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The first thought that comes to mind is that this would be a big problem in situations that arguably warrant speeding, such as accelerating out of a dangerous t

The first thought that comes to mind is that this would be a big problem in situations that arguably warrant speeding, such as accelerating out of a dangerous traffic situation, evading pursuers, or transporting a passenger in a life or death emergency.

luplex 3y ago
True, but it might still be worth the tradeoff. I would need to see some estimates of the numbers here
acdha 3y ago
Those happen in movies, but only very, very rarely in real life. Ambulances have flashing lights, sirens, and trained drivers and they still usually stay below the speed limit; Joe Soccer Dad is going to get t-boned trying the same thing on the way to the ER. In the vast majority of cases, the delays on those trips are caused by the other vehicles on the road. Driving aggressively will make that worse because it will cause cascades of other people doing unusual moves which increase the unpredictability and danger of the situation.
- nobodyandproud 3y ago
  > Joe Soccer Dad is going to get t-boned trying the same thing on the way to the ER. Depends on the zone and the speed limit. Going 35 mph in a 20 MPH zone isn’t even noticeable.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    It is if you’re the pedestrian the negligent driver ran over.
    - nobodyandproud 3y ago
      Yes, but the objection is that an average driver cannot go beyond 10 MPH “in practice” without losing control. Which is nonsense. A driver who can control their car in 20 MPH can control it in 35 MPH; it happens all the time. As to your point: I suppose all is well if a pedestrian is hit at 40 mph in a 40 MPH local zone?
      - acdha 3y ago
        The objection isn’t that people can’t drive 35mph but that there are exceedingly few real life situations where people need to go massively over the limit and can do so safely. Those scenarios which most drivers will never be in are being used to justify not having safety precautions which would save thousands of lives annually.
        nobodyandproud 3y ago
        “Joe Soccer Dad is going to get t-boned trying the same thing on the way to the ER.” That is what I’m responding to. That implies pretty clearly that people can’t handle more than +10 mph, which certainly isn’t true.
        acdha 3y ago
        I know, I wrote that. Getting t-boned does not mean that you can’t handle driving faster but rather that road conditions aren’t safe for it: in most places you aren’t averaging that kind of speed for a non-trivial time without running red lights or being in situations where you really don’t have visibility to do so safely – and you end up getting t-boned by someone who _thought_ they could proceed safely because they weren’t expecting cross traffic going that much faster than normal. The point is simply that it’s extreme rare to be in a situation where going that much over the limit is the right choice.
        nobodyandproud 3y ago
        > Getting t-boned does not mean that you can’t handle driving faster but rather that road conditions aren’t safe for it When you get t-boned—your words and scenario—it’s the other driver that lost control. And I will point out that there’s a large leeway in low speeds; the type of vehicle, weight, and tires all contribute and I stand by my original point. The other point you made is unsafe speeds for the given condition. Conditions—like icy or wet roads—is situational and subject to change. Do you govern for all and introduce a very complex system? Only for ideal conditions? Then there’s the question of changing speed limits (over the years) and the software's ability to keep up: Do you require open source software and hardware? Enforce an end-of-life after 10 years? Studies and data.
  - acdha 3y ago
    How many situations are there where there’s a life and death situation hinging on you going 35mph in that 20mph zone, but not the 30mph this law would allow? Now, do the reverse: getting hit at 35mph is far more likely to be fatal, and 99.9999% of the time the driver going it has no reason to do so better than “I like vroom vroom”. We have over 40k dead Americans annually and millions with serious injuries, and speeding is a factor in a large percentage of those.
    - nobodyandproud 3y ago
      Where it’s life or death will be an edgecase but it shouldn’t be ignored. There are other consequences like snarled traffic; if everyone goes near the limit, then the way to merge is to slow down. I’d like to see more studies and actual data. Not simply rely on “common sense”.
      - acdha 3y ago
        Yes, I too would like to see some data. For example, we have decades of studies showing that excessive speed is a significant factor to the point where even very pro-driver groups treat it as a given - here’s the first hit I got just now, for example: https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/winter-2022/05 https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/winter-2022/05 On the other hand, we’re being told that measures which will probably save many lives can’t be allowed because of things people saw in a movie? This thread is has people talking like it’s common to have trees falling across roads too quickly to brake or needing to evade pursuit, but it’s really conspicuous how nobody uses first-person language to describe it actually happening to them.
        nobodyandproud 3y ago
        Nobody is disputing that faster speeds on impact are more deadly. But what thought has been given to automatically restricting the speed of a car? If I cross from a 55 to 25 MPH, is it up to the automaker on whether it gradually slows? Brake checks? Should that mean speed limit zones should also be a gradual change? What happens when the system mistakes a highway for local? Should it be local only? How often is it error prone? Where’s your data for any of that? Poorly thought-out legislation will be worse than what we have now.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Sorry it really depends on the situation, road conditions, etc. Ambulances responding to a call is different than transport to a hospital. And many times the paramedics are treating a patient in the back so it doesn't make sense to drive fast if the injuries are treatable or non-life threatening. Firefighters and cops are typically first responders in accidents and incidents and many times they do need to travel faster than speed limit.
  - nomel 3y ago
    I think it's silly to assume that emergency vehicles would be included.
    - lamontcg 3y ago
      Literally called out in the article that they'd be exempt.
      - Volundr 3y ago
        To be fair, at least I was paywalled from reading the article, so it's highly likely many are stuck working on the headline alone.
        lamontcg 3y ago
        https://archive.is/NYi7U https://archive.is/NYi7U https://archive.ph/NYi7U https://archive.ph/NYi7U https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean/-/releases https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea... https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean/-/releases https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean...
  - acdha 3y ago
