> Luckily, there is some logic to the speed people choose other than the need for speed. The speed drivers choose is not based on laws or street signs, but the weather, number of intersections, presence of pedestrians and curves, and all the other information that factors into the principle, as Lt. Megge puts it, that “no one I know who gets into their car wants to crash.”

Rather than speed limits, we need to look at other avenues to reduce pedestrian traffic deaths. Just shooting from the hip, I think that we could do more to communicate to drivers the presence of pedestrians, and to make sure that rural highways and boulevards have shoulders or sidewalks for pedestrians.

A more complete analysis of pedestrian deaths: http://www.popcenter.org/problems/pedestrian_injuries/

Here are some useful factoids:

- Finally, the more one drinks, the higher the risk of being involved in a pedestrian-vehicle crash resulting in a fatality. One study found that out of 176 pedestrian fatalities, 86 of those involved pedestrians who had been drinking, nearly all of whom had BACs of 0.10 percent or more. - In addition, the same study noted that 71 percent of all fatal pedestrian-vehicle crashes in the United States in 2000 occurred in urban areas. - Finally, the majority of pedestrian injuries and fatalities happen to males between the ages of 25 and 44.

This gives us a pretty targeted demographic! Start a "dangers of the road" campaign targeted at pedestrians who are men, aged 25-44, drink at night and who live in rural areas.

> “I don’t want to lie to people,” Lt. Megge tells us. It may make parents feel better if the speed limit on their street is 25 mph instead of 35 mph, but that sign won’t make people drive any slower. Megge prefers speed limits that both allow people to drive at a safe speed legally, and that realistically reflect traffic speeds. People shouldn’t have a false sense of safety around roads, he says.

> If people and politicians do want to reduce road speeds to improve safety, or make cities more pedestrian friendly, Megge says “there are a lot of other things you can do from an engineering standpoint.” Cities can reduce the number of lanes, change the parking situation, create wider bike paths, and so on. It’s more expensive, but unlike changing the number on a sign, it’s effective.

Read the article before commenting, people.

Everyone knows a place cops like to hang out, and slows down accordingly.

Why not enforce speed limits more frequently so people obey them? Why suggest a worse solution (encouraging all drivers to go faster) instead of punishing more people for driving irresponsibly?

It's been a really slow process, but bit by bit we are beginning to recover from the mistake of treating the design of transportation networks as a technical engineering problem rather than a social design problem.

If you want people to drive 25mph, you have to design a 25mph road. You can't treat it like an engineering problem and include a "50% safety buffer", because then you designed a 37.5mph road and that's how fast people will drive.

I would argue they make drivers far less safe, because whilst on such a road, drivers are glued to their speedometers to make sure they're not going over the limit.

Drivers should be concentrating on driving safely. Not on driving at a specific arbitrary speed.

Also I would think the majority of cars have cruise control (the last three cars I owned were all less than £2000 second hand and all had it) - driving at a specific speed is a button press away.

It's mainly done for political reasons or money raising reasons rather than safety. These cameras are usually on motorways which are the safest roads to drive on. It's all just for show, it doesn't actually make us any safer.

I almost never touch the gas pedal once I've reached the speed limit: I just turn on cruise control and focus on the road, rather than my speedometer. Makes me a far safer driver, with the added bonus of also being a law-abiding one.

Cruise control isn't as big a thing in the UK. We have bendy roads and drive manual cars not automatics.

Personally, I use cruise control very often, and the attention freed up by it I typically put toward maintaining lane position and checking my mirrors more often. It keeps the trips engaging and makes me a safer, more consistent driver.

I'm also convinced that traffic flow would be much better if people used cruise control more often. Speed variability seems to cause excessive lane changes as a driver inadvertently slows down and the cars following attempt to pass so that they don't have to slow down too.

I don't know whether or not this is related to the use of cruise control, but I have observed many drivers using their brakes on the highway even when it's clearly not necessary. For example, they'll slow down behind a car before switching lanes instead of anticipating the traffic situation and either letting up on the accelerator before catching up to the vehicle in front of them or adjusting their speed and moving into the adjacent lane to pass.

I'll also say that by and large my experience in the UK is on most motorways traffic is sufficiently busy that cruise control is of relatively little use: there's enough variability in the speed of the traffic in front that you can't actually stay at a constant speed and there's enough traffic that you can't just pull out to overtake.

Firstly, in the UK they aren't 'equal' lanes. They are for overtaking only. Undertaking is illegal. So we don't just change lanes willy-nilly. We change lane to overtake someone, and then change back.

Secondly, only motorways and dual-carriage ways are multi-lane. Most roads are single lane.

The Sidney Harbor Tunnel had a serious problem with oversized trucks getting wedged in the tunnel. Watch a truck drive past two sets of giant flashing overhead warning signs. They stop only when they reach the final sign at the tunnel mouth, a water curtain with a giant STOP sign projected on it.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Cw0QJU8ro [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRKA7m-tbqM

To be nice make it out of crumpling noisy material, not concrete.

Except for the part where it requires significantly more maintenance to fix up the bridge and it's incredibly dangerous for drivers following, whether the truck hard-stops or gets its top sheared off.

You can easily cut a bypass through the curb or chicane.

Advocates of traffic calming measures aren't trying to literally make roads as unsafe as parking lots. What makes parking lots unsafe is the constant threat of someone pulling out in front of you, no one is advocating simulating that.

Think about roundabouts, they force you to slow down because they prevent you from driving directly though an intersection. They are statistically much safer than 4 way stops.

It absolutely does when you measure it against the alternatives instead of the status quo.

The only way you can get an apparent benefit from it is through people overcompensating for danger. People are driving 30MPH, you add some danger, people overcompensate for the danger by driving 25MPH, so the result is as though people were driving 28MPH on the original road. You call this a benefit.

The problem is that it's crazy. You're designing an intentional safety reduction and paying the full cost of it just so that people will overcompensate for it.

What you should be doing is designing a safety improvement that people will undercompensate for. Make the road as safe to drive at 35MPH as it was at 30MPH, but don't make that fact obvious, so that people only drive 2MPH faster even though the road is 5MPH safer. Then people drive 32MPH and the safety level is as though they were driving 27MPH on the original road. Compared to traffic calming you have a safer road and people get where they're going 7MPH faster.

>Make the road as safe to drive at 35MPH as it was at 30MPH, but don't make that fact obvious

What would that even look like? What would you do to increase the safe speed of road? You'd widen the lanes, limit access etc... All of these things are antithetical to making a road safer for non-motorists.

It is decreasing the actual safety of driving at higher speeds. And at lower speeds for that matter. The hope is that people will overcompensate for the danger, so that the safety improvement from driving at lower speed is more than the safety loss from the inherently dangerous design. That is obviously not a desirable trade-off, even when that actually happens.

> What would that even look like? What would you do to increase the safe speed of road? You'd widen the lanes, limit access etc... All of these things are antithetical to making a road safer for non-motorists.

You separate the motorists from the non-motorists. Put sidewalks and bike lanes on the opposite side of each building from the road, so that a building has motorist access on the north and east and non-motorist access on the south and west. Then the building to the north has motorist access on the south and pedestrian access on the north etc.

Build pedestrian tunnels or bridges at busy intersections so that pedestrians and cyclists are never in the road at all.

Houston has a system of underground pedestrian tunnels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_tunnel_system

None of those pedestrians has ever been hit by a car at any speed.

That's not entirely true, with half decent vision I can drive straight onto and off the roundabout again. Certainly in a 30/40mph limit I don't have to slow down particularly. The point of roundabouts isn't to slow people down, it's to keep traffic moving efficiently and safely.

