>I don’t find anything remotely controversial about banning a powered vehicle capable of ~30 km/h from pavements.
30km/h?!
Here in Sweden they forced the company to bring the top speed down to 20km/h for rental scooters.
Of course many have bought their own since the fad started dying down. And those are sometimes capable of illegal speeds up to 40km/h. Impossible for police to tell, and also a waste of time seeing as there are more pressing issues.
>These are perfomance vehicles that are rarely taken out, usually to tracks or shows,
Okay, if this is how it is, then why are they allowed on the road? Obviously I don't have a problem with people driving this in tracks or shows, only in public roads.
Besides, if the speed limit is, at most, 130kph, why do we allow (again, on public roads) machines that go to 250, 300, or above? Or that speed from a stop to that aforementioned speed limit in 5 or 6 seconds? Again, by all means enjoy them on the tracks (still, within reason with more relaxed emission standards).
How's that? Here in Holland there's quite an industry making scooters faster, but the police regularly set up funnels where they test the maximum speed of the scooters they catch. From what I hear some people even install hidden buttons to limit the top speed whenever they're checked (which I suppose is not too difficult to figure out now the police knows).
> Someone who can't handle going 5 km/h under the speed limit shouldn't be trusted to operate a motor vehicle
Neither should someone who can't handle going at 5km/h faster than the speed limit.
It will happen one day that they'll need to and maybe that day it will rain and that will be the day they cause an accident, possibly involving others.
Limits are not there because that's the maximum speed you should be _able_ to drive, they are there for pedestrian safety and to reduce the noise.
> . Enforcement and normalization of slower speeds through a critical mass of slower vehicles could change things.
On the contrary, I hope there will be way faster vehicles, underground, only for those trained to drive them or machine operated.
Everyone else should just ride a bike or walk or catch a bus or a (slow) cab.
The need for speed won't go back, we need to move faster and faster, the more our lives go faster.
p.s. before someone says it, I live in a very expensive neighborhood just to be at walking distance from my office. Even though I love driving and are a semi professional trained pilot, I usually don't drive in the city, unless I have to.
But I can understand why people forced to use a car want to drive them as fast as the limit permits.
I can't imagine this is true. Not many drivers overtly claim to support rules against speeding, but I expect most people would not campaign to remove them because it's not hard to imagine potential problems in their absence.
> I don't recall saying any artificial limit is less safe
Your devil's advocate position was "if you limit the speed for your teen and then need to accelerate to get out of a dangerous situation, what will happen" further clarified as "You should probably start funeral planning anyway if you can’t trust your kid in a vehicle without artificially limiting their speed.".
Had the original limit been 70 mph, I assume you would have said the same thing, as your comment didn't suggest any artificial limit was reasonable.
If you got the same training, does that mean there would be fewer situations where you need to exceed 65 mph on the motorway? Since you asked what could make things safer, it sounds you think additional mandatory training would help.
> should we start including GPS limiters as well just incase your kid thought they knew better?
No clue. That's a far more complicated question which I am ill-informed to answer.
I can make some obvious comments: Exposing the controls for an existing and well-tested speed limiter seems a lot easier than creating an entirely new geofence input system and adding GPS, to say nothing of the more complicated set of failure conditions. The geofence mapper needs to stay up-to-date because road change, so someone has to pay for that service. Most parents who want GPS tracking can already ask their teens to keep their phone on while the car is in use, for viewing aftewards, so the differential safety improvement of a built-in system - if it exists - seems rather low.
But I don't care to defend all conjectural possibilities, only to point out that electronic speed limits for teen drivers is not unreasonable, and already exists for some places, so if it were dangerous we should see that already.
> Traffic laws already limit how you are allowed to use your own car. This just prevents you from breaking the law. Your freedom ends where the freedom of another person to live a safe life begins.
There is a difference between a part in the car to limit how you use your own Car, and a speed limit on the road.