    I doubt this law won’t have an exception for emergency response, but my point was that even people with the legal right to speed, solid need, and safety equipment usually don’t end up going that fast because it’s unsafe or impossible due to traffic. Every so often there’s someone racing down a desert highway but even then they aren't going to want to lose it on a curve.
- beanjuiceII 3y ago
  do you not drive much? or not have much life experience? i've driven people in emergency situations many times both during day and night. it seems extremely naive to just paper over ALL the situations that happen on roadways with some ivory tower response. dang tree just fell on my car..couldn't accelerate any faster to make it
  - acdha 3y ago
    How many times have you seen trees falling on the road at all, much less too close to brake? I don’t know who taught you how to drive but in California in the 90s they tended to emphasize that if you couldn’t stop without hitting something, you were going too fast. I’d give long odds on that being better advice far, far more frequently in scenarios like what you describe.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    If a tree literally fell on your car, there was no way you were going to accelerate out from under it. Humans simply don't have the reaction time to do so. Now, if that tree fell in front of you, the slower you're going, the more likely you are able to stop before running into it. Human reaction time to apply brakes is ~half a second. Stopping distance is roughly linear as speed increases. So, 20mph you start braking in ~15 feet. 40mph, 30 feet. 60mph 45 feet. Etc. That's just to react - you still need the time/space to bring the vehicle to a stop or slow enough to swerve around the tree.
    - beanjuiceII 3y ago
      i guess I'll chalk that up as no to my first two questions
      - alistairSH 3y ago
        I made a conscious decision to reduce my driving from ~15k/year to ~3k/year. I'm 47, so plenty of life experience, though life so far has not included regular emergency trips across the county nor speeding out from under falling trees. :shrug:
- sandworm101 3y ago
  It happens every day. Happened to me several times yesterday. Often the google maps / internet version of the speed limit is wildly different than the actual speed limits. I drove for an hour on a highway that google thjngs is 40mph but is actually 65. Have fun being that one car whose computer doesnt understand how to read signs. Also, speed variable highways are common in my area.
  - kspacewalk2 3y ago
    The "it" that you're talking about is different from the "it" discussed in the parent comment.
- beej71 3y ago
  I transported my friend to the hospital when they had stroke symptoms. They got checked by a local medic (it was in a small national monument) who told me to drive to the nearest hospital, about 50 miles away, "fast, but not dangerously, unless the symptoms get worse, then drive REALLY fast." We definitely were more than 10 over, relatively safely. Luckily the symptoms did not get worse. But if my speed had been governed, I'd have made it my mission to destroy the careers of the politicians who passed that horseshit. Sometimes the best, safest thing to do is to speed. We need that capability. Normally I drive the speed limit, much to the dismay of those around me.
jll29 3y ago
Yes, indeed. Not very likely but still... I would like to have an annoying warning sound that prevents me from getting speeding tickets, but I would not like to have technology limit me artificially without the possibility of a "human override", for the reasons you cite.
- acdha 3y ago
  I’ve often wondered how effective it’d be if speeding simply turned off the entertainment system and played an excessive speed warning message instead. You’d accept that in any actual emergency but it’d really put a damper on LARPimg GTA on the way home from work.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    Can the car punch the driver in the kidney when they run a red light too? That would be great - I feel like ignoring stop lights is happening more and more and a bigger risk that simple speeding.
    - acdha 3y ago
      There’s a pretty high overlap between those groups, and I wish they’d be more aggressive at taking away licenses from people who refuse to drive safely. Running a red light twice in a year should suspend your driving privileges for the next year.
chrisco255 3y ago
The first thought that comes to my mind is binding your state's whole traffic grid to a single stupid point of failure. If bound by GPS + some database of speed limits, a single update to the speed limit database could cause traffic to grind to a halt. If bound by road signs with onboard AI, lots of false positive incidents can occur. Would be trivial to paper over road signs as a prank, for example, changing a speed limit sign from 65 to 15 and then slowing interstate traffic to a crawl.
- stefan_ 3y ago
  Yes, and clearly if an asteroid hits the world, we will not have to worry about speed limits at all! We should skip doing the work. As usual, don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. We have scooters that limit their speed in pedestrian zones and drones weighing 35g that will refuse to fly anywhere near airports. Yet cars that know perfectly well where they are can go 100mph in cities. It's not reasonable.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
jbandela1 3y ago
> transporting a passenger in a life or death emergency For a medical emergency, you are better off calling 911. First responders such as EMTs, fire fighters have significant training as well as immediately life saving medications and equipment such as Narcan (to reverse opiate overdoses), Epinephrine (for anaphylactic shock - a life threatening allergic reaction), and defibrillators (for cardiac arrhythmias). Even police officers may have some of these things in their cars now (especially Narcan), and may be trained in such things as first aid and assisting with child birth. In addition, the modern ambulance with paramedics provides much of the same life saving support that you would find in an ER. In addition, the ambulance will know which hospital in the area provides the type of care you need and they can call ahead to have things ready to go - for example, a patient having a stroke needs to go to a stroke center or a patient with a heart attack needs to go to a hospital than potentially has interventional cardiology on staff.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  > For a medical emergency, you are better off calling 911 Not always, no. Sometimes you would lose precious time by doing so. Sometimes they are 45 minutes away. Sometimes the city's resources are overwhelmed. Particularly in mass disasters. In California, for example, what if you are in the path of a wildfire? Nobody is gonna save you before you burn up.
cratermoon 3y ago
I expect HN people to be able to do basic statistics. For that one-in-a-million situation that (allegedly) warrants speeding to safe a life, there are at least a million times that speeding causes death.
303uru 3y ago
So purely fantasy situations then? Meanwhile, children, pedestrians, and cyclists are dying enmasse. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable trade.