Four way stops are just obviously an awful solution that I've never understood

However, I feel much less safe going through a traficated, small-radius two-lane roundabout than I do going through a traficated intersection (making a turn or not). First of all, you have to find a gap, which is stressful and entirely unnecessary in a normal intersection. Traffic usually mean that just don't get a large enough gap to get in without accelerating hard, which isn't really safe. If you want an exit that is not the first (sometimes also the second), you have to use the inner lane, meaning that you need to find a gap in two lanes, rather than one. It seriously lacks some fair scheduling.

Depending on the roundabout, exiting can only be done by going "LEEROY JEENKIIIINS". Your mirrors point at nothing useful due to the turn of the roundabout, so the lane change back out involves going fast forward to the left, with your neck twisted as far as you can back to the right. Everyone is moving at their own random, highly variable pace, so a quick orientation is immediately invalidated. On a straight road, you can rely almost entirely on your mirrors so your peripheral vision still covers what's ahead of you.

Collisions between cars are likely milder, as the vehicle velocity is limited by the roundabout geometry, but side collisions are awful, and the chance of collision seems much higher, feeling like a game of Russian roulette. I'm normally (over)confident behind the wheel, with no problem driving like an idiot, around other driving like idiots, and have several hundred thousand kilometers of driving experience, but I get uncomfortable and stressed in those roundabouts.

Some two-lane roundabouts have fixed this by drawing the lines so that the lanes spiral out, with the outer lane going to the next exit, and the inner lane going to the one after it. In this way, going around the roundabout is a constant lane change to the left with no one beside you, and an exit is simply keeping your lane. This helps a lot, but is by no means common. Entry still sucks, though

One study of 17 intersections found an 84% reduction in injury accidents. And a 100% reduction in fatal accidents. And every study I've seen is pretty similar in terms of injuries avoided.

Fatal traffic injuries are quite rare over here (175 in 2015, which gives about 1/4th of the fatal injuries in traffic per capita of USA), with most seemingly being bicycles killed in intersections by trucks turning right in the city (We have far more bicycles than cars, and they seem to enjoy ignoring rules while simultaneously going "I HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY AND PRIORITY OVER MOTORISED VEHICLES, SO I SHALL PROCEED BLINDLY").

I might be underestimating the intersection problem as a result of our "gentler" traffic (I don't recall ever actually seeing an intersection incident - I mostly see two-car incidents on the highway, where some idiot is too busy on their phone to see that the car in front is braking).

And that's the real goal here. This is just another avenue of attack for anti-car zealots.

But thanks for dropping by as an example.

This is not an uncommon opinion: https://likewise.am/2016/05/08/why-suburbia-sucks/

Adding some trees and shrubbery between the road and the sidewalk also does a lot. Because sidewalks next to a road visually widen the road. This has the added benefit of making pedestrians feel a lot safer. No-one likes walking 2 meters next to cars driving at near-highway speeds.

This sounds like a recipe to increase accidents, just saying.

One might say the current road design makes roads feel so safe that the actual safety benefits get canceled out by changed behaviour.

I often wonder what the environmental cost of speed bumps is. It is normal to drive huge SUVs. It is normal to slam on the brakes, go over the speed bump, and then hit the gas. There is also an environmental cost for broken parts that need to be replaced and oil that leaks from broken oil pans.

Of course, SUVs are highly profitable for the auto and petroleum industries, heavily represented in lobbyist circles, so it's pretty much a no-go.

[1] https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Small-Busines...

"How to not get re-elected in the USA 101"

Also I like the matter-of-factly / deadpan style.

If you don't want people getting hit by cars, you need to make them visible. Get rid of parallel parking. Get rid of bushes and mailboxes near the road. If there is a sidewalk, put it 10 feet from the road. Get rid of roadside advertising.

With those changes, highway speeds are perfectly safe. People don't pop out from behind opaque objects if there are no opaque objects near the road, and people don't fall into the road if the sidewalk is set back. Drivers have plenty of warning when somebody approaches the road, and there they can pay full attention because the distractions have been removed.

There's a famous saying that goes something like this: "The definition of Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result."

The article is proposing not doing the insane thing and instead doing something that studies show have the actual effect desired.

1. We should expect existing lax enforcement to have a significant effect on speed.

2. Existing lax enforcement has a nonexistent effect compared to the baseline (no enforcement at all).

Even if you established both of these, it still wouldn't be sufficient to make the logical inference that rigorous enforcement would be ineffective for decreasing speeds. It would not be at all surprising that behavior goes unchanged if enforcement rates are below 0.1%. It would be very surprising if enforcement rates closer to 10% had no power to change behavior.

If you added more police then people would stop speeding, but then people stop speeding -- there is no more ticket revenue. Now how are you paying for all the traffic cops?

There's quite a few countries in which people avoid speeding, even when there's no cameras around.

In most of the existing places with a culture of respect for the speed limit, they have a higher speed limit.

I suppose you could find a way to automate it similar to red light cameras but even those have been shown to be rather ineffective at actually lowering the incidence of violations so I'm not sure anything less than the presence of a police vehicle with flashing lights that pulls up behind you would have an effect.

It's also a good way to push people onto alternate roads which may be more dangerous or go through a neighborhood. It's also a good way to get people to completely avoid your roads and make your city or town dry up and blow away along with anybody that your roads connect.

The question is: What's the goal?

The article shows you how to increase safety.

What is your goal in busting speeders?

My goal in busting speeders is to increase safety. I just think the article is poorly reasoned and unconvincing in its claim that raising speed limits is an effective way to do that.

>This is important because, as noted in a U.S. Department of Transportation report, “the potential for being involved in an accident is highest when traveling at speed much lower or much higher than the majority of motorists.”

People may believe it is, but phisics laws are hard to fool. Meanwhile people are well known to not understand risk and probability.

That's actually safer.

until then, it's conjecture, feelings and wishful thinking.

edit: then again urban and highway situations are different, so there's that. but you have truck and slow traffic on the highway anyway thus increasing car limit does increase speed variation in that situation and would be detrimental whether variance or absolute speed are considered

That is if a crash happens. If you compare crash rates and fatality rates on limited access highways where speeds are higher to other types of roads, you'll find that the former is lower on both counts.

> but you have truck and slow traffic on the highway anyway

Trucks do not drive that much slower than cars unless they're going uphill or have a speed limiter. With higher speed limits, slower traffic will most likely speed up to some extent and trucking companies may remove their limiters (or increase the speed where they kick in).

They recently installed a new radar at a local highway, right at the beginning of a speed limit.

Everyone sticks to the speed limit now.

A different section of the highway has "section control". (Cameras at the beginning and end of a section that record license plates and determine average speed). Nobody speeds there either.

With todays technology it is trivial to enforce speed limits everywhere, and people really do stick to the speed limit if they know that there are consequences.

Also, the notion that there is some universal speed limit that makes driving safe on a particular road is silly.

Two scenarios with speed limit of x: 1) sunny day, brand new porsche, new tyres. I'm driving at a sped of x+5 2) windy, snowy day, nissan sunny from the 80s with almost worn out tyres. I'm driving at x-5

Pick the safer one. I doubt anyone would think option 2 is safer, yet 1 is illegal and 2 is perfectly fine.

In cities and suburbs where kids can run into the street in unexpected places - more thought is needed what is the best solution.

I've actually gotten a speeding ticket because I was going 35km/h in a "construction" zone with a temporary 30km/h limit on a freaking Sunday with nobody around. That is also clearly ridiculous.

Has this also resulted in traffic bunching up? That is, long lines of vehicles tailgating each other?

Think of it this way, which changes behavior getting a ticket in 4-6 weeks by mail or having a cop pull you over today. Or worse watching someone get a ticket, or possibly noticing a flash and having no idea what it's from.

The problem, of course, is that there is a better way to reduce side impact collisions -- and red light running in general -- which is to increase the length of the yellow light.

But because doing that actually does reduce the number of people who run a red light, the intersections with red light cameras do the opposite of that, because they need people to run red lights in order to generate revenue and pay for the cameras. And if you compare the results at red light camera intersections with short yellow lights against normal intersections with appropriately timed yellow lights, the cameras are killing people.

