward is something you really want to avoid.
In other European countries where it's also illegal to just fine the owner rather than the actual driver, the police sends an official inquiry about who was driving the car at the time. Providing false information or refusing to provide information at all is punishable by law, you have to name someone and take responsibility for the veracity of that information. The owner is legally responsible for knowing who is driving their car at all times, with the exception of the car being stolen.
In practice this just leads to a lot of penalty points or license suspensions for the 80 year old (grand)parents, or anyone who has a license but never drives.
Sweden: it’s not possible to charge an owner for a crime, only the driver. It’s also not a crime to not name the driver.
If a speed camera photo is blurry or dark (like in a place with darkness most of the year) the case is as far as I know closed and no inquiry is made.
If I realize too late that I’m going to speed past a traffic cam then I usually just hold my hand up near the wind screen to cover my face and the risk of a ticket would be nearly zero.
There has been talk of making it an administrative fee rather than a crime (like parking tickets) which would make it possible to attribute to cars and not owners.
Seems weird to me, as someone who’s used to the UK system of photo from the back and the owner being responsible for identification of the driver, that people hadn’t already figured this one out :)
Oh I totally agree the Finnish way makes far more sense in terms of accountability and process.
Just was wondering that, if you were the sort of person who habitually broke the limit and didn’t much care for the dangers, wearing PPE might have already become part of every drive, regardless of the pandemic situation.
In Israel, it is up to the owner of the car to name the driver (or accept responsibility) if no other evidence is available.
Rental companies name the renter, which is what you describe, and it is then up to the renter to accept or name a sub-lesser; by default, the responsible party is the latest to accept, or for court to determine (but that would likely require dissenting potential drivers to file legal complaints against each other)
Occasionally, people use this to equalize penalty points in a household (say, married couples) because other than fines, there’s a point system where 3-5 nontrivial tickets in as many years will get your license suspended or revoked for a while, and other sanctions.
This practice - admitting a crime you didn’t commit - is of course illegal, and not very prevalent - but there have been a few high profile cases involving famous (and infamous) people caught doing that.
> Not in Germany it doesn’t. Only the actual driver can be found guilty of speeding, even by speed-camera.
-Same in Norway - ticket is sent to registered owner by default, if s/he contests the claim, s/he is summoned to the local police and shown the photo. If s/he claims not to know who drove the car or refuse to identify the driver, the police may investigate if it's a slow day in the office - say, call you for a formal interrogation (during which you are legally obliged to provide truthful answers or else get slapped for obstruction of justice), compare the speedcam photo to other members of your household &c.
In short, the owner of the vehicle will never be on the hook for a speeding ticket with unknown driver - but is required to assist the police in finding out who the offender is.
Two identical twins back where I grew up claimed to have gamed this system on numerous occasions - claiming they couldn't remember which brother had driven the car on the day in question.
After all, refusing to cooperate is a crime. Not remembering isn't.
In San Francisco they intimidate you and claim you’re legally obligated to tell them who was driving.
They did this to me when someone ran a red light in a car I’d sold (and electronically transferred) six months prior.
I’d suspect what they did wouldn’t hold up in court if it weren’t for the fact that the San Francisco court house was engaged in this behavior.
Apparently, this scenario is so common in California that places that accept cars as donations often have a specialist to help donors deal with extortion demands over revenue tickets.
As long as we are talking about a speeding ticket, you are correct. But since around 2017 it is a crime to conduct an illegal road race. This covers extreme cases of speeding with quite harsh punishments: impounding of the vehicle, high fines or jail time for the driver - and the owner if the owner could have reasonably suspected that the driver was about to do it.
In Alberta, Canada, speed camera tickets are treated more like parking tickets (at least last time I checked which was quite a while ago). They are issued to the owner of the car. There are no license penalty points, however, as they don't even attempt to identify the driver.
My state in Australia have heavy, heavy fines, even compared to the rest of Aus. It doesn't reduce the amount of poor driving but speeding at least is unambiguous. There is no grey area. If the speed limit is 60kmph then you will get booked for exceeding it by 5kmph, and the only reason you get that 5kmph leeway is to account for camera calibration and some grace for speedometer calibration. They would ping you at 61kmph if they could
We also have demerit points, so if you get caught speeding say three times in a row you will most likely have ran out of points on your license and automatically get a 3 to 6 month license suspension. Most of this is automated, so you may find out you were suspended by getting pulled over before the letter arrives. It's all very strict.
I think that's stupid for one reason. As an engineer I often considered 10% tolerance to be sufficient. I think enforcing speed limits to anything greater than 10% is just silly. I often drift +/- more than 10% of my intended speed. It's just human nature. I pay more attention to potential dangers and obstacles, and less on whether I am within a % of the speed limit, and I really hope other drivers do as well.
Ignoring whether it’s “human nature” to vary by that much, the remedy is simple: in a 60mph limit (the clue is in the name), target 54. +/-10% is now 48.6-59.4, instead of 54-66. It’s within the speed limit, and a smaller absolute speed differential between lowest and highest speed.
Similar arguments have been made against average speed cameras on UK motorways - “I’ll have to be entirely focused on the speedo the whole time!”. No, you just drive within the speed limit.
Interestingly, you'll fail your UK motorcycle test if you don't largely treat the speed limit as a target.
If you stick at 40mph or thereabouts going into a 50mph zone, the examiner may think you haven't seen the speed limit change. More importantly, if you don't keep up a good pace on a clear country road with good visibility where the speed limit is 60mph, they won't have confidence in your riding at higher speeds, and they know - as all bikers know - that you will almost certainly spend a good chunk of your riding career at higher speeds on country roads.
They do have to check whether you are able to confidently, safely and within the bounds of traffic-rules, operate the vehicle close to the speed limits. This need not be taken to mean that one has to always ride close to the limit.
Of course, given that on two wheels, one is not as safe as on four (and also being enclosed in a metal frame). So, naturally the good riders will find ways to ride safely and that includes riding at appropriate speeds. The ones who aren't good/safe riders are not likely to ride for long.
The reasoning I see is that objects moving at the same speed in the same direction tend not to collide.
I have seen advice to motorcyclists that they should be just a bit faster than most traffic. Slow enough to manage changes in traffic ahead, but fast enough that no one is approaching you from behind.
Platitudes like this and the evergreen "speed kills" can themselves be dangerous.
Obviously driving at the speed limit all the time is not a legal requirement and there will be times when driving slower is appropriate. However, driving far slower than the speed limit for no good reason when there is other traffic around can itself increase the risk of something bad happening, because you won't be keeping up with the flow of traffic and behaving as other drivers will expect.
My suggestion for someone having difficulty keeping their speed in a 20% window was to aim 6 mph slower at highway speeds. That doesn’t constitute “far slower”.
