I also think the laws need to change with changing technology.
Take something like speeding. We have speed limits and fines set based on the idea that cops won't catch most speeders and that cops can give leeway based on the situation (driving 10 mph over the speed limit on an empty straight highway is different than driving 10 mph over the speed limit weaving in heavy traffic).
We set a relatively low max speed and a high penalty, because you are only going to be pulled over a fraction of the time.
Then we roll out speed cameras which can catch people EVERY time they speed. It doesn't make sense to have the limits as low and the fines as high when every single person that goes over the limit can be fined. We have to tune the laws for perfect enforcement.
This is true for a lot of laws... most are designed based on the enforcement capabilities of the time. We need to adjust for technology.
> Then we roll out speed cameras which can catch people EVERY time they speed.
Hikvision, in China, has a comprehensive system for this.[1]
Hikvision has other monitoring tools. Here's their Behavior Analysis Server data sheet. It's a 1U server for monitoring people.[2]
Hikvision Behavior Analysis Server
Based on the latest intelligent algorithm of deep learning, Behavior Analysis Server with a high-density GPU architecture supports the detection of behavior events in the perimeter, street, densely populated areas, indoor and other places, and triggers alarms in a timely manner, which can effectively improve the security of various places.
Behavior Analysis Server can detect the specific behaviors of individuals and groups in the perimeter, street, densely
populated areas, indoor and other places, and provide professional video intelligent analysis applications:
* Perimeter Protection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as line crossing, area intrusion, region entrance/exiting, loitering, parking,
unattended baggage or object removal.
* Trend Analysis -- Real-time detection and alarming of people density, real-time people counting statistics and people counting statistics.
* Street Behavior Detection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as fast moving, physical conflict, people gathering or falling down.
* Indoor Behavior Detection -- Real-time detection and alarming of events such as getting up, key person getting up, climbing, absence or sleep on duty,
abnormal number of people, overstaying, sudden change of sound intensity, regional overstaying, physical conflict,
standing up, sitting, or people counting.
Lol, I think they should be low and stay low and there should be more enforcement
For me, I live in a quiet neighborhood. The residential street outside my apartment has speed limit signs of 20mph. People are trying to walk their dogs and kids. 9 out of 10 cars go 40-50mph. Part of that is road design. The road is new, straight, barrier and speed bump free. Worse, if you try to obey the law and go 20 the person behind you will get road rage and then illegally pass on the left (going into the opposite lane) or pass on the right and swerve around to get to the left turn lane.
That said, a street a block over is 25mph with speed bump and at least 1 of 3 cars races to each bump. And 1 of 20 just flies over the bumps.
This is a street with apartments and condos one one side and a park and elementary school on the other.
There might be some roads that don't need enforcement (somewhere in Nevada) but even in outside of the city, say LA to Vegas or SF to LA there's enough traffic that speeders cause accidents.
There's also a great video I stumbled across yesterday
So if have a car going 70mph and they slam on their breaks to avoid an accident. When they stop they'll have expended 4900 units of kinetic energy. Another car, same weight, going 100mph slams on the breaks. When their car has expended 4900 units of kinetic energy they still have another 5100 units to get rid before their car will stop because 70^2 = 4900, and 100^2 = 10000. In other words, after they've applied as much stopping force as the 70mph car required to come to stop they're still going over 70mph
The point being, speeding issues scale exponentially, not linearly.
American drivers are extremely poor by international standards though - perhaps because of the relative ease of getting a licence, perhaps because of poor enforcement of road traffic laws.
Look at the level of road fatalities [1] in the US - comparable with developing world countries. I vividly remember travelling on the interstate in the US in the 2000s, and seeing a couple of burnt out recent wrecks (most likely fatal) by the highway side every hour or so. That's incredibly shocking to someone from the EU. For contrast, I've driven by the site of a serious accident perhaps twice in my life here in Ireland - which has a road fatality rate 1/4 that of the US.
I think this has more to do with the prevalance of driving among the population. At least compared with India I remember looking into this, and it did.
Being a driver or passenger on a roadway in India is much more risky, but people in India are far less likely to die in this scenario because they spend so much less time in those situations than Americans.
So you're saying that in your neck of the woods 60+% of drivers aren't texting, the average following distance is >0.5 seconds (ideally always, but at a bare minimum when it's icy out), the average speed through a stop sign is under 20mph, people choose to stop when the sun is blinding them instead of hoping for the best, ...?
