Hacker News Reader

Comment by tallowen | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the idea that I would like to see roads redesigned to make them safer.

I'm not sure why it's an either or though. Redesigning roads can certainly slow people down and make them safer but that often comes at the cost of a large planning process and a lot of money spent. Dyanmic speed limits and speed governors could be much simpler to manage.

I think most proposals for speed governors would make it difficult to go over 10 mph above the speed limit under non emergency operation. I don't think anyone would argue that it's safe to drive 10 mph over the speed limit on a redesigned street so why wouldn't a speed govenor be another tool in the toolkit?

View on HN

Arguably your plan would take longer to implement as you would need standardization across vehicles, implementation into actual cars, extensive testing, adoption by drivers, codification into the law with some enforcement mechanism and implementation on selected locations. It's a cool creative idea but redesigning a junction seems like something more within reach and that can actually prevent crashes in the meantime.

If you want to tackle speeding on highways, income-based fines from speed cameras seem like the way to go. It is more feasible, can be implemented more quickly and easily and is cheaper overall.

So really, it seems like a new expensive tool with questionable relative benefits that would take really long to deliver (not to mention the privacy / freedom concerns its existence would raise) while the existing tools haven't even been used yet.

I agree that we would need testing and trials before it could be rolled out. Many trucks in the US are already implementing these for various reasons. Other countries are already mandating this.

The European Union is introducing mandatory “Intelligent Speed Assist” in 2024 which requires a lot of the technology that you’re referring to.

I think the real obstacle to this is no longer technological but political

Fair, I didn't know about this. They are farther ahead than I knew.

But Intelligent Speed Assistance is way more lenient and it is up to the car maker how stringent they are. It can be as little as a beep which should be very easy to wire into a dashboard that already shows the speed. Indeed, this removes a lot of plausible deniability for speeding and arguably really is helpful to the driver.

Standardizing and implementing a limit, however, would take more time and testing. Mistakes could result in dangerous situations.

> I don't think anyone would argue that it's safe to drive 10 mph over the speed limit on a redesigned street

Speed limits are set for many reasons. In good conditions, such as very light traffic, good visibility, dry road, limited access, reasonable maintenance of vehicle and road, it's not unreasonable for the safe speed to be 20 mph or more over the posted limit, depending on what went into setting the posted limit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com