In the Uk, if you are incapable of handling your car on a highway with other vehicles driving 12mph slower than the limit, then you are incapable of driving on highways - some vehicles e.g. HGVs are restricted to these lower speeds.
An unfortunate extension of this is that sometimes, a speed limit will be set very low for no apparent reason, and almost everyone will exceed it significantly if it's not visibly being enforced. This puts a driver who wants to be both safe and legal in a no-win situation.
Personally, I liked the idea put forward by one of the UK driver advocacy groups a long time ago. Speed enforcement measures should prioritise places with a dangerous hazard, and there should be prominent warning signs on approach in a standard format that show (a) the speed camera sign, (b) the current speed limit and (c) the nature of the hazard, so drivers understand why the limit is there and enforcement is visible and clearly justified.
Somehow, I suspect that if drivers had more trust that speed limits were being set appropriately and expected that they would actually be enforced where they most matter, they would become largely self-policing anyway. Then the actual road police could spend more time dealing with other problems like using a phone behind the wheel or drinking and driving, which are potentially more dangerous than most speeding but much more difficult to enforce without human intervention.
Risk compensation [0] is a relevant idea here. When you give people a highway they will treat it like one. If you want them to slow down, you have to make a road that feels slower. Tighter corners, narrower lanes, parked cars, bulb-outs, etc.
In suburban development especially, there is/was an initiative to make roads safer by increasing the physical tolerances relative to the posted limits. So you have all these residential neighborhoods with big gentle corners in them that any drunk idiot in a shitbox could easily handle at 60mph. And that is exactly what happens.
If 30mph is too fast for a pedestrian encounter, then 30mph needs to feel too fast for maintaining control / avoiding obstacles.
Designing road systems to encourage an appropriate driving style is valuable. Some non-traditional arrangements have been used to very good effect here in the UK in recent years, though personally I'd say the experiments have had mixed success overall and we've had our share of well-intentioned changes for the worse as well.
That said, it's also important to use these design techniques for clear reasons. Some people don't like motor vehicles and want to deter their use for reasons other than safety. They have been known to argue for road designs that limit capacity or force traffic to go very slowly as a deterrent measure, when perhaps a road designed to support faster speeds could have been just as safe and allowed a more efficient transport system. Sometimes, they even argue for measures that would likely be counterproductive given their stated goals, possibly without understanding why that would be the result. So before you can design a road, you first need to establish what your requirements are and what you're trying to achieve, which is more of a political question than an engineering one.
In particularly walkable cities you can see the extreme end of this in the way barriers are removed from between driving and walking parts of the road, and the driving parts are made narrower. Drivers take much greater caution and are forced to pay attention. Contrast to a wide asphalt road with sidewalks on the side, drivers feel separated from foot traffic and thus safe in their speeds and lose focus, even though they likely couldn't stop in time for a hazard even if they were paying attention.
Many American highways actually increase the length and size of the road markings in order to make speed feel slower than it actually is, which was likely a comfort thing at first but clearly it hides the present danger of speed.
I have never been on a busy motorway with everyone driving at or above the speed limit. Car drivers always vary between 55 and 70(+), and heavier vehicles are frequently as slow as 50. That is not a hazard. It would be a hazard were they to drive in the wrong lane, or fail to merge, but that’s a totally separate issue to the steady-state-avoid-speed-cameras which I was replying to.
This tends to be my rule of thumb. Speed Limit +10% assuming good conditions. It keeps me from being a hazard when other drivers wish to go faster while pretty closely adhering to the whole point of speed limits. 7 mph over the limit on the freeway is still pretty safe. 7 mph over on a narrow residential street can be quite dangerous.
This rule of thumb means I really don't have to waste any mental energy keeping an eye out for police, since someone else is almost always going faster and I find it doesn't significantly impact my trip times since traffic and stop lights tend to cancel out most potential gains from driving any faster.
Speed limiters and cruise control are pretty common in modern cars. You can set your mental intended speed lower and won't drift as much. This is from experience of switching to a car with speed notification beeper (very low tech) - it took maybe 2 weeks to stop drifting over almost completely without paying extra attention. We ended up treating it as a game with gf - shortest time for a 300km drive with no beeps.
I have a modern car. 2015 Kia Optima, and it has basic cruise control. I don't know what conditions you're driving in, but I think it's fucking scary to drive with it on unless there's a completely open highway in front of me. Not controlling my own following distance feels like I'm about to hit the car in front of me at any given moment, especially on a road where the speed limit is 75mph and you have people going anything from 60-90mph.
Never heard of a speed limiter. As you can probably tell from the "freedom units," I'm from the US if that matters.
I pop the cruise control on lots, especially on motorways. If I get too close To car in front I’ll touch the break, but even in the U.K. roads are rarely that variable - especially near the speed limit.
The cruise control has a switch to change to limiter, I rarely use that.
Adaptive CC - yes, pretty much all the time. I understand it would be super annoying to use basic CC in the city. But that's where you can set the limiter instead (they often come together with CC).
Australia is the most nanny state country that I know of. The driving rules are absolutely draconian. In fact when I was growing up there, I was baffled at how aggressive the enforcement was, while at the same time the general level of driving ability was so low. Would you like to be responsible and have a designated driver to drive your inebriated friends home safely? Nope. Not allowed. Drivers on their L or P plates are not allowed to have other people in the car at night. It's ridiculous.
Indeed — Brit-turned-Aussie here — the drivers here are absolutely atrocious.
I often say that Brits can be pretty rude until they get behind the wheel, whereupon they turn in to gracious, giving angels. Australians directly mirror this: in person, they’re adorable, yet behind the wheel they’re selfish monsters.
I hate driving in this country. So much so that I don’t own a car.
I had the exact opposite experience with Aussie drivers - with the exceptions of taxi drivers, who were the absolute worst, it was always easy to merge lanes, noone driving too dangerous or fast.
I live and drive in Australia and find people polite and decent in all my commuting or country roadtrips. I swear it's improved over the years. There used to be more selfish driving, but there's always someone pausing to let you merge or flash you to continue if you both reach a narrow point.
Oh sorry, I meant in that they transform people's personalities. I am a low car use enthusiast as well, although I do own one it is mostly for motorsport.
They only target low effort enforcement like red lights and speed, and I think our license program is good now but the majority of the people got their licenses before that, with a couple of bucks and an hour or two with an instructor.
Then they have already subtracted their margin of error, which is definitely above 2km/h.
More likely they saw e.g 66km/h in a speed gun with 4km/h error, so they know you did at least 62, and can book you stating 62. But most likely you were doing 66 or even 70 then.
In NZ, which generally copy-pastes VIC's traffic laws, the tolerance is only applied to automated systems like speed cameras. A cop can ticket you in-person when you're 1km/h over.