luplex 3y ago

True, but it might still be worth the tradeoff. I would need to see some estimates of the numbers here

acdha 3y ago

Those happen in movies, but only very, very rarely in real life. Ambulances have flashing lights, sirens, and trained drivers and they still usually stay below the speed limit; Joe Soccer Dad is going to get t-boned trying the same thing on the way to the ER. In the vast majority of cases, the delays on those trips are caused by the other vehicles on the road. Driving aggressively will make that worse because it will cause cascades of other people doing unusual moves which increase the unpredictability and danger of the situation.

nobodyandproud 3y ago
> Joe Soccer Dad is going to get t-boned trying the same thing on the way to the ER. Depends on the zone and the speed limit. Going 35 mph in a 20 MPH zone isn’t even noticeable.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  It is if you’re the pedestrian the negligent driver ran over.
  - nobodyandproud 3y ago
    Yes, but the objection is that an average driver cannot go beyond 10 MPH “in practice” without losing control. Which is nonsense. A driver who can control their car in 20 MPH can control it in 35 MPH; it happens all the time. As to your point: I suppose all is well if a pedestrian is hit at 40 mph in a 40 MPH local zone?
    - acdha 3y ago
      The objection isn’t that people can’t drive 35mph but that there are exceedingly few real life situations where people need to go massively over the limit and can do so safely. Those scenarios which most drivers will never be in are being used to justify not having safety precautions which would save thousands of lives annually.
      - nobodyandproud 3y ago
        “Joe Soccer Dad is going to get t-boned trying the same thing on the way to the ER.” That is what I’m responding to. That implies pretty clearly that people can’t handle more than +10 mph, which certainly isn’t true.
        acdha 3y ago
        I know, I wrote that. Getting t-boned does not mean that you can’t handle driving faster but rather that road conditions aren’t safe for it: in most places you aren’t averaging that kind of speed for a non-trivial time without running red lights or being in situations where you really don’t have visibility to do so safely – and you end up getting t-boned by someone who _thought_ they could proceed safely because they weren’t expecting cross traffic going that much faster than normal. The point is simply that it’s extreme rare to be in a situation where going that much over the limit is the right choice.
        nobodyandproud 3y ago
        > Getting t-boned does not mean that you can’t handle driving faster but rather that road conditions aren’t safe for it When you get t-boned—your words and scenario—it’s the other driver that lost control. And I will point out that there’s a large leeway in low speeds; the type of vehicle, weight, and tires all contribute and I stand by my original point. The other point you made is unsafe speeds for the given condition. Conditions—like icy or wet roads—is situational and subject to change. Do you govern for all and introduce a very complex system? Only for ideal conditions? Then there’s the question of changing speed limits (over the years) and the software's ability to keep up: Do you require open source software and hardware? Enforce an end-of-life after 10 years? Studies and data.
- acdha 3y ago
  How many situations are there where there’s a life and death situation hinging on you going 35mph in that 20mph zone, but not the 30mph this law would allow? Now, do the reverse: getting hit at 35mph is far more likely to be fatal, and 99.9999% of the time the driver going it has no reason to do so better than “I like vroom vroom”. We have over 40k dead Americans annually and millions with serious injuries, and speeding is a factor in a large percentage of those.
  - nobodyandproud 3y ago
    Where it’s life or death will be an edgecase but it shouldn’t be ignored. There are other consequences like snarled traffic; if everyone goes near the limit, then the way to merge is to slow down. I’d like to see more studies and actual data. Not simply rely on “common sense”.
    - acdha 3y ago
      Yes, I too would like to see some data. For example, we have decades of studies showing that excessive speed is a significant factor to the point where even very pro-driver groups treat it as a given - here’s the first hit I got just now, for example: https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/winter-2022/05 https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/winter-2022/05 On the other hand, we’re being told that measures which will probably save many lives can’t be allowed because of things people saw in a movie? This thread is has people talking like it’s common to have trees falling across roads too quickly to brake or needing to evade pursuit, but it’s really conspicuous how nobody uses first-person language to describe it actually happening to them.
      - nobodyandproud 3y ago