Suppose drivers are perfect though. Things happen. You can't account for every kid, dog, ... running out in front of you. You don't know when there will be gravel on the road greatly increasing your braking distance. Top speeds of 15-25 are reasonable in a residential area in the sense that anything more greatly increases the chance and severity of pedestrian injury.
> have speed limits and fines set based on the idea that cops won't catch most speeders
I don't think there is any truth to this at all.
> We set a relatively low max speed
We made the mistake of mixing vehicle and pedestrian infrastructure. Our speed choices have way more to do with this than with imagined enforcement outcomes.
> because you are only going to be pulled over a fraction of the time.
Many cites engage in "zero tolerance traffic enforcement" programs. This is where they patrol a single stretch of road and stop every single person who is even 1mph above the limit.
> most are designed based on the enforcement capabilities of the time.
Most are "designed" (a.k.a rapidly created and pushed into existence) in reaction to disasters that occurred and people broadly feel could have been prevented if there was a law curtailing the behavior that led up to the accident.
We didn't make speeding laws based upon "enforcement capabilities" we made them in response to "wasteful deaths."
A lot of your post wreaks of 'citation needed' but I'll choose this one.
>Many cites engage in "zero tolerance traffic enforcement" programs. This is where they patrol a single stretch of road and stop every single person who is even 1mph above the limit.
Searching this all I find is Virginia where over 80 is an automatic reckless driving, but the highest speed limit in the state is actually 70. I've never heard of anyone being pulled over for 1mph over the limit.
"Reeks" (stinks) not "wreaks" (inflicts). And for any linguistic archaeologists of the future, yes, this is evidence that those two words are audibly indistinguishable in American English in this time period.
Yeah, they'll do it. You'll typically see a pair of cops with a speed gun. Then as you pass a curve, bridge, or other obstruction there will be six or more squad cars lined up. Speeders are picked up by radioing ahead. I've seen it in Illinois.
It's called "STEP." The NHTSA encourages states to do it. Several California cities engage in it once a month. Search a little harder before you victoriously declare "citation needed!"
Not sure if speeding is the leading cause of death or just gets the blame. The standard of driving in the US is abysmal and getting worse. US rates of accidents and deaths are much much higher than anywhere in Europe.
In my state, everyone speeds 10-15mph above the posted limits on highways. But the people that cause everyone around them to maneuver aren't the speeders, it is the people driving the posted limits and creating a bottleneck on the highway. And the number of rear end collisions caused by distracted drivers looking at screens instead of paying attention to their driving is the type of driving incident I see most often.
You don't crash into a stationary post or a pedestrian on highways.
If you crash into a stationary post, you were texting. If you crash into a pedestrian, WTF was the pedestrian doing there.
> And the number of rear end collisions caused by distracted drivers looking at screens instead of paying attention to their driving is the type of driving incident I see most often.
Talk to anyone on a motorcycle, especially in states where they're allowed to lane split. Almost everyone is on their phones. Almost all the time.
I personally think if you are at fault because you were on your phone, you should lose your license and the device for a period of time. After that timeout period, you then have to pay for a device to be installed in your car that forces you to place your device in it that prevents it from being used as anything similar to a breathalyzer ignition lockout.
People will not put down their devices with the current no consequence state we find ourselves now.
> The standard of driving in the US is abysmal and getting worse. US rates of accidents and deaths are much much higher than anywhere in Europe.
Rates per capita are much higher in the US, but the average American drives more than the average European so even if American drivers and European drives were equally good drivers we'd expect a higher death rate per capita in the US.
It is generally more useful to look at rates per vehicle per kilometer. By that the US is still higher than most of Europe, but not all. The Czech Republic at 9.8 is higher than the US at 8.3. Second in Europe is Belgium which is about 13% less than the US, followed by Slovenia at 16% less than the US. The rest of Europe ranges from about 30% below US to 64% below US.
> The standard of driving in the US is abysmal and getting worse.
This is honestly the biggest issue. So, so, so many drivers are so utterly shit at driving, and because our infrastructure is completely 100% car-centered, they HAVE to be permitted to drive unless their infractions add up to a degree where it becomes untenable to let them continue. And even then, due to the same pressures, they will probably still be driving because in many places in the States, there is simply no public transit whatsoever. They'll just then be driving without a license, and be subject to an extra fine on top of the fortune they already owe.
I work remotely but make a drive down to my employer for various reasons very regularly, usually once a month or so, and it takes me about three hours, and never, ever am I able to make that trip without seeing dozens and dozens of boneheaded, brain-dead maneuvers out of people. Traffic weaving, left-lane camping, people merging onto highways doing 40 mph, people who don't understand roundabouts, people making illegal U turns, crossing several lanes so as to not miss an exit. The state of driving in the US is an utter disgrace. So many drivers have absolutely no business behind the wheel ever again.