I would think that a better strategy would be to increase the delay before turning the next light green, after the last one turned red.

Studies done in Virginia and Texas contradict that assertion. Increasing the yellow phase time decreased the incidence of red light running and the effect was sustained over time.

http://saferstreetsla.org/wp-content/uploads/reports/A%20Com...

Assuming the number of right-angle crashes is proportional to the number of people who run red lights, the reduction due to having a longer yellow light is larger than the reduction due to the RLC. And that's before considering the rear-end collisions, which a red light camera increases but a longer yellow light reduces.

Rear end crashes cost less than right angle crashes. Further this does not mean there was a lower severity of crashes simply fixing doors costs more.

If your point is sure they cause more accidents but that's ok because X then use that argument don't pretend there are zero costs.

PS: Economic arguments are very easy to manipulate based on what you do and do not count. So, yes I also disagree with the study, but that's not the argument I am making.

Rlc issue is that incentive structure is all wrong, which lead to shortened yellows and people doing emergency braking at the slightest hint of light change.

If the case is taken to court, the officer will testify that he observed the vehicle committing a traffic violation (the vehicle appeared to be exceeding the speed limit), the supporting evidence of his assertion (e.g., RADAR tracking history), the fact that he initiated a traffic stop, then identified the driver, etc.

He cannot testify, under oath, that he did these things based on video or pictures that someone else took. The person that did take the video can testify to that effect though.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/ca-macias.pdf

"Here, Officer Berg did not qualify as the appropriate witness and did not have the necessary knowledge of the underlying workings, maintenance, or recordkeeping of the Redflex Traffic System. The foundation for the introduction of photographical evidence and the underlying workings of the Redflex Traffic System was outside the personal knowledge of Officer Berg.

In absence of a proper foundation, the photographic evidence was held inadmissable."

The officer cannot be the accuser and introduce the evidence if he has no expertise in how the evidence was obtained.

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-supreme-court/1669146.html

But according to the article, there is little or no correlation between the posted speed limit and the actual speeds at which people drive. So lowering the speed limit does not actually reduce fatality rates. But it does, as others have commented, creaet a misperception of what the actual expected speeds are on a road, which increases risk.

> Why not enforce speed limits more frequently so people obey them?

Because that would be way too expensive, not just in the increased cost of cops but in the lost time of all the people getting stopped even though they are driving at about the average speed of other drivers on the road--which, as the article notes, is the biggest factor in traffic safety.

The enforcement algorithm that most cops appear to actually use is to go after people who are going significantly faster than average, i.e., who are increasing the variance in speeds and therefore the risk of an accident.

> instead of punishing more people for driving irresponsibly?

This assumes that driving over the posted speed limit must equate to "driving irresponsibly". I strongly disagree with this assumption, and so, I suspect, do many others.

You can automate it for much less than what traditional cop labour costs, and speeding ticket revenue would pay for the automation. If there was more enforcement, people would keep to the speed limits more frequently and there would be less stops. It's a control system with a feedback loop.

They really ramped up automated radar deployment in 2003-2007, I spent 10 minutes trying to find data that would let me see at a glance if accidents went down more than usual starting in 2003 but didn't find anything straightforward.

Anecdotally, most people who speed just slow down at the traps, then accelerate back. I'm not sure that's much safer than going steady at the higher speed.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00430965/document

> This public policy has yielded remarkable road toll statistics. The number of fatalities has diminished by over 40% since 2002, and the authorities are speaking of 12,000 lives saved since the new policy was implemented. The number of injuries avoided is also considerable, even if the fatality figures are those that draw most attention from official decision makers and the media.

--

The "slowing down for camera" behaviour might be less of aproblem, if camera locations are biased towards safety critical places. But it also has a fairly simple technical solution: average speed cameras. These work by timing vehicle sightings between two cameras.

As long as we do it consistently, actually stop people, and do it across the country... which is pretty hard. The are quite a few issues with just extra ticketing because speeding is dangerous.

The worst ideas imo are the automated checks during holidays. So you get caught on a random road, in a place you're never coming back to. You pay the ticket you get a week after the fact, and what changed? You were still speeding during the busy holiday weekend, you'll likely forget about it next year.

Another one is small speeding (5 km/h) fines in residential area. You're constantly changing direction, slowing down and starting again. Would you rather people paid attention to their dashboard to keep the right speed, or actually looked around for people/cars?

As much as people made fun of it, I liked the idea that was used in Poland (maybe still is?) where instead of actual cameras or patrols, a simple plastic shape of a car painted like the police cars was placed near the road. [0] Works great on non local people and sometimes you would get an actual police car behind it to stop people who get used to / ignore that warning.

[0] https://creators-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage...

They might not cause any harm too.

You seem to think that anything that is legal must be "ok". That is certainly not the position I am taking. Lots of things are legal that I do not think are "ok", and some things that are illegal and I think should not be (such as mere possession of drugs), are still not "ok" to me. I would not advise anyone to drive while drunk or high, and if someone does it and manages to not cause harm, they were lucky and shouldn't expect to be so lucky if they try it again. And if their parents or spouses or significant others want to penalize them for doing something so stupid, that's fine with me. I just don't think the law should penalize them unless they actually cause harm.

I think that drunk driving checkpoints are often taken advantage of to work around the 4th amendment, but making it legal to drive drunk unless you harm someone is insane. Drunk driving directly causes around 10k deaths per year in the US.

What if I decide to walk down a crowded sidewalk swinging a sword over my head, under your system is that fine until I actually hit someone? Do you have no legal recourse to stop me?

Is it OK for me to drag race down a residential street at 120mph as long as I don't hit anything?

Lets say the guy next door decides that he's going to build a nuclear reactor. Do you have to wait until your hair starts falling out to stop him?

Clearly there is a limit where a behavior is inherently dangerous enough that we've decided to outlaw the behavior before it causes harm. Does drunk driving not cross that threshold for you? Where is the limit for you personally?

Clearly there is a limit where a behavior is inherently dangerous enough that we've decided to outlaw the behavior before it causes harm.

Clearly in our current system we do this, yes. And clearly it doesn't always work (as we see in the drunk driving numbers). And even in cases where it does "work", I think that's more because of the cost of the dangerous behavior--very few private individuals have enough wealth to be able to build their own personal nuclear reactor, and the ones that do appear to have better things to do with their wealth--than because of legal prohibitions. ("My house has anti-tiger protection." "But there are no tigers within thousands of miles of your house." "See how well my protection works?")

The fundamental problem is that some people have a propensity to do stupid and dangerous things. How do we stop them? Legal prohibitions don't seem to work very well. (If personal nuclear reactors were affordable, do you think making them illegal would really stop all the people who want to build one?) Plus, legal prohibitions preempt other possible methods, and reduce respect for the law, and undermine personal responsibility. So what are they really gaining us?

And fundamentally the only way to stop some people from doing stupid and dangerous things is with force.

Let's say my neighbor sets up steel target in his backyard. Directly behind the target is my kid's swingset.

My neighbor insists that he is such a good shot that he will never miss. He hasn't actually caused any damage yet.

Let's assume my neighbor is an asshole and asking him (and other forms of social pressure won't work).

You've taken the libertarian anti-regulation stance much further than anyone I've ever met. Most libertarians would say that the mere threat of him missing the target causes me harm, just like the threat of swinging a sword around on a crowded sidewalk causes harm.

> Legal prohibitions don't seem to work very well.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. You can't seriously look at the history of regulation over the past century or so and not realize that there are some successes and some failures.

I used to be a hardcore libertarian when I was younger, but I've learned that the world is rarely binary. Dogmatic approaches to governance rarely work, and no regulation is just as bad as a command economy.

