4 ms·

Oh yeah? And what if there are no other cars on the highway?

by snicky 6y ago

jay_kyburz 6y ago
Killing yourself is still a cost to society. People have to come out and scrape you off the road, put all your bits in a box and bury you.
- bigwavedave 6y ago
  Hard to collect more taxes if you're dead.
- kube-system 6y ago
  It is also worth noting that 'speeding' has only a very rough correlation with risky driving behavior. A road that meets MUTCD standards is usually guaranteed to have at least 15% of drivers speeding on it by design.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    You got me interested in the subject so I did some searching. This document, while doesn't address speed as a factor of accidents directly, does seems to show that speed cameras do push down Australia's fatality rate on the roads. (I'm Australian) https://www.bitre.gov.au/publications/2010/is_039 https://www.bitre.gov.au/publications/2010/is_039
    - kube-system 6y ago
      Of course, from a physics perspective, lower speeds means less force in an accident. To take an extreme example, if we set a nationwide speed limit at 1 mph (1.6 km/h in kangaroo units) and enforce it completely, we might not have any traffic fatalities. What if at a 5 mph speed limit, one person dies in total across the entire country? Do you say that driving at 1 mph is safe and driving at 5 mph is putting lives at risk? Well, I guess statistically that is the case, but only if you ignore all of the other factors that went into the crash and attribute everything to speed. For most accidents there is more than one factor that contributed to the accident. While speed is a measurable and oft-cited factor in a crash, it is not necessarily the reason that the crash occurred. Example: Someone drives 75 in a 70 zone, stops paying attention, and drives off the road into a wall. Speed and inattention could likely both be cited by forensic examiners as a factor, but the crash may have had the same outcome regardless of the speeding and entirely determined by the inattention. And to the other opposite, there are plenty of scenarios where someone could follow the legal speed limit of a road while operating their car at an unsafe speed. Someone could drive 65 in a 70 zone on an icy road, or past stopped traffic, etc. While they are following the legal speed limit, they are operating at a speed that puts others at risk. Basically, speed limits are an easy to understand approximation of what is usually a good idea for most drivers in most cars under reasonable conditions. Given that, sometimes they are too high and sometimes they are too low. You might find this page interesting: https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/topics/speed-management-for-safety/setting-speed-limits/ https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/topics/speed-managem...
      - MaximumYComb 6y ago
        Higher speed makes all road behaviours riskier. I'm also from the Kangaroo states and while I know of not a single person who likes getting a speed fine I think the vast majority agree that having some speed limits makes things safer. Australia doesn't have the same cultural views as America with regard to freedom. We have high taxes, virtually no guns, heavily enforced traffic policing, etc. On the Wikipedia page for road death per 100000 population Australia is about 5 compared to the US at 12. A large number of Americans seem to be culturally ok with this as long as the government doesn't interfere with their life. Hacker News has an international audience and you often see the different value systems at play in the comments.
        Tainnor 6y ago
        In addition, hackers from the US probably tend to lean more libertarian than the general US population. By contrast, the hacker scene in e.g. Germany, while of course being government-critical, tends to lean more traditionally left
        kube-system 6y ago
        I consider my politics left-leaning and not libertarian. I'm making an engineering argument about risk and blame, not a political argument about freedom. I am not arguing that we shouldn't have speed limits. Speed limits are like democracy. It's a terrible system... except for all of the others. Ideally we'd have a better measure of unsafe movement -- We could much better measure risk if the speed limit was set to an equation based on the difference in momentum vectors between vehicles, the capabilities of the drivers and vehicles involved, the weather conditions, etc... but that has a much larger weakness in that we don't have a way to effectively measure/calculate/communicate those expectations to drivers. I am all in favor of a utilitarian solution to the problem, but I'm under no illusion that it is a rigorous benchmark of risk. The libertarian argument is that we shouldn't penalize risk at all. I am saying we should penalize risk, but that speed limits do a mediocre job of measuring it.
        6y ago
- snicky 6y ago
  I guess we also need some thought police to penalize suicidal thinking too...