IIUc in a lot of cases, they can now know speeding was a factor because (ironically given this post's topic) the black boxes in the vehicles involved plus nearby surveillance tools the vehicles passed or had an accident in view of give hard evidence someone was speeding.
i.e. "We used to believe lies about how people drive, but thanks to the presence of more concrete evidence we are disproving those false assumptions."
One of the things Alphabet discovered early on in the Waymo experiment that was an eye-opener to the whole industry is that auto accidents were probably underestimate by a factor of three. When they started rolling out vehicles on the road, the best numbers available for accidents-per-mile were insurance reports and NHTSA incident records. Having vehicles with cameras on the road continuously revealed that there were 300% more accidents than those numbers suggested because humans are bumping into each other due to mis-estimates at stoplights all the time, but nobody wants their insurance rates to go up so they just don't report those incidents.
What if ubiquitous mass surveillance is good actually because it forces us to come to grips with realities we'd rather pretend are otherwise?
> IIUc in a lot of cases, they can now know speeding was a factor because (ironically given this post's topic) the black boxes in the vehicles involved plus nearby surveillance tools the vehicles passed or had an accident in view of give hard evidence someone was speeding.
Base rate matters though; for example if literally everyone is speeding because speed limits are too low then every accident will involve someone speeding.
> for example if literally everyone is speeding because speed limits are too low
is that really the case though, or is it people are so self involved that they feel they are too important to have to move that slowly? Just because everyone else is speeding does not automatically mean that faster speed is safe. It could also just be that people are assholes and they do what they want.
IIUC it's mostly that speed limits are set a little conservative relative to average road conditions.
The tongue-in-cheek way it was explained to me once was "the highway isn't 70 because you need that. It's 70 because the trucker driving sleep-deprived in a light rain who doesn't know his left tire is about to blow needs that."
We have always had technology to detect this, it is just a matter if it was on.
A few decades ago the NYS Thruway caused a bit of political controversy because they started issuing speeding tickets if you traveled between two tollbooths faster than would be possible going the speed limit.
> US rates of accidents and deaths are much much higher than anywhere in Europe.
That's actually only true per population. If you measure per miles driven the US does better then Europe (although Europe is large, and numbers vary in different countries).
The US is 7.3 if you use the same dataset as France. The wiki puts in 8.3 because they have updated data for the US, but not for France.
There are also some differences in data methodology US vs European countries, and when checked the rates from a different source (it was a while ago, I'll have to try to dig it up) the US came out better by comparison.
I think the difference had to do with what counted as a KM traveled.
Traffic accidents and deaths are rising because of phones. I think we actually "won" the war on drunk driving, only to have a new more vicious war set upon us.
Collision energy and thus damage increases with the square of speed (or ~speed^4 for head-on) so there is still an interest in controlling speed.
Most drivers (especially those over 35yo) will auto-regulate their speed to the optimal (safety vs throughput) for the road design. The problem is the ones who don't. Speed limits are set lower than this optimal speed, partly to make it easier to stop and charge drivers that can't auto-regulate well. Most of the time you will be ignored for going 5-10mph over. If you are over that, it is seen as deliberate defiance and "you are asking to be pulled over".
Automatic enforcement turns this de facto road law on it's head however.
During the 1970's oil crisis, highway speeds were capped at 55 mph nationwide. It took several decades for this to reverse and only after safety studies showed that differential speeds (those obeying and those going the optimal natural speed for the road) is a significant contributing factor in crashes. Unfortunately, speeds limits are still often below optimal because of an assumption that every driver will always go at least 5mph over the limit (which is incorrect).
On 70 mph interstates away from urban/commuter traffic (where time pressures often affect driving), It's not unusual to see some cars going 5mph below the limit. That is a sign that these Interstate segments have the optimal natural speed.
Every other nation has cell phones so I fail to see how the cell phone argument holds water.
Also the safety of speed for a given environment should include pedestrians. Many advocates for urban areas rightfully push for 25 mph limits for exactly that reason. If you want to successfully convert in town urban roads that are wide and have high speeds to 25mph there are two good options: speed calming measures or speed cameras.
I live in NZ and they introduced laws here where you can be fined and potentially lose your license for using your phone while driving citing it as being dangerous.