Yep! I got a fine for 15 over in Vic in an 80 to 60km zone transition and I was absolutely delighted by the fine. Only $230! Would have been $700ish in SA if I am not mistaken. That is ~$550 USD and 9mph over for anyone curious.
I’ll assume you aren’t in the U.K. (which this article is about), because the U.K. system is almost exactly as you describe!
> Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
Uk has a combination of:
* Average speed cameras (as per the Norway example)
* Variable speed cameras (where the speed limit varies depending on the conditions of the road and congestion)
* Fixed speed cameras (traditional speed cameras dug in next to a road)
* Mobile speed cameras (as per the bbc article, with a purpose to make sure the position changes each day so locals don’t know where the cameras are).
> These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding.
Traffic stops in the U.K. are very rare, and even mobile cameras just send the documentation to your registered address with no stop. A stop would only be done in the U.K. if there was a belief that the driving was putting others at immediate risk (eg appears drunk).
As opposed to the U.S., where parked highway patrol cars conceal themselves in blinds where you can't see them until they've already clocked your speed. Most Americans believe they have a quota of speeding tickets that must be met.
There are some incredibly forward thinking laws here. Non-compete being illegal, lane splitting for motorcycles is explicitly legal, etc. Of course, tons of stupidity too.
They're focussed on the heavily used sections though, ie where they are more likely to be encountered. By that measure (kms driven), they're much more common.
In 10+ years of driving in the UK, the only time I got caught speeding was in France! Oh, and once in New Zealand. I see signs for the the UK average speed cameras all over the place, but I guess they're tuned to only trigger for vehicles that are significantly exceeding the limit?
"A friend" drove a (non-UK reg) car from Glasgow to Southampton last year, significantly exceeding the speed limit most of the way and maintaining >90mph for multiple hours, and wondered if speeding tickets would later arrive in the post. Nothing ever happened. I can only guess that speed camera tickets are only sent to UK registered vehicles? That's a pretty big loophole.
I don't drive like this in France, they will stop you and my understanding is you must pay the fine on the spot or they arrest you and tow your car.
I've got another bit of anecdata like that - know a guy who never changed the plates on his French registered van.
Had the misfortune of going somewhere with him once and he was doing 80mph in a 50mph average speed camera bit of motorway - said the police never bother to chase up foreign plates so he just sped everywhere and never got a fine.
It’s on the anti-clockwise part when the limit drops from 70 to 50 round the bend. I got caught at 60, showing how little attention I was paying to the speed limit (I was preoccupied with the tailgater)
"un-sporting"? It's not a game. It's about reducing the most common cause of preventable death. The harms to privacy or "freedom" or whatnot are more defensible here than pretty much anywhere else.
In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents, way below “driver didn’t look properly”, which was 9 times as common.
As far as deaths go, the most common contributory causes are loss of control and failure to look properly. Exceeding speed limit was a cause in just 16% of deaths.
> In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents
That may be in part due to camera-based enforcement of the speed limits.
Also, road accidents kill quite a lot of people. If it's the 10th most common cause, that could still be enough to kill more people than many other things that we regulate.
> > In the U.K. excess speed is the 10th most common cause of accidents
> That may be in part due to camera-based enforcement of the speed limits.
I can't lay my hands on it now, but there are studies measuring the effect on road casualties before and after camera installations. A lot of the time there's no difference.
Like any punishment/deterrent, people aren't caught often enough for this to work.
If you drive around for long enough in the UK, you'll notice that speeding is actually pretty common. However, it's not the case that everyone speeds everywhere, you're far more likely to catch someone speeding on the motorway or an NSL A road in the clear and dry than in a 20 outside a school. This is because most people are competent enough to regulate their speed appropriately for the environment. Sometimes it's riskier to drive at 20mph past a school than it is to do 90 on the motorway.
Of course there are people who drive dangerously around vulnerable people and in hazardous situations and these are the people who often end up contributing to the statistics. Those are the people enforcement needs to focus on.
> Also, road accidents kill quite a lot of people. If it's the 10th most common cause, that could still be enough to kill more people than many other things that we regulate.
The problem with this is that if we were serious about making the roads safer with the limited resources we have, we wouldn't spend it on catching people speeding. We'd spend it on stuff that actually makes a difference.
It could be. I lack the data at the moment but I seem to remember when deaths were higher 20 years ago (3400 a year vs 1700), exceeding the speed limit was higher in the causes.
What cameras may have done is change the culture of speeding, making it far more antisocial - like the drunk driving campaigns did.
If others don’t speed, then you generally can’t speed, especially in towns where it’s most dangerous.
My parents used to speed all over the place in the 90s, my peers don’t today. Perhaps the cameras don’t make any local difference, but are part of a larger cultural shift.
More people are killed by car drivers knocking down pedestrians than by car drivers speeding.
I wonder if speeding is correlated with those other causes of accidents. It may not always be the cause of accidents but is evidence of bad judgement and easy to detect. In an ideal world we could also catch people who fail to check their blind spot, or get distracted automatically.
Also, it does make the environment less hospitable for pedestrians and cyclists which is a good enough reason alone.
Judgement is subjective. I would argue that the safest way to drive is conservatively and with caution. And that your own emotions, time constraints, and judgement about safety are not sufficiently compelling to override that.
Of course as a society we are forced to strike a balance between safety and utility. Where you strike that balance is political and not entirely objective.
It is completely possible to drive conservatively and with caution, while exceeding an arbitrary limit. Here's one for you, a 3-lane highway adjacent to a shopping centre and school. The 60km/h speed limit is too high during shopping & school hours, but stupidly low at 3am on a clear night with no traffic around. My opinion of a safe speed is very different for those 2 circumstances - I don't see how that equates to bad judgement.
"Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful"
It isn't wonderful at all. UK has average speed cameras as well and they are horrible. Every time I drive in average speed zones I spend more time looking down because
1) I don't want to go 5mi over the speed limit because I will get fined otherwise
2) I don't want to go 5mi below the speed limit because then drivers behind me have to break one by one which eventually causes a traffic jam
3) I can't overtake a lorry going 65 because it would take me too long and I might miss my exit, which then makes anxious because I have to extend my commute time if I get stuck behind one
4) I can't safely let people merge onto the motorway because if I speed up or slow down then 1) or 2) happen
5) I can't calculate my average speed and to avoid 1) and 2) I have to keep looking down not paying much attention to what's going on around me
This only works on roads with little traffic, like in Scotland, where you can set cruise control and drive for miles. It doesn't work in Cambridge where AADT is ten times higher.
"These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding."
You are comparing average speed cameras to traffic stops, rather than stationary speed traps...
"Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes."
No because the primary reason for speed cameras is ensuring road safety, not generating revenue in which case you are encouraging installing speed cameras where they are not required. Speed cameras are not as safe you believe they are, otherwise they would be installed every 100 metres.
"Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed."
That's like saying "if you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy" using the same "don't do the crime, if you can't do the time" principle, which is flawed. There are plenty of situations where you would want to occasionally speed 10% over the speed limit, but that's not equal to speeding 100% over the speed limit for a very long time. Both will get you a fine. It's not as simple as black or white.
'Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.'
Seems odd to me that Govt's struggle to raise revenue via normal taxes when they have a large pool of stupid people they could raise extra money from? Maybe making a regualr speeding fine a life changing amount rather than the negligable sum it is now would improve people's behaviour, raise some much needed revenue and save a few lives too?
> Seems odd to me that Govt's struggle to raise revenue via normal taxes when they have a large pool of stupid people they could raise extra money from?
Extracting money from drivers was one of the causes of community tension in Fergusson.
> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
> Maybe making a regualr speeding fine a life changing amount rather than the negligable sum it is now would improve people's behaviour, raise some much needed revenue and save a few lives too
The fine is negligible if you are well off. It isn't if you aren't. If you get points (for SP-30), the increase in insurance is about £300-400. So the actual cost of the fine is closer to £400-500 which is the rent for the month.
There has already been talk of making the fine be adjusted to how much you earn.
I personally am aware of many people that were speeding at well over 100mph. When they went to the majestrate they were let off with 6 points. People get away with things that should get them a suspension all the time.
A friend of mine was traveling across france on a motorcycle (this was decades ago) and one day had to get home to england quite quickly. So he got on the tollway and went quickly. But apparently they checked entrance and exit times on the tickets and would calculate your speed, so he "lost" his ticket and paid the max cost to be safe. I guess it worked.
There are a lot of automatic speed radars (at a single point), and a bit fewer average speed radars but they work over a few km at most (and don't interact with the toll).
He told me they check the entrance time on the ticket and when you get off at the exit they know approximately how long it should take you. And they would wave you off to the side if you made it say 120 miles in an hour instead of two. This was a long time ago.
There are a fair few of those average speed camera setups near me and I love them, everyone just sits at the speed limit - far more effective than the trap cameras.
Also my GPS (via bluetooth headphones) tells me when I'm entering and leaving a zone (not that I speed).
We do not have average speed cameras in Sweden and I hope we never will. The privacy implications of taking a photograph of everyone, process "who they are" (reg plate, generally driven by family member) is horrifying.
What privacy implications? The government already knows who you are, they processed your vehicle registration and issued that license plate specifically to make your vehicle publicly identifiable.
Are you also terrified that just anyone can read your house numbers or the address on your mailbox?
The problem is automated and centralised surveillance. The government can aggregate this data and build movement patterns on all citizens. They might not do it, but they could. And once something to exert power is possible, It'll be done eventually.
Governments arguably have a public safety interest in aggregating traffic data and being able to identify potential criminal suspects by vehicle. Yes, they could abuse that in some nebulous Orwellian future, but data collection and analysis isn't evil in and of itself.
Also, this is public data. Anyone sitting behind you in traffic has your license plate number, your employer and anyone you schedule appointments with can predict your behavior to a degree. Your movements were never that private to begin with.
If you want to be afraid of someone, be afraid of businesses, and what they can know based on analyzing customer data.
Governments have their own self interest at heart, second comes everything else. My license plate is indeed public information, should someone follow me around and document evertything I'm doing. I'm fine with that as the amount of resources required to perform this far outweighs any potential gains. When It's automated by computers It's very cheap. I'm no expert in image classification technology, but i imagine a top of the line Xeon could extract license plate information and the parts of the images containing humans (for later cross reference with some other dataset) a couple thousand times a second. Meaning it'll cost close to nothing.
Yes, we should be vary of the data everyone is collecting. I remember a friend of mine saying his grandmother was so suprised she always got offers in the mail from ICA (Big grocery store company in Sweden) on the products she purchases. Completely unaware that they're tracking every purchase she makes because of her membership card.
Ask someone in China how they're feeling about being constantly monitored in every concieveable way. You'll of course think "Well that's China, we don't have that kind of mass surveillance here". And then one bill after another you're right there in the boat with them.
Then ANPR is hardly the bottleneck. If they're able to get the tracking legislated, they'll be able to get cameras. If we're going to avoid technology just for vague allusions to dictatorships, we should get rid of the autobahn too.
You could ask the victims of the FBI's 'Highway Serial Killings' initiative how they'd feel about it. But they're dead.
If you're refering to doorbells with a camera facing the outside then no, they're very uncommon.
There's very strict rules about how you're legally allowed to point a fixed installation camera in Sweden, you're not allowed to have a fixed installation that'll record anything that isn't your property. Not even the corner of the pavement. All in all, Swedes don't want cameras pointing all over, you have to put up signs if there are cameras and usually you should apply for a permit before installing cameras.
Inside your house you're free to record as you like though.
Similar restrictions in the U.K. with signs. CCTV signs are usually up for commercial companies, but residential wise it isn’t enforced, and from the local Facebook group people seem shocked at the very idea recording te street and posting pictures of troublemakers is illegal.
I was disappointed by the number of people with them when I went door knocking for the election last year.
The police actually advised me to get one for my grandmother who has been suffering from door to door scammers.
>Beyond that, if you don’t want to get a fine, don’t speed
My concern with this kind of thing is less about the speed limit and more that I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police. It’s one thing if the police have to observe something suspicious and then take the time to stop you for ID to find out who you are. It’s another if they can track and identify everyone all the time passively.
> I believe people should be able to move around in public without being identified and tracked by the police.
You can. Just not in a car, because cars have license plates so not only can police identify you, anyone who can lookup a plate can. It’s non-anonymous almost by definition.
Where I live the registry is public so if I want I can ask for the owner of a license plate from the relevant authority.
But I think one of the things we see with technology and privacy is that there’s a real difference between things that you can do, but they require manual human action and are therefor costly, and things that are done effortlessly and constantly. We’ve always had license plates, but we haven’t always had a government record of where every car has travelled. We will soon, I’m sure.
And right now it’s true you can mostly walk or bike around in public without being tracked, but that’s just until we get the facial recognition really going. Then the argument will be that you were always showing your face in public and it was always possible that someone would recognize you so this is no different. But of course it will be different.
And now it’s possible, if you have a conversation in a cafe, that someone will overhear you. But if every conversation were being recorded, transcribed, and transmitted to the authorities, that wouldn’t be the same thing at all.
We get this problem all the time. The registry of cars was “public” so anyone could call and ask for the details or a car (e.g whether it had debt or parking fines or whether the guy trying to sell it was actually the owner). Then with the arrival of the internet, should this information be available at everyone’s fingertips? Should it be possible to web search it or was the phone call a good “rate limiter” and prevented abuse? It was actually decided it was, and it’s now call/text only.
