3 ms·

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 nai

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:
lamontcg 3y ago
I'm 52 years old and have driven since I got my license when I was 16. I've never once driven in any emergency situation where I felt I needed to floor it. In any kind of accident situation it is almost always better to brake early and bleed off speed so any accident will have less kinetic energy and not more (a common driver mistake on r/IdiotsInCars is to honk and swerve and not brake). And I've [safely and without accident] driven many vehicles which couldn't accelerate very fast at freeway speeds so trying to speed away from something wasn't much of an option. The situations where I miss more power is when you get stuck behind some idiot truck doing 40 in the next to left lane and have to get around them into much faster moving traffic and need to punch it, which being governed to 80 mph won't impact your ability to do that at all. Inside of cities with good 911 response times it is better to have the ambulance drive to you rather than you attempt to drive to the hospital. They have the training and the flashing lights to let everyone know why they're breaking the law along with being more emotionally detached from the situation. And in some cases people think that the hit and run they were just in constitutes and 'emergency' and they start to chase down the fleeing vehicle like they're the police and they should just not do that and stop putting the rest of the public at risk. Even if you're involved in a road rage incident with someone chasing you, then you still should just fairly calmly drive to the nearest police station or similar place where you can get help, and speeding at 100 mph isn't going to help you at all and just place everyone else at risk. The need to exceed the speed limits is pretty narrow, and likely just rural situations where it makes sense to drive to meet the ambulance. I'll agree that these kinds of laws should apply to cities and towns with good 911 coverage and they need exceptions for rural areas (which also means no speed governors on those long straight roads in texas and wyoming everyone gets concerned about as well).

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:

lamontcg 3y ago

I'm 52 years old and have driven since I got my license when I was 16. I've never once driven in any emergency situation where I felt I needed to floor it. In any kind of accident situation it is almost always better to brake early and bleed off speed so any accident will have less kinetic energy and not more (a common driver mistake on r/IdiotsInCars is to honk and swerve and not brake). And I've [safely and without accident] driven many vehicles which couldn't accelerate very fast at freeway speeds so trying to speed away from something wasn't much of an option. The situations where I miss more power is when you get stuck behind some idiot truck doing 40 in the next to left lane and have to get around them into much faster moving traffic and need to punch it, which being governed to 80 mph won't impact your ability to do that at all. Inside of cities with good 911 response times it is better to have the ambulance drive to you rather than you attempt to drive to the hospital. They have the training and the flashing lights to let everyone know why they're breaking the law along with being more emotionally detached from the situation. And in some cases people think that the hit and run they were just in constitutes and 'emergency' and they start to chase down the fleeing vehicle like they're the police and they should just not do that and stop putting the rest of the public at risk. Even if you're involved in a road rage incident with someone chasing you, then you still should just fairly calmly drive to the nearest police station or similar place where you can get help, and speeding at 100 mph isn't going to help you at all and just place everyone else at risk. The need to exceed the speed limits is pretty narrow, and likely just rural situations where it makes sense to drive to meet the ambulance. I'll agree that these kinds of laws should apply to cities and towns with good 911 coverage and they need exceptions for rural areas (which also means no speed governors on those long straight roads in texas and wyoming everyone gets concerned about as well).