Oh yeah? And what if there are no other cars on the highway?

by snicky 6y ago

Oh yeah? And what if there are no other cars on the highway?

Killing yourself is still a cost to society. People have to come out and scrape you off the road, put all your bits in a box and bury you.

bigwavedave 6y ago
Hard to collect more taxes if you're dead.
kube-system 6y ago
It is also worth noting that 'speeding' has only a very rough correlation with risky driving behavior. A road that meets MUTCD standards is usually guaranteed to have at least 15% of drivers speeding on it by design.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  You got me interested in the subject so I did some searching. This document, while doesn't address speed as a factor of accidents directly, does seems to show that speed cameras do push down Australia's fatality rate on the roads. (I'm Australian) https://www.bitre.gov.au/publications/2010/is_039 https://www.bitre.gov.au/publications/2010/is_039
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Of course, from a physics perspective, lower speeds means less force in an accident. To take an extreme example, if we set a nationwide speed limit at 1 mph (1.6 km/h in kangaroo units) and enforce it completely, we might not have any traffic fatalities. What if at a 5 mph speed limit, one person dies in total across the entire country? Do you say that driving at 1 mph is safe and driving at 5 mph is putting lives at risk? Well, I guess statistically that is the case, but only if you ignore all of the other factors that went into the crash and attribute everything to speed. For most accidents there is more than one factor that contributed to the accident. While speed is a measurable and oft-cited factor in a crash, it is not necessarily the reason that the crash occurred. Example: Someone drives 75 in a 70 zone, stops paying attention, and drives off the road into a wall. Speed and inattention could likely both be cited by forensic examiners as a factor, but the crash may have had the same outcome regardless of the speeding and entirely determined by the inattention. And to the other opposite, there are plenty of scenarios where someone could follow the legal speed limit of a road while operating their car at an unsafe speed. Someone could drive 65 in a 70 zone on an icy road, or past stopped traffic, etc. While they are following the legal speed limit, they are operating at a speed that puts others at risk. Basically, speed limits are an easy to understand approximation of what is usually a good idea for most drivers in most cars under reasonable conditions. Given that, sometimes they are too high and sometimes they are too low. You might find this page interesting: https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/topics/speed-management-for-safety/setting-speed-limits/ https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/topics/speed-managem...
    - MaximumYComb 6y ago
      Higher speed makes all road behaviours riskier. I'm also from the Kangaroo states and while I know of not a single person who likes getting a speed fine I think the vast majority agree that having some speed limits makes things safer. Australia doesn't have the same cultural views as America with regard to freedom. We have high taxes, virtually no guns, heavily enforced traffic policing, etc. On the Wikipedia page for road death per 100000 population Australia is about 5 compared to the US at 12. A large number of Americans seem to be culturally ok with this as long as the government doesn't interfere with their life. Hacker News has an international audience and you often see the different value systems at play in the comments.
      - Tainnor 6y ago
        In addition, hackers from the US probably tend to lean more libertarian than the general US population. By contrast, the hacker scene in e.g. Germany, while of course being government-critical, tends to lean more traditionally left
        kube-system 6y ago
        I consider my politics left-leaning and not libertarian. I'm making an engineering argument about risk and blame, not a political argument about freedom. I am not arguing that we shouldn't have speed limits. Speed limits are like democracy. It's a terrible system... except for all of the others. Ideally we'd have a better measure of unsafe movement -- We could much better measure risk if the speed limit was set to an equation based on the difference in momentum vectors between vehicles, the capabilities of the drivers and vehicles involved, the weather conditions, etc... but that has a much larger weakness in that we don't have a way to effectively measure/calculate/communicate those expectations to drivers. I am all in favor of a utilitarian solution to the problem, but I'm under no illusion that it is a rigorous benchmark of risk. The libertarian argument is that we shouldn't penalize risk at all. I am saying we should penalize risk, but that speed limits do a mediocre job of measuring it.
        6y ago
snicky 6y ago
I guess we also need some thought police to penalize suicidal thinking too...