Is Every Speed Limit Too Low?
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph. Risks vary significantly by age. For example, the average risk of severe injury or death for a 70‐year‐old pedestrian struck by a car travelling at 25 mph is similar to the risk for a 30‐year‐old pedestrian struck at 35 mph. https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...
Please think of everyone on the roads, not just drivers, when making arguments like these.
However, a modern mid-sized car with an efficient engine gets 40 MPG or more at 75 MPH, while a gas guzzler won't get such mileage at any speed.
To try to counteract this, those signs that tell you your speed were put up that blink when you are going over the limit. They were promptly ignored.
So really I'm just trying to reiterate that what the article says is absolutely true - people will drive what they feel comfortable going, not what the posted speed limit says. In practice, the risks are there, but nowadays everyone knows to avoid main street for pedestrian crossing because its approaching highway speeds now. But on very congested roads like our main street (this being a 250 year old town, where there is no traffic shaping planned, so all through traffic goes down the road that also has the most foot traffic) you aren't going to have an easy answer, because slowing down traffic can be just as dangerous when its bumper to bumper for the ~5 mile long road through town and drivers will go mad being forced back to 25mph combined with the immense traffic bottleneck it would reintroduce (the main reason they fast tracked paving the road in the first place - traffic would back up onto the nearby highway offramp because of how bad main street traffic is).
I think the reality is that busy streets are just never safe for pedestrians (or bikes, etc). That is why you invest in crosswalks meant to funnel people across them all at once, in centralized places, where traffic is already forced to stop. And if you really care, you get the cars out of downtown entirely.
I have cycled routinely on roads with speed limits greater than this. The first that comes to mind is Madison Ave in Sacramento (often 50mph+). For that matter I used to have a commute that took me on a brief stretch of I-5 in San Diego - that was hair-raising, to say the least. It's legal there due to lack of other options.
Except in most places, neither is happening. People are driving dramatically over the speed limit because that is the natural speed of the road, and no attempts to change the actual speeds of traffic are happening because they cost money.
So people get to die for the multitude of reasons the article outlines because of political deadlock.
It always amazes me how cars commercials show awesome dashboards with 250 mph speedos, perfectly knowing there is no single road that you can lawfully go that fast.
Heck, it probably won't cost much more than a thumb drive to stick into your car computer port to update speed limits built in.
"Authorities consider this road safe for average drivers at x mph, therefore it must be safe for me at x * 1.y".
The y in the "1.y" pseudomath btw is proof enough to me that claims about enforcement not working are wrong: when you cross state borders it is easy to witness considerable changes in "typical y", the amount of relative speeding customary in the local population of drivers. Road design certainly has an influence on actual speed, but so do limits and enforcement.
Studies [1] have shown that not to be the case.
Given the stated stated observation that speed limit signs have very little correlation with driver behavior, the only way to significantly impact road speeds is through road design.
I vaguely recall that the US interstate system was generally designed for 150-200 km/hr.
> Luckily, there is some logic to the speed people choose other than the need for speed. The speed drivers choose is not based on laws or street signs, but the weather, number of intersections, presence of pedestrians and curves, and all the other information that factors into the principle, as Lt. Megge puts it, that “no one I know who gets into their car wants to crash.”
Rather than speed limits, we need to look at other avenues to reduce pedestrian traffic deaths. Just shooting from the hip, I think that we could do more to communicate to drivers the presence of pedestrians, and to make sure that rural highways and boulevards have shoulders or sidewalks for pedestrians.
A more complete analysis of pedestrian deaths: http://www.popcenter.org/problems/pedestrian_injuries/
Here are some useful factoids:
- Finally, the more one drinks, the higher the risk of being involved in a pedestrian-vehicle crash resulting in a fatality. One study found that out of 176 pedestrian fatalities, 86 of those involved pedestrians who had been drinking, nearly all of whom had BACs of 0.10 percent or more. - In addition, the same study noted that 71 percent of all fatal pedestrian-vehicle crashes in the United States in 2000 occurred in urban areas. - Finally, the majority of pedestrian injuries and fatalities happen to males between the ages of 25 and 44.
This gives us a pretty targeted demographic! Start a "dangers of the road" campaign targeted at pedestrians who are men, aged 25-44, drink at night and who live in rural areas.
> “I don’t want to lie to people,” Lt. Megge tells us. It may make parents feel better if the speed limit on their street is 25 mph instead of 35 mph, but that sign won’t make people drive any slower. Megge prefers speed limits that both allow people to drive at a safe speed legally, and that realistically reflect traffic speeds. People shouldn’t have a false sense of safety around roads, he says.
> If people and politicians do want to reduce road speeds to improve safety, or make cities more pedestrian friendly, Megge says “there are a lot of other things you can do from an engineering standpoint.” Cities can reduce the number of lanes, change the parking situation, create wider bike paths, and so on. It’s more expensive, but unlike changing the number on a sign, it’s effective.
Read the article before commenting, people.
Everyone knows a place cops like to hang out, and slows down accordingly.
Why not enforce speed limits more frequently so people obey them? Why suggest a worse solution (encouraging all drivers to go faster) instead of punishing more people for driving irresponsibly?
This article has an attention-grabbing headline (cop says to increase speeds!), but really it's drawing attention to how there are many factors that go into road usage and laws and there are places where people are starting to take these other factors into account. Sounds like a micro-level revolution in how the executive branch of US government operates.
This is the same logic that failed in the "War on Drugs". First off, there's a false dichotomy between proscribing a behavior and encouraging it. And strict enforcement of a "crime" that it turns out lots of people commit on a regular basis doesn't really work so well.
Off the top of my head: Many of the drugs in question are responsible for far fewer deaths than cars are, and so it's not obvious why the penalty fits the crime and there's a strong argument for outright legalization. Many of the drugs are physically addictive and not merely something people want to do with full free will; many people arrested would be happy to stop doing drugs if they got treatment instead. The war involved foreign policy and foreign military activity, whereas nobody is suggesting that we bomb Toyota if they refuse to make slower cars. The war has been waged particularly aggressively among historically-oppressed races and classes (cf. The New Jim Crow), whereas no directly analogous danger exists from enforcing low speed limits.
Just compare the streets of Tokyo to that of San Francisco and tell me it is not working!
Also, compare driver (and pedestrian) behaviour in Japan. In urban areas, both largely follows the rules and it is safer.
(Strict liability for drivers may also be a part of it...)
It's been a really slow process, but bit by bit we are beginning to recover from the mistake of treating the design of transportation networks as a technical engineering problem rather than a social design problem.
If you want people to drive 25mph, you have to design a 25mph road. You can't treat it like an engineering problem and include a "50% safety buffer", because then you designed a 37.5mph road and that's how fast people will drive.
It's also a good way to push people onto alternate roads which may be more dangerous or go through a neighborhood. It's also a good way to get people to completely avoid your roads and make your city or town dry up and blow away along with anybody that your roads connect.
The question is: What's the goal?
The article shows you how to increase safety.
What is your goal in busting speeders?
My goal in busting speeders is to increase safety. I just think the article is poorly reasoned and unconvincing in its claim that raising speed limits is an effective way to do that.
>This is important because, as noted in a U.S. Department of Transportation report, “the potential for being involved in an accident is highest when traveling at speed much lower or much higher than the majority of motorists.”
People may believe it is, but phisics laws are hard to fool. Meanwhile people are well known to not understand risk and probability.
That's actually safer.
until then, it's conjecture, feelings and wishful thinking.
edit: then again urban and highway situations are different, so there's that. but you have truck and slow traffic on the highway anyway thus increasing car limit does increase speed variation in that situation and would be detrimental whether variance or absolute speed are considered
That is if a crash happens. If you compare crash rates and fatality rates on limited access highways where speeds are higher to other types of roads, you'll find that the former is lower on both counts.
> but you have truck and slow traffic on the highway anyway
Trucks do not drive that much slower than cars unless they're going uphill or have a speed limiter. With higher speed limits, slower traffic will most likely speed up to some extent and trucking companies may remove their limiters (or increase the speed where they kick in).
Think of it this way, which changes behavior getting a ticket in 4-6 weeks by mail or having a cop pull you over today. Or worse watching someone get a ticket, or possibly noticing a flash and having no idea what it's from.
The problem, of course, is that there is a better way to reduce side impact collisions -- and red light running in general -- which is to increase the length of the yellow light.
But because doing that actually does reduce the number of people who run a red light, the intersections with red light cameras do the opposite of that, because they need people to run red lights in order to generate revenue and pay for the cameras. And if you compare the results at red light camera intersections with short yellow lights against normal intersections with appropriately timed yellow lights, the cameras are killing people.
http://saferstreetsla.org/wp-content/uploads/reports/A%20Com...
Assuming the number of right-angle crashes is proportional to the number of people who run red lights, the reduction due to having a longer yellow light is larger than the reduction due to the RLC. And that's before considering the rear-end collisions, which a red light camera increases but a longer yellow light reduces.
I would think that a better strategy would be to increase the delay before turning the next light green, after the last one turned red.
Studies done in Virginia and Texas contradict that assertion. Increasing the yellow phase time decreased the incidence of red light running and the effect was sustained over time.
Rlc issue is that incentive structure is all wrong, which lead to shortened yellows and people doing emergency braking at the slightest hint of light change.
Rear end crashes cost less than right angle crashes. Further this does not mean there was a lower severity of crashes simply fixing doors costs more.
If your point is sure they cause more accidents but that's ok because X then use that argument don't pretend there are zero costs.
PS: Economic arguments are very easy to manipulate based on what you do and do not count. So, yes I also disagree with the study, but that's not the argument I am making.
There's a famous saying that goes something like this: "The definition of Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result."
The article is proposing not doing the insane thing and instead doing something that studies show have the actual effect desired.
1. We should expect existing lax enforcement to have a significant effect on speed.
2. Existing lax enforcement has a nonexistent effect compared to the baseline (no enforcement at all).
Even if you established both of these, it still wouldn't be sufficient to make the logical inference that rigorous enforcement would be ineffective for decreasing speeds. It would not be at all surprising that behavior goes unchanged if enforcement rates are below 0.1%. It would be very surprising if enforcement rates closer to 10% had no power to change behavior.
If you added more police then people would stop speeding, but then people stop speeding -- there is no more ticket revenue. Now how are you paying for all the traffic cops?
There's quite a few countries in which people avoid speeding, even when there's no cameras around.
In most of the existing places with a culture of respect for the speed limit, they have a higher speed limit.
I suppose you could find a way to automate it similar to red light cameras but even those have been shown to be rather ineffective at actually lowering the incidence of violations so I'm not sure anything less than the presence of a police vehicle with flashing lights that pulls up behind you would have an effect.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/ca-macias.pdf
"Here, Officer Berg did not qualify as the appropriate witness and did not have the necessary knowledge of the underlying workings, maintenance, or recordkeeping of the Redflex Traffic System. The foundation for the introduction of photographical evidence and the underlying workings of the Redflex Traffic System was outside the personal knowledge of Officer Berg.
In absence of a proper foundation, the photographic evidence was held inadmissable."
The officer cannot be the accuser and introduce the evidence if he has no expertise in how the evidence was obtained.
If the case is taken to court, the officer will testify that he observed the vehicle committing a traffic violation (the vehicle appeared to be exceeding the speed limit), the supporting evidence of his assertion (e.g., RADAR tracking history), the fact that he initiated a traffic stop, then identified the driver, etc.
He cannot testify, under oath, that he did these things based on video or pictures that someone else took. The person that did take the video can testify to that effect though.
They recently installed a new radar at a local highway, right at the beginning of a speed limit.
Everyone sticks to the speed limit now.
A different section of the highway has "section control". (Cameras at the beginning and end of a section that record license plates and determine average speed). Nobody speeds there either.
With todays technology it is trivial to enforce speed limits everywhere, and people really do stick to the speed limit if they know that there are consequences.
Also, the notion that there is some universal speed limit that makes driving safe on a particular road is silly.
Two scenarios with speed limit of x: 1) sunny day, brand new porsche, new tyres. I'm driving at a sped of x+5 2) windy, snowy day, nissan sunny from the 80s with almost worn out tyres. I'm driving at x-5
Pick the safer one. I doubt anyone would think option 2 is safer, yet 1 is illegal and 2 is perfectly fine.
In cities and suburbs where kids can run into the street in unexpected places - more thought is needed what is the best solution.
I've actually gotten a speeding ticket because I was going 35km/h in a "construction" zone with a temporary 30km/h limit on a freaking Sunday with nobody around. That is also clearly ridiculous.
Has this also resulted in traffic bunching up? That is, long lines of vehicles tailgating each other?
You can easily cut a bypass through the curb or chicane.
The Sidney Harbor Tunnel had a serious problem with oversized trucks getting wedged in the tunnel. Watch a truck drive past two sets of giant flashing overhead warning signs. They stop only when they reach the final sign at the tunnel mouth, a water curtain with a giant STOP sign projected on it.[2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Cw0QJU8ro [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRKA7m-tbqM
To be nice make it out of crumpling noisy material, not concrete.
Except for the part where it requires significantly more maintenance to fix up the bridge and it's incredibly dangerous for drivers following, whether the truck hard-stops or gets its top sheared off.
And that's the real goal here. This is just another avenue of attack for anti-car zealots.
But thanks for dropping by as an example.
This is not an uncommon opinion: https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/
Advocates of traffic calming measures aren't trying to literally make roads as unsafe as parking lots. What makes parking lots unsafe is the constant threat of someone pulling out in front of you, no one is advocating simulating that.
Think about roundabouts, they force you to slow down because they prevent you from driving directly though an intersection. They are statistically much safer than 4 way stops.
That's not entirely true, with half decent vision I can drive straight onto and off the roundabout again. Certainly in a 30/40mph limit I don't have to slow down particularly. The point of roundabouts isn't to slow people down, it's to keep traffic moving efficiently and safely.
Four way stops are just obviously an awful solution that I've never understood
However, I feel much less safe going through a traficated, small-radius two-lane roundabout than I do going through a traficated intersection (making a turn or not). First of all, you have to find a gap, which is stressful and entirely unnecessary in a normal intersection. Traffic usually mean that just don't get a large enough gap to get in without accelerating hard, which isn't really safe. If you want an exit that is not the first (sometimes also the second), you have to use the inner lane, meaning that you need to find a gap in two lanes, rather than one. It seriously lacks some fair scheduling.
Depending on the roundabout, exiting can only be done by going "LEEROY JEENKIIIINS". Your mirrors point at nothing useful due to the turn of the roundabout, so the lane change back out involves going fast forward to the left, with your neck twisted as far as you can back to the right. Everyone is moving at their own random, highly variable pace, so a quick orientation is immediately invalidated. On a straight road, you can rely almost entirely on your mirrors so your peripheral vision still covers what's ahead of you.
Collisions between cars are likely milder, as the vehicle velocity is limited by the roundabout geometry, but side collisions are awful, and the chance of collision seems much higher, feeling like a game of Russian roulette. I'm normally (over)confident behind the wheel, with no problem driving like an idiot, around other driving like idiots, and have several hundred thousand kilometers of driving experience, but I get uncomfortable and stressed in those roundabouts.
Some two-lane roundabouts have fixed this by drawing the lines so that the lanes spiral out, with the outer lane going to the next exit, and the inner lane going to the one after it. In this way, going around the roundabout is a constant lane change to the left with no one beside you, and an exit is simply keeping your lane. This helps a lot, but is by no means common. Entry still sucks, though
One study of 17 intersections found an 84% reduction in injury accidents. And a 100% reduction in fatal accidents. And every study I've seen is pretty similar in terms of injuries avoided.
Fatal traffic injuries are quite rare over here (175 in 2015, which gives about 1/4th of the fatal injuries in traffic per capita of USA), with most seemingly being bicycles killed in intersections by trucks turning right in the city (We have far more bicycles than cars, and they seem to enjoy ignoring rules while simultaneously going "I HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY AND PRIORITY OVER MOTORISED VEHICLES, SO I SHALL PROCEED BLINDLY").
I might be underestimating the intersection problem as a result of our "gentler" traffic (I don't recall ever actually seeing an intersection incident - I mostly see two-car incidents on the highway, where some idiot is too busy on their phone to see that the car in front is braking).
It absolutely does when you measure it against the alternatives instead of the status quo.
The only way you can get an apparent benefit from it is through people overcompensating for danger. People are driving 30MPH, you add some danger, people overcompensate for the danger by driving 25MPH, so the result is as though people were driving 28MPH on the original road. You call this a benefit.
The problem is that it's crazy. You're designing an intentional safety reduction and paying the full cost of it just so that people will overcompensate for it.
What you should be doing is designing a safety improvement that people will undercompensate for. Make the road as safe to drive at 35MPH as it was at 30MPH, but don't make that fact obvious, so that people only drive 2MPH faster even though the road is 5MPH safer. Then people drive 32MPH and the safety level is as though they were driving 27MPH on the original road. Compared to traffic calming you have a safer road and people get where they're going 7MPH faster.