The search for a simple set of fundamental governing principles is a search for elegance--the same as trying to design an algorithm with no edge cases and no exceptions. The problem is that I've yet to encounter a system that didn't require edge cases and exceptions.

Yes, that's true. But the law is not the only way to apply such force.

> Most libertarians would say that the mere threat of him missing the target causes me harm

I don't think they would. But I think there are plenty of libertarians who would say that a homeowners association, neighborhood group, etc.--i.e., a private organization, not the government--has the right to tell your hypothetical neighbor that the rules prohibit him doing shooting practice in his back yard. And people who really, really can't live with such restrictions will, under a libertarian system, end up living far away from anyone else, because no one wants to live near them.

> I've yet to encounter a system that didn't require edge cases and exceptions.

I agree with this. But different systems can have very different edge cases and exceptions; and it seems reasonable to me to judge systems based on which ones have edge cases and exceptions that are more manageable.

In our current system, the edge cases and exceptions are instances in which regulations prevent people from doing things which would benefit them but which some rare people can't be trusted to do safely. Such cases are common: for example, to go back to the topic that originated this discussion, lots of people get stopped for speeding that would not have caused an accident had they not been stopped. And the fact that everyone knows such edge cases and exceptions are common means that people have less respect for the law--which spills over into the cases that are not edge cases and exceptions.

In the kind of libertarian system I envision, the edge cases and exceptions are instances in which private preemptive action is not sufficient to stop someone from causing harm. I would expect such edge cases and exceptions to be rare, since most people don't want to cause harm and will respond to reasonable requests to curtail potentially harmful activities. Furthermore, I would expect there to be much more respect for the law in such a system, because everyone understands that the law has a clearly defined boundary: cause harm, get punished.

And every drunk driver who causes a death should be penalized, no question. But penalizing people who have caused no harm undermines people's respect for the law. It also undermines personal responsibility: people figure that if it's legal, it must be ok, instead of exercising their own judgment.

Actually, the very fact you quote should make you doubt the effectiveness of penalizing drunk drivers who have not caused harm. Everyone knows you can lose your license for drunk driving, yet drunk driving still causes 10k deaths per year? What sort of draconian system would it take to actually deter all those drunk drivers if the law is the only tool we have to do it? I don't want to find that out.

What if I decide to walk down a crowded sidewalk swinging a sword over my head, under your system is that fine until I actually hit someone? Do you have no legal recourse to stop me?

Once again, you're conflating "legal" with "ok". Obviously walking down a crowded sidewalk swinging a sword over your head is stupid and carries a huge risk of harm. And everyone around you should be ducking and screaming at you to stop, for goodness' sake, you're going to hurt someone. But no, the law should not punish you unless you actually do hurt someone.

Your underlying fallacy here is that the only way to prevent people from doing something is to make it illegal. That is both too weak and too strong. Too weak, because, as noted above, even severe legal penalties aren't sufficient to deter some people (including, apparently, 10k drunk drivers a year). Too strong, because there are lots of ways to deter people without any legal penalties whatsoever--but that requires us, as individuals, to take responsibility for regulating our own behavior and pointing out obviously stupid and dangerous things that others around us are doing and asking them to stop, and imposing non-legal penalties if they don't. Sorry, you can't come into my house with that sword, it's too dangerous. Sorry, you can't come into my store with that sword, it's too dangerous. Sorry... Pretty soon the idiot will get the idea that nobody is going to interact with him if he persists in swinging his sword around all the time. (Applying similar logic to people who are prone to try driving while drunk is left as an exercise for the reader.)

But let's not argue in vague generalities about using social pressure instead of laws.

A company builds a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan. There is a 10% chance per year that the plant will fail. The failure will catastrophically damage Lake Michigan and the surrounding area. The company decides that it's worth it.

Under your system, a boycott is the only way to stop them?

A lab decides to manufacture biological weapons to sell to dictators. There is no chance of a boycott doing any good because the owner doesn't sell to anyone in the US. There is a 5% chance per year that safety procedures will fail, releasing a virus that will kill an estimated 50 million people in the US.

Under your system, what do we do about it?

These hypothetical situations are extreme, but I'm trying to find out what your limits are. Because I really don't think you've thought this through.

But there are still 10k of them a year. Why, by your logic, don't we tighten up enforcement until there are none of them? What justifies stopping anywhere short of that?

> Under your system, a boycott is the only way to stop them?

How did they manage to build a plant with a 10% per year chance of catastrophic failure? It takes thousands of people to build a nuclear plant. Why would all of them participate in such a thing?

> Under your system, what do we do about it?

Under our current system, what do we do about it? You have described the current world situation: someone could have such a lab right now and we couldn't stop them. So why hasn't it happened?

> I really don't think you've thought this through.

I'm not sure you have either. You are assuming a world in which we have eliminated all penalties against people who have not done actual harm, but nothing else has changed from our current world. That is not at all what I have been assuming. I am trying to contrast what we have now--a system in which the law penalizes people who have done no actual harm, and which has evolved for a long time under that assumption--with what we would have if a system in which the law does not penalize people who have done no actual harm had evolved for a long time under that assumption. In such a world, many, many things would be different from today's world.

As an illustration, I'll redescribe your two scenarios:

A company wants to build a nuclear plant on Lake Michigan. However, when they try to acquire the land, they find the landowners asking what they are going to use the land for, and when they say a nuclear plant, they start getting asked all kinds of hard questions about the risks involved. They can't give satisfactory answers, so the landowners refuse to sell. Similarly, when they try to recruit people to help work on the plant, they find the prospective employees asking the same hard questions, and refusing to work for them when they don't get satisfactory answers.

A lab wants to manufacture biological weapons. However, they are unable to get funding to even start, because there are no dictators or similar insane rulers to sell to. Plus, once the lab's employees find out what the owners are thinking, they all quit.

In short, in our current world, where we allow the law to penalize people preemptively, everyone expects the few people who make the laws to be responsible for stopping people from doing harmful things. So nobody feels individually responsible for doing it. In the world I'm describing, where everyone understands that the law won't step in until actual harm is done, everyone feels individually responsible for stopping people from doing harmful things, which means stepping in preemptively based on their own individual judgment instead of expecting the law to do it.

Would such a world be free of harmful things? Of course not. But neither is our current world. The question is, would the world I'm describing have fewer harmful things happen? Would it have fewer than 10k drunk driving deaths a year? We don't know because we can't run a controlled experiment, but I think it's quite possible that the answer could be yes.

In some cases, the person who might have an adverse impact of a decision is someone other than the person taking it. And sometimes the impact of that decision may be irreversible.

In those kinds of circumstances, we, as a society have to ask whether the externalised risks (i.e. the risk that person A imposes on person B, against their will or knowledge) outweigh the curtailing of rights (i.e. the right to do whatever I like) that a restriction would impose.

While I don't think that laws are the only way to prevent someone from doing something bad, I will leave you with a potential downside to what you're suggesting:

Lets say someone is rich/powerful, would the rules apply the same to them in your scenario? Should they?

Are there any studies that demonstrate that people will not engage in undesired behaviors solely because they're illegal as opposed to what they feel is right due to their upbringing and/or education?

For example, I'll wear a seat belt while riding or driving a vehicle regardless of whether there's a law that makes it a requirement.

That's the principle that underlies our current system, yes. But it's not the only possible principle on which to base a legal system. The alternate principle I am proposing is basically that the point of the law is to make clear exactly what actions cause harm and will cause those perpetrating them to suffer penalties.

> Lets say someone is rich/powerful, would the rules apply the same to them in your scenario?

Sure, why not?

I can take concealed firearms into a public space start firing into the air with no intention of hurting people, and so long as I don't accidentally hurt anyone, the law is powerless to stop me.

No one wants to let me into their store? Ok. I'll just walk down the street and shoot into the air!

