It's not the first solution. It's just a last-ditch effort to try. In other words, it "could well kill you". I'd much rather take the "COULD" route than doing something that will darn sure kill me, i.e. speeding uncontrollably.
This is clearly not the solution, unless it is accompanied by changes to speed limits in North America- which itself introduces a bunch of complexity and negative side-effects.
also - you disagree with the proposed solutions in the article (I do too), but I don't understand why you are disagreeing with the stated problem?
If speeding is contributing to fatalities, changing road designs to discourage speeding is a reasonable response. We don't have to claim that fatal accidents are not related to reckless behavior to make changes to discourage reckless behavior.
I think his idea is that there are times where the safest thing to do is to accelerate out of a dangerous situation on the road. Which is sort of true, but at those speeds most cars tend not to accelerate very quickly so I don't find it particularly convincing.
This is a wonderful idea. A college friend of mine died in a single car accident. They interviewed a DOT officer who said something to effect of "Yeah, people drive way too fast on that street, no one anticipates the sharp corner, I guess nothing can be done." The first step to fixing any problem is acknowledging the problem exists.
Introducing a safety hazard, likely to cause further issues, when vehicles are traveling at speed, with nowhere else to go. Good job on suggesting one way to make things much worse.
If a system of infrastructure is designed to make speeding the natural thing do do, its not 'reckless' for people to do so. The same goes for drunk driving, if the infrastructure makes driving the only real possibility then people will do it much larger number.
So the solution to all of this is infrastructure change. However the solution that are often pushed will never be successful, ad campaigns against drunk driving, education about speeding and so on will never be the answer.
What statistics like that also hide is the people that did not die because they were not there. In the US, there is much less walking and biking because the roads are designed as they are. So of course people don't die often walking, simply because nobody is walking in the first place. And not many people walk because its dangerous.
So basically the US has reduced fatal crashes by simply not making it possible to crash into anybody else by the virtue of nobody else being insane enough to use this infrastructure.
This only makes sense as a solution to the problem "some people are going faster than the little sign says they should". By design, it doesn't make anyone any safer; it makes them less safe. What problem are we trying to solve?
> Traffic fatality rates have dropped dramatically over the past few decades, and much of that can be attributed to safety technology.
Yes that is true but it's not relevant to the idea that an alternate universe with different conditions could be safer than seat belts. If one truly engaged with the thought experiment, you'd have to try to imagine all side effects of the "ludicrous" spike. E.g. drivers no longer tailgate at 70mph -- in fact, they may drive under the speedlimit of 55mph. Instead of whizzing through the neighborhood at 40mph, they drive less than 20mph because any random squirrel running into street would trigger a reaction to hit the brakes which causes the heart to be pierced. Maybe less parents would let their kids have a drivers license at age 16 and instead make them wait until age 18 because of an iron spike pointing at their kids chest would keep them up at night. (That's 2 years less of teen driving fatalities right there.)
There may be all sorts of hard-to-imagine secondary effects that would lead to less deaths than seat belts. That's the idea of truly playing with that thought experiment. It doesn't mean we'd ever realistically implement that idea.
I love ideas that solve social problems with brain dead simple solutions.
Unfortunately it's unlikely this solution will last or spread to other states for two reasons:
a) It takes the control from the authorities and gives it back to the people.
b) Because the states make a lot of money from speeding tickets and it will be a lot harder to give them if there isn't a speed limit.
Can you provide a scenario where to avoid an accident the best choice is to add speed, which would have the effect of worsening the accident if you are wrong?
Limiting acceleration isn't a great solution, but your idea that accelerating cripples avoidance makes even less sense.
Ideally cars would be equipped with speed limiters. Then the problem disappears. Until this happens, there are many other solutions like you only start paying fines until you do over some limit (like 12 per year) of such minor infractions. Let's not take the focus from the main point: there is currently huge problem with reckless drivers causing death of tens of thousands of people per year (in US alone).
This is a fantastic idea. No one should be able to endanger pedestrians and other drivers through reckless speeding, which killed 12,330 people in the US in 2021 alone [0].
In any case, I was just throwing out an idea.
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