>Make the road as safe to drive at 35MPH as it was at 30MPH, but don't make that fact obvious
What would that even look like? What would you do to increase the safe speed of road? You'd widen the lanes, limit access etc... All of these things are antithetical to making a road safer for non-motorists.
It is decreasing the actual safety of driving at higher speeds. And at lower speeds for that matter. The hope is that people will overcompensate for the danger, so that the safety improvement from driving at lower speed is more than the safety loss from the inherently dangerous design. That is obviously not a desirable trade-off, even when that actually happens.
> What would that even look like? What would you do to increase the safe speed of road? You'd widen the lanes, limit access etc... All of these things are antithetical to making a road safer for non-motorists.
You separate the motorists from the non-motorists. Put sidewalks and bike lanes on the opposite side of each building from the road, so that a building has motorist access on the north and east and non-motorist access on the south and west. Then the building to the north has motorist access on the south and pedestrian access on the north etc.
Build pedestrian tunnels or bridges at busy intersections so that pedestrians and cyclists are never in the road at all.
Houston has a system of underground pedestrian tunnels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_tunnel_system
None of those pedestrians has ever been hit by a car at any speed.
I often wonder what the environmental cost of speed bumps is. It is normal to drive huge SUVs. It is normal to slam on the brakes, go over the speed bump, and then hit the gas. There is also an environmental cost for broken parts that need to be replaced and oil that leaks from broken oil pans.
Of course, SUVs are highly profitable for the auto and petroleum industries, heavily represented in lobbyist circles, so it's pretty much a no-go.
[1] https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Small-Busines...
"How to not get re-elected in the USA 101"
Also I like the matter-of-factly / deadpan style.
Adding some trees and shrubbery between the road and the sidewalk also does a lot. Because sidewalks next to a road visually widen the road. This has the added benefit of making pedestrians feel a lot safer. No-one likes walking 2 meters next to cars driving at near-highway speeds.
This sounds like a recipe to increase accidents, just saying.
One might say the current road design makes roads feel so safe that the actual safety benefits get canceled out by changed behaviour.
If you don't want people getting hit by cars, you need to make them visible. Get rid of parallel parking. Get rid of bushes and mailboxes near the road. If there is a sidewalk, put it 10 feet from the road. Get rid of roadside advertising.
With those changes, highway speeds are perfectly safe. People don't pop out from behind opaque objects if there are no opaque objects near the road, and people don't fall into the road if the sidewalk is set back. Drivers have plenty of warning when somebody approaches the road, and there they can pay full attention because the distractions have been removed.
I would argue they make drivers far less safe, because whilst on such a road, drivers are glued to their speedometers to make sure they're not going over the limit.
Drivers should be concentrating on driving safely. Not on driving at a specific arbitrary speed.
I almost never touch the gas pedal once I've reached the speed limit: I just turn on cruise control and focus on the road, rather than my speedometer. Makes me a far safer driver, with the added bonus of also being a law-abiding one.
Cruise control isn't as big a thing in the UK. We have bendy roads and drive manual cars not automatics.
Personally, I use cruise control very often, and the attention freed up by it I typically put toward maintaining lane position and checking my mirrors more often. It keeps the trips engaging and makes me a safer, more consistent driver.
I'm also convinced that traffic flow would be much better if people used cruise control more often. Speed variability seems to cause excessive lane changes as a driver inadvertently slows down and the cars following attempt to pass so that they don't have to slow down too.
I'll also say that by and large my experience in the UK is on most motorways traffic is sufficiently busy that cruise control is of relatively little use: there's enough variability in the speed of the traffic in front that you can't actually stay at a constant speed and there's enough traffic that you can't just pull out to overtake.
I don't know whether or not this is related to the use of cruise control, but I have observed many drivers using their brakes on the highway even when it's clearly not necessary. For example, they'll slow down behind a car before switching lanes instead of anticipating the traffic situation and either letting up on the accelerator before catching up to the vehicle in front of them or adjusting their speed and moving into the adjacent lane to pass.
Firstly, in the UK they aren't 'equal' lanes. They are for overtaking only. Undertaking is illegal. So we don't just change lanes willy-nilly. We change lane to overtake someone, and then change back.
Secondly, only motorways and dual-carriage ways are multi-lane. Most roads are single lane.
Also I would think the majority of cars have cruise control (the last three cars I owned were all less than £2000 second hand and all had it) - driving at a specific speed is a button press away.
It's mainly done for political reasons or money raising reasons rather than safety. These cameras are usually on motorways which are the safest roads to drive on. It's all just for show, it doesn't actually make us any safer.
As long as we do it consistently, actually stop people, and do it across the country... which is pretty hard. The are quite a few issues with just extra ticketing because speeding is dangerous.
The worst ideas imo are the automated checks during holidays. So you get caught on a random road, in a place you're never coming back to. You pay the ticket you get a week after the fact, and what changed? You were still speeding during the busy holiday weekend, you'll likely forget about it next year.
Another one is small speeding (5 km/h) fines in residential area. You're constantly changing direction, slowing down and starting again. Would you rather people paid attention to their dashboard to keep the right speed, or actually looked around for people/cars?
As much as people made fun of it, I liked the idea that was used in Poland (maybe still is?) where instead of actual cameras or patrols, a simple plastic shape of a car painted like the police cars was placed near the road. [0] Works great on non local people and sometimes you would get an actual police car behind it to stop people who get used to / ignore that warning.
[0] https://creators-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage...
They might not cause any harm too.
You seem to think that anything that is legal must be "ok". That is certainly not the position I am taking. Lots of things are legal that I do not think are "ok", and some things that are illegal and I think should not be (such as mere possession of drugs), are still not "ok" to me. I would not advise anyone to drive while drunk or high, and if someone does it and manages to not cause harm, they were lucky and shouldn't expect to be so lucky if they try it again. And if their parents or spouses or significant others want to penalize them for doing something so stupid, that's fine with me. I just don't think the law should penalize them unless they actually cause harm.
I think that drunk driving checkpoints are often taken advantage of to work around the 4th amendment, but making it legal to drive drunk unless you harm someone is insane. Drunk driving directly causes around 10k deaths per year in the US.
What if I decide to walk down a crowded sidewalk swinging a sword over my head, under your system is that fine until I actually hit someone? Do you have no legal recourse to stop me?
Is it OK for me to drag race down a residential street at 120mph as long as I don't hit anything?
Lets say the guy next door decides that he's going to build a nuclear reactor. Do you have to wait until your hair starts falling out to stop him?
Clearly there is a limit where a behavior is inherently dangerous enough that we've decided to outlaw the behavior before it causes harm. Does drunk driving not cross that threshold for you? Where is the limit for you personally?
And every drunk driver who causes a death should be penalized, no question. But penalizing people who have caused no harm undermines people's respect for the law. It also undermines personal responsibility: people figure that if it's legal, it must be ok, instead of exercising their own judgment.
Actually, the very fact you quote should make you doubt the effectiveness of penalizing drunk drivers who have not caused harm. Everyone knows you can lose your license for drunk driving, yet drunk driving still causes 10k deaths per year? What sort of draconian system would it take to actually deter all those drunk drivers if the law is the only tool we have to do it? I don't want to find that out.
What if I decide to walk down a crowded sidewalk swinging a sword over my head, under your system is that fine until I actually hit someone? Do you have no legal recourse to stop me?
Once again, you're conflating "legal" with "ok". Obviously walking down a crowded sidewalk swinging a sword over your head is stupid and carries a huge risk of harm. And everyone around you should be ducking and screaming at you to stop, for goodness' sake, you're going to hurt someone. But no, the law should not punish you unless you actually do hurt someone.
Your underlying fallacy here is that the only way to prevent people from doing something is to make it illegal. That is both too weak and too strong. Too weak, because, as noted above, even severe legal penalties aren't sufficient to deter some people (including, apparently, 10k drunk drivers a year). Too strong, because there are lots of ways to deter people without any legal penalties whatsoever--but that requires us, as individuals, to take responsibility for regulating our own behavior and pointing out obviously stupid and dangerous things that others around us are doing and asking them to stop, and imposing non-legal penalties if they don't. Sorry, you can't come into my house with that sword, it's too dangerous. Sorry, you can't come into my store with that sword, it's too dangerous. Sorry... Pretty soon the idiot will get the idea that nobody is going to interact with him if he persists in swinging his sword around all the time. (Applying similar logic to people who are prone to try driving while drunk is left as an exercise for the reader.)
But let's not argue in vague generalities about using social pressure instead of laws.
A company builds a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan. There is a 10% chance per year that the plant will fail. The failure will catastrophically damage Lake Michigan and the surrounding area. The company decides that it's worth it.
Under your system, a boycott is the only way to stop them?
A lab decides to manufacture biological weapons to sell to dictators. There is no chance of a boycott doing any good because the owner doesn't sell to anyone in the US. There is a 5% chance per year that safety procedures will fail, releasing a virus that will kill an estimated 50 million people in the US.
Under your system, what do we do about it?
These hypothetical situations are extreme, but I'm trying to find out what your limits are. Because I really don't think you've thought this through.
But there are still 10k of them a year. Why, by your logic, don't we tighten up enforcement until there are none of them? What justifies stopping anywhere short of that?
> Under your system, a boycott is the only way to stop them?
How did they manage to build a plant with a 10% per year chance of catastrophic failure? It takes thousands of people to build a nuclear plant. Why would all of them participate in such a thing?
> Under your system, what do we do about it?
Under our current system, what do we do about it? You have described the current world situation: someone could have such a lab right now and we couldn't stop them. So why hasn't it happened?
> I really don't think you've thought this through.
I'm not sure you have either. You are assuming a world in which we have eliminated all penalties against people who have not done actual harm, but nothing else has changed from our current world. That is not at all what I have been assuming. I am trying to contrast what we have now--a system in which the law penalizes people who have done no actual harm, and which has evolved for a long time under that assumption--with what we would have if a system in which the law does not penalize people who have done no actual harm had evolved for a long time under that assumption. In such a world, many, many things would be different from today's world.
As an illustration, I'll redescribe your two scenarios:
A company wants to build a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan. However, when they try to acquire the land, they find the landowners asking what they are going to use the land for, and when they say a nuclear plant, they start getting asked all kinds of hard questions about the risks involved. They can't give satisfactory answers, so the landowners refuse to sell. Similarly, when they try to recruit people to help work on the plant, they find the prospective employees asking the same hard questions, and refusing to work for them when they don't get satisfactory answers.
A lab wants to manufacture biological weapons. However, they are unable to get funding to even start, because there are no dictators or similar insane rulers to sell to. Plus, once the lab's employees find out what the owners are thinking, they all quit.
In short, in our current world, where we allow the law to penalize people preemptively, everyone expects the few people who make the laws to be responsible for stopping people from doing harmful things. So nobody feels individually responsible for doing it. In the world I'm describing, where everyone understands that the law won't step in until actual harm is done, everyone feels individually responsible for stopping people from doing harmful things, which means stepping in preemptively based on their own individual judgment instead of expecting the law to do it.
Would such a world be free of harmful things? Of course not. But neither is our current world. The question is, would the world I'm describing have fewer harmful things happen? Would it have fewer than 10k drunk driving deaths a year? We don't know because we can't run a controlled experiment, but I think it's quite possible that the answer could be yes.
I can take concealed firearms into a public space start firing into the air with no intention of hurting people, and so long as I don't accidentally hurt anyone, the law is powerless to stop me.
No one wants to let me into their store? Ok. I'll just walk down the street and shoot into the air!
In some cases, the person who might have an adverse impact of a decision is someone other than the person taking it. And sometimes the impact of that decision may be irreversible.
In those kinds of circumstances, we, as a society have to ask whether the externalised risks (i.e. the risk that person A imposes on person B, against their will or knowledge) outweigh the curtailing of rights (i.e. the right to do whatever I like) that a restriction would impose.
While I don't think that laws are the only way to prevent someone from doing something bad, I will leave you with a potential downside to what you're suggesting:
Lets say someone is rich/powerful, would the rules apply the same to them in your scenario? Should they?
Are there any studies that demonstrate that people will not engage in undesired behaviors solely because they're illegal as opposed to what they feel is right due to their upbringing and/or education?
For example, I'll wear a seat belt while riding or driving a vehicle regardless of whether there's a law that makes it a requirement.
That's the principle that underlies our current system, yes. But it's not the only possible principle on which to base a legal system. The alternate principle I am proposing is basically that the point of the law is to make clear exactly what actions cause harm and will cause those perpetrating them to suffer penalties.
> Lets say someone is rich/powerful, would the rules apply the same to them in your scenario?
Sure, why not?
Clearly there is a limit where a behavior is inherently dangerous enough that we've decided to outlaw the behavior before it causes harm.
Clearly in our current system we do this, yes. And clearly it doesn't always work (as we see in the drunk driving numbers). And even in cases where it does "work", I think that's more because of the cost of the dangerous behavior--very few private individuals have enough wealth to be able to build their own personal nuclear reactor, and the ones that do appear to have better things to do with their wealth--than because of legal prohibitions. ("My house has anti-tiger protection." "But there are no tigers within thousands of miles of your house." "See how well my protection works?")
The fundamental problem is that some people have a propensity to do stupid and dangerous things. How do we stop them? Legal prohibitions don't seem to work very well. (If personal nuclear reactors were affordable, do you think making them illegal would really stop all the people who want to build one?) Plus, legal prohibitions preempt other possible methods, and reduce respect for the law, and undermine personal responsibility. So what are they really gaining us?
And fundamentally the only way to stop some people from doing stupid and dangerous things is with force.
Let's say my neighbor sets up steel target in his backyard. Directly behind the target is my kid's swingset.
My neighbor insists that he is such a good shot that he will never miss. He hasn't actually caused any damage yet.
Let's assume my neighbor is an asshole and asking him (and other forms of social pressure won't work).
You've taken the libertarian anti-regulation stance much further than anyone I've ever met. Most libertarians would say that the mere threat of him missing the target causes me harm, just like the threat of swinging a sword around on a crowded sidewalk causes harm.
> Legal prohibitions don't seem to work very well.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. You can't seriously look at the history of regulation over the past century or so and not realize that there are some successes and some failures.
I used to be a hardcore libertarian when I was younger, but I've learned that the world is rarely binary. Dogmatic approaches to governance rarely work, and no regulation is just as bad as a command economy.
The search for a simple set of fundamental governing principles is a search for elegance--the same as trying to design an algorithm with no edge cases and no exceptions. The problem is that I've yet to encounter a system that didn't require edge cases and exceptions.
Yes, that's true. But the law is not the only way to apply such force.
> Most libertarians would say that the mere threat of him missing the target causes me harm
I don't think they would. But I think there are plenty of libertarians who would say that a homeowners association, neighborhood group, etc.--i.e., a private organization, not the government--has the right to tell your hypothetical neighbor that the rules prohibit him doing shooting practice in his back yard. And people who really, really can't live with such restrictions will, under a libertarian system, end up living far away from anyone else, because no one wants to live near them.
> I've yet to encounter a system that didn't require edge cases and exceptions.
I agree with this. But different systems can have very different edge cases and exceptions; and it seems reasonable to me to judge systems based on which ones have edge cases and exceptions that are more manageable.
In our current system, the edge cases and exceptions are instances in which regulations prevent people from doing things which would benefit them but which some rare people can't be trusted to do safely. Such cases are common: for example, to go back to the topic that originated this discussion, lots of people get stopped for speeding that would not have caused an accident had they not been stopped. And the fact that everyone knows such edge cases and exceptions are common means that people have less respect for the law--which spills over into the cases that are not edge cases and exceptions.
In the kind of libertarian system I envision, the edge cases and exceptions are instances in which private preemptive action is not sufficient to stop someone from causing harm. I would expect such edge cases and exceptions to be rare, since most people don't want to cause harm and will respond to reasonable requests to curtail potentially harmful activities. Furthermore, I would expect there to be much more respect for the law in such a system, because everyone understands that the law has a clearly defined boundary: cause harm, get punished.
While I don't think that anything legal must be "ok" and law is perfect I still don't agree with you and there is serious reasons for that. First of all one can simply be "lucky" with careless driving or just straight defective brakes.
Second I seen how law enforcement changed driver behaviour in my country of origin. Even with extreme amount of corruption it's still forced almost everyone to use seat belts, pass vehicle inspection regularly and avoid breaking the law if there is chance that will end up with loss of their driving license or huge bribe. I totally sure that without proper enforcement that would be never achieved otherwise.
Third is that I seen the difference between driving behaviour in the UK and Asia and while UK system cause a lot of false positives lethality numbers make a big deal. Even if enforcement is not the only measure to calm traffic it's important one. I really can't see how one can justify that 3x-10x more people going die.
Last reason is that I simply not believe that society on it's own can change driver behaviour as effective (if at all) as enforcement. Fines and tickets work because they are market mechanism like fuel and horsepower taxes, paid parking and London's congestion charge, etc.
Also there are plenty of other laws that limit overtaking on sidewalk, illegal parking and many more that only work because there are enforced. Remove them and streets of any country will slowly turn into hell.