The discussion about everything being logged is why I like the GDPR. It’s the long term mass gathering of data that should be addressed.
But to what end? Ignoring the privacy aspect, the point should not be too ensure everyone goes the does limit or slower. The point should be that people are traveling at a reasonable and safe speed. Driving fast doesn't necessarily mean unsafe. You can be driving the speed limit and be going at an unsafe speed. So the speed cameras make it more likely that people will be under the speed limit. But are the roads safer?
Absolutely yes. Speed contributes in two major ways when it comes to accidents, which this is all about: reaction time and energy.
Going faster means you have less time to react and handle the situation.
If you're going 100 km/h instead of 80 km/h, and something happens 100m in front of you, you have only 3.6 seconds instead of 4.5 seconds to react and deal with it. This scales with distance.
If you're going at 100 km/h instead of 80 km/h, your car has 50% more kinetic energy. This translates fairly directly into increased breaking distance.
So as speed increases you have less time to react and in addition you require more time to slow down.
Or to put it a bit more bluntly, based on this chart[1] of typical stopping distances versus speed, you can come to a stop in 53m if you're going 80km/h.
If instead you're going 100km/h, your car will be still be doing over 60km/h after 53m...
Obviously the exact numbers will vary based on car and conditions, but the point stands about just how much things change when you're speeding.
Do the numbers speak for themselves? In Ireland, at least, speed cameras are generally placed at compliance black spots, not accident black spots. Speed cameras on extremely safe motorways here have never been shown to reduce accidents, only to reduce speeding.
> Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.
I got a 100€ fine for speeding on a 130km/h. My crime? I was driving 100km/h instead of the supposed speed limit of 80km/h.
Every day I drive down that section I slow down to 80km/h while everyone else rightfully drives at almost twice the speed at 130km/h or even faster without getting a ticket. I don't think this is safe. It's also not good for me psychologically. It means the rules are stupid and arbitrary and not worth trusting.
Take it another level. Every car should have a chip. Once you are in a speed limit - your car can't go faster. Oh wait, this wont generate revenue - so it wont work. Never mind.
> very car should have a chip. Once you are in a speed limit - your car can't go faster.
This is actually dangerous because people need the ability to use discretion.
Suppose you're transporting a part to repair a machine which is causing a fatality every five seconds as long as it's offline. Getting there 20 seconds faster saves four lives. Do you still want a chip that prevents you from exceeding the speed limit?
> Oh wait, this wont generate revenue - so it wont work. Never mind.
This is a major reason why the US doesn't have many speed cameras either. Also why most of the speed limits are set 10-15 MPH below the ordinary speed of travel. If violations are prolific and enforcement is sporadic, they can generate fine revenue whenever they want.
If enforcement is automatic then people figure that out and do what's necessary to avoid the fine, but then you're left with an expensive boondoggle that isn't generating revenue.
It also deprives the police of the excuse they currently have to pull over cars at whim when everybody is speeding at all times, and they wouldn't be happy to lose that at all.
Is that Homo Economicus driving the delivery truck?
You'd expect a machine that saves a life every 5 seconds to have some kind of investment in redundancy. Either is spread over more machines or the wonder device has spare parts that are kept stocked.
And if not, I'm sure parliament could pass a law to clear the streets for the day.
> Is that Homo Economicus driving the delivery truck?
Is it too far of a leap to expect that someone who knows they're doing something where lives are at risk and time is of the essence will rightly estimate that the optimal travel speed is in excess of the ordinary speed at which accountants commute to their office buildings?
> You'd expect a machine that saves a life every 5 seconds to have some kind of investment in redundancy. Either is spread over more machines or the wonder device has spare parts that are kept stocked.
You might think that, but in reality, humans are fallible and don't always have perfect foresight.
Maybe they had a spare on site, but the spare was defective, or was the wrong revision number and incompatible. Maybe the part is a filter, but the problem is that there are a hundred times more pollutants than normal, so they already used all their spare filters and need twenty more ASAP. Maybe the machine is the backup generator for a hospital, which was damaged by the same lightning strike that caused the power outage.
> And if not, I'm sure parliament could pass a law to clear the streets for the day.
The scenario is the machine goes offline so the company immediately calls the shop with the part who immediately leaves to deliver it. It's a five minute drive at the speed limit, but meaningfully less if you exceed it.
The police response time is six minutes, they can't help you. Your suggestion is for parliament to enact legislation in that amount of time?
All I'm saying is that the example is contrived, it streches credulity. You're making a marginalist argument where the cost of being slow is increased enormously. I could as well make up a scenario where each additional kph increase costs some absurd number of lives, and then it balances wherever you pick the numbers to balance.
> And if not, I'm sure parliament could pass a law to clear the streets for the day.
My scenario is that we run out of parts due to a foreseen supply chain issue, and parliament can then indeed pass a law to let the delivery guy drive faster, assuming the issue is not fixed.
And for your case, there is already a judicial system that will give you a break if these things happen. In the end, and this is what we really mean to be discussing, rules vs discretion ends up with discretion somewhere in the system.
> All I'm saying is that the example is contrived, it streches credulity. You're making a marginalist argument where the cost of being slow is increased enormously.
Things like that actually happen. Hospital generators fail during a power outage. The floodgate machinery for a dam fails and if they can't get it open in time the dam will burst.
Instances exist of someone without lights and sirens on their car having a legitimate need to get somewhere quickly.
> I could as well make up a scenario where each additional kph increase costs some absurd number of lives, and then it balances wherever you pick the numbers to balance.
But then human discretion is deployed in the other direction, and you don't drive the vehicle that fast, even if the vehicle itself doesn't prevent you from doing so.
> And for your case, there is already a judicial system that will give you a break if these things happen.
What we are discussing is having a chip in your car that prevents you from exceeding the speed limit. How is ex post facto judicial understanding supposed to help with that?
It's a bad example, but there are legitimate scenarios where you want the ability to (temporarily) drive above the speed limit. E.g. speeding up until you can get out of the way of an ambulance, or to avoid getting rear-ended.
Almost all cars can be set to respect a speed limit already; I do that when I drive on highways to make sure I don’t accidentally go over (which is easy to do especially when others around me do it).
Outside of the US (and perhaps a few other places, but not many), speeding tickets are not designed to be a revenue source. (They do produce revenue, of course - but are not optimized or planned for that purpose)
This idea goes back a long way. In 1923 42,000 Cincinnati residents petitioned for mandatory speed governors to limit cars to 25 miles per hour [1]. This was an era when pedestrians typically owned the streets, so the advent of high-speed traffic caused a lot of pedestrian deaths.