While I don't think that anything legal must be "ok" and law is perfect I still don't agree with you and there is serious reasons for that. First of all one can simply be "lucky" with careless driving or just straight defective brakes.

Second I seen how law enforcement changed driver behaviour in my country of origin. Even with extreme amount of corruption it's still forced almost everyone to use seat belts, pass vehicle inspection regularly and avoid breaking the law if there is chance that will end up with loss of their driving license or huge bribe. I totally sure that without proper enforcement that would be never achieved otherwise.

Third is that I seen the difference between driving behaviour in the UK and Asia and while UK system cause a lot of false positives lethality numbers make a big deal. Even if enforcement is not the only measure to calm traffic it's important one. I really can't see how one can justify that 3x-10x more people going die.

Last reason is that I simply not believe that society on it's own can change driver behaviour as effective (if at all) as enforcement. Fines and tickets work because they are market mechanism like fuel and horsepower taxes, paid parking and London's congestion charge, etc.

Also there are plenty of other laws that limit overtaking on sidewalk, illegal parking and many more that only work because there are enforced. Remove them and streets of any country will slowly turn into hell.

UPD: Grammar fixes.

I see a big difference. Driving drunk/high impairs your judgment; it means you are less capable of knowing what a safe speed is (as well as being less able to judge many other factors). So it obviously increases risk.

Violating the speed limit, assuming you are sober, might not increase risk at all, because the driver has more information about the conditions in the particular situation than whoever set the posted speed limit, and therefore is better able to judge what a safe speed is. His judgment might be (and often is, if typical behavior on highways in the US is any indication) that the posted speed limit is too low--that speeds higher than that limit are still safe. I don't see any basis for saying that he must always be wrong and the posted speed limit must always be right.

> I seen how law enforcement changed driver behaviour in my country of origin

I didn't say that law enforcement doesn't change behavior. Of course it does. The question is, at what cost? And is the cost less than the benefit? Could the same (or greater) benefit be achieved at a lower cost by some other method.

Your own description suggests very large costs that you do not appear to be taking into account: you speak of "extreme amount of corruption" and "huge bribe". What cost does your society as a whole bear as a result of these things, compared to a society in which people are held strictly responsible when they cause harm and know they can't bribe their way out of being punished?

This article has an attention-grabbing headline (cop says to increase speeds!), but really it's drawing attention to how there are many factors that go into road usage and laws and there are places where people are starting to take these other factors into account. Sounds like a micro-level revolution in how the executive branch of US government operates.

The NMSL was repealed in 1995 (22 years ago). Most states have raised their interstate highway speed limits from 55 or 65 mph to 70 mph and beyond. Yet, the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled has dropped substantially since 1995.

Therefore, higher speeds do not have a correlation with higher fatality rates.

Actually it's pretty neat how much safer cars in America have gotten since then.

Given the average age of a vehicle on the road is about 10 years give or take, then by 2005, the majority of vehicles had both drivers and passenger side air bags and crumple zones. Traffic speeds have also increased to some extent in the last 10 years as well.

[1] https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

In some situations, but in other situations it seems to be a negative (at least as implemented on my car, a '13 Hyundai Genesis Coupe).

I can see that it's helpful for low-traction situations where it's just protecting the driver from losing control.

But on my car it has a really annoying, and I think dangerous, side effect. You'll note that difference in wheel speed from left to right is what triggers the stability control behavior, and that this delta is proportionately greater for tighter-radius turns, the ultimate example of which is a right turn from a stop sign or driveway. And the effect of it is to severely limit the force applied to the wheels (whether by pulling back the throttle or by applying a brake to the affected wheel).

But that right turn, when I'm trying to merge into traffic on a road with a 60mph speed limit, is exactly where I need the power to accelerate. So I see a break in traffic, turn onto the road, a tire slips on a bit of sand, and then I'm stuck wallowing there with no power, watching my mirrors as a car barrels down on me from behind.

I've learned that I get the best results if I make the first thing I do when I get into the car, to turn off the traction control unless the pavement is wet.

Studies show it's effective. Of course it depends on the car, but I've never found it to be a problem unless I'm driving like I'm at the track.

Also where are you turning right onto a road with a 60mph speed limit with no merging lane?

I agree that it's doing a good job in keeping me from breaking my tires free, which could lead to losing control. But I'm skeptical that enforcing these tactics blindly in all cases (as my car does) is the best overall strategy.

where are you turning right onto a road with a 60mph speed limit with no merging lane?

Specifically, US 290 west of Austin TX. But this seems to be the norm in much of Texas.

It's not optimal strategy in all cases. But driving 100% of the time with electronic stability control (for which traction control is required) on results in an overall safety benefit as opposed to driving with traction control off 100% of the time. Which is why it is a required feature in all new cars.

>Specifically, US 290 west of Austin TX. But this seems to be the norm in much of Texas.

That's crazy. I've seen something like that in very rural areas, but even then the speed limit was only 55.

I also wonder what's going to happen when those sensors get a little screwed up and start to fail. Or when you put different tires on, or make any modifications to the suspension.

I get your meaning, but any difference with ABS isn't going to put you in harm's way (except some really rare cases of deep snow, where the effect of your tires pushing the snow provides extra resistance). All you have to do with ABS is trust it, but even if you don't it'll work out fine.

But in this case, you've got your mind calibrated to how you know your car can accelerate, and the safety of the maneuver is contingent on the car living up to it. But the stability control makes the car say, "no, I'm not going to do it", leaving you hanging out there in danger.

You would have to look at what vehicle safety features were mandated between 2000 and 2010 to really see if any of them played a part in the decline in the fatality rate in the 2005 to 2015 time period.

Also in 2007 about half of all new cars sold were equipped with it.

The NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway safety estimate that stability control could prevent 1/3 of fatal accidents.

If a substantial portion of cars started to be equipped with it around 2005 (they did), it's a likely explanation for a decline in traffic fatalities since then.

I should have looked that up before stating the opposite. My mistake.

> Also in 2007 about half of all new cars sold were equipped with it.

I've read that the average vehicle age is about 10 years. That means that only now are we getting to the point where the vast majority of vehicles would be equipped with electronic stability control. Looking at the FARS page I cited earlier, the decline in fatality rate is pretty clear, but how prevalent ESP was and how much it changed in that time period is not as clear (at least I don't have the data for it).

So by 2012 we have a minimum of 17% of cars with electronic stability control (probably much higher given that by 2010 75% of cars sold were mandated to include it). If cars with electronic stability control are really involved in 1/3 few accidents, then we'd expect a very sizeable decrease in vehicle fatalities due to electronic stability control alone by 2012 and probably much earlier.

Personally, I prefer to see police enforce more meaningful laws and investigate crimes where there are actual victims involved.

The article addresses this. the posted speed limit doesn't affect how fast people drive (slow or fast). They drive as fast as is comfortable regardless.

Posting a higher speed limit doesn't make people drive faster. But it does give a clearer warning to pedestrians and parents as to what the probably speed of drivers is, so they can take the appropriate cautions.

> it argues we have no control over speeding. And then it suggests places that ticket aggressively are behaving irresponsibly, to the point of villafying a town in Missouri for enforcing its speeding laws.

He doesn't argue that we have no control. Only that posted speed limits aren't effective as a control measure. The point of discussing the towns that use traffic violations as a revenue source is that, if posted speed limits aren't effective at creating safer drivers, then the only reason to use super low speed limits is to generate revenue which is a conflict of interest and counter productive for the reasons stated above.

This is the same logic that failed in the "War on Drugs". First off, there's a false dichotomy between proscribing a behavior and encouraging it. And strict enforcement of a "crime" that it turns out lots of people commit on a regular basis doesn't really work so well.