UPD: Grammar fixes.
I see a big difference. Driving drunk/high impairs your judgment; it means you are less capable of knowing what a safe speed is (as well as being less able to judge many other factors). So it obviously increases risk.
Violating the speed limit, assuming you are sober, might not increase risk at all, because the driver has more information about the conditions in the particular situation than whoever set the posted speed limit, and therefore is better able to judge what a safe speed is. His judgment might be (and often is, if typical behavior on highways in the US is any indication) that the posted speed limit is too low--that speeds higher than that limit are still safe. I don't see any basis for saying that he must always be wrong and the posted speed limit must always be right.
> I seen how law enforcement changed driver behaviour in my country of origin
I didn't say that law enforcement doesn't change behavior. Of course it does. The question is, at what cost? And is the cost less than the benefit? Could the same (or greater) benefit be achieved at a lower cost by some other method.
Your own description suggests very large costs that you do not appear to be taking into account: you speak of "extreme amount of corruption" and "huge bribe". What cost does your society as a whole bear as a result of these things, compared to a society in which people are held strictly responsible when they cause harm and know they can't bribe their way out of being punished?
But according to the article, there is little or no correlation between the posted speed limit and the actual speeds at which people drive. So lowering the speed limit does not actually reduce fatality rates. But it does, as others have commented, creaet a misperception of what the actual expected speeds are on a road, which increases risk.
> Why not enforce speed limits more frequently so people obey them?
Because that would be way too expensive, not just in the increased cost of cops but in the lost time of all the people getting stopped even though they are driving at about the average speed of other drivers on the road--which, as the article notes, is the biggest factor in traffic safety.
The enforcement algorithm that most cops appear to actually use is to go after people who are going significantly faster than average, i.e., who are increasing the variance in speeds and therefore the risk of an accident.
> instead of punishing more people for driving irresponsibly?
This assumes that driving over the posted speed limit must equate to "driving irresponsibly". I strongly disagree with this assumption, and so, I suspect, do many others.
You can automate it for much less than what traditional cop labour costs, and speeding ticket revenue would pay for the automation. If there was more enforcement, people would keep to the speed limits more frequently and there would be less stops. It's a control system with a feedback loop.
They really ramped up automated radar deployment in 2003-2007, I spent 10 minutes trying to find data that would let me see at a glance if accidents went down more than usual starting in 2003 but didn't find anything straightforward.
Anecdotally, most people who speed just slow down at the traps, then accelerate back. I'm not sure that's much safer than going steady at the higher speed.
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00430965/document
> This public policy has yielded remarkable road toll statistics. The number of fatalities has diminished by over 40% since 2002, and the authorities are speaking of 12,000 lives saved since the new policy was implemented. The number of injuries avoided is also considerable, even if the fatality figures are those that draw most attention from official decision makers and the media.
--
The "slowing down for camera" behaviour might be less of aproblem, if camera locations are biased towards safety critical places. But it also has a fairly simple technical solution: average speed cameras. These work by timing vehicle sightings between two cameras.
Personally, I prefer to see police enforce more meaningful laws and investigate crimes where there are actual victims involved.
The NMSL was repealed in 1995 (22 years ago). Most states have raised their interstate highway speed limits from 55 or 65 mph to 70 mph and beyond. Yet, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled has dropped substantially since 1995.
Therefore, higher speeds do not have a correlation with higher fatality rates.
Actually it's pretty neat how much safer cars in America have gotten since then.
Given the average age of a vehicle on the road is about 10 years give or take, then by 2005, the majority of vehicles had both drivers and passenger side air bags and crumple zones. Traffic speeds have also increased to some extent in the last 10 years as well.
You would have to look at what vehicle safety features were mandated between 2000 and 2010 to really see if any of them played a part in the decline in the fatality rate in the 2005 to 2015 time period.
Also in 2007 about half of all new cars sold were equipped with it.
The NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway safety estimate that stability control could prevent 1/3 of fatal accidents.
If a substantial portion of cars started to be equipped with it around 2005 (they did), it's a likely explanation for a decline in traffic fatalities since then.
I should have looked that up before stating the opposite. My mistake.
> Also in 2007 about half of all new cars sold were equipped with it.
I've read that the average vehicle age is about 10 years. That means that only now are we getting to the point where the vast majority of vehicles would be equipped with electronic stability control. Looking at the FARS page I cited earlier, the decline in fatality rate is pretty clear, but how prevalent ESP was and how much it changed in that time period is not as clear (at least I don't have the data for it).
So by 2012 we have a minimum of 17% of cars with electronic stability control (probably much higher given that by 2010 75% of cars sold were mandated to include it). If cars with electronic stability control are really involved in 1/3 few accidents, then we'd expect a very sizeable decrease in vehicle fatalities due to electronic stability control alone by 2012 and probably much earlier.
In some situations, but in other situations it seems to be a negative (at least as implemented on my car, a '13 Hyundai Genesis Coupe).
I can see that it's helpful for low-traction situations where it's just protecting the driver from losing control.
But on my car it has a really annoying, and I think dangerous, side effect. You'll note that difference in wheel speed from left to right is what triggers the stability control behavior, and that this delta is proportionately greater for tighter-radius turns, the ultimate example of which is a right turn from a stop sign or driveway. And the effect of it is to severely limit the force applied to the wheels (whether by pulling back the throttle or by applying a brake to the affected wheel).
But that right turn, when I'm trying to merge into traffic on a road with a 60mph speed limit, is exactly where I need the power to accelerate. So I see a break in traffic, turn onto the road, a tire slips on a bit of sand, and then I'm stuck wallowing there with no power, watching my mirrors as a car barrels down on me from behind.
I've learned that I get the best results if I make the first thing I do when I get into the car, to turn off the traction control unless the pavement is wet.
Studies show it's effective. Of course it depends on the car, but I've never found it to be a problem unless I'm driving like I'm at the track.
Also where are you turning right onto a road with a 60mph speed limit with no merging lane?
I agree that it's doing a good job in keeping me from breaking my tires free, which could lead to losing control. But I'm skeptical that enforcing these tactics blindly in all cases (as my car does) is the best overall strategy.
where are you turning right onto a road with a 60mph speed limit with no merging lane?
Specifically, US 290 west of Austin TX. But this seems to be the norm in much of Texas.
It's not optimal strategy in all cases. But driving 100% of the time with electronic stability control (for which traction control is required) on results in an overall safety benefit as opposed to driving with traction control off 100% of the time. Which is why it is a required feature in all new cars.
>Specifically, US 290 west of Austin TX. But this seems to be the norm in much of Texas.
That's crazy. I've seen something like that in very rural areas, but even then the speed limit was only 55.
I also wonder what's going to happen when those sensors get a little screwed up and start to fail. Or when you put different tires on, or make any modifications to the suspension.
I get your meaning, but any difference with ABS isn't going to put you in harm's way (except some really rare cases of deep snow, where the effect of your tires pushing the snow provides extra resistance). All you have to do with ABS is trust it, but even if you don't it'll work out fine.
But in this case, you've got your mind calibrated to how you know your car can accelerate, and the safety of the maneuver is contingent on the car living up to it. But the stability control makes the car say, "no, I'm not going to do it", leaving you hanging out there in danger.
The article addresses this. the posted speed limit doesn't affect how fast people drive (slow or fast). They drive as fast as is comfortable regardless.
Posting a higher speed limit doesn't make people drive faster. But it does give a clearer warning to pedestrians and parents as to what the probably speed of drivers is, so they can take the appropriate cautions.
> it argues we have no control over speeding. And then it suggests places that ticket aggressively are behaving irresponsibly, to the point of villafying a town in Missouri for enforcing its speeding laws.
He doesn't argue that we have no control. Only that posted speed limits aren't effective as a control measure. The point of discussing the towns that use traffic violations as a revenue source is that, if posted speed limits aren't effective at creating safer drivers, then the only reason to use super low speed limits is to generate revenue which is a conflict of interest and counter productive for the reasons stated above.
Ticket them and make money for the municipality. Don't engineer new solutions that cost tax payers money and make rodes less safe for people not in cars.
* Camera installation is usually accompanied by shortening the yellow light period to increase revenue, which leads to more accidents.
* Most red light camera tickets are for rolling right turns on red. Such a violation rarely leads to accidents. These tickets are more for revenue than safety.
Did you read the article?
The problem is that the speed limit doesn't correlate with accidents. The speed variance (or spread) however does correlate with accidents.
So, what the article says, very politely, is that the schmucks who regard the speed limit as an actual limit cause more accidents than the people driving at the consensus average.
And, just so you know, most people don't object to red light cameras for public safety. There are dangerous intersections where a red light camera would be quite appropriate.
However, much like speed limits, red light cameras seem to grow on revenue producing intersections with low fatality rates but a mis-engineered light sequence while somehow missing intersections which actually are low-volume but very dangerous.
Traffic citations should have the ultimate goal to increase the level of safety on roadways. Revenue should play no part in it.
A better proposal would be to remove all fines and court costs associated with a traffic citation and change the penalty to only be demerit points on the offender's drivers license. If they accumulate enough points, then their license is suspended. If they're caught driving on a suspended license, they're arrested and go to jail pending a hearing.
That is a bad idea, because then the traffic arrangements will drift to be optimized for revenue generation, not safety nor fluent traffic.
That's not what the article is saying. The best way to put it is to say that "people are going to run red lights anyway, so make the yellow light longer so that less people will run red lights".
Place speed camera every 100 meters and red camera at every cross (without cheating the yellow, which is a separate problem) and watch dead rate drop.
People are notoriously bad at assesting danger and probability. Them driving faster doesn't make the faster speed always reasonable.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/exclusive-spee...
I have to say, this article simply is not rigorous.
I've seen it argued that shoulders/sidewalks actually make roads more dangerous, because drivers drive faster when they're present.
> This gives us a pretty targeted demographic! Start a "dangers of the road" campaign targeted at pedestrians who are men, aged 25-44, drink at night and who live in rural areas.
Isn't that classic victim-blaming? Getting pedestrians off the road would reduce pedestrian deaths, but it's the wrong way to solve it as a matter of principle.
Sounds plausible, I'd love to know the context. Got a link?
As for the victim-blaming... Teaching safety isn't something that should be controversial. If it's victim-blaming to teach our children to look both ways before crossing the street, then I'm ready to throw American culture into the garbage.
That "American culture" is actually a by-product of the automotive industry. In the early 1900s the automobile manufacturers managed to turn around the image of cars being child killing machines, which they were, into it being the fault of the kids.
Drive down that cul-de-sac at the speed limit and if you run over a kid, the kid wasn't looking properly, you're not at fault! How could you be when the child wasn't looking?
The driver should almost always be responsible for hitting something. In North America the sad truth is killing someone with a car by "accident" is actually less of an inconvenience than getting a root canal. You pay a small fine, you go on with life as if it never happened.
This comes off as incredibly flippant. Is this something you've personally experienced? Would you elaborate on what you mean by a small fine? Going on with life as if it never happened? I fortunately have not been through anything like this, but I've never come across anyone who considers vehicular manslaughter insignificant.
Driver ran down a mother of three children on the sidewalk, killing her. The punishment for the driver? "Ms. Taylor was fined $1,000 and given six months of probation and six months of varying driving restrictions."
A good thing the driver wasn't downloading an illegal song while driving or they'd face ten years in jail!
There was a day last year here where eighteen(!) pedestrians were hit by bad drivers: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/10/21/10-pedestrians-w...
Eighteen people. One twenty-four hour period.
It was absoultely astounding, yet sadly all too typical. Drivers don't care, and why should they? What's the worst that could happen? A six month partial suspension?
IDK, this seems like it's more an issue with Canada's justice system. Canada is more humane than the US is, and that means forgiveness. The article mentioned that the driver broke down crying in court. Does it seem to you like the driver DGAF about her actions?
There is a good points in the article you posted:
> Long-term data from the city show that drivers are responsible in the majority of pedestrian deaths. In spite of this, public-safety campaigns have tended to focus more on pedestrian behaviour. On Monday – coincidentally, at the same time as Ms. Taylor’s case was being heard – the police released a video urging those who walk to be more careful.
Yeah. With the stats from the USA that I posted, it seemed like it was drunk people that were putting themselves in danger. They share some responsibility. But if pedestrians don't have any behavior changes they can do to get better outcomes then of course, we should target drivers and re-engineer roads.
Not really. It's just that the judges don't need to look "tough" to get re-elected. They're all appointed and can just go about doing their job.
I'm just exposed to local news more than other cities, but across North America the punishment for bad driving is astonishingly weak.
Most of the American stories I hear relayed to me are from cyclists who cannot believe the complete indifference police have to their plight. You got run down on the road and the driver fled the scene? Yeah, well, you had it coming and be thankful you're not dead. It doesn't even get reported because the police won't bother.
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/inga_saffron/If-you-...
>How many of this year’s 63 fatalities will result in criminal charges? The four November deaths, some of the most horrific of 2016, are all still under investigation, according to police. But if history proves any guide, only in those cases in which the motorists committed other crimes, such as driving drunk or fleeing the scene, will police hold drivers accountable.
>although statistics are hard to come by, every transportation official I spoke with cited anecdotal evidence suggesting that the odds of drivers' avoiding repercussions in fatal car crashes far outweighed the likelihood of criminal charges.
>“If the driver isn’t drunk, it just gets declared a terrible accident,” says Andrew Stober, who helped oversee Mayor Michael Nutter’s transportation office. Even when the driver is found to have been speeding, there are often no charges, adds Kate Fillin-Yeh, who runs the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/you-can-kill-anyone-you-w...
>According to a recent report by the League of American Bicyclists, barely one in five drivers who end bicyclists’ lives are charged with a crime. The low prosecution rate isn’t a secret and has inspired many to wonder whether plowing into a cyclist with a car is a low-risk way to commit homicide.
>Nationwide, incidents like Cann’s often result in misdemeanor charges, tickets, or nothing. Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault. Last year in New York City, the bike-advocacy organization Time’s Up pushed for changes in police investigations of bicyclist deaths by painting chalk-body outlines on streets, marked with words familiar from NYPD reports: “No Criminality Suspected.”
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jay...
>This time, the driver of a Jaguar traveling down 42nd Street in Manhattan struck another car and lost control, flipping onto the sidewalk and striking several pedestrians. Amazingly, given that this is one of the most crowded parts of town, no one was killed. Less amazingly, given the New York Police Department’s general approach toward car-pedestrian or car-bicycle crashes, the driver will apparently not face any criminal charges.
>Despite remarkable recent gains in pedestrian safety – thanks in part to design changes aimed at slowing down drivers – cars still jump the curb nearly every day. Drivers who kill or maim pedestrians with their vehicles are still only rarely treated as criminals in New York, as long as they are not drunk and do not flee the scene. Even that is sometimes not enough to merit serious charges.
>Twenty years ago, an out-of-control driver plowed through New York’s Washington Square Park, killing 5 people and injuring 27 others. That horrific incident caused a public outcry and galvanized advocates in what has become known as the livable streets movement. But the driver, a 74-year-old woman, was not charged with any crime.
http://startribune.com/in-crashes-that-kill-pedestrians-the-...
>Carol Wiggins crossed Territorial Road every day at the crosswalk on her way home from work in Watertown. But the driver of the car that hit her one evening said he didn’t see her until it was too late.
>Wiggins never recovered from the traumatic brain injury from the 2011 crash, dying weeks later in a Minneapolis hospital. The driver never faced any charges — not even a traffic citation.
>The decision not to cite the driver who struck Wiggins isn’t unusual. The majority of drivers who killed pedestrians between 2010 and 2014 were not charged, according to Star Tribune analysis of metro area crash data. Those who were charged often faced misdemeanors — from speeding to careless driving — with minimal penalties, unless the driver knowingly fled or was intoxicated at the time of the crash.
>Charles Roger Lord died after being struck by a van while checking out a Nice Ride bike on a north Minneapolis sidewalk in 2014. The van “reportedly driving at a high rate of speed” jumped the curb, hit him and dragged his body across a vacant lot before crashing into a building, according to a police report.
>The driver fled, but was later arrested. He said he did not know he had hit someone before fleeing and blamed the crash on problems with the van’s steering. He was never charged.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/recreational-cycling/why-do-d...
>Despite the cyclist having clear, unambiguous footage of the incident, the CPS decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute. The reason, apparently, is that it was a hire car and so they couldn’t say for sure who was driving. Nottinghamshire police say the man and woman who were eligible to drive the car both ignored a legal request to provide driver details despite being summonsed to court. The man got six penalty points and a £150 fine for failing to provide details and no action was taken over the hit and run.
I found it really hard to find cases of people actually being convicted because most articles mentioning a fatality and an aggressor never yielded much in terms of court records. It's like they just shrug and move on. It's the worst.
Current laws don't do much, but an incident like that should be a minimum automatic five year suspension with mandatory re-testing.
