Not sure about the US but in Europe (at least the EU) 150km/h max would be fine, at least it would make life harder for some sociopaths that treat public roads as a racing track.
It would take a lot more effort and political will to roll this out to millions of vehicles already on the road than to enforce it on a budding new vehicle category, though. That's pretty much how new safety codes always work.
Given that outright street racing is common amongst blue-collar or inner-city demographics, this is an unrealistic expectation that will just push more people away from legal venues. It's a policy that says "you can't enjoy your hobby" in disguise that shows disregard for others' preferences, plus it's practically difficult.
https://komonews.com/news/local/teen-to-be-sentenced-for-hig...
Would you be willing to say the same for firearms and their availability? It meets much of your criteria, sans perhaps the portability part and location of many enthusiasts.
I believe in high availability of firearms because I'm principally against prior restraint. The state doesn't get to take machineguns away from people who haven't demonstrated abuse of them to the standard of reasonable doubt. The state doesn't get to take hellcats away from people who haven't demonstrated abuse of them to the standard of reasonable doubt. That's my moral position, which I assume you don't share, so I'm trying to point out a more practical reason why this is a bad policy in terms of outcome.
I doubt most people speeding in the streets do track or street racing as a hobby, so I think track availability is pretty much irrelevant.
I think I should have the freedom not to get splattered by dumbasses going 100 in a 50MPH zone. Why don't I get that freedom?
Says who?
This isn't something on which we can compromise or establish bipartisanship, generally, so the conflict will only continue to escalate. There's just no frame in which I can frame a society which mandates seatbelts as good or just. People like you like to use it to deride my values, purposely picking a trivial example to trivialize what I believe. But that's neither constructive nor respectful nor a rebuttal of my views. Those who wish the state to impose safetyism on them should self-segregate into maybe a few states and spare the rest of us having to group together to counteract their votes.
Ideally, the virtue of a federalist system should be that it offers choice in under what regime one elects to live. Strip every vestige of this from the federal government and ensure safetyists can promulgate their desires only at very local levels, so they can go live as they choose, where they choose, without polluting the rest of America.
Nobody races steeet legal cars. Except maybe a few drag racers, and half those cars probably have illegal tires or emissions removals, but they drove on the street anyway.
Source: Many years in the car hobby.
Most people don't but that's an overly broad generalization.
I raced Spec Miata in its early days (2000-2010) and it was possible (and I did) to keep a moderately competitive Spec Miata still street legal. I didn't have space for a trailer so had to drive it to the track.
Race cars are usually heavily modified and aren't street legal, and the drivers don't want them dinged up on the way to the track, and if they fail while racing they need a way to get it back home.
If you're racing a street-legal car on a track... it's unlikely to be very good at racing, compared to all the other cars there that are stripped to bare minimum.
Perhaps you're thinking of a demographic who can't even afford a second car but like the idea of racing anyway, so they break all laws and race the one car do they have, on public streets without permission, which is strongly disregarding others' preferences for remaining alive, uncrippled, and their vehicles and street furniture remaining unscathed.
I kind of hoped more EU would become like that, not the other way round.
No idea if it's just a coincidence, but people seem to be driving way slower on average compared to last year.
(I was never particularly a speed demon in the first place though)
The funny thing is I might actually be safer without it, as it's the old static-speed cruise control not adaptive. While I'm less patient to idle along at 75, I am also more attentive. Who knows.
By comparison, Texas we have long open stretches and up to eight lanes each way, so obviously it's less of an issue.
I'd actually assume it's due to proximity to DC, which would tend to massively increase the population of "but the data say"-type technocrats.
These days, it’s not really about the Confederacy, just culturally.
There is another, semi-derisive, use in which it means any non-southerner. But that is less common and context-dependent.
"To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_road_...
For surface roads, I'll take our bespoke road layout over a grid any day. Although I do share the sentiment that driving in the Northeast Megalopolis is much more suffocating than the rest of the country. Coming back from a road trip and hitting New York State is like vacation is over, time to get home on the interstate.
I don't object to bespoke layouts out in the country so much as that the "through roads" in the northeast are extremely un-fun to drive on if you have distance to cover. Probably bias from how I grew up, but when I have hundreds of miles to go, I like hopping on a nice, wide FM and opening the throttle.
Also what the heck is with Newsom vetoing the passive ISA bill?
Makes sense, everything else that CA does essentially causes things to cost more. This would be another thing. Not everyone has your salary. That said, I agree with you, cars going that fast are driven by idiot teenagers (or people that want to be a teen again) and are endangering people.
Which is exactly what California has been doing for decades.
But, to that point, I mostly agree. I’d rather we hired some quality road engineers and urban planners who are willing to build roads and towns that aren’t car-dependent hellscapes.
I doubt that existing areas are going to see that happen. Plus, I'd rather live in a totally car-dependent area because 1. it makes it harder for people I don't want to live near to move in. Lower crime, fewer cars on blocks in front yards, etc. and 2. I like having lots of space. I like having room for a shop/lab combo. I like having space for a full-size piano. I am not willing to surrender all that for the sake of "walkability". Also 3. it's 105F in the summer here. Honestly, I'm not much interested in walkable cities in this part of the country.
People who want to go faster can trailer their race cars to a track.
(I'm not really trying to be on the opposite side of this argument though. If speed limits reflected the speeds most traffic goes, police themselves followed the speed limits, and disrupting traffic by dawdling in the middle lane stoned or with AI missile mode engaged were a law enforcement priority - then maybe I'd believe. But as it stands speed limits mostly serve as an excuse for cops to sit around playing candy crush until they selectively hassle a motorist)
https://www.theautopian.com/if-you-ever-see-this-speed-sign-...
Just check out how slow it takes to do hurricane evacuations, and we know about those days ahead of time.