Best keep my old car then. Some of the measures are useful though, some like alcohol interlocks are dumb, will trigger too many false positives or are easily circumvented. Compliance by 2024 is actually a hidden subsidy to the auto industry. How would they retrofit lane assist on an older vehicle? You'd have to buy a new one.
It's a bad analogy because it's hard to imagine any kinds of thoughts/behaviors that we're absolutely sure we want to prevent. (Maybe some amount of nonviolent mischief is good for humanity, maybe the impulse for violent retribution is necessary when justice systems are flawed, maybe these kinds of thoughts are generally not acted on and actually make people more self-reflective, etc.) But it's at least a bit harder to come up with reasons that speed limits should be exceedable on public roads and a bit easier to think up solutions. Medical emergencies are one possible case, but having an override that records that the override happened and that you'll have to give a good reason for doing is a possible solution. Maybe there's sudden traffic situations where you have to speed up to avoid a crash, and the system could be made to allow limited bursts of speed.
GPS isn't good enough for that yet. I have received warnings from my GPS because it thought I was driving at 70 mph in a 20 mph limit. In fact, I was driving at 70 mph on a motorway flyover above a residential street that had a 20 mph limit.
If it had been able to cut the engine (or, worse, apply the brakes) then that could have produced a dangerous situation.
There are situations in which that might be dangerous. On the other hand cars could be fixed (via the chip) with external and internal warning signals to show the world and driver that a speed limit has been exceeded. This might constitute a psychological barrier to breaking the limit when everyone around you knows you're in the wrong.
It’s common for trucks here to be governed to 70mph with a sign on the back saying so. Pretty sure it’s an insurance thing.
Recently I’ve seen the odd ones mentioning 40mph in town too.
Don't worry - in Brexit Britain the tailbacks will be so long you'll struggle to find a road you can break the speed limit on. And those you can all have bends on them.
I agree speed camera are necessary but "time of travel" speed cameras are absolutely violating the intent of the law, which is to have people drive safely.
Part of driving safely is that you may need to speed up to avoid a situation, or change lanes safely or what have you - a time of travel camera (in the way they get implemented which is identical to single-point speed cameras AFAIK) is essentially just a random ticket generating machine. If we're going to use these things, let's just require them to publish the license plate and time online, so our phone's can download the number and tell us if we're currently going to get ticketed going past them.
Because tickets aren't just monetary - at least in Australia, license demerit points mean you eventually lose your license, thus your ability to drive and very likely your job as a result.
For thought experiment, assume a five-mile stretch of road with 60mph limit, and "time of travel" ticket kicking in at 65mph. It takes 5 minutes to drive legally, and if you take less than 4:37 then you get the ticket.
Assume you drive at 60mph and then you suddenly have to "speed up" to 80mph to avoid a situation. How long can you drive at 80mph before you're ticketed? 69 seconds.
If you're driving for 69 seconds at 20mph above limit then you're not "avoiding a situation". You are speeding.
Time of travel are the only ones respecting the intent of a law?
Systems that measure your instantaneous speed will ding you for speeding up to avoid (or reduce the probability of) a collision. Time of travel as defined in GP only dings you if your average speed over many km exceeds the speed limit, a few temporary bursts of speed won't change your average speed significantly.
What a load of rubbish. Driving fast to overtake will not make a significant difference, unless you are one of those assholewz weaving between cars constantly overtaking.
It is ridiculous how blaze most roads users take speeding.
There are exactly 0 situations that require you to break the speed limit to become “safe.” The UK Highway Code and driving lessons are very explicit in how you respond to emergencies and “speed up” is not on the list.
There can be but only after you have already been inattentive or negligent leading up to the situation.
My teen is less than a year into his license. The other night he was driving us in an unfamiliar area and missed a sign indicating that the 3 lanes were merging into 2. He found himself at the merge point completely blocking a car trying to merge. Yes, the merging vehicle is obligated to yield but speeding up for a few seconds with open road in front of him was the safer move than braking hard or maintaining speed and hoping the merging vehicle yielded appropriately before it ran out of pavement.
So either he slows down to aid the overtake or it’s not possible in time and the overtaking vehicle slows down to merge behind.
Appreciate these things are tough when you’re still new, nervous in an unfamiliar area, etc. but that’s the time you go back to basics on your driving to maximise safety.
There are very rare situations when speeding saves you. One example is someone going into your lane and driving into you for a head on collision. Assuming there is space to swerve you should also accelerate to escape faster.
That being said it's so extremely rare there is no point debating those cases. If speeding was physically not possible it would be a better and safer world.
Absolutely not. In such a situation, you don’t have time to look to your side to check it’s empty. The safest thing is to slam on your brakes and hope they do the same.
If you’re suggesting someone is intent on killing you by speeding vehicle, then yes this pretty much never happens between cars.
It happens rarely but regularly. They fall asleep or try to pass and don't see you. This kind of passing is very common and major fatal accident cause in my country. If there is place to the right (assuming driving on right country) (sometimes designated safety area or a field of grass or whatever) then you have to escape and you have to accelerate to escape faster. Being only makes sense if there is enough time or it looks like they might be breaking as well. If it's a truck for example going your way hitting the brakes is just suicide.
Anyway my point is that it does happen. I agree it's rare. I would be careful when it comes to trusting UK guidelines blindly. Last time I checked they recommended push and pull steering which is to put it mildly a very bad way to control a car.
I didn't know this was a thing in the US until a few months ago - apparently the local police notify insurance companies (somehow) of speeding violations and thus give the insurance reason to increase your premiums.
If the goal is to charge people who take actions that result in higher probability of losses, then it makes sense. Otherwise, drivers that have less probability to cause losses are subsidizing those that do.
Also, in the US as far as I know, you can “fight” the ticket in court and pay the local government more to reduce the level of speeding ticket and hence points you get, so that the insurance company doesn’t see any speeding (or sees less severe speeding).
> If the goal is to charge people who take actions that result in higher probability of losses, then it makes sense. Otherwise, drivers that have less probability to cause losses are subsidizing those that do.
How can it not be a competitive disadvantage? Auto insurance profit margins are very low, and I’m sure the actuaries have access to plenty of data about losses correlated with speeding.
If a speeding ticket did not result in higher losses (probabilistically, not in specific individual cases of course), then a person with a speeding ticket should be able to find cheaper insurance.
The other option is there’s highly qualified people who are decent enough at math to operate insurance companies, but not decent enough to realize they are mispricing an obvious variable.
They aren't notifying insurance companies. The violation becomes a part of your driving record and the insurance companies pull this information at regular intervals that can vary by company.
That's the same thing, just in a different part of the process. Why does the insurance company get access to your driving record, which ideally is confidential between you and the state? Corporate lobbying making laws that give select companies access to everyone's driving records?