Click on the last link and watch the video. It's a video that can only be described as a brutal and unprovoked attack with a deadly weapon, caught on camera. The author described it as "attempted murder." If someone was caught on camera beating someone else with any other weapon (nightstick, bat, hammer) police would be a lot more interested in following up and making sure the attacker doesn't attack again.
I think the big problem is there is rarely any sort of investigation unless it's really, really egregious. You just say "whoops" and maybe get a ticket for speeding or failure to keep right or running a stop sign and that's the end of it.
The fact this comment actually exists shows the problem.
Yes, sometimes, some other vehicle will swerve and force you off the road. That seems to be the exception, not the common case.
Very rarely, a mechanical fault will cause an accident. But, even those are generally do to lack of maintenance. Personal example - I was almost hit by a detached car wheel/tire a few months ago while riding my bicycle on a bike trail. The car was an old beater. No muffler, rusty, etc.
Rather than actually changing anything, suggest education.
(A phrase, I might add, is the single most useless one in the english language? It's a thought-terminating cliche.)
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
It depends on a lot of factors. The presence of a separated sidewalk might imply a hard separation between vehicular and pedestrian traffic which can increase speeds. Deliberately blurring those boundaries, as is often done in small European cities, makes the road more ambiguous and this leads to slower, more cautious drivers.
Confidence equals speed. Long, straight, wide roads with ample room for stopping encourage people to drive faster. Narrow, winding, difficult to navigate roads are naturally approached with more caution. The trend has been to straighten out and widen narrow roads, to eliminate any impediments to "traffic flow", which often makes for roads over-engineered for their intended speeds.
The presence of a sidewalk doesn't make people drive faster, but the philosophy of separation of traffic flows that leads to sidewalks being used does.
If you're dead or severely injured, what does it matter if it was not legally your fault? I pay attention to other cars regardless of whether I have the right-of-way or not. This has saved me from accidents. I don't care to be "dead" right.
I don't understand pedestrians and bikers who wander carelessly into traffic, presuming that having the right-of-way is some magic shield against getting run over.
I step into the road when I have a right - while being careful, but still taking a risk that isn't strictly necessary - because it is my right and I care about that.
I don't leave valuables in plain sight in my car when I leave it, and I lock the door on my dwelling. I don't go around flashing wads of cash.
This is not victim blaming, as flashing cash does not reduce the culpability of the robber in the slightest. I just don't care to be a target. And that's my choice.
Think you may be mixing up two words
> In addition, the same study noted that 71 percent of all fatal pedestrian-vehicle crashes in the United States in 2000 occurred in __urban__ areas
The problem is that enforcement of such a rule is impractical in most situations. If you're going 35Mph in what was once posted as a 25Mph zone, and it was posted as 25Mph because there's a school zone in two blocks, even if there's a strong argument that 25Mph is the objectively safest limit, you'll then have to prove that the driver knew there was a school in two blocks. Then the driver could argue school was out. Etc, etc, etc.
There's a tension between administrative efficiency regarding enforcement and fairness to the accused. This tension is made greater the larger the community. In a tiny community everybody can trust the sheriff to make a judgment call, and the ticketed person not to contest the issue. As the community becomes more diverse and less personally connected, and the environment more complex, you need to rely on strict, clearly articulated rules that minimize discretion.
There's another axis we're dealing with here, too. Do we emphasize overall outcomes, or do we emphasize individual justice (for victims, for offenders)? If you emphasize overall outcomes then we focus on prevention and social measures. If you emphasize individual justice you want to make it easier to punish offenders, as well as make the rules clear so that everybody knows precisely how to avoid offending.
I tend to emphasize more on overall outcomes. I think most people do, at least in the abstract. But the moment a kid or a biker is run over many people switch into individual justice mode, and that's how elections play out.
I'll stop you right there.
We are talking about how to prevent accidents, not how to make them less serious.
I have often heard cited, the fact that force scales with acceleration in a non-linear way, as the reason for speed limits. That is not the case, nor should it be.
The roads there are twisty, with dry stone walls either side, mostly. Except for the mountain roads that are spectacular.
Then there's the TT, when bikers from all over the world come there to race, and about a dozen or so die each year. Apart from that, though, road fatalities are not exceptional.
Driving there is great, because you don't have the constant worry of "am I going over the limit?" or "what is the limit here?". You stop worrying about the number, or checking your speedo, and concentrate on driving safely on the road. How fast or slow you're going becomes irrelevant, it's all about how you drive on the road you're given.
The speed limit is as much a target as a limit. If the limit is 60 then there's a feeling that "well, they know their business, it must be safe to drive at 60 here". What is authorised becomes advised. No-one can blame you if you lose control due to speed, because you were driving under the speed limit so it must have been OK.
With no limits, it becomes your responsibility to decide what's safe. And yes, there are people who think they can drive safely much faster than they actually can. But they they tend to head for the mountain roads where's less traffic to get in their way. There's also less macho bullshit around it because there's no "rebel cred" in driving over the limit when there is no limit.
Conversely, driving slowly in town is accepted, because it's clearly done for good reasons. Speeding in town isn't socially acceptable (if you want to go fast, head to the mountain and do your worst). People drive more safely, and more courteously because they have responsibility.
It's a great system. I wish we adopted it here in Australia.
Why do you even need cars there? Everything is within cycling distance.
Nowadays, I ignore any speed limits. I'm frequently speeding when it's safe, and I'm very frequently going slow enough to people flash lights or honk at me - no crashes since that.
I of course recognise I was at fault and don't blame the speed limit - I should've known to adjust my driving regardless of the limit. However this way of thinking isn't uncommon and while the speed limit isn't at fault, it had its part in causing the crash.
It would be unreasonable (& annoying) to have different speed limits for every different corner/stretch of road. There's also considerations such as the weather & lighting conditions to take into account (& while I have seen signs on motorways for variable speed limits based on those in Europe, you cannot expect every case to be covered).
The problem of speed limit overuse (recognized even by our officials) is a lot smaller in western Europe, if you got your experience from their roads.
I seriously doubt this. It's a speed 'limit' not a speed 'target'. I can't fathom how you could think 'sign says x, I'm sure if I go that speed I can get around this sharp turn safely'. How strict were the driving tests where you learned?
In many European countries, there actually is a speed limit before almost every sharp turn that's in or near a bigger city, and thus people begin to think like this.
Not only there are speed limits before sharp turns, but unnecessary small limits in regular turns or on straight motorways, which makes people go over the limit even when the limit makes sense.
Please be aware that the rather strict driving test in the Netherlands means that you are trained for at least 40 odd hours, or let's call it 60 hours on average, to drive at the speed target. Going too slow means you're unable to handle the traffic, and going too fast is illegal, so this strictness can instruct people to drive at the speed target.
Yes, I did name them targets, because that's what they're used for. It looks like a target, it acts like a target, it's called a target. Legally, they're limits, but I don't think you'll ever see many people driving at the limit. Always at least 1 or 2 km/h faster.
Same experience with the speed target/limit in the Czech republic.
Public transport is good, though.
These roads are not just for fast driving cars.
1. How not to do it IMO: Road next to me had a limit of 60 because of "road works", there even was a road works sign standing there. Everyone knew it was safe to drive 80.
One day I was driving suddenly after months of inactivity a worker comes walking out into the road while I come driving. The sun was low and I just saw his legs moving and managed to brake and steer away.
If I had crashed it would have been my fault - and I would have deserved jail and losing my license. But I totally wouldn't say road authorities would have been without blame:
Designing a 80 zone, then training everyone to think the road works sign is just a forgotten artifact is really really not a good idea if you intend to suddenly send your people out there in low light.
2. How it should be done IMO: Next to a school that I sometimes drive past there is a 60 zone. But it (used to) only apply when kids could be reasonably expected to be there (0600 - 2000 or something). Every summer road authorities would even cross it out.
This way we are constantly reminded about why there is a very valid reason to slow down at this place - and we are reminded that at least some of them honestly think before they restrict us.
and this should come together with ban of cars older than 10-15 years not meeting current safety standards and of course all cars should be checked for quality of their brakes and other parts before being allowed to drive
The speed limit is supposed to be the upper bound. By over using low speed limits, we indirectly increase the danger level for vulnerable road users because of the reasons detailed above.
It seems like it would compared to a wild west situation where everyone is doing lots of drugs/going as fast as possible, but in our current society cracking down further offers no further benefits and may come at additional costs.
For example:
Automatic breaking technology on cars that can detect people who the driver might not be able to see (child running out from in-between parked cars).
Better selective enforcement of speed limits so that people pay a bit more attention. When an empty country road says 25mph due to a speed trap, it reduces the trust people place in speed limits, meaning they won't respect the 25mph speed limit as much even when it is in a school zone where children are constantly crossing the street.
Better side walk design. I shouldn't be only two feet from a speeding 2 ton object even when everyone is following the law correctly. Having space between the road and sidewalk helps. Maybe add some trees and other objects that will stop a drunk driver who runs off the road.
Bike paths for those riding bikes. Also separated from the road.
I'd rather figure out how to make city drivers more attentive and responsible than effectively turn every arterial road into a mini highway.
We have several cities, but they're somewhat small by comparison to some of the places a lot of HN readers are from. There's no analog to SF/Silicon Valley here. Sure, people walk around Detroit, but for the most part, that's down-town in a few select areas (yes, people do walk in the outskirts, as well, but there are much larger dangers going on there than pedestrian fatalities). There are several other cities where there is a lot of walking traffic. The speed limits are 25MPH in all of the places you'd expect them to be[0]. The 85th percentile rule does not apply in these cases nor does it apply on residential roads. I live on a main subdivision road and folks commonly exceed 25MPH. I call the cops when I see it and they've had patrols going on in my neighborhood every day for the last two weeks (it's very profitable for them). People are finally slowing down again. You will get pulled over for going 5MPH over the limit in these situations, whereas that would never happen on a main road unless you were doing something else wrong.
I'm a huge supporter of the 85th percentile rule, but only when applied outside of these cases. Yes, people walk on the county/state roads that are set by this rule, but there are proper signals with increased delay times when pedestrians push the magic button (which, on these roads, actually does something -- the walk/don't walk signals won't turn to walk ... ever ... if the button isn't pressed). On freeways, there's no pedestrian traffic (on purpose, anyway).
[0] My daughter is hard of hearing (with hearing aids and all) and ADHD. She's the kid who's going to chase a ball into the road without looking and not have strong enough hearing to notice a car before it's too late (she rarely wears the hearing aids at play outside to fear of damaging them). I have followed kids home in my car and had discussions with their parents about their driving. I stick with the rule of "keep up with traffic" and will speed when that's how fast everyone else is going, but I never exceed the speed limit in pedestrian areas and I hope most adults follow suit ... though if my neighborhood is any indication, the worst time for speeding is when parents are heading to the Elementary school (located in my neighborhood!) to pick up their children. They'll blow past the crossing guards while kids are walking home from school doing 40 MPH. I guess if it's not their kid on side-walk, some folks feel it's more important to get where their going.
A low speed limit typically is enforced with a traffic camera. Additionally we've go a lot of dynamic speed signs which show a speed limit which fits the current traffic conditions. (empty road at night - it's turned off. Rush hour - 80 km/h. Fog - 60 km/h And several steps in between)
Not having a "fixed" all the time limit makes drives accept the speed limit more easily.
Oh yes, and 85'th percentile. I frequently drive "+15km/h", so I go 95 when there's 80 allowed because the fine when I get caught that is not too expensive. (Fines for speeding are lower when you get caught outside city limits, speeding in a residential zone or in front of a school for example is one thing I have no tolerance for as well.)
The article talks about differential speed and lane discipline. In Germany, it's not rare to see people driving 250 km/h (155 mph), but some heavy trucks are restricted to 80 km/h (50 mph) regardless of the speed limit. Germans are very strict about lane discipline though. It's generally illegal to pass on the right or be in the left lane when not passing, and someone who puts their turn signal on to move left will usually respond to a flash of the headlights from an approaching car and wait for it to go by.
As an American who has spent a lot of time in Germany, and driven across Texas a few times, I sometimes wish for German style speed unlimited-speed highways in the US, but I think it would be hard to get American drivers to adopt German attentiveness and discipline.
When you accelerate from the 80kmph to the 140kmph you better have a good engine or you feel stressed like hell slowing everybody else down.
And keeping right all the times just creates a lot of unnecessary dynamics in traffic flow.
Don't even get me started on congestions when everybody slams their breaks and hit the warning blinkers.
German traffic is for macho wannabe race drivers.
I rather have US traffic or the traffic in the Netherlands where everybody just set their cruise control and drive casually.
In the Netherlands they also have trajectory speed checks, so you cannot speed anywhere from point A to B, since they clock your total time. Works wonders for getting a nice steady flow on the highway.
My 5 cents anyway.
The highways are also regularly torn up and rebuilt to maintain a glass-smooth surface on which one could safely drive 300 km/h, but it's only possible to maintain that for a minute because then you hit another construction zone or traffic jam caused by inadequate capacity. Despite all the construction, the highways rarely get widened, just resurfaced.
I don't think the main problem is that speed differentials are causing poor dynamics, but that the roads don't have enough lanes.
I don't know.
I drove throughout Germany a few times last year, and I didn't really understand why there were so many jams and general slowdowns. I usually drive in France where the highways are almost exactly the same as Germany (most often two lanes, frequently three, rarely more, usually in very good state) and traffic is rarely as bad. I got stranded a few times in completely still traffic, for tens of minutes, during a normal working day, while this only ever happens at the worst time of holiday traffic in France.
Maybe it's because French highways are paying which probably discourages some drivers, but I also noticed a lot of roadworks in Germany (almost as bad as Belgium during the height of roadworks there last year). Enough, as you said, to never be able to maintain a high speed for long, while you barely ever notice those in France. I don't know how French companies do it, but I'm pretty sure it helps with the traffic.
Other than the traffic though, driving in Germany was a pleasure. People are aware of their surroundings and don't drive like the road was theirs.
I'm pretty sure Germany is trying to use less road for a lot more cars and everything else is secondary with regard to traffic jams.
And the fact that the French highways require payment reduce trafic even more. But they are a joy to drive on. Set the CC and just go.
In Germany, the logistics clearly utilizes the autobahns a lot. You see constant lines of heavy vehicles on the rightmost lane, and sometimes your overtaking them is interrupted by one truck passing another one, very very slowly as they both have a speed limiter, just adjusted slightly differently.
Almost every freeway around major American cities is 4 lanes and yet traffic persists. Some freeways in LA are 6 lane parking lots.
Anecdote: recently went from Offenburg to Stuttgart and back and could drive a pretty much constant 190~240kph all the way (~1h30) except for a couple sections which were not unlimited. Having to slow down to 190kph isn't quite what I'd call a traffic jam. 300kph is just harder because there's not that many vehicles able to go that fast, so you end up catching up with the "slower" (so to speak) ones, and since vehicles are (supposed to) be electronically limited to 250kph, you're bound to meet some anyway.
It was my impression that vehicles aren't supposed to be able to go faster than the speed rating of their tires. Since 250 km/h is a common speed rating for tires, and higher ratings tend to get expensive fast, German cars are often limited to 250 km/h.
No current Porsches (real ones, not the SUVs) are that slow, and the Porsche tire recommendation guide calls for tires rated for 300 km/h, or "over 300 km/h" (the standardized ratings don't go higher) for all models except the Macan SUV with 18" wheels, for which it recommends 270 km/h.
http://files2.porsche.com/filestore/download/usa/none/porsch...
You can thus see why the index of stock tires always vastly overshoot the top speed of a car, e.g my car gets a Y tyre stock even though its top speed is 245kph, and my ex car has a W rating when the top speed is 210kph.
It's not a good idea to go anywhere near the limit of your tire speed index, nor to go cheap and skimp on the index when buying a replacement tire.
I bet the Macan that gets 18" and the W index is the one with low enough top speeds (below 230kph, that'd be 2.0L four-pot petrol and 3.0L V6 Diesel ones)
EDIT: found a reference again WRT index tests
> Speed ratings are based on laboratory tests where the tire is pressed against a large diameter metal drum to reflect its appropriate load, and run at ever increasing speeds (in 6.2 mph steps in 10 minute increments) until the tire's required speed has been met.
https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=...
Actually the limited number of lanes is what enables us to survive the speed differentials. Fast/[middle/]slow lanes can easily be enumerated without counting, which makes situational awareness so much easier. And you certainly do need a lot of situational awareness. It's a bit like CPU registers vs. an unconstrained stack.
I have only ever seen more than three regular lanes in large metropolitan areas where there is hardly any open road between interchanges and where speed limits are a certainty. I don't know if a single piece of four lane unrestricted driving exists in all of Germany, I would not even be entirely surprised if you could not legally build one.
I'm guessing you've never been to any developing country. India doesn't even respect traffic lights or the concept of "lanes." You have modern cars sharing the roads with literal ox-drawn carriages and they're all splitting lanes with hundreds of little scooters.
Hell, even Italy is a complete clusterfuck. If Germany is stressful to drive in for someone I would question if that person is comfortable behind the wheel of a car at all.