Off the top of my head: Many of the drugs in question are responsible for far fewer deaths than cars are, and so it's not obvious why the penalty fits the crime and there's a strong argument for outright legalization. Many of the drugs are physically addictive and not merely something people want to do with full free will; many people arrested would be happy to stop doing drugs if they got treatment instead. The war involved foreign policy and foreign military activity, whereas nobody is suggesting that we bomb Toyota if they refuse to make slower cars. The war has been waged particularly aggressively among historically-oppressed races and classes (cf. The New Jim Crow), whereas no directly analogous danger exists from enforcing low speed limits.

Just compare the streets of Tokyo to that of San Francisco and tell me it is not working!

Also, compare driver (and pedestrian) behaviour in Japan. In urban areas, both largely follows the rules and it is safer.

(Strict liability for drivers may also be a part of it...)

Place speed camera every 100 meters and red camera at every cross (without cheating the yellow, which is a separate problem) and watch dead rate drop.

People are notoriously bad at assesting danger and probability. Them driving faster doesn't make the faster speed always reasonable.

Ticket them and make money for the municipality. Don't engineer new solutions that cost tax payers money and make rodes less safe for people not in cars.

* Camera installation is usually accompanied by shortening the yellow light period to increase revenue, which leads to more accidents.

* Most red light camera tickets are for rolling right turns on red. Such a violation rarely leads to accidents. These tickets are more for revenue than safety.

Did you read the article?

The problem is that the speed limit doesn't correlate with accidents. The speed variance (or spread) however does correlate with accidents.

So, what the article says, very politely, is that the schmucks who regard the speed limit as an actual limit cause more accidents than the people driving at the consensus average.

And, just so you know, most people don't object to red light cameras for public safety. There are dangerous intersections where a red light camera would be quite appropriate.

However, much like speed limits, red light cameras seem to grow on revenue producing intersections with low fatality rates but a mis-engineered light sequence while somehow missing intersections which actually are low-volume but very dangerous.

Traffic citations should have the ultimate goal to increase the level of safety on roadways. Revenue should play no part in it.

A better proposal would be to remove all fines and court costs associated with a traffic citation and change the penalty to only be demerit points on the offender's drivers license. If they accumulate enough points, then their license is suspended. If they're caught driving on a suspended license, they're arrested and go to jail pending a hearing.

That is a bad idea, because then the traffic arrangements will drift to be optimized for revenue generation, not safety nor fluent traffic.

That's not what the article is saying. The best way to put it is to say that "people are going to run red lights anyway, so make the yellow light longer so that less people will run red lights".

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/exclusive-spee...

I have to say, this article simply is not rigorous.

I've seen it argued that shoulders/sidewalks actually make roads more dangerous, because drivers drive faster when they're present.

> This gives us a pretty targeted demographic! Start a "dangers of the road" campaign targeted at pedestrians who are men, aged 25-44, drink at night and who live in rural areas.

Isn't that classic victim-blaming? Getting pedestrians off the road would reduce pedestrian deaths, but it's the wrong way to solve it as a matter of principle.

Sounds plausible, I'd love to know the context. Got a link?

As for the victim-blaming... Teaching safety isn't something that should be controversial. If it's victim-blaming to teach our children to look both ways before crossing the street, then I'm ready to throw American culture into the garbage.

That "American culture" is actually a by-product of the automotive industry. In the early 1900s the automobile manufacturers managed to turn around the image of cars being child killing machines, which they were, into it being the fault of the kids.

Drive down that cul-de-sac at the speed limit and if you run over a kid, the kid wasn't looking properly, you're not at fault! How could you be when the child wasn't looking?

The driver should almost always be responsible for hitting something. In North America the sad truth is killing someone with a car by "accident" is actually less of an inconvenience than getting a root canal. You pay a small fine, you go on with life as if it never happened.

This comes off as incredibly flippant. Is this something you've personally experienced? Would you elaborate on what you mean by a small fine? Going on with life as if it never happened? I fortunately have not been through anything like this, but I've never come across anyone who considers vehicular manslaughter insignificant.

Driver ran down a mother of three children on the sidewalk, killing her. The punishment for the driver? "Ms. Taylor was fined $1,000 and given six months of probation and six months of varying driving restrictions."

A good thing the driver wasn't downloading an illegal song while driving or they'd face ten years in jail!

There was a day last year here where eighteen(!) pedestrians were hit by bad drivers: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/10/21/10-pedestrians-w...

Eighteen people. One twenty-four hour period.

It was absoultely astounding, yet sadly all too typical. Drivers don't care, and why should they? What's the worst that could happen? A six month partial suspension?

IDK, this seems like it's more an issue with Canada's justice system. Canada is more humane than the US is, and that means forgiveness. The article mentioned that the driver broke down crying in court. Does it seem to you like the driver DGAF about her actions?

There is a good points in the article you posted:

> Long-term data from the city show that drivers are responsible in the majority of pedestrian deaths. In spite of this, public-safety campaigns have tended to focus more on pedestrian behaviour. On Monday – coincidentally, at the same time as Ms. Taylor’s case was being heard – the police released a video urging those who walk to be more careful.

Yeah. With the stats from the USA that I posted, it seemed like it was drunk people that were putting themselves in danger. They share some responsibility. But if pedestrians don't have any behavior changes they can do to get better outcomes then of course, we should target drivers and re-engineer roads.

Not really. It's just that the judges don't need to look "tough" to get re-elected. They're all appointed and can just go about doing their job.

I'm just exposed to local news more than other cities, but across North America the punishment for bad driving is astonishingly weak.

Most of the American stories I hear relayed to me are from cyclists who cannot believe the complete indifference police have to their plight. You got run down on the road and the driver fled the scene? Yeah, well, you had it coming and be thankful you're not dead. It doesn't even get reported because the police won't bother.

http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/inga_saffron/If-you-...

>How many of this year’s 63 fatalities will result in criminal charges? The four November deaths, some of the most horrific of 2016, are all still under investigation, according to police. But if history proves any guide, only in those cases in which the motorists committed other crimes, such as driving drunk or fleeing the scene, will police hold drivers accountable.

>although statistics are hard to come by, every transportation official I spoke with cited anecdotal evidence suggesting that the odds of drivers' avoiding repercussions in fatal car crashes far outweighed the likelihood of criminal charges.

>“If the driver isn’t drunk, it just gets declared a terrible accident,” says Andrew Stober, who helped oversee Mayor Michael Nutter’s transportation office. Even when the driver is found to have been speeding, there are often no charges, adds Kate Fillin-Yeh, who runs the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/you-can-kill-anyone-you-w...

>According to a recent report by the League of American Bicyclists, barely one in five drivers who end bicyclists’ lives are charged with a crime. The low prosecution rate isn’t a secret and has inspired many to wonder whether plowing into a cyclist with a car is a low-risk way to commit homicide.

>Nationwide, incidents like Cann’s often result in misdemeanor charges, tickets, or nothing. Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault. Last year in New York City, the bike-advocacy organization Time’s Up pushed for changes in police investigations of bicyclist deaths by painting chalk-body outlines on streets, marked with words familiar from NYPD reports: “No Criminality Suspected.”

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jay...

>This time, the driver of a Jaguar traveling down 42nd Street in Manhattan struck another car and lost control, flipping onto the sidewalk and striking several pedestrians. Amazingly, given that this is one of the most crowded parts of town, no one was killed. Less amazingly, given the New York Police Department’s general approach toward car-pedestrian or car-bicycle crashes, the driver will apparently not face any criminal charges.

>Despite remarkable recent gains in pedestrian safety – thanks in part to design changes aimed at slowing down drivers – cars still jump the curb nearly every day. Drivers who kill or maim pedestrians with their vehicles are still only rarely treated as criminals in New York, as long as they are not drunk and do not flee the scene. Even that is sometimes not enough to merit serious charges.

>Twenty years ago, an out-of-control driver plowed through New York’s Washington Square Park, killing 5 people and injuring 27 others. That horrific incident caused a public outcry and galvanized advocates in what has become known as the livable streets movement. But the driver, a 74-year-old woman, was not charged with any crime.

http://startribune.com/in-crashes-that-kill-pedestrians-the-...