> Speeding cars make it a lot more difficult for other means of transport to share the road. In Europe many urban areas are limited to 30km/h (19mph). This allows sharing the street with bicycles, pedestrians and playing children. Speeding cars (speed limits are often seen as minimum speeds) make this impossible
This is an issue of enforcement, and its not being fixed because the EU is lazy.
Its as easy as installing speed traps and fines that hurt the drivers where it matters, the wallet.
Most people don't respect the strict speed limits in Europe. As long as there's no radar and no heavy traffic around I can guarantee cars will go faster than 50km/h.
> I think it's pretty widely acknowledged that speed limits are not effectively enforced on cars.
No it's not, unless you have some study to back it up because it's not my experience.
(edit: just to be clear, the spirit of this comment is not to dismiss anything that isn't backed by studies, sometimes simple observation of the world around us is enough to reach solid conclusions, but I disagree that speed limits aren't respected and enforced. Could depend on where you live as well.)
> It seems to be mostly about hurting people with expensive cars, so they cannot have fun with them anymore.
Absolutely not. Every car can go well above the speed limits of every European country except Germany's unlimited stretches for obvious reasons. I can perfectly well drive 160km/h to work in a median/average car, it's just not efficient. And enjoying your sports car is something you should really do on a race track. It can be safe to drive fast when it's totally empty, but you don't need a sports car to drive the kinds of speed where you want it to be empty.
This affects everyone roughly equally. Heck, it might even hit the average person worse because they wouldn't take random time off work to drive to and pay entrance and insurance for a race track.
At least for me it's not about spite; I'm a rich person myself. If someone wants to do sports on a public road when it's safe, go ahead, but also clean your fumes back out of the air when you're done please. It just turns out that we can't do attribution to atmospheric gasses, and historically we just conveniently ignored exhausts, so it feels weird to suddenly start requiring that you clean up after yourself.
> Beyond that, if you don't want to get a fine, don't speed.
I got a 100€ fine for speeding on a 130km/h. My crime? I was driving 100km/h instead of the supposed speed limit of 80km/h.
Every day I drive down that section I slow down to 80km/h while everyone else rightfully drives at almost twice the speed at 130km/h or even faster without getting a ticket. I don't think this is safe. It's also not good for me psychologically. It means the rules are stupid and arbitrary and not worth trusting.
> That's like asking why there is a car doing 60mph on the highway when everyone else is doing 75mph.
thankfully in my country being too slow on the highway (lower limit being 80 km/h apparently) will net you a fine. It's people's right to drive whatever van they fancy... as long as this does not have any too much negative influence on society.
Speed cameras are not the go-to tech. Nearly every car on the road has a GPS, either organic to the vehicle or inside the driver's phone. If we wanted to actually enforce speed limits it would be a trivial matter to have google forward the relevant information.
This was done by a few rental car companies many moons ago (circa 2001). Speeding laws don't know how to account for such data. Should someone speeding continuously over many miles be fined more or less than someone who speeds twice, each time only for a short distance? Traffic laws are premised on the systems by which people are caught (cops, traffic cameras etc). They are not adapted to the perfect knowledge that modern tech can provide.
Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular speed while on public roads. Japanese motorcycles are already limited by industry agreement, iirc 300kph (see the Hyabusa fiasco). Merc/BMW cars are limited to 250kph. Those limit could be lowered via a simple software patch.
> We can't enforce that humans drive that way after they're licensed
Wait, isn't that what traffic police are for? Sometimes I wish speed limits were universally removed so that police will be forced to enforce the other 99.99% of traffic laws more strictly.
Is it? I mean maybe it is, I don't know, but I'm guessing you don't really know either. I can imagine that maybe a scooter could be safer than a very bad car. You can get crushed in a car, cars go faster, you've got less situational awareness.
I'm not sure this is one of those things that is just obviously true.
30km/h?!
Here in Sweden they forced the company to bring the top speed down to 20km/h for rental scooters.
Of course many have bought their own since the fad started dying down. And those are sometimes capable of illegal speeds up to 40km/h. Impossible for police to tell, and also a waste of time seeing as there are more pressing issues.
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