In fact, I'll say this is one of the big problems with how lax driving standards are in America. There are lots of people who drive everywhere here who do NOT have the skill, attention span, or reflexes to be behind the wheel of a car. It's too economically essential to be a functioning member of society to make the standards any stricter, but they're so lax that we have a glut of terrible drivers. Terrible drivers lead to overly permissive road design (that winds up being unsafe for anyone not in a car like bikers, cyclists or pedestrians) and that just leads to a bad quality of life overall for everyone.
Self driving cars don't need new infrastructure, its functionally an application that runs on existing infrastructure. If you have decent roads it'll work the same way whether you're in India or anywhere else.
Although I guess you could argue that Indians are less prissy about what they're willing to tolerate. A self-driving auto-rickshaw wouldn't fly in America, but it would be just fine for just about any Indian, and it's a much more useful application of self-driving tech than expecting everyone to have their own robo-chauffeured luxury cars.
So should we only allow some of the population to utilize cars? Considering how vital they are to the American lifestyle (the US covers so much land), that seems unreasonable.
How is the rest of the population supposed to get around?
However, despite the amazing hiking/backpacking places we can go here, we have only done that a few times (relying on other people driving).
Should we always rely on other people to go to non-public transportation routes (This has also hampered us from doing lots of other things hence why we got a zipcar membership recently)?
The assumption with this requirement is that the parents are good drivers. That may or may not be the case. It would be better to require that the 50 hours be completed with a certified driving instructor.
And it will cost you - over the whole course it will almost certainly be above € 1000 and generally depend on how well you do, how many sessions/tests you need. With these kind of costs people take this very serious and still fail all the time.
Naturally I'm not a fan of the costs, but I think thorough preparation and training is essential. Operating a car is a huge responsibility that affects not only your safety but that of other drivers, pedestrians, passengers, etc. Getting the license to do so should not be a cakewalk.
On a sidenote: Of course this approach requires valid alternatives to a car, like efficient public transport options, but that's another discussion.
I don't know how you just pulled "25%" out of the air. Most people could be trained to drive better, they just never bother learning because the standards for licensing are so lax that there is no downside to doing so. There are lots of areas where you can get a drivers' license without even knowing how to parallel park.
Yet people do manage to have some kind of order within chaos, that makes the whole traffic flow.
Yes, but only until you understand the trick: do NOT expect perfect adherence to driving code from others. That's it!
For example, when approaching an intersection where you have right of way, expect someone to try and pass anyway: it basically means slowing a bit down and paying attention on the incoming roads. Applying this grain of salt would prevent a good part of the car crashes I see on youtube (namely "driving in Russia", but not only).
And, by the way, expecting bad behaviour from others is not a justification for when I'll be the other.
Now, one has to compare similar situations, not a German Autobahn in a Metropolitan region with a empty desert highway... But comparing a busy Autobahn with a busy freeway (say the interstate into Chicago), I found the freeway to be much more stressful. People are passing on both sides! And there is not much speed differential. I can't just fall back to the right if I want to take it slow. There is often no emergency lane. I feel like I'm being pushed along, and if I can't keep up, I will be ran over.
In Germany, people can go faster, but it feels very predictable, clockwork-like. Yes, you have occasional idiots speeding with 250 km/h on the left lane that don't slow down and assume you will move out of the way out of self-preservation. But those are outliers, other than that I rarely have complaints. Maybe it is a cliche, but it seems the drivers' education, and the condition of cars and streets, is really good in Germany.
It is not a cliche. I have lived in the US for the past 5 years and lived for 20 years in Germany before that. Germans roads are like 5000x better than US roads (at least here in California).
Road paintings here are a joke, especially at night or when it is raining. The only exception is when a road gets painted freshly. Then it is good for like 2 months.
Where I live (Finland) we have lots of sand but much less salt. The salt use is diminished to protect the environment, but the sand eats the road, as well as the studs most people use in winter tires.
(Yes, we change to winter tires in the autumn and summer tires in the spring; this seems to be an unknown thing in Britain or France and even a bit of snow produces a mess there. Germans have non-studded winter tires which work fine with the amount of salt.)
I live in the US and switch to those tires in the winter and find that they have much better traction compared to the all season tires I have on my other car. Other than icy conditions, does having studs have much advantage over studless. I suspect that the damage to roadways caused by studs could be substantially reduced if more people used studless snow tires in the winter.
Studded tyres are more noisy, and they do eat the road more. They are more consistent - in snow, there's no difference; when the road is clean, studs do slightly worse; when the road is particularly slippery and icy, the studded tyres are much better. However, I can deal with that, so I prefer studless tyres. Last winter I had studded ones because they came with the used car I bought. I'm switching to studless for next winter.
It would be good to reduce the number of studded tyres, but people like them for the consistency. However, it wouldn't be good if all switched to studless tyres, because then the roads would sometimes become extremely slippery and polished. The studs remove the ice so that main roads become safer also for studless tyres. I think that a ratio of 30 % of studded tyres would be good for the whole.
If everyone had studless tyres, there would need to be substantially more salt and grit on the roads, and then there would again be more dust and damage to waterways.
(Currently we can see the polishing impact on bus stops: buses are heavy vehicles which do not have studs, and they sometimes get stuck on bus stops at a slight uphill, as the area is polished ice, while everyone else drives by normally.)
We do use a lot of salt. I don't think rock salt is much of an environmental concern. It can kill plants by the roadside until it's flushed out of the soil, but the roadside is already a degraded environment for flora. Normal rock salt is a natural material.
What's worse is that some towns will use raw "frack juice" as we call it for deicing roads. This is a mixture of water, salt, and chemicals that spits out of gas wells in the hydrofracking process. Often they'll just remove some of the water to concentrate a brine and apply it to roads as well. There is unbelievably little oversight, it's done on a local level, the chemicals are considered an industry trade secret and god knows what they're spreading around in those communities that allow this to happen.
Driving in Italy, Rome esp, is fine too. There is a reason the red light is so big and so much larger than the green light though :)
It might all be cultural differences though. I noticed drivers seemed more attentive and never used their phones (unless completely stopped in traffic jams), whereas here in the U.S. it is extremely common to have drivers piddling in the left lane and absolutely oblivious to the goings on around them.
The only stressor I could see from driving on the autobahn was easily overcome - before passing someone on the left, just be sure to check really, really far back towards the horizon to make sure one one is coming.
I can appreciate not wanting to go back and forth between say the middle lane and left lane all the time. I just wish people could figure out they are holding up traffic and get out of the way for a minute or two every now and then.
That is about as self centered one can be in trafic. In reality, they are endangering themself and everybody else near them.
If I do a steady 140 km/h in the middle lane, as mostly everybody else (here in germany), then why am I endangering anybody, if I just stay there? There is still the left lane for the faster ones and the right for the slower. (in the 3 lane scenario)
I base that on sideways skid marks and wall impact.
https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIV/Ch...
I lived in Massachusetts for 3 years and routinely passed people on the right, sometimes even in the breakdown lane if it was open for traffic.
On a typical 3-lane highway, the right lane will have many big trucks, plus merging traffic entering and exiting constantly. The center lane puts them right in the middle of all the chaos, getting passed by other traffic regularly on both sides. In the left lane they can set their cruise control to 5mph below the limit and squat.
Even when there are lulls in the amount of traffic, many times I have approached this type of driver from behind in the left lane, paused to see if they would move over for me to pass, and they almost never do.
Disclaimer: I like to drive 5-10mph over the speed limit :)
Horrifying! :) But yes, the left lane is much nicer to camp out in on, say, a long commute - as long as you can handle maintaining the speed.
I live in the Dallas area and the lanes usually seem to be, from right to left: "the limit", "+5-10” and "+10-15". 15mph over is my cutoff, more or less, so I keep an eye on the mirror and try to shift over if someone is clearly coming up fast. Besides, don't want anyone tailgating me at those speeds tbh.
Does get a bit aggravating when what I consider "safe following distance at speed" is considered by the driver behind me as "this dumb econo-box being slow" and they whip around me. Doubly so when all it achieves is the two of us swapping places because there are no open avenues forward, lol. I'd have given it to him if there was one.
But "everyone else is a bad driver" will always be with us (myself no exception) so what can you do but grin and turn the music up.
Isn't that a thing in the U.S. as well? At least where I'm from (the northeast), passing someone on the right generally gets you a loud honk on the horn and occasionally a flip-off.
It refers to passing people while in an exit-only lane, turn-only lane, shoulder, etc.
Now, yes, you get situations where people veer from lane to lane because the overall flow of traffic isn't fast enough for their tastes. But, especially on three lane each direction roads, you get cars and trucks that don't want to deal with merging traffic at exits just sitting in the middle.
I disagree with strictfp that "staying to the right" creates unnecessary traffic dynamics. What happens in California is worse. Someone holds up the left lane, so all the faster cars will pile up on the right lane and try to sneak in front of the slow car, but inevitably they'll cut someone off and set off a chain reaction of braking for everyone that was patiently queued up in the left lane.
(Granted on two-lane I-5 there are some legitimate a reason for this: the right lane is used heavily by trucks, so the road wears down quicker and becomes rougher in the right lane than the left. Naturally people gravitate towards smoother asphalt. And if you just passed a truck a few minutes back and are gonna pass another one again, why not just stay in this lane?)
Since the US infrastructure system is a colossal piece of shit, highways built 40 years ago still stand exactly as they were then today having to accommodate multiple times more traffic than they were ever meant to. This breaks down the road rules when its bumper to bumper and every lane is backed up.
Meanwhile, the leftmost lane attracts people wanting to drive faster than traffic, the people who just want to get one car ahead, as well as the people who just want to drive without having to let cars in all the time.
If there's only two lanes -- like on most rural interstates -- and sufficient volume exists to prevent the left lane from actually clearing out cars, this creates a tragedy-of-commons situation in the left lane where there's more empty space in the right lane than in the left. A subset of people will then use the empty slots in the right lane to try to get ahead, making the situation even riskier.
But this poster's right; the root cause is not enough lanes to ensure a high level-of-service.
It would be much more informational to take into account things like average number of cars traveling between various locations, number of lanes between said locations, residential density...
By that logic, that would mean at 11pm at night on US-101 between SF and San Jose, I shouldn't need to pass anyone on the right, but I guarantee you there's always drivers lingering in the left-most lane.
Yes, but not normally observed in more densely populated areas. In Los Angeles, for example, it's use any lane you can to pass. I've personally witnessed people, who were driving slower than the flow of traffic, move all the way to the left to "get out of the way" of other drivers. It's well-intentioned, though poor understanding.
Licensing needs to be more rigorous, but many cities rely very heavily on commuting without a proper public transportation infrastructure in place.
That said, if you do have an accident at those speeds... The one wreck I saw looked like a tin can had met a hydraulic press.
Also, speed limits on the Autobahn are lower in construction zones, urban areas with more traffic, and anywhere the roads are not that great (still good by Jersey Turnpike standards).
The stretches with no speed limit are really well maintained.
Sure, as an Austrian I prefer driving on German autobahns as well (due to better perceived discipline), but the US trip was something else entirely - and I've come to think that it's maybe because almost every car has cruise control.
It's not even the speed differences between different lanes, but staying in lane, setting CC and not having to correct it for a really long time is not something I was used to, and going 600km or more a day left me far less tired than over here.
EDIT: Maybe there are intra-US differences as well? Since most here seem to talk about California...
Outside of the big cities, it can be much more relaxing. I drove across the mid-west and did the same as you. Drive at 70-80 mph and not take the cruise control off for hours.
Laws for passing on the left was intended for roads with one lane going in opposite directions.
Driving the speed limit is considered normal speed according to case law. Slow traffic is going 10 on a 25.
Also, I pass people on the right all the time, but I blame them for it. :-) If people don't want to be passed on the right, they shouldn't drive on the left. Simple enough.
On a highway with no speed limit and only 2 lanes, the difference between the right lane and the left lane is just so freaking huge, you are stressed out every time you need to pass a truck or slower car, and almost always see your random Ferrari / Maseratti / Porsche approaching at a fraction of second of the time you spend on the left lane.
I would advocate for no speed limit on highways with >= 3 lanes, but would put a limit of 140-150 on those with only 2.
I have noticed that a lot of people change into the middle lane for no reason at all. This results in you having to pass on the right, especially if there is a slow driver on the left lane. So now you have to change 2 lanes to pass 2 cars....
Fact is, if you learn how to drive well and everyone else does as well, then driving is not at all stressful. You can still use your cruise control in Germany, just not on the left lane (if you are going 80 or whatever).
In Germany it is in one direction only. Left to overtake, right to pull back over. In addition you do have to monitor your back mirror more carefully, which people in the US do not seem to do (though they should). In Germany, virtually no one plays with their phones on highways.
Also, traffic deaths are more than half in Germany than in the US, despite higher speeds [0].
I feel like traffic rage in the US is much more prevailent, particularly in the east coast. Having said that, Dutch or Danish traffic is far more relaxing. But also much much slower...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Because people know cars can fly past them with more than 200 kmh, they also actually stay to the right and use the left lane to pass and not to cruise. All in all it's a pleasant experience and all a driver really needs to wrap his head around is to keep as much track of the traffic behind and as in the front.
Germany is the best country in the world in which to drive.
Drivers are trained well. They look before they turn. THEY DON'T USE THE LEFT LANE AS A CRUISING LANE - they move over, pass, and return to the right lane. They use their turn signal.
You can go very, very fast in situations where it's warranted. In situations where it's not, people slow down. As someone who walks, rides a bike, and enjoys not being deafened by road noise in towns, this is good.
My experience driving has primarily been California, Ireland, and Germany, and Germany has been _far_ superior to the other two.
I've always wanted to take a dash cam and compare the driving styles when driving to the Eurotunnel in the UK and then driving across Belgium. The ring around Antwerp is an absolute mess of people driving in a dangerous manner.
Belgian drivers typically will leave no more than a 1 second gap. In the UK this is repeatedly drummed into you that it should be 3 seconds.
Also I find Belgian and Dutch drivers react erractically, they will switch lanes erratically and move very close to the car in front before switching lanes often without indicating. Germans and British seem to leave much more room and perform maneouvres in a much more deliberate manner.
Certainly with Belgian drivers, this is back up with statistics, their death rates per 100k population are 2x that in the UK and 1.5x Germany [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
> Rush hour - 80 km/h
Does "rush hour" mean something different in Germany? You couldn't go 80 km/h in rush hour if you tried.
Is it possible you live in NRW? It's a bit extreme there. Much fewer speed cameras in other parts of the country.
If you cannot check your speedometer, and safely navigate in the trafic at the same time, you should stop and look inwards. It is not hard.
1) The "priority road" system, indicated with diamond signs, for right of way on secondary roads. This isn't quite as weird for outsiders as the weird British Columbia flashing green lights thing (wtf), but still, almost caused an accident the first time I encountered it at night.
2) When traffic is stopped and you want to allow emergency vehicles, you make a gap between (California) lanes 1 and 2, i.e. where Californian motorcycles go; in the US (and everywhere else I've seen), emergency vehicle drive on the shoulder. Either makes sense, but knowing what's going to happen is good. I naturally pulled toward the right in the leftmost lane until I looked behind me and saw flashing lights coming up fast.
As far as I can see those limits exist to make the politicians responsible for them look concerned about safety.
I'd say in the UK it's pretty similar as well. The standard limit on single-carriageway roads, unless indicated, is 60mph/97kmh. This could be anything from a bypass around a town, to a small country road with tight bends and steep drops at the side.
The limit is usually only lowered if going through a town/village (typically 30mph or 40mph) or if there is a some sort of danger that you wouldn't expect, like a hidden junction on a bend.
The officers argument to my dad was "why would you go so much slower than traffic (this is on i78 in PA, mean traffic is around 75 and he was going the posted 55) if you aren't trying to hide something by going the speed limit" when the back of his covered pickup was full.
Turns out he was just bringing china plates to my grandparents.
He didn't get ticketed for it, but it gave the police a legal reason to pull him over beyond arbitrary suspicions.
A poorly enforced law provides a tool for executives (the law enforcers) to legislate (make their own laws) without any say from the real legislators. It's a loophole of sorts in the US's separation of powers.
Take marijuana. It's illegal to smoke marijuana. It's not illegal to be black. Yet the selective enforcement of the marijuana law allows authorities in any given district to shape policy on race without ever having to explicitly put a law on the books.
This is why the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is so dangerous. It is broad enough to be used as a tool to enforce laws that would be too unpopular to explicitly pass.
It's also why threats from the US government to "ban encryption" should not be taken idly. You think to yourself, "Certainly they couldn't ban encryption, nothing would work without it." But they wouldn't enforce it across the board, only selectively.
Last I checked, encryption _is_ banned in the U.S., isn't it? So it's already the case that the government could selectively jail people for using encryption, as it sees fit.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States, the regulations are still in effect. It doesn't say what the U.S. loosened them to, but they do still exist.