>Carol Wiggins crossed Territorial Road every day at the crosswalk on her way home from work in Watertown. But the driver of the car that hit her one evening said he didn’t see her until it was too late.

>Wiggins never recovered from the traumatic brain injury from the 2011 crash, dying weeks later in a Minneapolis hospital. The driver never faced any charges — not even a traffic citation.

>The decision not to cite the driver who struck Wiggins isn’t unusual. The majority of drivers who killed pedestrians between 2010 and 2014 were not charged, according to Star Tribune analysis of metro area crash data. Those who were charged often faced misdemeanors — from speeding to careless driving — with minimal penalties, unless the driver knowingly fled or was intoxicated at the time of the crash.

>Charles Roger Lord died after being struck by a van while checking out a Nice Ride bike on a north Minneapolis sidewalk in 2014. The van “reportedly driving at a high rate of speed” jumped the curb, hit him and dragged his body across a vacant lot before crashing into a building, according to a police report.

>The driver fled, but was later arrested. He said he did not know he had hit someone before fleeing and blamed the crash on problems with the van’s steering. He was never charged.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/recreational-cycling/why-do-d...

>Despite the cyclist having clear, unambiguous footage of the incident, the CPS decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute. The reason, apparently, is that it was a hire car and so they couldn’t say for sure who was driving. Nottinghamshire police say the man and woman who were eligible to drive the car both ignored a legal request to provide driver details despite being summonsed to court. The man got six penalty points and a £150 fine for failing to provide details and no action was taken over the hit and run.

I found it really hard to find cases of people actually being convicted because most articles mentioning a fatality and an aggressor never yielded much in terms of court records. It's like they just shrug and move on. It's the worst.

Yes, sometimes, some other vehicle will swerve and force you off the road. That seems to be the exception, not the common case.

Very rarely, a mechanical fault will cause an accident. But, even those are generally do to lack of maintenance. Personal example - I was almost hit by a detached car wheel/tire a few months ago while riding my bicycle on a bike trail. The car was an old beater. No muffler, rusty, etc.

Current laws don't do much, but an incident like that should be a minimum automatic five year suspension with mandatory re-testing.

Click on the last link and watch the video. It's a video that can only be described as a brutal and unprovoked attack with a deadly weapon, caught on camera. The author described it as "attempted murder." If someone was caught on camera beating someone else with any other weapon (nightstick, bat, hammer) police would be a lot more interested in following up and making sure the attacker doesn't attack again.

I think the big problem is there is rarely any sort of investigation unless it's really, really egregious. You just say "whoops" and maybe get a ticket for speeding or failure to keep right or running a stop sign and that's the end of it.

The fact this comment actually exists shows the problem.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

Rather than actually changing anything, suggest education.

(A phrase, I might add, is the single most useless one in the english language? It's a thought-terminating cliche.)

If you're dead or severely injured, what does it matter if it was not legally your fault? I pay attention to other cars regardless of whether I have the right-of-way or not. This has saved me from accidents. I don't care to be "dead" right.

I don't understand pedestrians and bikers who wander carelessly into traffic, presuming that having the right-of-way is some magic shield against getting run over.

I step into the road when I have a right - while being careful, but still taking a risk that isn't strictly necessary - because it is my right and I care about that.

I don't leave valuables in plain sight in my car when I leave it, and I lock the door on my dwelling. I don't go around flashing wads of cash.

This is not victim blaming, as flashing cash does not reduce the culpability of the robber in the slightest. I just don't care to be a target. And that's my choice.

It depends on a lot of factors. The presence of a separated sidewalk might imply a hard separation between vehicular and pedestrian traffic which can increase speeds. Deliberately blurring those boundaries, as is often done in small European cities, makes the road more ambiguous and this leads to slower, more cautious drivers.

Confidence equals speed. Long, straight, wide roads with ample room for stopping encourage people to drive faster. Narrow, winding, difficult to navigate roads are naturally approached with more caution. The trend has been to straighten out and widen narrow roads, to eliminate any impediments to "traffic flow", which often makes for roads over-engineered for their intended speeds.

The presence of a sidewalk doesn't make people drive faster, but the philosophy of separation of traffic flows that leads to sidewalks being used does.

Think you may be mixing up two words

> In addition, the same study noted that 71 percent of all fatal pedestrian-vehicle crashes in the United States in 2000 occurred in __urban__ areas

The problem is that enforcement of such a rule is impractical in most situations. If you're going 35Mph in what was once posted as a 25Mph zone, and it was posted as 25Mph because there's a school zone in two blocks, even if there's a strong argument that 25Mph is the objectively safest limit, you'll then have to prove that the driver knew there was a school in two blocks. Then the driver could argue school was out. Etc, etc, etc.

There's a tension between administrative efficiency regarding enforcement and fairness to the accused. This tension is made greater the larger the community. In a tiny community everybody can trust the sheriff to make a judgment call, and the ticketed person not to contest the issue. As the community becomes more diverse and less personally connected, and the environment more complex, you need to rely on strict, clearly articulated rules that minimize discretion.

There's another axis we're dealing with here, too. Do we emphasize overall outcomes, or do we emphasize individual justice (for victims, for offenders)? If you emphasize overall outcomes then we focus on prevention and social measures. If you emphasize individual justice you want to make it easier to punish offenders, as well as make the rules clear so that everybody knows precisely how to avoid offending.

I tend to emphasize more on overall outcomes. I think most people do, at least in the abstract. But the moment a kid or a biker is run over many people switch into individual justice mode, and that's how elections play out.

The roads there are twisty, with dry stone walls either side, mostly. Except for the mountain roads that are spectacular.

Then there's the TT, when bikers from all over the world come there to race, and about a dozen or so die each year. Apart from that, though, road fatalities are not exceptional.

Driving there is great, because you don't have the constant worry of "am I going over the limit?" or "what is the limit here?". You stop worrying about the number, or checking your speedo, and concentrate on driving safely on the road. How fast or slow you're going becomes irrelevant, it's all about how you drive on the road you're given.

The speed limit is as much a target as a limit. If the limit is 60 then there's a feeling that "well, they know their business, it must be safe to drive at 60 here". What is authorised becomes advised. No-one can blame you if you lose control due to speed, because you were driving under the speed limit so it must have been OK.

With no limits, it becomes your responsibility to decide what's safe. And yes, there are people who think they can drive safely much faster than they actually can. But they they tend to head for the mountain roads where's less traffic to get in their way. There's also less macho bullshit around it because there's no "rebel cred" in driving over the limit when there is no limit.

Conversely, driving slowly in town is accepted, because it's clearly done for good reasons. Speeding in town isn't socially acceptable (if you want to go fast, head to the mountain and do your worst). People drive more safely, and more courteously because they have responsibility.

It's a great system. I wish we adopted it here in Australia.

Why do you even need cars there? Everything is within cycling distance.

Nowadays, I ignore any speed limits. I'm frequently speeding when it's safe, and I'm very frequently going slow enough to people flash lights or honk at me - no crashes since that.

I of course recognise I was at fault and don't blame the speed limit - I should've known to adjust my driving regardless of the limit. However this way of thinking isn't uncommon and while the speed limit isn't at fault, it had its part in causing the crash.

It would be unreasonable (& annoying) to have different speed limits for every different corner/stretch of road. There's also considerations such as the weather & lighting conditions to take into account (& while I have seen signs on motorways for variable speed limits based on those in Europe, you cannot expect every case to be covered).

The problem of speed limit overuse (recognized even by our officials) is a lot smaller in western Europe, if you got your experience from their roads.

I seriously doubt this. It's a speed 'limit' not a speed 'target'. I can't fathom how you could think 'sign says x, I'm sure if I go that speed I can get around this sharp turn safely'. How strict were the driving tests where you learned?