It most certainly is not. Plus, I'd imagine this is more for accidents "in town" rather than on straight interstate highways where these cameras are normally set up. Take out alcohol and poor conditions and it's basically a non-issue.
Speeding is dangerous, but almost all traffic engineers say that speed limits don't always match what the safe driving speed is.
I think you are already doing subconciously what i am talking about; you are thinking of speeding, but I doubt you are thinking of someone driving 50 mph in a 45mph zone. That is not the type of speeding that kills, but would be the type that could be caught with perfect enforcement.
> but I doubt you are thinking of someone driving 50 mph in a 45mph zone. That is not the type of speeding that kills
I know you're pulling this up as an example of a small infringement, but there are studies that quantify the fatality rate as a function of velocity. The numbers you picked are right in the steepest part of the increase. Using equation 2.3 from [0] (with conversions from mph to kph), there's a 64% chance of fatality at 45mph, but a 83% chance of fatality at 50mph.
US traffic engineers can't be trusted on anything about safety. If they designed roads to make speeding as easy as possible and to kill as many pedestrians as possible, it would look no different from what they do today.
Speeding/speeds would be reduced if they simply designed roads to be harder to drive above the speed limit on, like being narrower and less straight. They don't do this.
The population is also increasing. If you're not using deaths per mile driven, and instead just the raw absolute number of deaths, your viewpoint is meaningless and just adding FUD into something that should be an extremely easily data-driven topic.
I am not making a blanket statement that all speed limits are too low, just that they are set based on the implicit assumption that enforcement rates are going to be low and that police are going to be using their judgement to determine if someone is driving at an unsafe speed.
They have speed cameras all over Europe too, but the speed limit is often 130 km/h (about 80 mph). Most of the population of the US lives in states where the speed limit is 70 mph or lower.
Obviously this is an oversimplification, Switzerland and Spain are 120 km/h (75 mph), Germany often has no upper limit, a few places are 140 or higher. But in general it seems like most of Europe sets the limit at the speed Americans actually drive.
And int he uk the highest speed limit is 70, and in busy areas it’s usually 60 or 50 on highways from average speed camera enforcement of variable speed limits.
In towns it’s 30 and there’s plenty of cameras, for speed, red lights, bus lanes etc.
I know from experience that raising the speed will immediately raise the speed speedsters are willing to go. When the highway in my country went from 100 to 130km/h, people who drove 120 then started to drive 150.
The UK has the best system for speeding prevention I've seen.
The cameras are established to clock you at position X1 at time Y1. Then the next cameras a handful or more miles down the road clock you at position X2 at time Y2. You get a ticket if (X2 - X1) / (Y2 - Y1) > Limit + e.
You can speed all you'd like between those cameras, but unless you're exiting before the next set, you'll have to pull over and wait the amount of time necessary to bring you back to the speed limit for that area, achieving zero reduction in total trip time.
This would be an improvement for sure. The locals in my town are all familiar with the highway speed cameras now, so they just slam on their brakes before the camera and speed up again after. The is combined with the fact that they put these cameras right at a speed limit change from 65 down to 55. Driving that section of the highway is a cluster fuck.
This also doesn't really touch on the perverse incentives when implementing automated fines. Want to make a stop light intersection safer? Increase the yellow light time. It's been proven to work, over and over and over again. Sometimes we see cities shorten yellow lights, increasing accident risk in an effort to get more revenue.
We know we can better control driver speed through road design. That's been effectively demonstrated through studies. Yet our "solution" to speeding is to make the roads as straight and wide and clear as possible and then give you a fine for using them as they have clearly been designed.
I disagree strongly with your example, which also ruins your point for me. I think you should find a different example than one based in motornormativity, saying some laws are fine to break as long as it's behind a wheel.
I was not saying there is anything special about being behind the wheel that makes it ok to break a law. I used that example because it fits with the 'low enforcement rate but a high penalty to make up for the low enforcement rate' combo.
How about an example like playing poker for money with friends? Illegal in most places where gambling is illegal, but people do it all the time. The laws might make sense if we think casinos are bad for society and want to prevent them, but think occasional gambling amongst friends is fine.
The current laws don't carve out home poker games because there was never a need to; there was no way to enforce the law against small friend groups gambling. If there suddenly became a way, we would need to re-write the laws to permit home games.
Yes, I like those examples better. Speeding and the danger cars impress on society is something many of us want to be handled stricter.
One other example for me could be something like drinking alcohol in a public place. It's never enforced if people are just enjoying a beer quietly during a picnic and bother no one. However if sound equipment mounted in trees could detect the opening of a can and write a ticket, I would feel the law obviously would need to be amended.