        Nobody is disputing that faster speeds on impact are more deadly. But what thought has been given to automatically restricting the speed of a car? If I cross from a 55 to 25 MPH, is it up to the automaker on whether it gradually slows? Brake checks? Should that mean speed limit zones should also be a gradual change? What happens when the system mistakes a highway for local? Should it be local only? How often is it error prone? Where’s your data for any of that? Poorly thought-out legislation will be worse than what we have now.
chrisco255 3y ago
Sorry it really depends on the situation, road conditions, etc. Ambulances responding to a call is different than transport to a hospital. And many times the paramedics are treating a patient in the back so it doesn't make sense to drive fast if the injuries are treatable or non-life threatening. Firefighters and cops are typically first responders in accidents and incidents and many times they do need to travel faster than speed limit.
- nomel 3y ago
  I think it's silly to assume that emergency vehicles would be included.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    Literally called out in the article that they'd be exempt.
    - Volundr 3y ago
      To be fair, at least I was paywalled from reading the article, so it's highly likely many are stuck working on the headline alone.
      - lamontcg 3y ago
        https://archive.is/NYi7U https://archive.is/NYi7U https://archive.ph/NYi7U https://archive.ph/NYi7U https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean/-/releases https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea... https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean/-/releases https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean...
- acdha 3y ago
  I doubt this law won’t have an exception for emergency response, but my point was that even people with the legal right to speed, solid need, and safety equipment usually don’t end up going that fast because it’s unsafe or impossible due to traffic. Every so often there’s someone racing down a desert highway but even then they aren't going to want to lose it on a curve.
beanjuiceII 3y ago
do you not drive much? or not have much life experience? i've driven people in emergency situations many times both during day and night. it seems extremely naive to just paper over ALL the situations that happen on roadways with some ivory tower response. dang tree just fell on my car..couldn't accelerate any faster to make it
- acdha 3y ago
  How many times have you seen trees falling on the road at all, much less too close to brake? I don’t know who taught you how to drive but in California in the 90s they tended to emphasize that if you couldn’t stop without hitting something, you were going too fast. I’d give long odds on that being better advice far, far more frequently in scenarios like what you describe.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  If a tree literally fell on your car, there was no way you were going to accelerate out from under it. Humans simply don't have the reaction time to do so. Now, if that tree fell in front of you, the slower you're going, the more likely you are able to stop before running into it. Human reaction time to apply brakes is ~half a second. Stopping distance is roughly linear as speed increases. So, 20mph you start braking in ~15 feet. 40mph, 30 feet. 60mph 45 feet. Etc. That's just to react - you still need the time/space to bring the vehicle to a stop or slow enough to swerve around the tree.
  - beanjuiceII 3y ago
    i guess I'll chalk that up as no to my first two questions
    - alistairSH 3y ago
      I made a conscious decision to reduce my driving from ~15k/year to ~3k/year. I'm 47, so plenty of life experience, though life so far has not included regular emergency trips across the county nor speeding out from under falling trees. :shrug:
sandworm101 3y ago
It happens every day. Happened to me several times yesterday. Often the google maps / internet version of the speed limit is wildly different than the actual speed limits. I drove for an hour on a highway that google thjngs is 40mph but is actually 65. Have fun being that one car whose computer doesnt understand how to read signs. Also, speed variable highways are common in my area.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  The "it" that you're talking about is different from the "it" discussed in the parent comment.
beej71 3y ago
I transported my friend to the hospital when they had stroke symptoms. They got checked by a local medic (it was in a small national monument) who told me to drive to the nearest hospital, about 50 miles away, "fast, but not dangerously, unless the symptoms get worse, then drive REALLY fast." We definitely were more than 10 over, relatively safely. Luckily the symptoms did not get worse. But if my speed had been governed, I'd have made it my mission to destroy the careers of the politicians who passed that horseshit. Sometimes the best, safest thing to do is to speed. We need that capability. Normally I drive the speed limit, much to the dismay of those around me.

