> hopefully this saves many lives.

That's very unlikely. More than half of roadway fatalities in the USA involve drugs or alcohol. You'd have much better luck putting a brethalyzer ignition interlock on all vehicles.

One minute of thinking should make it obvious how easily that would be defeated as well.

This is not in the USA.

Also, I'm particularly interested in the effects on pedestrian and cyclist deaths, and it should be large. The relationship between speed and severe injury is nonlinear.

https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve...

Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph

Yes but "vehicle was speeding" is often _not_ the mode in which pedestrians are killed. Pedestrians walk on the shoulders of poorly lit roadways where the speed limits are greater than 35. This is a recipe for disaster and it is a very common mode for pedestrian deaths, up to 30% on some years, the drivers did nothing wrong in these cases.

The other is bad roadway design. I searched FARS once for all accidents where the pedestrian was killed _after_ a vehicle had become airborne in one way or another (e.g. Left The Roadway).

There were more than 100 when I ran the search, one memorable one was, a vehicle was driving on a roadway in winter which had a descending hill next to it, the vehicle hit the brakes to avoid an accident, lost control, went down the hill, rolling several times, and in the process killed a pedestrian and his poor dog, before finally tumbling into the lower road and landing upside down on another vehicle.

So. Pedestrians have zero safety margin out there. Even maximum enforcement of speed limits will have almost no impact on this. Unless you also want to make 10mph the maximum speed limit inside a city.

I just shared a source illustrating how lower speeds dramatically affect outcomes for pedestrians (never mind that braking distance is way shorter for lower speeds) and you respond with a straw man about rural road shoulders?

Incidentally I tend to favor 30kph for urban cores, which is 18mph, so you’re not far off. Amsterdam recently made this change and it’s nice, but enforcement is so-so. I’m glad to see this come online in addition to enforcement. My six year old who bikes to school is too.

We don't limit the speed of ebikes - we limit the point at which the electric motor cuts off, but there's nothing stopping you from just pedalling faster.

Isn't stopping the powered propulsion the same mechanism? I suppose you are free to put pedals on your car as well if you like.

A bicycle(ebike) can be reasonably and with not too much effort accelerated manually past the speed limit(at least here in Uk/EU with the 15.5mph limiter) and in fact I'd say it's a very common occurance. The same cannot be said about any car, even if technically it's true that if you had some other source of prepulsion the car could go above its own speed limiter.

I'm almost certain that the Autobahn is inside the EU and it's famous for the very thing this law supposedly limits.

And on the derestricted section of the autobahn it will do nothing, given that there is no speed limit.

Until gps fails and it starts repeatedly braking because it thinks it is somewhere else

It doesn't brake for you, not even in the most hardcore version of this law proposed by the EU.

For now.

It won't stop reckless driving on roads where the legal limit is way above the practical limit.

Although I have absolutely zero stats to backup my argument, I'd say deaths on twisty country roads where the vehicle was under the legal speed limit far exceeds those on straight motorways breaking the limit.

My hope is that it lowers the number of people who do 50km/h on 30km/h residential streets and prevents pedestrian deaths.

> roads where the legal limit is way above the practical limit

Can you give an example of such a road? At least in the US, I've never seen one.

Here in rural Ireland there are plenty of roads with 80km/h speed limit where even the rally stages (on closed roads) can't reach it - hence the racing!

Unfortunately rural Ireland is also a pretty dangerous place to walk due to some pretty high speeds on some pretty small roads :-/ . Too often the council "upgrades" a road and in the process takes it away from people walking or biking.

I made a video about some of these roads at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew if you're curious.

As a cyclist I've never been more terrified of riding on Irish roads which is a shame as the scenery can be spectacular

Same. I had a beautiful home on a few acres of land with an old bog road from the 19th century near me (it's in the video I linked a lot) and cycling on that was a dream, but as soon as I tried to use the cycle lane to Tullamore it was a disaster of lorries and tractors trying to use said lane to pass each other.

Was driving a rental with speed limit indicators and warning beeps this weekend in Germany. Over the course of a couple days, it was maybe 95% correct, but had major issues with what were probably former construction zones on the Autobhan and some limits near towns. There were a few times where it was giving technically correct "national speed limit" answers for .. not fast roads.

On the Autobahn, it wanted me to slow to 80 in a no speed limit zone a few times, when the general flow of traffic was ~ 130 or so. It was increasingly annoying beeping, but had it actually slowed down, it would have been a severe issue.

This is the first time I've been driving a car with lane assist or active speed control, and I'd say that it increased the congnitive load, especially in trickier situations where there were narrow shifting lanes (due to construction). It may have helped in the easy case, but that's the easy case, and I can handle it.

Alerts were definitely distracting, to the point of taking my attention from the road at potentially bad times. I'll also point out that there was a medium screen tilted toward the driver, that had a freaking youtube app on it, and the instrument cluster is basically a video game now. So a couple of alerts are just the tip of the iceberg.

I may be old enough to yell at clouds now, but I really prefered the full analog, numbers only view of the car's instruments. Text is slow.

I agree with you. My partner's car has lane-keeping and active cruise control. I also find lane-keeping to be more exhausting than helpful. On the other hand, active cruise control is wonderful. It keeps me from getting bored because I'm watching traffic and trying to anticipate when the cruise control changes the speed up or down.

I use cruise control whenever possible, even around town. We have some communities where speeding fines are considered city revenue, so I set my cruise control to what the sign says, and I don't worry about losing track and accidentally speeding. Since I have a plug-in hybrid, I can brake faster because I can grab the regenerative braking paddle on the steering wheel faster than I can move my foot to the brake pedal.

Or we might see many cities raising speed limits