There's a 30mph city street near me where cars routinely go 45mph -- the fatality rate jumps up to 60% at that speed. So just having cars follow the speed limit would go a long way toward reducing fatalities.
(IMHO) jamitons would dissolve if people would leave a flexible buffer between them and the car in front of them and focusing on minimizing braking, rather than driving up to their bumper, brake, wait for moving, accelerate, brake, repeat. The lag due to reaction time and ac/deceleration exacerbates the "viscosity" of traffic flow. If most drivers focused on "staying fluid" rather than hurry-up-and-wait, traffic ought to improve. Like fluidized beds.
No one is saying reduce speeds everywhere. But in an urban context with lots of pedestrians, these speeds matter, and urban traffic is generally so stop-and-go and congested that drivers rarely sustain the top speed, and reducing it doesn't actually affect travel time by all that much.
However comforting that logic may be, it is unusable in the real world. If you value lives infinitely, then you will never ever do anything that risks your or somebody else's life in order to gain on any other need. You routinely engage in things that are not the safest possible option in order to fulfill other needs, ranging from food or water acquisition through mere entertainment. Therefore you place a finite value on your life. Don't feel bad, so does everybody else. It is possible to determine the value placed on life, I believe there are studies that show the value is more stable than you might think, and balance things appropriately.
It may be uncomfortable thinking, but, again, unless you literally never take even the smallest risk in the pursuit of other goals, you are already thinking this way. You just haven't lifted it up to the conscious level yet.
I'd say you're almost right about nobody asking for infinite value, but I'd say it's more like nobody who has pulled this up to the conscious level is asking for infinite value. People who have not examined the belief are quite prone to speaking as if life's value is infinite... but their own actions inevitably belie that claim. Once examined, it becomes rationally obvious that life is not infinitely valuable (including your own), but, well, if humans automatically accepted and believed all rational things they examine without emotional consequence the world would be a very different place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/economy/17regulat...
For evaluating safety regulations relative to the cost of inplementation, NHTSA values the risk of loss of human life in relation to the market value of risk reducing products, and the safety they provide.
They extrapolate from the take rate of airbags and their cost and effectivity, to how much value the average American places on their own life. IIRC on the order of $5 million.
FYI, juries do not look kindly on companies that implement this in liability suits. The data is that if a corporation writes down a $-figure for a (statistical) human life, it anchors punitive fines at a higher level.
Universally adhered to lower speed limits in urban environments would be great.
Conduent offers a turnkey solution for this. They provide and manage speed cameras: https://www.conduent.com/solution/transportation-solutions/r...
Most of them are empty but people unfamliar with the place will usually slow down.
But what about an even lower speed? If 15 mph is good, then 5 mph is better. And if 5 mph is better, 1 mph is superior once more.
I think we can agree there is a point where slow becomes too slow and the 'sufficient planning' becomes an unreasonable burden. So given we aren't operating off the notion that slower is inherently better, then there is some equation giving us our optimal point. What if that point is 45 mph instead of 15 mph?
In short, how do we argue that 15 mph is better than 45 mph that can't also be applied to speeds lower than 15 mph?
There is a fundamental inequity between the operator of dangerous equipment comparing hours and years of life, and the pedestrian who suffers the consequence of that comparison. The USA auto industry is built on this inequity, which is why no one ever talks about it.
Lives, dollars, wasted time are all fungible.
Your new, inequity point adds externalities to the discussion. That's fine, but those are also measured in lives, dollars, wasted time.
But I shouldn't pick nits; you were speaking in generalities! So when I said "any transportation goal" and you disagreed, you hadn't actually thought of a particular exception to my universal statement. And you still haven't thought of one. Are your contributions to this discussion offered in good faith?
2. Auto plant needs radiators. Truck delivering them takes longer to get them there. Costs $x more. Car costs more. Car buyer has to work longer to buy car. Car buyer wastes y hours of life.
There are lots of alternatives that don't involve you spending more time driving.
While it's true that goods will cost more to transport if it takes longer, that higher charge is amortized across many products in the truck, so is a very small portion of the finished product.
So if a radiator fits in a box 16x24x6" or 1.3ft^3 and a 40ft truck holds 2400 ft^3 (subtract 20% since it won't be a perfect fix, so 2000 ft^3, so you can fit 1500 of them in the truck.
If a truck+driver costs $100/hour, that means each radiator will cost 13 cents more.
Or, another way at looking at it -- all of the parts that make up a car aren't going to be bigger than a car (sure, some space is lost to packaging, but there's a lot of empty space in a car), and 6 - 10 cars can fit on a car carrier truck, so each car will end up costing around $25 more.
Though since we're talking about urban speed limits, and there aren't many urban car manufacturers, slow urban speed limits won't affect the price of cars.
Often speeding just gets you to the next intersection, or red lighter, quicker, where you then have to wait longer for traffic, or a green light.
(edit: just to be clear, I'm not in support of speeding, however I do value good logic.)
The vast majority of people just go however fast they feel comfortable (considering conditions, etc) regardless of the speed limit.
Mixed traffic speeds decrease safety.
Raising speed limits so that you don't have the % of people who comply with the letter of the law traveling slower than the people who go however fast they're comfortable usually improves safety.
Unless your goal is to increase ticket revenue or appease the "think of the children crowd" there's no point to lowering speed limits. It doesn't do much to affect traffic speed. To do that you have to modify the road or do something to change the traffic flow.
Self driving cars will improve safety because they'll result in political pressure to raise speed limits to match reality and they'll make dynamic speed limits more practical.
Sure, but city streets are already mixed traffic. There are pedestrians, bikes, vehicles parking or turning, etc. It's not reasonable to raise the limit to what people want to drive and just ignore all the other users of the street.
Also, the optical narrowing mentioned in a sibling comment is quite effective. They've done that on a few streets near me via things like sidewalk bulb-outs at intersections, and swapping the parking lane & bike lane (so it goes curb-bike-parking-drive, rather than curb-parking-bike-drive). Everyone drives more slowly on those streets now - myself included.
For more, see https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/30/13784520/roads-d...
The trick is to make people feel like driving fast is unsafe, without actually making driving any unsafer.
Exactly. That is why we should ban all cars anywhere there is people, and they should be limited to highways. Because safety is most important, right? Right???
Itβs very simple, put speed cameras on every corner, and fine in terms of day wages. E.g., one week of your income as fine for going x% above.
Several countries are doing parts of this already, or moving towards it.
In fact, self-driving cars may actually improve the situation if cars actually start complying with speed limits en masse.