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85% Of Car Drivers Break 20mph Speed Limits, Reveals U.K.’s Department For Transport
(www.forbes.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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@figaro @vlad76 Hey, did you guys know that speed limits exist because the faster a car goes, the more likely it is to kill someone?
If you don't go over the the speed limit not only do you not have to pay a fine, you're also less likely to kill someone! It's a win for everyone!
What if I don't drive at all? Why should we accept people like you being infinitely more likely then me to kill someone with a car? Where is the limit? Why can't we just make all speed limits zero?
This, but unironically
It's 100% unironic.
I agree driving is dangerous to society. But I do have issues with the reliance on "enforcement" instead of prevention. You can set the speed limit to whatever you want and you can set the penalties for speeding to be almost as draconian as you want, but drivers are going to drive at whatever speed they are physically allowed to unless there is something that physically prevents them. So therefore trying to moralize about how they are more likely to kill someone, isn't really helping anything. The only thing that can help is not allowing people to drive to begin with.
Nobody cares about your condescending non-solution that ignores human nature and is therefore worthless.
Traffic engineers have to design for the reality of how people actually act, not some theoretical Platonic ideal of how they "should" act.
Edit: that first sentence is harsher in tone than @[email protected] deserved, in retrospect. I'm not going to rewrite it because I still mean what I wrote, but please treat it as being addressed towards people who make that sort of argument in bad faith instead of at Pablo. (Sorry, I guess I've still got some leftover cynicism from Reddit.)
Look, you're not wrong from a moral perspective; it's just that your sentiment isn't useful either.
When roads are designed appropriately, the vast majority of people don't speed and the ones that do are incorrigible. In this, case, trying to shame the latter group to stop speeding is ineffective.
Conversely, when roads are designed inappropriately, the vast majority of people do speed. In this case, successfully shaming a few of them into driving the speed limit only makes the situation worse because having a wide disparity of speeds is even more dangerous than everybody uniformly exceeding the speed limit.
The bottom line is that, from a traffic engineering perspective, trying to shame people into not speeding simply doesn't ever improve the situation. Moreover, bringing it up in a discussion of how to fix speeding is actively unhelpful because it's a distraction that serves to dissuade policymakers from forking out the money for the solutions that do work!
True.
Also true.
No, see, that doesn't follow because not "all" changes are good. Only modifying the geometry of the street is good. Changing the number on the speed limit sign should only ever be done in conjunction with that geometry change, and even then it's just an afterthought.
It's really, really, really important not to give the people in control of the budget any excuse to think that they can cost-cut "fix the geometry" down to "install lower speed limit signs" and still have it count as accomplishing something!
Increase the fines (and scale by income) until they provide sufficient incentive to pay attention and have the tiniest bit of self control. Then the people holding a ticket can beg the engineers to fix the road to remove the need for not being lazy and impatient instead of the people whose kids were just killed.
I got the need...