I don't know, I see that driving behavior more often from born and raised relatively conservative Denverites who are pissed that Denver has become a bigger city.

FWIW, one of the stranger results of legalization is the number of 60+ conservatives who just get mega-stoned on the reg.

It's always seemed like conservatives are just as into weed as liberals, they just don't want "those people" to have it. The asshole conservatives in my family that say we should stop oppressing responsible gun owners while firing their AK with five beers in them have been growing and smoking since the 70s, and it regularly polls pretty highly in conservative demographics. It's just the politicians ignoring that and niches of diehard cop groups that refuse to accept that 90% of the stuff they pushed during dare were lies and that nobody should trust them.

Except that what's fatal is high relative, not absolute, speed.

It seems like a large claim to say that an accident between someone going 60 and 40mph is as fatal as an accident between someone going 60 and 80. I would need to see empirical evidence to consider the claim.

Absolute speed is one of the key values indicating how much energy is in a car crash.

I don't think most accidents are cars driving into the backs of other cars?

I think it's quite a lot of them! But both vehicles are designed to absorb a lot of energy in this scenario.

people who study the traffic safety problem area will generally avoid saying the word "accident", just for your information.

https://www.grahamfeest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/accid...

Such an over-long and redundant article. However, they do make a point (twice) that is no longer true:

>Only about 10% of accidents are caused by vehicle error, weather, or another non- human-related event.

Clearly the self-driving feature of more recently-made vehicles is going to, if not already doing so, cause more than 10% of crashes.

Think of it this way: The relative speed between your car and a tree is whatever speed you’re going. 80 is more than 60.

But if everyone around you is going 80 and you’re going 50, you’re the tree. People going too slow on the freeway are dangerous. But not as dangerous as people going crazy fast.

The real problem is when people go slow in the fast lane. Or fast in the slow lane.

Head on and angle collisions cause the most vehicle-vehicle deaths.

My info may be outdated, but I thought the highest injury rates for vehicle-vehicle collisions was from getting T-boned by people running a red light. You have a stationary vehicle getting hit into its least protected part by a speeding vehicle. In older cars this sort of collision can be deadly at speeds as low as 30mph. Something about the two sides of your brain slamming together and lack of side crumple zones.

That’s why Slovenia (probably from an EU directive) made it illegal to run a yellow light in the early 2000’s. Yellow means stop unless you’re already in the intersection and can’t stop in time.

As opposed to USA where yellow, at least in practice, means “accelerate like mad”

Yellow could be used to start the sequence in reverse order. You are stopped at an intersection with a red light, light turns yellow for a brief time indicating proceed with caution as the cross street has just had its green light go directly to red. The brief yellow turns green allowing cautious transition of cross traffic right of way, instead of the regular use of yellow which seems to induce a lack of clarity on what to do, accelerate or decelerate. Green directly to red makes it very clear what to do, stop or maintain velocity. The grey zone still exists but it is on the new flow to proceed with caution instead of just, green=go. Rightly this would be rejected as it wacky, but wow t-boned accidents are horrendous and people really like to game the yellow light in a reckless way. How can we move towards caution.

In Europe lights go from red to red + yellow to green and from green to yellow to red. That’s how you know which yellow it is.

And at least in theory just yellow does mean “proceed with caution”. You have intersections without a green light, just flashing yellow.

I think t-bone would be under angle collisions.

Does Slovenia do “all-way” reds for a few seconds before anyone gets a green? That’s what USA/Canada does.

Bumping into a tree at 20mph is significantly less fatal than a 80mph person rear ending a 60mph person because in the latter example, the drivers lose control and just keep going at high speeds.

what you did there, I see it.

That's wrong. Relative speed differences result in collisions, yes. Absolute speed causes those collisions to be fatal. Low speed collisions are much less likely to be fatal.

The problem would be reaction time in those cases, I would think.

That being said, I think most people under the influence of marijuana are not really going to want to go anywhere most of the time.

> think most people under the influence of marijuana are not really going to want to go anywhere most of the time.

This is an old joke that I wish would go away. People smoke weed and drive everyday and as a former user we were always looking for something to do. Pot heads dont, as a unit, “sit around and do nothing” much more than any other group of substance abusers.

Yeah, so if they get on a freeway they'll be doing 50 instead of 65?

My friend got in a car crash when stoned (forgot the details, seems he didn't make the turn quite right), the passenger was hurt

I don’t condone driving while high in the slightest but we allow rampant alcohol consumption leading to substantial annual DUI accidents and deaths. Perhaps let’s consider more roadway enforcement while also appreciating the benefits of non-pharmaceutical therapy. And if you’re just using it at home for fun, that’s fine too, just don’t drive after (people are going to use it whether it’s legal or not of course).

There is some data (although admittedly inconclusive) that opioid use and deaths decline in jurisdictions where marijuana is legalized, an important point to consider.

TLDR some medication is better than others, don’t drive under the influence regardless. “In God We Trust, all others bring data” as the saying goes.

I think the bigger issue is that mj impact can vary wildly. You can just laugh more or you just met god and are traveling back in time to the moment you were just at, which is not an ideal moment to be in a car ( you might be going 20 miles an hour slowly over someone ).

IL is slowly starting to see the same issue in the suburbs. I have zero problem with weed legalization in principle.

As always, the issue is with people and that is hard to correct.

> or you just met god and are traveling back in time to the moment you were just at, which is not an ideal moment to be in a car ( you might be going 20 miles an hour slowly over someone ).

No doubt. But how does that work in practice? Is someone seeing god likely to be getting behind the wheel, or are they just lying wasted on the couch somewhere? Can it also happen with a delay?