I remember reading a story of a multi-billion dollar corporation in Russia being sold for pennies on the dollar, essentially at gunpoint. Otherwise, they'd prosecute it for being run illegally, since essentially all corporations are run illegally, because that's how Russia's legal system is set up.
The solution to this seems to be to make the roads designed for lower speeds, or to reduce the safety margin, or as other commenters suggest to add traffic calming measures. I'm pretty sure this would reduce traffic speeds, but I don't know if it would reduce traffic safety.
And as with pretty much any community that has that much value in their house, they're huge NIMBYs.
Cars are like bullets in our hands and should be handled with the utmost of care.
Edit: Forgot to add my favorite solution: Add a very high, hard speed limit (130mph?) on all streets, and let traffic signs serve as recommendations. Obviously, also limit to walking speed in neighborhoods where kids play in the streets, or city centers.
I don't trust their self-evaluation of their own skills.
Racing is dangerous and the people who do it know that they're taking a risk. It's not appropriate to take that risk when driving on a road.
Or come over to Germany sometime and enjoy some Autobahn driving with literally no speed limit whatsoever (on certain sections). Early Sunday morning (when trucks are banned) in a good car; that should be on those "N things you do before you die" - bucket lists.
The point of the article was that speed limits should be set to keep the most amount of people at the same speed. Otherwise by reducing them too much, you create environments where there are greater differences in speed between cars. That is what is dangerous, not the actual number itself.
At the other extreme, on neighborhood streets in residential areas, the rationale for the 85th percentile rule (reducing the speed differential between cars traveling in the same direction) is absurd: these speed differentials are much lower and much less important than other speed differentials. If a car driving down my street at 30mph has trouble dealing with a car going the same direction at 20mph, it will also have trouble with the kids playing basketball in the street, or the car headed the opposite direction without room to pass, or the car backing out of a driveway, or the bike going 15mph. Conflicts between drivers headed the same direction are a non-issue on these types of streets.
And there are streets in the middle. A major commercial street in my town is four very narrow lanes (the right lane is actually less wide than a city bus, so when a bus is traveling the same direction you must enter the oncoming lane if you try to pass), with very small blocks, crosswalks at every intersection, tons of pedestrians and cyclists, tons of cars turning left across traffic, etc. Should this be set at the 85th percentile speed? Although it's more debatable, again, I don't think that the speed differential between cars traveling the same direction is likely to be a major contributor to fatal accidents here--on a busy urban street like this the danger is much more likely to arise from the speed differential between pedestrians and cars, a car turning left and an oncoming car, cyclists and cars, etc.
Obviously this applies less to country roads where pedestrians are rarely encountered, speed limits are well over 40mph and drivers often should be paying more attention to the bends ahead of them than the notional speed limit when judging how fast to go anyway.
Accident rates are only a concern because of harms from accidents, including, most especially, fatalities.
* speed limits are set at the 85th percentile of speeds to minimize speed variance, giving slow drivers a target speed and thereby making them go faster than they might otherwise go (but still at a safe speed).
* larger variances in speeds correlate with both greater traffic and frustration. if highway patrol could enforce just one law, it should be that drivers should move to the right if they are not passing cars on the right. this allows faster cars to clear out of congestion, increasing the overall average speed and throughput for a given section of road. it also reduces overall frustration.
* traffic enforcement as a revenue generator creates a perverse incentive and adversarial relationship largely exacerbated by artificially low speed limits. let's abolish those limits and bad incentives and give the police more time to develop relationships within their community.
* change the term "speed limit" to "safe speed" on signs (along with commensurate fines/laws), because that would have the same normalizing effect on speed variance, while also removing the revenue incentives for police.
* distracted driving is the real killer on the roads, not speed. changing roads to make them more hazardous (like narrower lanes, obstructing sightlines) probably reduces distracted driving more than it reduces speeding (just my conjecture), and thereby lowering accidents. i don't mind narrower lanes and such, but i'd advocate separating cars from bikes and pedestrians as much as possible so that cars can still move at a good clip while providing greater safety for pedestrian and bike traffic.
Well that will never happen..
Bike riders also solve traffic jams (by NOT going bar car), make cities more silent and more liveable, bring more business to local stores and restaurants etc.
Obligatory Reference to wit: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/08/29/will_everyo...
So... (1) maybe a welfare state isn't that bad? and (2) that's akin to not believing in small-scale trials/pilots because they're small.
As for 'incredibly homogenous', they have a larger foreign-born population (15%) than the US (14%) or the UK (12%). While that number doesn't tell the full story, sure, it does show that Sweden isn't some hermit-state. And it's neighbour Norway has the highest immigration rate of any western democracy that isn't a city-state.
Trying to find reasons to exclude Sweden as a comparator is basically condoning bad behaviour. It's not a perfect fantasy state; they're just doing really well in the quality-of-life stakes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
Georgia, Michigan, NC and NJ are the closest in size but that's about where it ends. Michigan probably has the closest demographic homogeneity. However the existence of the federal government as well as natural resources as a economic base throws a wrench into any further comparisons.
True for Norway, but not any other country in the neighborhood (fine, Scotland I guess)
Also, as some other commenters point out, their homogeneity isn't on a different scale from places that aren't topping the charts.
I can understand saying "well they have a bunch of Oil money and not much ground to cover" but most things in the universe can be solved at scale in the same way they're tackled in these countries.
It'd be like if Sweden was the only place that invented spark plugs and you're like "Well they're a really small country so they have less people to give spark plugs to so it's feasible".
"The United States has terrible public transport" doesn't hold true for pocket regions which have very reliable public transport. You just can't very reliably go across the country because some of our states are larger than many, if not most, European countries. Not to mention geographical differences. Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
This is such a weird argument. I can take a train from London to Paris to Zurich to Berlin, despite them being entirely different countries. You're telling me travelling between US states is somehow massively harder?
> Compare a topography map of Sweden with California.
Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
The US is 3.797 million mi². Europe is 3.931 million mi².
I think this has to do with the frequency of rest-stops/ tourist destinations.
There are many places to stop and see if you were to have a track going through all of the EU, but if you do that with the U.S, you're just going through "nothing" for hours on end. There's no site-seeing, sparse and isolated rest-stops, etc.
This is if we assume coast-to-coast travel, not just state-to-state. If we do, it's just not worth it to spend that much money.
2 hours 16 minutes.
Of course, as always, this is from station to station, not your real total journey because you don't live at the station.
A train from New York to Miami, Florida is around 2057 km leaving from Penn Station. From Paris to Zurich and Zurich to Berlin is 1622~ km. Although a tad larger going back to Paris from Berlin, a total of 2676 km.
So for comparable distances and from [Tourist Attraction] --> [Tourist Attraction] things are comparable.
Take a train around all of Germany, Switzerland, and France. The entire countries - and not just the capitals! You've still only covered a small portion of the US [0].
Things don't work when there is large amounts of nothing between areas that need to be connected. This is also why the US has laughably bad internet connections in most of the nation. It isn't worth laying down fiber in towns with populations <5,000 nor is it worth laying down rail.
Size isn't the only issue but it is, in my opinion, the largest issue. Pun not intended.
>Switzerland has a) some of the most challenging topography in the world and b) one of the most extensive, heavily used train systems in the world.
My understanding of it is as coredog64 said in their reply, but also Switzerland is yet-another-tiny-country. It'd be more fair to compare it with a 3rd of New York. Does a third of New York have an extensive, heavily used train system? Yes. It so happens to have one of the most extensive rail systems out of any state in the US even! Why? My guess is the size: it's a smaller state with more concentrated populations.
New York (State): 141,300 km² Switzerland: 41,285 km²
Does anyone have information on how extensive and heavily used public transport is in, say... Russia? Then we'd at least be closer to any size comparisons. I'm only familiar with Moskva and Sankt-Peterburg (Moscow and Saint Petersburg) which is the capital and the second largest city, so I'd expect them to be well connected - so that isn't exactly saying much. Looking at the rail map on Wiki [1] doesn't tell you which are public transport lines and which are freight lines. So it's hard to get a good idea.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/uwOnbWY.png
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Russia_R...
That we have any American cities with decent transit seems to be largely thanks to the restrictive geography of those cities, as well as some excellent activists (Jane Jacobs being the easiest example.)
Smaller countries or countries where half the country isn't populated (due to geography such as frozen tundra or large mountains), focusing population in a smaller region of that country don't have to deal with as many pockets of low density populations.
Because they're small.
No. It's a lack of "populated" regions at all. The problem being described is that the population density is too even.
The issue is not the spacing of our metro areas in relation to one another (interregional distances). Rather, we have bad geometry withinour metros (intra-regional distances.) To me, this seems to stem largely from the many ways we've subsidized automotive transit and low density, single family residences since WWII.
The difficulty created by our development pattern is that you can almost never gather enough people into one place to justify building a train station, subway station, or even a bus stop. When you can gather them, it's normally by those people driving to the stop, and the disappointing crowd that shows up often doesn't pull enough weight to get reliable, frequent service to those stops. And as long as those people are going to get in the car anyway, and then have to wait a long time to catch the next bus/train, a lot of them are just going to say "the hell with it" and drive to their destination instead.
Alternatively, maybe you live in a downtown area where there actually are enough people in close proximity to justify transit stops with a high level of service. If you're in a typical American city, you'll run into the problem at the other end of your journey. Sure, you easily walked to your stop, but maybe when you get off at your other stop, several miles from the center of town, you're still several miles from the store, or the restaurant, or your friend's house. And it's typically not on streets that are pleasant to walk, because they're not very interesting and the cars may be quite fast. So you'll have to make your friend pick you up, or pay for Ubers both ways, or walk anyway in an act of defiance against the place you've ended up. None of that sounds great, and if you even did it once, you're probably thinking seriously about driving your car next time.
And so it turns out that what you really need are at least two places, neither of which really require cars, for transit to be all that helpful. And in the US, we seldom have that, because we have a single center of intensity, with the density decreasing radially in all directions.
These places don't have to be huge, either. A compact outlying town of 30,000 or so could reasonably have hourly bus service to the major city an hour away. The key is that the town needs to be walkable enough that people can easily get to the bus, and the big city also needs to be navigable without a car.
As to intercity: I'm not saying NYC and LA should have a dedicated rail line between them, but it would certainly be reasonable to have SF, LA, and SD all connected by rail, perhaps high-speed. But at the same time, given the spread out development of those three cities, it doesn't surprise me at all that that's not feasible.
If that's true, so what?
Split it into 20 separate jobs, each equivalent to Sweden in terms of landmass, population, and budget.
Or maybe 48 separate jobs.
Similarly, the Nordic countries are not homogeneous: most of the population lives near their southern borders (on the Baltic Sea), while their northern areas are barely populated at all. It's very similar to Canada: most of the population there lives within 100 miles of the southern (US) border.
So you can't compare population densities like that: you have to focus on specific areas. What's the population density of Malmo versus Philly? Stockholm vs. DC? And even here it's hard to compare, because for instance "DC" could mean just the District itself, or it could mean the much larger metro area around it, and all parts that are reasonably commutable. Most of the "DC" population lives outside of DC.
Offhand, I'd say Sweden has substantially better public transportation because most of the population lives in a few large cities, and also because it's a better-managed country that invests more in infrastructure for the common good.
I have never paid too little attention to the speed limit being 25mph. I have always been very well aware of being in such a residential zone.
And then: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-fatalities-shar...
Well, even then, the US still has somewhere around 3-4 times more deaths on the roads per capita than other western countries.
It would be interesting to know what the ratio of deaths per driving regularly capita is for all western countries.
If the break-even point isn't 1 million people, where is it? 622k? 100 billion? 3^^^3?
This is Eliezer Yudkowski's dust speck argument all over again. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/
And it's the large differentials in speed which create the most dangerous conditions and accidents.
Even rigorous enforcement can't catch everyone, and the high speeds quickly become the norm; with people going 65 the dangerous exceptions.
Setting the limit at 80 doesn't make everyone drive 80, either.
Evidence, please.
We did this experiment and the evidence is against you.
Fatalities did not significantly increase for any of the states that increased their limits after the 55mph thing ended and there was some weak evidence that they went down.
In addition, if you look at the fatality and injury numbers for urban interstate they went down for 65MPH and up for 55mph and 75mph. That makes no sense.
Basically, the statistics are sufficiently close to a wash that the confounding factors (like texting or rerouting due to more convenience) matter more than the speed limit.
Someone has a pretty big axe to grind when they have to lump speeders in with drunk drivers in order to get the statistics they need... I suspect that the number is almost the same even if you remove the non-drunk speeders from it. (I'm being a little snotty and disingenuous--I suspect that the issue is that the number of non-drunk, speeding fatalities is almost nil and that drunk and fatality almost always implies speeding as well).
And I still can't believe how many people die because they won't put on a bloody seat belt. Sheesh.
So, what we know is that using electronic devices in cars is more dangerous than speeding. So, we clearly need to remove the cellular towers near highways, right?
- suicides (somewhere between 10 % and 20 %) - spontaneous deaths (around 10 % of traffic deaths, driver dies of old age or similar; they are included in statistics even though the accident was not actually cause of death) - gross negligence (at least 30 %: the driver is severely drunk, does not have a license, the vehicle has not passed inspection and the driver is trying to escape the police at 160 km/h on a 50 km/h zone; sometimes you have all these at the same time!) - freak observation errors (at a rail crossing, just drive under the train)
The current Swiss yearly deaths are around 250, a very significant drop from the typical 1000 I remember growing up in the 80s - http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/7515011ec041... lists a maximum of 1720 in 1971. As the population increased about 25% in the same period, that's about an 8x drop in per-capita rate.
In the same period, US fatalities dropped from 52000 to 35000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...), for a per-capita drop of 2.3x (the per-mile drop is 4x, the current Swiss per-mile rate is 60% of the US one).
In the period I remember:
- speed limits were reduced in town from 60 to 50km/h, on highways from 100 to 80 km/h and on freeways from 130 to 120 km/h
- speed limit enforcement became much more pervasive (there's an automated radar every 10km or so on busy freeways?)
- cars got safer (this applies everywhere)
- drunk driving limits were reduced (and people's attitude to driving after drinking changed substantially)
So suggestions that speed limits are irrelevant and pointing to reduced death rates in the US as evidence are not very convincing when other countries saw substantially larger improvements over the same period.
I'm curious what per-capita driving hours and mileage changes look like over the same period.
You can see that this holds true when looking at some of the Eastern European countries that only recently got better road infrastructure. E.g in Poland, the max speed limit at a highway is 140 km/h, whereas countries like France or Spain keep lower limits (130 & 120 respectively).
I think that today, any highway limit below 140 km/h is just obsolete and should be revised. Now, I would prosecute harder those who speed in urban areas, where the risk of hitting pedestrians or cyclist is real.
They are also so that cars can get on the highway (some older cars or larger cars can't get to 140). Then you have trucks that have 80/90kph max. The differential gets large.
And then there is the issue of noise and particles in the air. Cars are most economic around 80kph.
At least these are reasons in the netherlands
2. Speed limits help maintain a steady flow of traffic.
My father found driving in France terrific because all lanes were limited to 130 km/h. Steady flow, no stress. In Germany, driving on the autobahn is stressful. The speed difference between the lanes is too big. From my experience, it is: right lane 100 km/h, middle lane 140 km /h, left lane “Get out of my way you sucker!!” >180 km/h. Passing someone on the middle lane means taking the left lane and accelerating as fast as possible because the next space ship SUV is coming closer at rocket speed. They tailgate you, sometimes flash lights or use their left blinker to bully you to switch lanes. Because of that, many people cut into the safety distance of the car they just barely passed to get rid of the bully.
The speed difference also causes backpropagating traffic jams. To the observer there is no obvious reason where the slowdown comes from. It was simply created by people driving too fast compared to the car in front of them, having to brake, causing the cars behind them to brake, etc.
I don't understand why this isn't mentioned in every speed limit discussion. Driving in Australia / New Zealand with very strict speed limit laws is so much more relaxing compared to the anarchic mess on German autobahn or the disobedient mentality of Czech roads...
Hence why distance to the car in front matters, proportionally to speed, not speed itself as an absolute metric. 180kph is not a definitive tailgating trigger when people behave. Case in point, in France people regularly tailgate you too even at 130kph, even more so because they feel safer due to the comparatively reduced speed.
> The speed difference also causes backpropagating traffic jams. [...] It was simply created by people driving too fast compared to the car in front of them, having to brake
It was created by people either braking too late and having too much of a tendency to tailgate you, or jumping out of their lane and sitting there, and it happens just as much in France. It's a property of reaction time and distance WRT speed, not speed itself.
> They tailgate you, sometimes flash lights or use their left blinker
I've mostly seen this behaviour when the car either cruises at a reduced speed on the left lane or irresponsibly takes over when it should have no business in doing so WRT current traffic: it's just as disrespectful to others to tailgate someone as it is to take over and block a lane when you're driving at a locked 140kph to overtake someone at 138kph and there's constant faster traffic on the left. I've also witnessed people playing vigilante and do this voluntarily precisely because of the existing speed limit.