Driving slightly under the speed limit (and perhaps bumping existing speed limits slightly upward before increasing the efficiency of enforcement) should address most of those concerns.
My main objection is that enforcement, at least in the UK is absolutely useless. The likelihood of actually coming across a speed trap is tiny, the likelihood of coming across a speed trap that isn't one of the ones that are regularly used is close to 0. So it's not like people who speed get fined. It's people who speed and get unlucky get fined (and points). I just think it's bad policy to have relatively huge penalties and relatively rubbish enforcement. It's capricious and ineffective. People still speed because being caught is highly unlikely, people who get caught face a penalty that is disproportionate for something so common. The increase of tools like this don't actually address that. Tools like this don't actually address the policy failure in speed enforcement.
Ironically you can pretty much only get caught by the irregular ones if you’re on a quiet road too - otherwise someone will flash you as you approach to let you know. At least in some places anyway.
I sometimes flash people on roads where there are no speed traps. This way I achieve two things: defeating the usefulness of flashing people as a warning and also possibly making people drive slower than they would.
They are making people slow down to the legal limit, thus resulting in a net increase of lawfullness on the road.
Also, around here, it's incredibly common to flash your lights to remind oncoming traffic to turn off their high-beams. It's a form of communication, and not all communication is distraction.
I disagree, it doesn't result at all in a "net increase" of lawfulness, it's just an extra person breaking the law and driving badly.
UK highway code is pretty clear on when it is acceptable or not to flash your headlights. Using them to alert others to your presence (ie, "I'm here please turn off your high beams") is fine. Doing it like the parent poster suggested could result in a £1000 fine if caught.
Check the laws in your local area first. Intentionally dazzling other drivers may be illegal and can carry a much higher fine (sometimes 10x more) than speeding, depending on country.
In the UK you should only flash your high beams to alert other drivers to your presence.
Using them as you describe could lead to a £1000 fine. I understand that people using them to warn drivers is also illegal, but two wrongs won't make this right. Why put yourself at risk for no benefit?
Honestly you should reconsider. There's enough bad driving on the roads without you adding to it.
The main issue is using fines as punishment, since people can affordably keep speeding if there aren't enough speed traps. The only way to solve most road problems is to forbid speeders from ever driving.
You already need a driving exam to drive, it doesn't seem crazy to now allow criminals who don't care about speed limits or safety from taking it.
> Personally, I'd rather they clamped down harder on tailgating, poor lane discipline and uninsured drivers than on motorway speed limits.
There's some interesting facts (?) that I've learned on the topic of traffic safety over time: certainly the speed one has is directly proportional to how bad an accident will be should a crash (née "accident") occur because of the kinetic energy involved.†
However, the speed differential between different vehicles also has a correlation to the accident rate because some folks are going 'too fast' but others are going 'too slow'. I've heard this used as an argument for variable/dynamic speed limits which are changed on factors such as road conditions and visibility.
† Numberphile has an interesting video on the topic: if a blue car is doing 70 (units/hour) and manages to just stop before an obstacle, what would happen to an identical model/mass red car going 100? Even though the red car was going only 30% faster, at the point that the blue car managed to (just) stop, the red car would be going 70.
The energy scrubbed from a starting speed of 70 is 70^2, so 4900; but going at 100 you have 10'000 energy (100^2): so if both cars managed to scrub ~5000 worth of energy, the blue car stopped, but the red car still at 5000 worth of energy left—i.e., 70 units/hour of speed.‡
‡ If you had the same blue/red cars going 55 and 100, while the red car would been going 'only' twice as fast, it would have had three times the kinetic energy because of 55^2 versus 100^2.
Speeding is one of the most obvious examples of government overreach.
1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)?
2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.
The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.
Speed limits are important for non-cars. As a cyclist, I don't want people overtaking me 100km/h with a 1m gap. As a pedestrian trying to cross a small city or town street without dedicated crossing, I don't want drivers to suddenly appear with 100km/h from a small curve. I'd argue that 50km/h in a city is still too much. 30km/h should be the limit.
Cars drive through cities at that speed regularly. They use highways. That’s what the people are saying. With better strategies for putting cars and non-cars at decent distances, we can allow for cars to go faster with the same or lower risk. The issue right now is that people in cars want higher speeds and pedestrians/cyclists want to go all over the road like cars don’t exist. These two things don’t work and thus we have to go with whatever is the slowest of the equation here (people jumping into the street). The annoying part is when there are low speed limits but almost no pedestrian or cycling traffic on such roads. Highways are frequently an example of that in the US. (Literally no pedestrians or cyclists anywhere near but speed limits are frequently 55mph in some places but 80+ in others - no reasoning for the difference)
Have you ever consider that 1m gap is a product of speed limits? If we didn't have such limits, dedicated cycle lanes set apart from roads would become the norm imo.
Its not uncommon for cheap inadequate safety measures to supplant real ones.
> Have you ever consider that 1m gap is a product of speed limits?
It's hardly better on rural streets with 100km/h limit and lots of space to overtake. It's not a speed limit issue, it's an issue with car drivers not giving a damn about cyclists and pedestrians because they have no concept of how dangerous this is. Speed limits are essential in a city, and bumps are needed in addition to them.
I think this is a reasonable stance. Personally, I don't have a problem with the in-city, shared roads having very low limits.
I have a huge problem with enormous super-highways having 60mph limits or lower.
Some of the roads out where I live were engineered with going 90+ in mind. In fact, there's a tale of an engineer going such speeds and getting out of a ticket by explaining that to the judge out here.
What was the speed limit? When you're over 15 miles from the city, it's 60, but pass a turn in the road and it's 70.
> 1) The speed limit obviously an arbitrary choice - the chance of death is decent at 50k/h (standard "town" speed limit in Slovenia) (so why not 40hm/k or 30km/h), and e.g. Germany has no speed limit on the highways (in some places) so there's really no good reason to set a limit of 130km/h (why not 110km/h or 150km/h)?
As are most limits.
I get that driving on a motorway at say 85 mph is probably not that much dangerous than the speed limit (70 mph) but 100? 120? 140?
I know about Germany, but would you say that Britain's or Slovenia's road are designed and kept to the same standard?
> 2) The easiest objection to (1) is "society has jointly decided about acceptable risk limits" but that clearly isn't true. Speed limits are simply a bad idea. A much better idea is speed constraints - roundabouts, speed bumps, chicanes [0] - i.e. actually forcing people to drive slower or else they ruin their cars.
how do you constrain speed on a motorway?
> The fact that governments default to traffic cameras etc. is proof (revealed preference) that they don't actually care about safety and people driving slowly, but what they want most is making their citizens live in fear, punishing them and extracting money from them. This is particularly obvious when there's a hidden police / traffic control on some section of the road where it's obviously safe to drive fast, but it's just technically within city limits so it has a low speed limit.