What I've noticed with alcohol (which is legal!) is that sometimes I'd drink, and everything would seem fine, then it would hit me like a ton of bricks 15 minutes later. 15 minutes is enough to figure "yeah, I'm fine, let me get in my car" and end up in traffic.

My point is that I'm wondering whether weed (which I don't smoke) is actually worse than alcohol (which I do sometimes drink). And since we already have plenty of people smoking weed, maybe legalizing it would help with education.

When I took my driver's license in France, there's a whole segment on driving intoxicated. They'd go into the effects of cannabis, which clearly don't seem great for driving, but that'd be about it, besides the generic "drugs are bad, mkay". Whereas alcohol, while also decried, had a bit more info, such as a rule-of-thumb of how long it takes to get out of the blood stream, interactions with food, etc. So, I know that I shouldn't drive while high, but since I've already smoked a joint right now, how long can I expect to wait before I'm legal again? Crickets.

> Is someone seeing god likely to be getting behind the wheel

I think you're significantly discounting the number of people who smoke weed while driving. I saw quite a bit of it in college- much more, in fact, than drinking alcohol before driving (never saw some literally drinking while driving, though I know it happens).

Apologies for the completely made up numbers, but I think it is illustrative: If weed only makes you 5% more likely to get into an accident (compared to, say, 50-75% for alcohol), but legalization causes an additional 10-15% of the population to drive stoned, that's still a statistically significant effect.

Real numbers would be useful to draw meaningful conclusions about what to do about it, but I think it's not unreasonable to believe that it will have a negative effect in this regard.

> If weed only makes you 5% more likely to get into an accident (compared to, say, 50-75% for alcohol), but legalization causes an additional 10-15% of the population to drive stoned, that's still a statistically significant effect.

Sure, but isn't that also an argument for outlawing alcohol?

I don't think I meant "negative effect" in my last paragraph to mean "should remain outlawed", but rather that we need to understand and perhaps plan for the negative consequences of legalization.

The biggest challenge is that there is not yet any procedure that can verify impairment by marijuana. With alcohol, it is easy- any amount over 0.08 and you are legally considered impacted.

With pot, the metabolites stay in your system for weeks. Did you crash because of a genuine accident, or did you crash because you were driving impaired by weed? The police don't have a way to make a distinction with a simple breath / blood test, so it is harder to enforce.

I genuinely agree. Amusingly, this is the side effect of war on drugs. As in, those various interactions for the longest time were not common knowledge, but word of mouth mostly. On the other hand, we have centuries of alcohol use and abuse history to draw from and learn.

That said, I can't blame it all on lack of knowledge. There is a fair amount of regular prescription medication that clearly says "don't do anything after you take it", which is also mentioned in passing by your doctor and yet people either don't listen or just assume it won't affect them?

FWIW, I genuinely don't know what the answer is here.

In Seattle, we recently had a high driver hit-and-run, killing a cyclist, going 30 mph over the posted 25 mph speed limit.

> Documents also show Yusuf was identified on Ring camera and audio behind his house telling someone he was driving "55mph," several admissions he made in his social media feeds, including searches for "hit-and-run death of cyclist," "how long does marijuana (weed) stay in your system?"

https://www.q13fox.com/news/suspect-identified-and-charged-i...

Weed doesn't magically make people safe drivers; it's still driving while intoxicated and it's still dangerous.

Canada has not seen a rise in cannabis related DUIs since it legalized the drug.

Which is weird because I see people smoking weed while driving pretty frequently (especially in stopped traffic on the Lion's gate). Last I heard, we don't have a reliable test for cannabis intoxication -- which makes recorded DUI rates questionable as evidence.

If someone can pass a field sobriety test what is the problem if we don't have a chemical test?

I wish we had a system of simulators people could be put into to assess their driving ability before criminally charging them.

While it won’t capture everything related to driving, it’s gotta be better than existing sobriety tests. And I say that as a terrible video game player but good driver (or so I believe), with a relative that’s a great video game player but meh driver.

Dunno how well correlated a field sobriety test is, but the subjective element of it leaves a lot to be desired.

> I wish we had a system of simulators people could be put into to assess their driving ability before criminally charging them.

That it would cause an uproar when "safe drivers" who are really just "safe to insure" because they follow the letter of the law fail miserably in droves because they have the context processing ability of a 2017 "driverless" car.

The field sobriety test is merely a way for police to make up signs of intoxication. It is a subjective test. If you're there you've already lost. At least in my state you can refuse it without losing your license.

I'm not a lawyer, but I view it as akin to speaking to police without a lawyer. It has no upside for me, therefore I refuse to do it. I do submit to chemical testing due to that being a requirement of my license (in my state the portable breathalyzer is not admissible in court so I'm fine with taking that too).

This. The entire test is fine tuned to let the officer pen a police report that makes you look drunk without having to actually lie in an observable way vs the dashcam/body cam.

They'll tell you to stand on the line, you'll pass, they'll make small-talk, they'll tell you to say the ABCs backwards, you'll pass, and they'll write "suspect was unable to remain on white line while saying ABCs backwards" in the police report and in the court the prosecutor will ask "did the officer ever instruct you to stop standing on the white line?".

Where I live they just test your urine for metabolites. If you pop hot and have smoked anytime in the last month, DUI. No fucks are given whether you are currently intoxicated, as that's too hard to figure out. In theory this yields a result of higher DUIs than actually intoxicated drivers.

You're responding to a different claim than I'm articulating. I'm just tired of people handwaving away high driving as "high drivers are harmless and slow." I am not making the claim that legalization increased rates of high driving; and personally, I support legalization.

>Every pothead I get stuck behind here in Colorado is going 15 under the speed limit. Hard to get in a fatal accident going 20.

More overtaking -> more crashes.

Homogeneous traffic is safe traffic.