jll29 3y ago

Yes, indeed. Not very likely but still... I would like to have an annoying warning sound that prevents me from getting speeding tickets, but I would not like to have technology limit me artificially without the possibility of a "human override", for the reasons you cite.

acdha 3y ago
I’ve often wondered how effective it’d be if speeding simply turned off the entertainment system and played an excessive speed warning message instead. You’d accept that in any actual emergency but it’d really put a damper on LARPimg GTA on the way home from work.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Can the car punch the driver in the kidney when they run a red light too? That would be great - I feel like ignoring stop lights is happening more and more and a bigger risk that simple speeding.
  - acdha 3y ago
    There’s a pretty high overlap between those groups, and I wish they’d be more aggressive at taking away licenses from people who refuse to drive safely. Running a red light twice in a year should suspend your driving privileges for the next year.

chrisco255 3y ago

The first thought that comes to my mind is binding your state's whole traffic grid to a single stupid point of failure. If bound by GPS + some database of speed limits, a single update to the speed limit database could cause traffic to grind to a halt. If bound by road signs with onboard AI, lots of false positive incidents can occur. Would be trivial to paper over road signs as a prank, for example, changing a speed limit sign from 65 to 15 and then slowing interstate traffic to a crawl.

stefan_ 3y ago
Yes, and clearly if an asteroid hits the world, we will not have to worry about speed limits at all! We should skip doing the work. As usual, don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. We have scooters that limit their speed in pedestrian zones and drones weighing 35g that will refuse to fly anywhere near airports. Yet cars that know perfectly well where they are can go 100mph in cities. It's not reasonable.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

jbandela1 3y ago

> transporting a passenger in a life or death emergency For a medical emergency, you are better off calling 911. First responders such as EMTs, fire fighters have significant training as well as immediately life saving medications and equipment such as Narcan (to reverse opiate overdoses), Epinephrine (for anaphylactic shock - a life threatening allergic reaction), and defibrillators (for cardiac arrhythmias). Even police officers may have some of these things in their cars now (especially Narcan), and may be trained in such things as first aid and assisting with child birth. In addition, the modern ambulance with paramedics provides much of the same life saving support that you would find in an ER. In addition, the ambulance will know which hospital in the area provides the type of care you need and they can call ahead to have things ready to go - for example, a patient having a stroke needs to go to a stroke center or a patient with a heart attack needs to go to a hospital than potentially has interventional cardiology on staff.

chrisco255 3y ago
> For a medical emergency, you are better off calling 911 Not always, no. Sometimes you would lose precious time by doing so. Sometimes they are 45 minutes away. Sometimes the city's resources are overwhelmed. Particularly in mass disasters. In California, for example, what if you are in the path of a wildfire? Nobody is gonna save you before you burn up.

cratermoon 3y ago

I expect HN people to be able to do basic statistics. For that one-in-a-million situation that (allegedly) warrants speeding to safe a life, there are at least a million times that speeding causes death.

303uru 3y ago

So purely fantasy situations then? Meanwhile, children, pedestrians, and cyclists are dying enmasse. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable trade.