In this country (UK) there is this myth that the cameras are money making devices, when during the 2008 crisis they were turned off to save money for some constabularies, this is the same type of argument.
Putting limits on toxic compound X in food would also be an overreach according to your views. At some point we have curves of accident rate and estimated speeds of accident and a decision is made. For food, we have an estimated exposure (plus other factors such as lab tests on animals etc) plotted against chances to develop a disease later...
Roundabouts are not always a good solution, in US I kept seeing people taking them the wrong way going directly left..
Also what is your proof that cameras don't slow down traffic? Just talking about me it make me more conscious of my speed in the city to avoid getting fined. So I guess I'm the kind of people it is directed at.
Gosh isn't that the truth. I remember reading on reddit years ago about a "study" where college students drove on freeways in a wall, one in each lane, going exactly the speed limit no faster and no slower. It backed up traffic for miles.
Where I am in Southern California the freeway speed limit in most places is 65 MPH. EVERYONE drives over 65 MPH on the freeways. I think you are more likely to get pulled over on the freeway if you are in the left lane actually going 65 than if you are going 75-80 in one of the middle lanes (the speed everyone else is going so it looks normal).
This just creates a situation where basically everyone is "breaking the law" and gives cops a reason to arbitrarily pull anyone over that they want.
I fully agree with you that speed limits are not about safety they are about instilling fear in citizens that at any moment you could be pulled over and harassed (even worse for colored people) and about being a source of revenue to find this tyranny
Not really. If limits are overreach why does every country have them? Ask some people with kids if they want yobs to be able to race at 120 mph in their neighborhoods. Speed bumps are ok on side streets but not so much other roads.
Tailgating is my biggest hate while driving. The tailgating driver is way over confident that he can stop in time. Its me who will pay the price when he can't. (No I don't drive slowly and do drive in the correct lane when there is a choice.) I hope AVs will fix this.
We don’t need AVs for that. Adaptive Cruise Control with self-breaking cars can do this now; it’s very much how I prefer to drive on a motorway, knowing the car will deal with it if I lose concentration or react late for whatever reason.
Obviously these are optional extras on most cars, but the self braking and auto-distance-keeping could be made a legal requirement well before we see self-driving cars. I’d be all for that.
My car will comfortably sit at 110mph all day long, if I'm alone on a motorway in the early hours who am i hurting or endangering? It certainly isn't about safety because that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
Fact is that people drive that speed regularly on German autobahns without any widespread carnage. Driving aggressively when below the speed limit, or being distracted, is far more dangerous than just driving quickly on a clear road. The emphasis on speed is mainly because it’s easy to measure and enforce.
There’s standard etiquette there to slow down when there are vehicles in the distance ahead or curves or imperfect visibility. You don’t have to drive like a mindless drone holding a one-size-fits-all-situations speed limit. You and other drivers are generally safer going 160 km/h on a mostly empty highway than 50 km/h through an urban where there’s a much higher risk of encountering other people/vehicles/obstructions.
In Germany not all drivers want to go fast even on unlimited sections. And people are much more respectful (both fast drivers and slow drivers) of who use which lanes and to not push you if you are in the right lane. Statistically you would be safer anyway at 130km/h on that same highway than at 160km/h. Lets compare apples to apples.
My point is that driving at 160 km/h on a fairly empty highway in a manner that is respectful of others is not particularly dangerous. In fact it’s pretty relaxed and routine in Germany for the middle lane of 3 lane derestricted autobahn. The right lane goes 130 km/h, middle lane goes 160 km/h, left lane stays mostly empty except for the occasional person passing. People keep their distance, slow down when there’s traffic in the distance ahead, and strictly adhere to keeping right except to pass. On most modern cars, stopping distance and fuel economy are also pretty reasonable at 160 km/h. I will admit people flying by at over 200 km/h in the left lane can be scary, and stopping distance and fuel economy become terrible for most cars at 200 km/h, though it generally works safely there because of the strict lane etiquette, coupled with people maintaining distance and slowing down in advance when traffic is ahead.
A bigger danger than speeding on clear highways is things like tailgating, weaving between lanes, aggressive passing, and distracted driving. This often happens below speed limits, and is not the focus of automated speed enforcement systems.
In Ontario, Canada, we have wide, well maintained, and well engineered highways that have unreasonably low speed limits of 90 or 100 km/h. While there are times when it’s necessary to drive more slowly (bad weather, traffic ahead), strictly enforcing such limits on wide clear highways in good weather would be silly. People here generally drive 120-130 km/h because cars are designed to operate safely and efficiently at these speeds. Strictly enforcing unreasonably low speed limits would just breed contempt from drivers, so currently the police are lenient with the speeds people actually drive. Strict enforcement of speed limits could be more reasonable if they set realistic speed limits, perhaps variable ones depending on the weather and traffic conditions.
At 130kph, you will spend more of your life driving than at 160kph. If you drive 16k km/yr at speed on motorways, the difference is about 23 hours/yr or 2 months (3 waking months) over your driving lifetime. That’s a different form of life being taken away as well.
> Anybody can have an accident at any speed that could lead to a fatality
Sure, but do you really think the risk of having an accident, and if so, the risk of it resulting in a fatality, has no relationship to the speed involved?
We accept that virtually every activity carries some risk, but we also choose (as a society, whether you as an individual agree or not) to set some rules to help limit the level of that risk.
Plus the pollution from the car, your embalming or cremation etc. And You are clearly endangering other people coming behind your flat body later and putting lifes of emergency service and cleaning crews at risk, just for your the enjoyment of breaking a rule you feel isn't fair.
Until you hit a pothole, a bird or other animal, aquaplane or any other thing that happens to thousands of people just like you every day. I hope you are an organ donor at least.
>that same car will stop from 100mph in less distance than the highway code requires for 70.
What car is it and with what tires? I'll be happy to look up the facts.
That's the reason there was the national mandate to drive no faster than 55mph on any road in the entire United States.
You're welcome to drive no faster than that speed on any road you like. On several of them, please, please don't drive on any road that has a higher speed limit than 60 to keep the rest of us safe, though. And have your hazards on, so we can reasonably get around you.
We had THE ONE software engineer that is better than everybody that ever does a single mistake. But we also have THE ONE driver that is better than every other driver. It has been studied drivers are overconfident in their abilities...
In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit.
If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photograph it again many kilometers later. If you get there too soon, then at some point, you must have been speeding.
These systems are safer for police and drivers as there are no traffic stops for speeding. Yes, the bill goes to the car owner, but if you're loaning your car out to someone who speeds, at least some of the culpability falls on you.
Can speed cameras be used as a revenue source? Yes. It is reasonable to place requirements on the determination of speed-limits and camera-locations to prevent abuse. Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.