My experience is that most issues on the road are a byproduct of terrible individualistic human behaviour, and setting limits on arbitrary metrics do not solve that.
- make roads narrower (either by optical illusion with narrower painted lanes or physically)
- reduce stretches of straight road: traffic circles are great at breaking up a straight line
- remove all straight lines from highways, making them perpetually in a slight curve. This is something that has been done in many place in Europe for newer highways. This breaks up the monotony of being on a straight stretch of highway and therefore feeling the need to drive faster. As an example, notice the slight curves in the limited access highway (A5) and compare to the 2-lane road that runs parallel to it (D605) in segments of straight lines:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/A5,+France/@48.4802471,2.7...
The government recently increased the speed limit on a long highway I take a few times a year. Honestly a lot of people were driving at or below the limit and I felt no reason to speed. The highway also seemed to move better and felt a lot safer with fewer lane changes needed.
But it seems wrongheaded to focus on 85/15 out of safety, in areas where the safety concerns are for surrounding property, bikers, and pedestrians. I'd love to see more emphasis on designing roads for intended speed limits.
Communities need to enforce zoning that makes certain areas (malls, downtown, etc.) pedestrian areas only. Additionally, separate bicycle traffic onto different paths.
That would probably increase safety quite a bit.
I'd like to see more license classes than "Car, Car with Motorcycle rider, CDL (over 13 tons), and CDL with Trailer". One could start with a "light weight class" like moped/motorcycle/small car, then have a progressive system for "heavy weight cars" (SUV or pickup truck) or "high HP/Ton cars" (Sports car). These "advanced licenses" would have a higher standard of testing and stiffer penalties if you are driving a car that meets these higher-spec classes.
In Europe I've gotten tickets driving only 5mph over the limit (58 km/h on a 50 road), which would explain why the 85th percentile is closer to the actual speedlimit there.
It could be argued that the vehicle owner is responsible for ensuring this adjustment is made every time tires are changed, but with no real way for the average consumer to verify or measure the difference, the fact is we depend on the business providing the service to do it for us.
Why? It would add time to your (and everyone else's) commute, while simultaneously being unlikely to substantially improve traffic safety.
It's kind of funny to watch on the last two or three days of the month how many of the state troopers are out on the interstate, doing speed traps all day long. The rest of the month, you'll almost never see them, unless they are escorting an oversize load.
I will admit though, she counsels me against following the rule in Virginia because the cops there don't mess around.
EDIT: I should add that 15mph over the limit is usually "going with the flow". If the other cars are traveling at 70 then 85 really stands out.
My usual rule is 5MPH over. I sometimes increase it to 10MPH, but it works almost everywhere.
5 over is safe everywhere in the USA except school zones. 10 is generally safe in suburban and rural areas. 14 over on highways, unless mitigating situations exist (bridge, visibility, twisties)
Beware, almost every area has some county or township that abuses their little patch of highway, and they tend to be well known to locals, but prey on passers by.
This is not bulletproof, but has been my experince.
This rule of thumb still allows for 61 mph on urban freeways and 77 to 83 on rural interstates.
If you are less than 10% over, the cops would need to prove that you knew it. This would involve testing your car. Nobody wants to bother with that, so you normally get an extra 10%.
There is no such need for cop to "prove" you "knew" you were speeding. Ignorance of the law (or the condition of your vehicle, or whatever) is no excuse, as the saying goes. When you sign up for a driver's license (in the US) you agree that you will abide by all traffic laws.
Plug an OBDII reader + app into your car to see the true velocity.
Just like the recent discussion about "troublemakers", 90% to 95% of drivers are - with different levels of driving competence - OK.
It is the remainining 5%, maybe 10%, that create most of the issues, directly or indirectly, that is not only speeding, it is often distraction, aggressivity at the wheel, etc..
One of the reasons why "black boxes" that record driving habits are not as common as they could or should be, besides of course the usual privacy risks, is that everyone is afraid if the data that would come out of them.
If all drivers were monitored it would likely come out that a small minority (the said 5% or so) should simply be deprived of the right to drive any vehicle (no insurance would ever cover them, as insurance is about risks, not about certainties) and this would break quite a few "social contracts", including the unwritten one in which there is a "right to drive" (because our cities and lives are organized in such a way that a car is needed to commute, to take kids to school, etc.).
This paragraph is really key. You want to design the road and the area around it to encourage an appropriate speed, and then set the speed limit at that speed (which should work out to the 85th percentile of what people would drive anyway). IMO most freeways, at least where I'm from, should have higher speed limits (and are already designed to support them). Some residential streets should probably have lower ones, but would need design changes to encourage people to actually drive at an appropriate speed.
Either they need to raise the limit or enforce it. I'm sick of being the asshole going too slow.
Also my speed is generally more a function of gas mileage than anything else. With stop lights littering the route I don't feel that driving 55 is any faster than 40. It just wastes more gas. So maybe it wouldn't even make sense to raise it and instead it just needs to be enforced.
In fact, I think it needs to go a step further - ALWAYS stay to the right. Only move to the other lane to pass or turn left.
Passing left laws were intended for two way streets with one lane in each direction when the only way to pass is by driving on the lane going the opposite direction.
Do you have a citation for that? Many state laws use the speed of traffic as a reference to define slower as opposed to using the posted speed limit as the reference. If they meant to say only slower than the speed limit, then the text of the law would be explicit on that point.
Having less speed variance leads to smoother flow and traffic that's more spread out. That increases safety overall.
No thanks!
Generally its the middle lane I use, but sometimes it's even the left if some landscaping truck or cement mixed is in front of me dropping who knows what into the road.
The chief component in getting to one's destination is the traffic and the second one is number of lights you get stopped out. Since all the lights are timed to 40mph it doesn't make sense to go faster unless they re-engineer the road.
Generally any car that passes me will be stuck at the light ahead and if there is light traffic I will pass them because I have a rolling start and if there is heavy traffic it's all the same.
Staying to the right in this situation only makes sense if you're unable to accelerate at a reasonable speed or unable to go the speed limit at all.
The randomness of having a human officer grab me (not the other 1,000 people) off the road for going too fast feels unfair and ineffective.
There are stretches in DC with exactly that strategy. As a consequence, people speed and then hit the brakes right before the cameras.
I'd love to know the accident stats right around those stretches.
I don't think I've ever seen anywhere with them with less than, say, half a mile separation between junctions. At that point, you just get normal speed cameras.
[1] https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
You need to fix the core speed limit problem before fully enforcing the limits.
It's a fun (and annoying) game to observe how people's speed varies compared to the limit. I almost always go at the limit plus 5MPH unless that would make me dangerously slow. Sometimes this makes me the fastest car on the road, and other times the slowest.
There's a road I drive about twice a day where the first half has a 25MPH limit and the second half is 35MPH. I'm usually a slowpoke on the first half, building up a queue of cars behind me, and then end up the fastest car around on the second half. (And to preempt any haters, the 25MPH segment is less than a mile long, so I'm not severely inconveniencing people.)
Rural interstates here have a 70MPH limit, so I go 75MPH. Most people go 65-70MPH. As you get into the city where I live, the limit drops progressively to 55MPH, and most people go... 65-70MPH.
I really hope this is not the case
Some cops claim that aggressive traffic enforcement leads to knock-on effects in reducing gun crime:
https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/809689.pdf
> Gun seizures by police in the target area increased by more than 65 percent, while gun crimes declined in the target area by 49 percent
It probably makes sense -- any kind of warrantless search has the potential to decrease crime.
> A plot was hatched, fueled by indignation: "By God, I've paid taxes for a long time -- and more than a lot of those trucks." First he consulted with the commonwealth attorney's office and other traffic authorities to ensure that his plan was legal, that passing on the right was acceptable on multilane highways and that traveling over 55, even to pass, was against the law.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1984/11/21/...
I refuse to speed; I think it is immoral. This is because I ride a bicycle everywhere, and the extent to which people speed on surface streets has an obvious and tangible effect on my safety. My town has a narrow bridge that used to be the only way for cyclists to get across the river, where drivers routinely exceed the 35 mph speed limit by 20 mph or more. It is terrifying, and people have gotten killed. I wish they would put a speed camera on that bridge.
The argument that "the speed limit doesn't matter because people will travel the same speed" only makes sense under the assumption that the only people who will use the public roads are drivers who feel like they can do whatever they want. Plenty of drivers feel entitled to run red lights, too, and that causes more collisions.
The phrase "speed excessively" in your second sentence directly implies that "speeding" leads to the immorality rather than just speed. Additionally, "excessive" is approaching a tautology. In your first comment though you just talk about "speeding" without the excess and then say that's flatly immoral.
People are bad at assessing risk and bad at awareness of road conditions. And I think learning to disregard posted speed limits corrodes regard for other rules of the road, like stopping at traffic lights.
Even in jurisdictions that didn't have speeding laws (before we had a national standard) those people were still prosecuted for reckless driving. The standard speeding law is whatever is reasonable and prudent given the traffic, weather, and road conditions. It's a subjective standard that offers police a lot of leeway, but so it goes.
> On the other hand, a New York judge announced that he would not convict drivers for blocking speeding traffic, People v. Ilieveski, 175 Misc. 2d 943; 670 N.Y.S.2d 1004 (Monroe County N.Y. 1998).
But drivers have developed a sense of entitlement to speed at least 10 mph, and regard the posted speed limit as a speed minimum. But if a car is traveling 65 mph in a 65 mph zone in a center or right lane, and a car behind him traveling at 75 mph swerves recklessly into another lane in order to avoid having to slow down to the posted speed limint, then the responsibility for the risk of that unsafe lane change is the responsibility of the driver who did it, not the car driving at the posted speed limit in the right lane.
This is the result of underposting highway speed limits for decades. Had that not happened, then dotted limits would have a lot more respect today.
So you basically have a generation of motorists who grew up and spent a substantial portion of their driving years with highway speed limits that virtually no one complies with, and that it was okay to drive 5 to 10 mph above the speed limit. This attitude spread to other road types as well meaning that even appropriately posted speed limits (e.g., 25 mph residential streets) have a high degree of noncompliance.
It's going to take a while to undo the damage, but that's what happens when traffic control devices are effectively used to "cry wolf".
Edit: s/compliance)/noncompliance/
In general, I think speed limits can be higher on highways, but should be much lower and actually enforced in town. Fast cars are absolutely terrible for the safety and comfort of walkers and bikers.
People seem have a bias towards thinking about speed limits in terms of interstate travel speeds, which frequently have been raised to 70–80 mph anyway.
Perhaps this is because most speeding enforcement is on interstates and there is relatively little enforcement of speed limits on surface streets unless they are very egregious.
In my area the state and/or county went to great lengths to create a bidirectional bicycle highway alongside (but physically separated from) some of the freeways, but the city can't be bothered to provide bicycle lanes and street lights along the full length of any of the major roads through town. During most of the year I prefer to stick to the major roads in the early morning hours because the vehicle traffic usually keeps the coyotes away. The only thing more likely to cause a driver to hit me than swerving to avoid an animal (assuming I'm complying with the laws while riding my bicycle in the street) would be if the driver is impaired or passes too close, either of which is a law I would be much happier to see an officer enforce than the speed limit.
Every time a car, train, boat, or plane crosses paths with one of the other modes of transportation on that list we make sure that someone has to have a lapse of attention, poor judgment, or some form of vehicular malfunction to violate the right of way. When it comes to a car, bicycle, or pedestrian, though, we tell them it's ok to share the same road and pretend that there's nothing wrong with that assumption, even when more people every year seem to be completely unaware that they're supposed to share the road with bicycles (and more cyclists seem to be unaware of which side of the road they're supposed to be on or that any laws regulate them).
Then they built a ped bridge, and threatened to kick off cyclists because cyclists are vehicles that travel 10-20 mph faster than pedestrians (and don't integrate well with pedestrian traffic generally).
Your situation sounds ripe for change. Look into street calming demonstrations, and seek neighborhood support to do one as well as possibly painting lines to narrow the lanes for drivers.
Just don't be surprised that drivers try to drive highways like highways, even when you try with signs to tell them that it's a low speed road.
But when driving on a limited access highway,I will speed most of the time because the speed limit is based on a now defunct national motor vehicle maximum speed law that was repealed over 20 years ago instead of an actual traffic and engineering study.
I would really like to see some consistency applied to how the law is enforced and written when it comes to traffic safety. What I mean by that is driving is clearly an inherently dangerous activity given the frequency of traffic incidents on a per-capita basis compared with just about anything else. Well, for every other type of inherently dangerous activity we are all forced to sign wavers basically saying that we understand and accept said risk and we are willing to take that risk. That acceptance protects mostly everything but situations involving negligence or gross negligence. I never understood why driving is treated any differently.
Also, when you look at what traffic law is at its most basic level, it makes little sense when compared to the rest of the body of law that exists for everything else. Traffic law exists primarily to increase safety on the roads and reduce the risk of accidents. Now, statistics do show that enforcing traffic laws do actually make the roads safer. I acknowledge that up front. But my issue with them is that the overwhelming majority of traffic citations are issued for violations that have caused no harm. That is, drivers are cited and forced to pay a fine simply for increasing the odds of an accident happening. The accident need not actually have occurred. Nowhere else does that shit fly. You can't go to court and sue someone for anything without there being some sort of harm/tort/injury/etc. That's basic law. If someone, for example, tried to defraud you but you were slick enough to spot it and stopped it, you can't sue them in court because you didn't actually lose money.
I'd much rather see a situation where either people accept the risks of the road and only have limited options like negligence and perhaps a few others - or, to see cops citing people only when they are deemed the cause of the accident or the rare cases when someone is driving so insanely on the road that their driving alone is enough to justify gross negligence (i.e. racing or doing 50 in a 25 in the rain).
Well, I might believe that if they didn't derive a sizable chunk of revenue from this enforcement. I think society as a whole might actually believe them if and only if it became a legal requirement that any and all revenues coming directly from fines are required to be donated to charity. Then I would be far, far more likely to actually believe that I'm getting a citation because the officer truly thinks I did something unsafe and worthy of being fined for. Since courts typically also assign a court fee if you decide to (or are required to) show up in court, there would need to be some kind of protection to prevent them from jacking up the court costs as well.
I strongly suspect that without the possibility of making money from traffic violations, most law enforcement agencies wouldn't bother doing any enforcement.
I don't know about the US, but in Germany there are many cases where you can be fined for decreasing safety, even if no accidents happened.
For example obstruction of escape ways, violations of fire safety rules, organizing large events without the required quota of paramedics present and so on.
Another category is the possession of weapons without permit, which is illegal even if you haven't shot anybody.
That wand exists - it's called "enforce the law". Increase penalties, or decrease them if you need a revenue-neutral plan, but enforce that 60MPH is a limit, not a suggestion.
This article parrots the same concept as most speeding solutions: speed doesn't kill, only variance in speed is dangerous. That makes perfect sense. So why increase the possible variance from zero, and why let people complain about driving at the limit being too slow? If you're above the limit, _you_ are increasing the variance, and _you_ need to slow down.
Enforcing the limits when they are artificially low helps no one except for the police.
Sufficient enforcement will, over time, reduce speed variance, which is the behavioral problem which leads to the conclusion that speed limits are "too low". So, no, increasing enforcement of limits that are "too low" based on the variance of speeds produced on those roads given present enforcement patterns helps safety in the same way as raising speed limits does, by reducing speed variance. And it does so without increasing the number of people who are driving faster than is safe for their own abilities because of traffic pressure.
Now, you might argue that the cost of enforcement or the travel time make it undesirable.
Forcing everyone to drive at a slower speed than what's safe by force does not actually make the road safer. 100% enforcement of current speed limits would not actually make things better.
Yes, and I directly addressed it's points. Did you read my post? Because you don't seem to address what I've said, and you ignore that I've more directly dealt with the points made in the article than you do in yours.
> 85% of people drive at a safe speed regardless of what the speed limit is.
No, traffic engineers have come to the conclusion that, because speed variance is a significant source of risk, the safest speed limit (considering auto vs. auto issues only) is the 85th percentile speed of traffic on the road, which (at least with patterns of enforcement over the time the rule was found and since) seems not to vary much based on posted limits, in any case.
That's the 85th percentile rule, and it's the single most common rule for setting speed limits in the US. Its incorporated in federal guidance, its incorporated in most state laws (though with some exceptions—e.g., school zones, upper highway speed limits—in virtually all of them).
Given that the 85th percentile speed will rarely fall on exactly a convenient numbee, you'd expect nearly half of limits to be below that because of rounding, and add in some conditions which create downward departures in limited cases, and, sure, as the article body says, most (>50%) are below. But that's not the headline's "every speed limit".
Not is it clear, as I stated previously, that the 85th percentile rule is ideal for safety for mixed use. There's considerable global evidence that lower speed limits are better for that.
Enforce limit, speed is now 45 to 55 = 10MPH max variance, a 60% reduction.
Enforcing limits will reduce variance. Please explain how this is flawed?
