this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
108 points (76.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43889 readers
2987 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a-day
It's a feature, not a bug.
Your not expected to obey all laws all the time, its a tool in the toolbox for selective enforcement punishment, taxation.
Ironically, self driving cars will do more to make traffic laws more sensible, since the cars will OBEY every law, no matter how silly... and that will back up traffic until the law is fixed.
I've always thought that if you want to fix bad laws, go to the capital city where the law makers are and obey the law very carefully, such that the cost of obedience is paid by the lawmakers.
That looks like a pretty interesting book, will definitely give it a read.
I personally feel that speed limits, etc are actually quite reasonable given the average human's response time, and the fact that impact force increases non-linearly with increased speed. I think the bulk of the problem is that so many drivers far over-estimate their driving abilities and are out of touch from the outside world being completely isolated in their cars. The fact stands that if you hit a pedestrian at 25 mph, they have a 75% chance of survival but at 35 mph it is 75% likely to be fatal. The 2-lane road in my original post has a lot of hikers, bicyclists, and even horseback riding not to mention the deer that regularly jump out in front of you. Efficiency of literally every car on the road goes up just by slowing down a bit, too. Don't people like spending less on gas?
Funny you mention the self-driving car thing, I'm a tesla FSD beta tester and thats how I made sure to obey every limit and road rule to the T. It was the only way I could get through it since obeying the laws gave me so much anxiety I wanted to speed up at every chance. Using the FSD in real life, though it has a setting to always go x% over the posted speed limit. As if the word "limit" has lost any and all meaning in our society.
I think you would really enjoy reading about the strategies used in traffic engineering. Where they not only take into account the physics of driving, but the human psychology of drivers.
The highway manual indicates for new roads a traffic survey should be done and the 80% speed should be the traffic limit for the road (this doesn't always happen). From a TE perspective you want the law to encourage everyone to work at the same flow.
For roads where drivers go to fast for the conditions, you can create visually hostile environments where drivers naturally slow down (not just speed limit signs, which most people ignore). I.E. add trees, break up sight lines, add curves and chicanes, making lanes more narrow, speed humps, REMOVE traffic markings (this forces people to pay more attention to figure out whats going on).
The highway manual manual is based off gut feelings and little else. Why 80%, where did that come from? How is the currently set speed limit impacting the survey? If you go to a speed trap town by the highway, you'd say the speed limit is dead on, as no one speeds since they know its a trap.
Roads should be designed for the speed you want, and not the other way around. Your last paragraph is dead on. Real solutions look like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc
The speed limits were set at 80% many years ago when driving a car at that speed felt a lot faster. Physics and impact forces havenβt changed since then though.