If we start pervasive automated enforcement of speed limits everywhere, it is most likely to hit poorer Americans as a regressive tax.
We haven't redesigned our cities to be non-car centric, with good public transportation and street design that favors lower speeds. But we've got a bunch of people running around wanting to severely punish anyone breaking the speed limits (because "fuck cars" means holding individual people responsible for being born in a car-centric society). The result will be that one morning they'll wake up and have to deal with how much they've punitively hurt the working poor in this country. I guess that'll be okay though because that "in this house" rainbow flag in their window means that they care.
The poorest often don't own a car. Yet another way a car-centric society punishes them, as you often need a car to do normal functions. I don't get why car-proponents often push other groups in front of them to argue their case. Also see it all the time with parking. "You can't remove parking, think of HC parking!", "We will actually double the amount of HC parking and make the area more accessible when we remove other on-street parking", "oh".
But not breaking the law when driving is something people are in full control of themselves. I don't buy the premise that it's a regressive tax. Yes, some laws disproportionately hit certain demographics, but not speeding is not one of those.
> I guess that'll be okay though because that "in this house" rainbow flag in their window means that they care
I'm not sure what you mean by that? Are you conflating lgbt stuff into a comment about cars and technological advancements in enforcement, or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
The poorest may not, but the working poor are likely to be highly dependent on some cheap, old vehicle.
> Yes, some laws disproportionately hit certain demographics, but not speeding is not one of those.
WFH software developers are probably going to be hit a lot less than someone who needs to drive from where the cheap rents are to the job site every day.
And that was a comment on performative liberalism.
And the "if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" aphorism applies.
> And the "if the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class" aphorism applies.
This is the kind of thing that's only repeated by slumming upper-class children, the same ones who live in Brooklyn, have leftist podcasts, and think it's actively good when you see someone smoking crack on the subway because it's "cool".
Actual working class people don't like it when other working class people speed near them or commit crimes!
(It's also a very American statement, because in other countries the upper class is not the people with the most money, it's the people with the most tradition and social status. Or they own a lot of land but are cash poor.)
> Actual working class people don't like it when other working class people speed near them
Survey 100 working class Americans and ask if they think another working class American should receive a ticket for driving 65 in a 55 on an Interstate.
I’d be shocked if even 5% of them wanted that outcome.
50 in a 25? Sure. 100 in a 55? Sure. But I doubt they want perfect enforcement, which is the topic being discussed here.
I have no problem with strict enforcement of current speed limits in residential areas. But speed limits on controlled access highways in many states are set ridiculously low. When government officials try to claim that a 65mph limit on a flat, straight freeway is necessary for "safety" it's obvious that they're being disingenuous and this is just a revenue grab. It breeds contempt for the law among the driving public and is ultimately counterproductive.
The emissions and efficiency difference between 55, 60, 65, and 70mph are significant and cannot be understated. It makes such a real difference for air quality that TEXAS (the state that hates regulation and built the monstrosity called the Katy freeway) has a reduced speed limit in some metro areas for air quality reasons.
In fact, the reason most national highways have a speedlimit of 50mph, even out in the boonies in Kansas where everything is flat and straight, is because of the fuel crisis of the 70s.
When I was a child, I was curious why highways were 50mph but the interstates had a speedlimit of 65-70mph, so I went and found out instead of assuming it was a disingenous revenue grab.
Most interstates were generally built after the fuel crisis, and they modified the national speed limit in 1988, setting the speed to 65mph, again for efficiency reasons. It was repealed in 1995. Perhaps 65mph is what was considered safe for the road and vehicular technology at the time, and no one has had the political or municipal capital to do a new study ever since.
You want that speed limit changed, contact your reps, I guess.
You typically don’t want different limits for different vehicles on the same highway. Although where I live trucks have a lower limit than passenger vehicles.
Take something like speeding. We have speed limits and fines set based on the idea that cops won't catch most speeders and that cops can give leeway based on the situation (driving 10 mph over the speed limit on an empty straight highway is different than driving 10 mph over the speed limit weaving in heavy traffic).
We set a relatively low max speed and a high penalty, because you are only going to be pulled over a fraction of the time.
Then we roll out speed cameras which can catch people EVERY time they speed. It doesn't make sense to have the limits as low and the fines as high when every single person that goes over the limit can be fined. We have to tune the laws for perfect enforcement.
This is true for a lot of laws... most are designed based on the enforcement capabilities of the time. We need to adjust for technology.