Casual speeders would benefit from better street engineering. Excessive speeders don't care. They just don't understand the concept of consequences.
A speed governor would have likely saved four lives, and that 18-year old man from a 17 year prison sentence, but sure, let's all wring our hands about why this is a worse alternative to taking away someone's license.
Everyone speeds a little when they think it's safe, but some people speed excessively.
This is about making a remedy available to judges, as an alternative to other, less effective, or more draconic (or both less effective and more draconic), forms of punishment.
And judges deal with outlier cases every single day. They job is to look at and weigh all the special cases and considerations, provided by two sides in a dispute, and prescribe one of the many remedies available to them by law.
There's nothing fundamentally immoral, tyrannical, or unfair about requiring an repeat offender who has demonstrated their inability to follow the rules of the road to have a conditional license if they want to keep driving, and there's nothing immoral or unethical about using mechanical mechanisms to enforce those conditions.
Because the alternative is a full revocation (which is catastrophic to the ability to make a living in this country), or prison (which is catastrophic for a whole lot of other reasons). There's a reason that prescribing ignition interlocks for DUIs results in a dramatically lower recividism rate than license suspensions, and a dramatically lower overall social harm than prison.
Locks keep honest people honest, and they put up enough of a hurdle for most less-than-always-honest people to not consistently act like anti-social dipshits. You can circumvent them with effort, but we still use them. They are part of a defense in depth.
Then there's 'reckless endangerment' tier which is +15 over the limit.
The example of that guy going 100 in a 40 is beyond even that. It's SO far outside of the range of permissible I don't even know that there's a good legal construct for it.
That's the vehicular version of taking an otherwise legal handgun and for relative examples. Not just happening to fire it somewhere you maybe shouldn't have but in a way that was safe. Nor the really stupid but often OK if there aren't people around act of a celebratory shot 'up'. No, that example has gone even further beyond and is like blind-firing at the side of a brick building, headless of how thin those are, of any windows, etc.
My argument is that tracking, inhibitors, etc should be too far for the other cases, and not enough for a case like the individual in question. Someone clearly made a product and wants to make money by offering it as a form of limiting other people's freedoms.
I know part of this is related to sociopathic behavior, but the bigger part of it is probably that we really need better public transit and should design walkable cities instead of cities based around cars.
People still have to get to work, to the doctor, pick up their kids from practice, etc.
Without better mechanisms to actually meaningfully enforce insurance requirements, changes to those requirements are unlikely to be effective.
The elephant in the room in the US is that although driving is a (very dangerous and extremely socially-costly) privilege, any attempts to hold drivers accountable and take away that privilege from repeat offenders is treated as a rights violation, so instead we just accept many deaths of innocent people from repeat DUI and speeders.
Maybe in this case it could work like child support: you pay the state, the state pays the insurance on your behalf, and if you don't pay the state then they're the ones coming after you.
At some point you might have to decide between letting the state garnish your wages, or giving up your car.
Also, since we live in a card dependent world, you can argue that taking away someones car is destroying their ability to make a living (as much as I think this excuse is horseshit when dealing with dangerous driving)
same, with this law :)
It's why a lot of states will occasionally do license fine forgiveness.
Oh it does. Nobody will lend you a car that be lost to seizure. Denmark has car confiscation for speeding (not even repeated, just for single time 100% over the speed limit), and they will even take rental cars. It has definitely changed how easy it is to loan a car from friends, family, and businesses. Naturally consequences for driving without a license should also be increased.
I don't buy the car dependent argument. People are put in prison for minor victimless crimes. Something much much more life destroying than loosing your car and right to drive. If you need your car to live don't break the law repeatedly.
They'll buy a car or use a friend/family members.
This is an issue in almost rural areas. Something like 75% of people who get their licenses taken continue to drive. They just rack up fines.
I bet 90% of initial implementations will be resettable back to unlimited speed with a simple factory reset or similar.
The article points out that 75% of people with suspended licenses continue to drive.
No.
Waymo put the myth to bed [1]. Even if you might piss off a speeder, driving the limit in speeding flow remains safer as the handling advantage (frequency) and exponentially-lower energy in the event of a collision (magnitude) dwarf other effects.
[1] https://theavindustry.org/resources/blog/research-discoverie...
If this is actually being implemented as widely as the article suggests, I guess we'll all find out the answers to these questions pretty soon, the hard way!
I.e. you just remove it.
Also, glitch does not look like a big problem, since for now the system will only verbally warn, just once.
Seems like a much easier solution, no?
Like, you floor the accelerator and as soon as you reach 100mph you get a text message with a fine and a link to pay.
The faq also claims there are no civil liberties implications for this since people use gps for maps anyway. There is no government infrastructure to regularly inspect my gps mapping software's correct operation, unlike the speed limiter. It's unclear what kind of data exchange happens during inspection and what the implications are for other, non-speeding drivers of the car.
Don't get me wrong, I despise speeders. I regularly compete in sanctioned motorsport and I find that the more I do, the less sympathy I have for driving badly in public roadways. I wouldn't bat an eye at a system that mechanically governs a vehicle, without the possibility of data exchange, to the maximum speed limit in the state (or a value decided by a judge). This gps system seems too easy to abuse.
I'd love to hear more about the claimed statistic of 75% of suspended drivers continuing to drive. I'm surprised that addressing this has jumped to requiring modification of vehicles and GPS surveillance. What other ways of improving compliance with suspension have been tried? Why do drivers ignore the suspension?
"You're effectively forced to pay, so we'll make it as high as the system can bear" model. Kind of like the prison calls, etc.
You probably want a car in most places, just like almost everywhere in the US.
endianswap•7h ago
Very cool and certainly effective design for people who already go 30+ mph over the speed limit.