Please be aware that the rather strict driving test in the Netherlands means that you are trained for at least 40 odd hours, or let's call it 60 hours on average, to drive at the speed target. Going too slow means you're unable to handle the traffic, and going too fast is illegal, so this strictness can instruct people to drive at the speed target.

Yes, I did name them targets, because that's what they're used for. It looks like a target, it acts like a target, it's called a target. Legally, they're limits, but I don't think you'll ever see many people driving at the limit. Always at least 1 or 2 km/h faster.

Same experience with the speed target/limit in the Czech republic.

In many European countries, there actually is a speed limit before almost every sharp turn that's in or near a bigger city, and thus people begin to think like this.

Not only there are speed limits before sharp turns, but unnecessary small limits in regular turns or on straight motorways, which makes people go over the limit even when the limit makes sense.

Public transport is good, though.

1. How not to do it IMO: Road next to me had a limit of 60 because of "road works", there even was a road works sign standing there. Everyone knew it was safe to drive 80.

One day I was driving suddenly after months of inactivity a worker comes walking out into the road while I come driving. The sun was low and I just saw his legs moving and managed to brake and steer away.

If I had crashed it would have been my fault - and I would have deserved jail and losing my license. But I totally wouldn't say road authorities would have been without blame:

Designing a 80 zone, then training everyone to think the road works sign is just a forgotten artifact is really really not a good idea if you intend to suddenly send your people out there in low light.

2. How it should be done IMO: Next to a school that I sometimes drive past there is a 60 zone. But it (used to) only apply when kids could be reasonably expected to be there (0600 - 2000 or something). Every summer road authorities would even cross it out.

This way we are constantly reminded about why there is a very valid reason to slow down at this place - and we are reminded that at least some of them honestly think before they restrict us.

"Authorities consider this road safe for average drivers at x mph, therefore it must be safe for me at x * 1.y".

The y in the "1.y" pseudomath btw is proof enough to me that claims about enforcement not working are wrong: when you cross state borders it is easy to witness considerable changes in "typical y", the amount of relative speeding customary in the local population of drivers. Road design certainly has an influence on actual speed, but so do limits and enforcement.

Studies [1] have shown that not to be the case.

[1] http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel/

It always amazes me how cars commercials show awesome dashboards with 250 mph speedos, perfectly knowing there is no single road that you can lawfully go that fast.

Heck, it probably won't cost much more than a thumb drive to stick into your car computer port to update speed limits built in.

Except in most places, neither is happening. People are driving dramatically over the speed limit because that is the natural speed of the road, and no attempts to change the actual speeds of traffic are happening because they cost money.

So people get to die for the multitude of reasons the article outlines because of political deadlock.

Given the stated stated observation that speed limit signs have very little correlation with driver behavior, the only way to significantly impact road speeds is through road design.

I vaguely recall that the US interstate system was generally designed for 150-200 km/hr.

It seems like it would compared to a wild west situation where everyone is doing lots of drugs/going as fast as possible, but in our current society cracking down further offers no further benefits and may come at additional costs.

For example:

Automatic breaking technology on cars that can detect people who the driver might not be able to see (child running out from in-between parked cars).

Better selective enforcement of speed limits so that people pay a bit more attention. When an empty country road says 25mph due to a speed trap, it reduces the trust people place in speed limits, meaning they won't respect the 25mph speed limit as much even when it is in a school zone where children are constantly crossing the street.

Better side walk design. I shouldn't be only two feet from a speeding 2 ton object even when everyone is following the law correctly. Having space between the road and sidewalk helps. Maybe add some trees and other objects that will stop a drunk driver who runs off the road.

Bike paths for those riding bikes. Also separated from the road.

I'd rather figure out how to make city drivers more attentive and responsible than effectively turn every arterial road into a mini highway.

I'll stop you right there.

We are talking about how to prevent accidents, not how to make them less serious.

I have often heard cited, the fact that force scales with acceleration in a non-linear way, as the reason for speed limits. That is not the case, nor should it be.

These roads are not just for fast driving cars.

To try to counteract this, those signs that tell you your speed were put up that blink when you are going over the limit. They were promptly ignored.

So really I'm just trying to reiterate that what the article says is absolutely true - people will drive what they feel comfortable going, not what the posted speed limit says. In practice, the risks are there, but nowadays everyone knows to avoid main street for pedestrian crossing because its approaching highway speeds now. But on very congested roads like our main street (this being a 250 year old town, where there is no traffic shaping planned, so all through traffic goes down the road that also has the most foot traffic) you aren't going to have an easy answer, because slowing down traffic can be just as dangerous when its bumper to bumper for the ~5 mile long road through town and drivers will go mad being forced back to 25mph combined with the immense traffic bottleneck it would reintroduce (the main reason they fast tracked paving the road in the first place - traffic would back up onto the nearby highway offramp because of how bad main street traffic is).

I think the reality is that busy streets are just never safe for pedestrians (or bikes, etc). That is why you invest in crosswalks meant to funnel people across them all at once, in centralized places, where traffic is already forced to stop. And if you really care, you get the cars out of downtown entirely.

[0]: http://bikepa.com/routes/index.htm

I have cycled routinely on roads with speed limits greater than this. The first that comes to mind is Madison Ave in Sacramento (often 50mph+). For that matter I used to have a commute that took me on a brief stretch of I-5 in San Diego - that was hair-raising, to say the least. It's legal there due to lack of other options.

However, a modern mid-sized car with an efficient engine gets 40 MPG or more at 75 MPH, while a gas guzzler won't get such mileage at any speed.

The speed limit is supposed to be the upper bound. By over using low speed limits, we indirectly increase the danger level for vulnerable road users because of the reasons detailed above.

and this should come together with ban of cars older than 10-15 years not meeting current safety standards and of course all cars should be checked for quality of their brakes and other parts before being allowed to drive

We have several cities, but they're somewhat small by comparison to some of the places a lot of HN readers are from. There's no analog to SF/Silicon Valley here. Sure, people walk around Detroit, but for the most part, that's down-town in a few select areas (yes, people do walk in the outskirts, as well, but there are much larger dangers going on there than pedestrian fatalities). There are several other cities where there is a lot of walking traffic. The speed limits are 25MPH in all of the places you'd expect them to be[0]. The 85th percentile rule does not apply in these cases nor does it apply on residential roads. I live on a main subdivision road and folks commonly exceed 25MPH. I call the cops when I see it and they've had patrols going on in my neighborhood every day for the last two weeks (it's very profitable for them). People are finally slowing down again. You will get pulled over for going 5MPH over the limit in these situations, whereas that would never happen on a main road unless you were doing something else wrong.

I'm a huge supporter of the 85th percentile rule, but only when applied outside of these cases. Yes, people walk on the county/state roads that are set by this rule, but there are proper signals with increased delay times when pedestrians push the magic button (which, on these roads, actually does something -- the walk/don't walk signals won't turn to walk ... ever ... if the button isn't pressed). On freeways, there's no pedestrian traffic (on purpose, anyway).

[0] My daughter is hard of hearing (with hearing aids and all) and ADHD. She's the kid who's going to chase a ball into the road without looking and not have strong enough hearing to notice a car before it's too late (she rarely wears the hearing aids at play outside to fear of damaging them). I have followed kids home in my car and had discussions with their parents about their driving. I stick with the rule of "keep up with traffic" and will speed when that's how fast everyone else is going, but I never exceed the speed limit in pedestrian areas and I hope most adults follow suit ... though if my neighborhood is any indication, the worst time for speeding is when parents are heading to the Elementary school (located in my neighborhood!) to pick up their children. They'll blow past the crossing guards while kids are walking home from school doing 40 MPH. I guess if it's not their kid on side-walk, some folks feel it's more important to get where their going.