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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

> some emergency situation where a higher travel speed is a matter of life and death

Can you describe such a situation?

I can't think of anything other than completely unrealistic action movie scenarios.

California wildfire evacuations, maybe, in very specific edge cases. But even then I very much doubt it would matter much, given how actual videos out of those incidents show relatively low-speed caravans with limited visibility from smoke.

Medical emergencies are not "unrealistic action movie scenarios". If my family member is bleeding and I'm driving them to the ER, I don't and shouldn't have to care about precise speed limits.

If you're in that situation and you've already broken the speed limit so flagrantly multiple times that the courts have installed a speed limiter, that family member may well be safer waiting for the ambulance.

The typical "it's not incrementalism" response.

Is there any correlation between speeding tickets and the probability of getting into an accident at a given speed? If you have to exceed the speed limit by 20 MPH today, better the person who does it all the time than the person who isn't used to it, no?

speed limits, if majority of cases are not about public safety but generators of revenue. if we all started driving the speed limit the number of accidents would not be significantly reduced while many, many cities/counties/… would fully go bankrupt. I have spent more than a decade in state&local courts records management business and can tell you this first-hand. you can cool deals if you just pay the fine and don’t come to court at all and neat stuff like that. speed limits never were and never will be about public safety

This goes in complete opposition to every single study ever performed on this matter. Higher speed very directly translates into higher risk of accidents and higher risk of fatalities or serious injuries per accident. Now, it's true that there are cases of occasional unscrupulous places placing onerous speed limits only to force fines (I've seen places on highways that are normally 100 km/h that have a short portion of 30km/h on flat straight land with no houses around, but with a good place for a police car to stay hidden), but these are the exception and nowhere near the rule.

This is a false dichotomy. You seem to think that the way speeds are enforced, with a focus on revenue generation, means that speed limiting is only for revenue generation. That is just not true. At higher speeds your reaction time, combined with stopping distance increases, mean that you need more warning and space to avoid hazards. Cars pulling out of driveways/side streets/parking lots, cars changing lanes, cars stopping to turn, pedestrians crossing roads, bicycles, etc. all take time and space to respond to. That is why we don’t have home driveways or crosswalks on a freeway. We have 15-25 mph school zones because children can and do behave unpredictably and may dart out into traffic, so a drive will have almost no time or space to respond.

> Is there any correlation between speeding tickets and the probability of getting into an accident at a given speed?

“There is a strong relationship between the number of tickets a person has in a two-year period (2015–16) and the likelihood of a crash outcome (2017–2019). However, the accumulation of tickets is not the best predictor of crash likelihood. A combination of the excess in speed and the accumulation of tickets increases the relative odds of a subsequent crash” [1].

So no, the person who regularly breaks the limit by 20 mph is the textbook person who should not drive their bleeding relative to the hospital but instead wait for an ambulance.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243752...

how long did it take you to find a study from a country known for driving like new zealand to make this crazy claim?! surprising the study is not like from 1950’s :)

> how long did it take you to find a study from a country known for driving like new zealand to make this crazy claim?

About five minutes on Kagi. There is a solid global meta analysis [1], but it’s not as simple to read and doesn’t discriminate by the speeding magnitude. So I opted for the cleaner source as it’s more relevant to the question of people who speed so aggressively and often that a judge might consider putting a governor on their car.

Also: not sure why it’s a crazy to analogise kiwis and Americans. I honestly thought it was common knowledge that folks with lots of speeding tickets tend to crash more frequently than population.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4851372/

The grandparent poster was asking a broader question about automatic enforcement in general, and when it would be appropriate to avoid enforcement.

If your family member is bleeding to the point where this will make a notable difference you should be staying with them, applying direct pressure and a tourniquet, not letting them bleed out in the back of your car while you race to the ER.

I've driven ambulances for a living (as a critical care paramedic). It's not the speed that saves lives. If transport is a factor, it's Opticom that makes a difference (traffic light pre-emption).

To be blunt: in the space of nearly ten thousand patient transports -by ambulance-, fewer than 1%, far fewer than 1% would have a discernible outcome change due to "how fast can I drive to the ER".

Not to mention, you are not going to be a focused driver when your family member is bleeding in the back seat of your car.

And all of this matters very little, because if you've only ever had a couple of "regular" speeding fines, you're not going to have this device on your car stopping you from "saving a life".

Have you seen emergency vehicles in city areas going to an emergency? Unless they are willing to cause more injuries on their way, they can’t just casually speed to your destination. They’re pausing and making sure people notice them or hear their sirens before running the red light or driving in the wrong lane.

Also why are you moving a person with that much blood loss? Shouldn’t you apply pressure to the wound to stop the bleeding and call for help? It’s been years since I had to requalify myself for first aid though.

I thought about specifying the exact degree of increased risk I would actually be willing to accept, but saw that it took up as much space as the rest of my post. Suffice to say, I would still be careful.

If you're driving a bleeding family member to the ER, I'm especially concerned about your ability to drive safely and concentrate on the road. You don't want to turn one emergency into two or three, and your main obstacle on the way to the hospital will probably be traffic, not speed limits. High speed collisions are typically fatal and it's not okay to kill yourself or a pedestrian on the way to the hospital.

This kind of thinking is what gets people killed. Lights and traffic are what keep you from getting to the hospital. So you would be driving too fast to stop in time for lights or cars pulling into the road, while distracted, and hit someone. No wonder they installed a speed limiter on your car. You’re a public menace.

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