But the sign clearly said 60. Further more, you know you can get ticketed. Even if the limit is artificially low and the police are doing it for revenue raising reasons, why not just slow down regardless of the conditions?
It seems irrational to me that you would go faster on a street where they enforce the limit just because the conditions are good. Why even bother risking the ticket and losing points on your license.
I drive in Sydney. There are signs well in advance of red light cameras and speed cameras. And people still speed through them. There are certain roads where I see the camera go off quite regularly. Hell, a couple of times I've seen signs, slowed to match the limit and people behind me will change lanes and speed to over take me, triggering the cameras. Sometimes I am already over the limit, and the person behind me will decide I am not over enough, change lanes and speed to overtake.
Fortunately the cops in CA don't share your opinion.
There is very little benefit to increasing speed limits beyond the 85th percentile. The capacity of the roadway does not increase because of the increased headway between vehicles. As vehicles speed up, the distance between vehicles increases and thus the total number of vehicles that can occupy a given segment of roadway is decreased. At 30 mph, about 36 vehicles can fit within a one mile stretch (assuming 3 second following distance, 15 ft long vehicles and one travel lane). Under the same assumptions only about 16 vehicles would fit in a one mile section at 70 mph. However, slow speeds everywhere is not reasonable and that is why some measure of central tendency is used to establish speed limits.
Doesn't the upper limit of that usually match the 85th percentile speed of traffic?
> There is very little benefit to increasing speed limits beyond the 85th percentile.
Assuming traffic speeds follow a normal distribution, even those who exceed the 85th percentile speed don't exceed it by much (more than 5 mph). Beyond that, we're talking about 97th percentile speed or greater.
> As vehicles speed up, the distance between vehicles increases and thus the total number of vehicles that can occupy a given segment of roadway is decreased. At 30 mph, about 36 vehicles can fit within a one mile stretch (assuming 3 second following distance, 15 ft long vehicles and one travel lane). Under the same assumptions only about 16 vehicles would fit in a one mile section at 70 mph.
As traffic volume increases, the overall flow speed decreases which should offset the issues you noted.
Here in Switzerland (and throughout Europe), most limits are mostly sane. We have 120 km/h (75 mph) global highway limit, which you mostly don't want to ignore (especially in the mountains, which is like almost anywhere). And on the smaller roads, if it suddenly says e.g. 80 km/h, you better reduce your speed, otherwise you'll risk not fitting into the turn.
> 85% of drivers drive at or below the speed limit. ... > “I’ve found that about 10% of drivers truly identify the speed limit sign and drive at or near that limit,” says Megge. Since these are the slowest share of drivers, they don’t affect the 85th percentile speed.
If 85% of drivers drive at or below the speed limit, then why are the 10% who follow the speed limit amongst the slowest of drivers?
So the standard for acceptability is that you only see a crash (i.e. a tragic event, often with fatalities) every several months?
According to https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/ "more than 32,000 people are killed and 2 million are injured each year from motor vehicle crashes. In 2013, the US crash death rate was more than twice the average of other high-income countries." With that data, I don't know how a post that starts by saying this even gets this high in HN.
Car travel is more than one order of magnitude more unsafe than train travel, and two orders of magnitude more unsafe than plane travel. I think our grandchildren will wonder how people in our time were so crazy to drive around so much in cars, just as we now wonder how they were so crazy some decades ago to watch nuclear tests live or hold asbestos shoving competitions.
As for the argument of the overwhelming majority of people not obeying limits, I don't know the laws in the US but I suspect it may be relating to not fining enough. It used to be the same way in Spain until they introduced more fines the possibility of taking "points" off your license, which you lose for six months (and it's cumbersome to get back) if you get to zero. Now most people follow the limit or only drive slightly over it (there is a certain tolerance level below which there are no fines) and when some years ago it went temporarily from 120 to 110 km/h in highways, it was very visible how most people were indeed driving slower.
In Denmark we raised the highway limit from 110kmh to 130kmh on half of all highway. In the 2 years before and the 2 years after (ignoring the initial 2 months) the number of accidents and injuries on all roads fell roughly -15%. But on the highways with the new limit, it increased with 14%, and the average speed barely changed. The parts of the road where the 110kmh limit is saw significantly less accidents as well, probably because the average speed here decreased.
But the conclusion is fairly straight forward. The average speed barely increased, but the number of accidents rose significantly.
[0] http://www.vejdirektoratet.dk/DA/viden_og_data/publikationer...
There are fundamental differences in the way people in different countries approach driving and nothing's going to change that.
Swiss and Germans LIKE FOLLOWING RULES. It makes them happy (source: I work with a lot of both and they will frequently make statements like "Rules exist for a reason. If everyone just followed them the world would be better for all." Yes, I jump straight to Hitler with my counterarguments)
Americans do not. To an extreme detriment to their own health and safety (see: Airbag regulations that assume Americans won't have their seat belt on - a basic prerequisite to driving for literally everyone else on the planet. See also: socialized healthcare being "controversial").
Directly on either side of the toll road are the free roads. The only difference is one fewer lane each way. The speed limit is 60mph.
I do not believe there is enough difference between the two roads to justify a 25mph speed limit difference, except to create an artificial police-enforced incentive to fork over if you want to be able to drive as fast as you should.
I suspect many speed limits are designed in this way: either mostly arbitrary or calculated to maximize revenue (for police, toll road operators, etc.). They are not designed with optimizing driver utility in mind.
There are few things better than when you end up driving in a swarm of experienced drivers who are willing to safely exceed the speed limit. Safety (and efficiency!) in numbers.
The waste of space and resources that was required to put those extra lanes in, and all of the traffic control measures could have EASILY doubled the number of lanes on the beltway - alleviating traffic for many many years to come.
Instead, they've just created a false economy around the pricing of convenience. It's essentially rent seeking by the government.
This never seems to happen in practice tho, from what I understand. Traffic always seems to 'magically' expand to match capacity.
Adding traffic lanes increases traffic. (Amusingly, I originally learned this reading about the research that went into SimCity, though I've done a lot more reading on urban and traffic planning since.)
I still find myself speeding up to match the flow when the roads are busy though.
Can you be prosecuted for driving at the speed limit in the fast lane? It seems like nobody would be legally allowed to use that lane if that were the case.
One of the reasons they would prefer to flush you out of the lane rather than pull you over and give you a ticket is that the very action of pulling you over (possibly across all lanes of traffic) and sitting on the side of the road while ticketing you causes other drivers to slow down (sometimes erratically) and increases the likelihood of a collision.
The CalTrans manual for setting speed limits includes some references for many of the issues this article is discussing: http://www.dot.ca.gov/trafficops/camutcd/docs/california-man...
John Nestor tested the law in D.C. He was the major force in bringing to light the effects of Thalidomide in the early 1960s. He stood up to drug companies.
> A plot was hatched, fueled by indignation: "By God, I've paid taxes for a long time -- and more than a lot of those trucks." First he consulted with the commonwealth attorney's office and other traffic authorities to ensure that his plan was legal, that passing on the right was acceptable on multilane highways and that traveling over 55, even to pass, was against the law.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1984/11/21/...
https://www.motorists.org/press/montana-no-speed-limit-safet...
The whole point of this article was that driving those speeds isn't driving like a maniac. Because if that is the flow of traffic the maniac thing to do is drive at the speed limit.
I also believe it came out that the company providing the cameras was getting a cut of every ticket issued, leading to a tendency towards false positives. The program wasn't profitable for the state and people complained so much that the cameras were gone a short time later. I remember most people would slam on the brakes just before the stationary cameras, cruise through at exactly 64 or 74 mph (the cameras went off at 10 mph above the posted limit) and then accelerate to whatever speed they wanted. It was way worse than people just speeding.
Maybe it works well in S. Korea because the incentives aren't so screwed up, but here in the States "Cameras" mean someone is getting a cut and the people are getting screwed. The camera's get set up in the best places to get revenue (downhill when the speed limit changes from 65 mph to 55 mph around a bend so you don't even see the sign before it's too late).
Pretty much no-one seems to obey the official speed limits, instead opting to go with the subjective "safe speed" as per the current weather conditions, traffic flow, visibility etc (just like the article explains).
Is your experience driving in S. Korea that different?
That said, in addition to safety, cars get lower gas mileage at higher speed (above about 50 mPH). Every time I see someone speed, follow too closely, or is careless in lane changing, I think "there goes a selfish a$$hole who doesn't care about the safety of others or the environment." I have never had a speeding ticket, BTW. People who speed and drive carelessly are self centered a$$holes.
.... although the yellow stripe between opposite directions of traffic is something the rest of the world sorely needs.
"The United States' only contribution to the modern world" to paraphrase Jeremy Clarkson.
People focus on whether the speed limit will be respected and not on what the full consequences up.
(Right now I can find a couple studies, but they're mostly from... insurance lobbyists? I feel like the interests are aligned there but lobbyists so...)
The intuitive explanation is to consider that every instance of passing or being passed is an opportunity for a collision, and increasing the number of instances (either by being faster and passing many vehicles, or by being slower and being passed by many vehicles) will inevitably catch up to you the longer you do it.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of well-done research around this. But several factors get in the way of doing the ideal thing (which is usually to put the speed limit either at the design speed of the road segment, or at the 85th percentile of observed traffic speed). The biggest problem is political forces causing a road to have a posted limit significantly lower than its design speed; many people will, unless they're laser-focused on the speedometer, end up driving around the design speed of the road regardless of posted limit, because they'll take their cues from the road (width, length of curves, length of turning and merging lanes, etc.) rather than from infrequently-placed signs.
Germany: 4.3 deaths/100k inhabitants, 6.8 deaths/100k vehicles.
United States: 10.6 deaths/100k inhabitants, 12.9 deaths/100k vehicles.
Germany: 4.9 US: 7.1
I'd say that's a more reasonable measure.
I had this wonderful experience in the south of Portugal, where they had traffic lights that would only go on red if you were speeding, and if you would ignore the red light you would get a fine for it.
I thought it was pretty genius.
Instead, many people seem content to do a bad job modulating their speed with the pedal on hills, and average just under the speed limit instead; or swerve like a maniac across as many lanes as it takes to get ahead a few car lengths. It's really frustrating.
That's the behavior of my wife's cruise control on her truck; we have to set it to account for 8-10mph slop on either side of the set point, depending on the slope of the hill. It's not even an old truck...
That's why it's so bloody dangerous that clueless folks plod along in the left lane obstructing traffic. It's extremely common to see 1/4mi or more of open roadway ahead of knotted up traffic driving the same speed.
The ticket is only a small part of the actual costs.
And even worse, while this combination-punch can be irritating to middle- and upper-class folks, it can be financially devastating to someone living on the edge of sustainability.
But then, somebody has to pay for all those shiny new Police Intercept cruisers, SUVs, tactical body armor, new weapons & training, drones, robots, etc. etc. etc.
I've not read of him routinely buying new cars - quite the contrary. In this case I believe it was a simple disregard for the laws that only applied to "little people." He couldn't be bothered and didn't care.
Related: He routinely parked his Mercedes (the one without a license plate) in a reserved Handicapped parking space.
source: Walter Isaacson's Jobs biography, Sculley's book, and Amelio's book on his time at Apple.
The article implicitly accepts the conventional 85h percentile rule as defining correctness, and it's the single most common rule used to set speed limits in the US. Yes, some are below because of rounding rules, and some are below because of special safety conditions (in California, in general, these allow 5mph downward departures), because of specific legislative exceptions (school zones), or because of state maximums (which mostly affect major highways, not city streets).
And, outside of restricted-access highways, while the 85th percentile rule may be ideal for automotive traffic alone, there's a reasonable case that it's too high for mixed uses. [0]
[0] An example of the argument is here: http://la.streetsblog.org/2016/06/15/legal-obstacles-to-safe...
I used to drive 62 miles round trip to work, worked at home for a bit in between and am now back to about a 30 mile round-trip commute. Both were split equally on surface and freeway roads. Back when the speed limits were lower it was generally expected that most drivers -- during rush hour (assuming one could reach the speeds) -- would drive 50 MPH in a 40 and around 55 in a 50. It always surprised me -- every morning and evening on about a 6-mile stretch of road marked 40 MPH, there wasn't a car driving under 50 (and when that rare driver arrived, he was often tailgated so hard that traffic safety decreased considerably for him). Then, out of the blue, almost every road I took to work was changed to 50 MPH. Surprisingly, people weren't suddenly driving 60 MPH. I'm now on a similar commute as I was years ago, taking that same road, and people are consistently driving between 50 and 55 MPH on it.
I love our 85th percentile rule. It makes sense -- that one driver who's obeying the speed limit is being tail-gated by everyone else, reducing the distance between him and other cars, which increases accident probability and the relative severity of the accident since it will happen at a higher speed due to reduced braking time. When everyone is going about the same speed on the road, cars tend to be more spaced out and the relative difference in speed between the two objects colliding affects the severity of the accident.
There's also a lot of misconceptions about how speed is enforced -- at least in my area -- and what rules exist around speeding. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it used to be that you were legally allowed to exceed the speed limit by 10 MPH on a freeway to overtake a vehicle in the passing lane. I have family who work in traffic patrol for the county and this topic comes up regularly. The department they work in encourages targeting people driving in excess of the speed of traffic, not folks who are keeping up with the speed of the cars around them. Of course, you can be pulled over in this scenario, and you are breaking the law[0], but at least in my area, it's not encouraged. An orderly system is safe, an outlier is unsafe, so they aim for folks who are driving in the left lane on a freeway in low traffic volumes, folks going over 20% of the speed of others and exceeding the speed limit, people jumping solid lines[1] and the huge problem caused by large numbers of people running red lights and failing to yield right-of-way when turning left[2].
[0] Both of them will tell you "If I want to pull you over, I can find a reason". A common one is those plastic covers/dealer advertisements around license plates or things hanging from a rear-view mirror. Some of the plate variations are legal (but there are very specific rules and almost all of them are not -- it's just rarely enforced), but most things hanging from the rear view mirror are obstructions.
[1] There are many places on the freeways in Michigan where the lane markers are solid white and for some reason, people don't understand that it's illegal to change lanes -- that's why they're solid. Aside from safety (they're put in due to increased blind-spots that make lane changes unsafe), they're often located in areas where people are entering the freeway and backups occur. Folks who panic at merging traffic or just don't want to slow down will jump lanes ... causing a worse backup.
[2] I realized this is going to sound uncommon to folks who don't live here, so pardon the long explanation. Easily the most common issue on road-ways in my area is people failing to yield when turning left at an intersection (my cousin/uncle will tell you this, but if you live here you're either already aware of the problem, or you aren't realizing you're doing it). Red light running is also more common here than in most of the country because of the frequency with which people encounter one-way intersections. It's legal, everywhere (except NYC and a probably a few other corner cases), to turn left on red when the road is one-way. Where I live, every road over three lanes (and many under) are engineered using the "Michigan Left" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_left). Often, though becoming less common, the "turnaround" is configured so that you can only turn left onto the same road heading in the opposite direction. Everything's fine when this is the case. However, it's grown popular to position these turnaround lanes in places that coincide with large retail business entrances or moderate traffic side-roads. All bets are off here. Because people are used to turning left on red in these turn-arounds, they assume they can also, legally, go straight into the side-road/business on red. Go ahead and google for signs telling people not to run red lights ... I couldn't find any. We have several of them on Hall Road in Macomb County. People are also used to "just going" when it's green, but you can't do that if the turnaround has traffic entering the road on the other side -- all of that traffic is turning right and has the right-of-way, just like in any other intersection -- left must yield unless they have a green arrow. I've been honked at on more than a few occasions by other drivers for not just plowing into the intersection, or not running the red to enter a side-street when traffic is clear but the light is red. Worse, once they put these hybrid side-street/turnarounds in, it destroys any advantage that the Michigan Left supposedly provides. It's already at a disadvantage since a portion of the traffic now has to pass through an intersection twice, but now the advantage of the "increased flow due to reduced traffic light phases" is overcome by the backups occurring in both turnarounds bleeding into a lane of traffic and the sudden pouring in of new traffic -- which has priority over existing traffic due to right-of-way -- entering in from popular businesses and busier side-streets (and, yes, a vein is popping out in my forehead now).
Do any/many states have lower ages?
Not seeing a person dying in an accident in the last couple of months is not a good enough excuse for me. Even the fact that I know 1 person in my life who died in a car accident means that we should be stricter in law enforcement with speed limits.
What we need is autonomous vehicles, because the sad truth is that a very large portion of the driving population should never have been issued a license in the first place.
Don't even get me started on the 85th percentile thing. That is a poster child for lazy engineering and government.
Do you have a citation for the increase being caused by inattentive drivers? There could be other factors, such as more people driving instead of flying, for instance.
But I do wish everyone would just drive to their abilities rather than some prescribed upper limit. Our laws made sense back when you still found carriages on the road. (Sorry Amish).
As I mentioned in another comment, I would love to see an advanced driver certification available. My main gripe with the common driver is their being unaware of the fundamental shift in car handling above 50mph, countersteering with loss of traction, and tire condition.