Here are the speeds converted to miles per hour, for reference:
According to Bolian, who has been in contact with the new record holders, the time to beat is now less than 26 hours. A sub 28-hour Cannonball Run was once unthinkable.
While he has not disclosed the exact time, that frame of reference means the drivers would have had to achieve an average speed of at least 173km/h (107 mph) for the 4507km (2801 mi) journey.
Accommodating for fuel stops, the team’s peak and cruising speeds are probably far in excess of that figure.
Bolian states that the new record holders averaged 193km/h (120 mph) when crossing “several” States. It is unknown what car the new record holders used.
Note, if you get caught at these high speeds on public roads, you will be arrested and vehicle impounded. Most of the time police officers will draw their weapons when making vehicle stops of this nature. Most state laws have a zero tolerance policy for vehicles exceeding 90mph on public roads.
I would bet that most traffic on I-90 in South Dakota is at or over 90mph given the speed limit is now 80mph. Heck, North Dakota, not exactly a bastion of enforcement, decided against going higher specifically because of South Dakota. Idaho, Wyoming and Utah have 80mph limits and Texas has road at 85mph. A lot of plain states are not hyper about speed limits. 120mph is going to get you in trouble, badly, but 90 might not even get you stopped.
I drove on that 80 MPH stretch of I-80 between the Utah/Nevada border, and even the big rigs were going at least 5 over. I honestly think that as long as you're not going 10 over, the police are just there to make sure that if you crash somebody is there to help.
I'll say man, there is just something almost spiritual being all there alone out in the Utah West desret can see a hundred miles in every direction, nothing but flat unbroken skyline, blowing down the highway at 110 mph and then realizing even at those blistering speeds you're hardly moving against that infinite flat backdrop.
I once thought North Dakota was sparsely populated, but I had no true idea of that word until I drove through Wyoming. It is so easy to run way over the speed limit, more from inattention than any real decision, on a deserted road with such a far horizon and nothing anywhere near you. Its a different kind of driving when there are signs with "Next Gas Station 79 miles".
A buddy drives back and forth across Utah multiple times per year. He sets his cruise on 95 in the 80 zones, and has passed and been passed by many police without issue.
I vaguely remember driving west through Utah as a teenager, where there was a long stretch that was desolate and scenic and straight, somewhat downhill, maybe I-40? ...and my car did more mph than it had hp.
>Note, if you get caught at these high speeds on public roads, you will be arrested and vehicle impounded.
Being white and polite (and generally having a bunch of things about you that scream the opposite of "criminal scum") counts for a lot. In most states officers have discretion to choose between the civil and criminal version of whatever the state's "ludicrous speed" violation is.
Indeed. I've had the privilege (see what I did there) of getting off easy when I got caught going 101mph on US-101 in central coast CA (where it was a 55 limit). The cop pulled me over and said "you know I could take you to jail for this, right?" I kept my hands on the wheel, used "yes, ma'am" / "no, ma'am" type answers, and was let go with a very pricy ticket rather than having my life turned upside down or getting shot.
Some municipalities and states also have rules on the book that police are not to chase if someone is driving over 100 Mph because it is more dangerous than just letting them go and catching them later.
I think it's interesting that the community which supports and follows the Cannonball Run appeared to be mostly against the first 26 hour run (the Audi pictured in the article). At least the most vocal part.
My question is, do you actually PREFER that people reach reckless speeds in more crowded conditions?
as someone who has participated in roadrally (and other scca events), 'Gumball' style road-rallys are nothing like the sanctioned events.
SCCA roadrally events are about pace-setting and arriving just on time, not fast OR slow. Because of that, the setting is much more about clinical analysis, and less about having the worlds' fastest cars and the highest speeds.
Very little about SCCA RoadRally is anything like any other motorsport, actually. It's closer to a scavenger hunt most of the time.
For much of my younger life, my morning commutes in Texas were in the 100-125mph range. If you knew where to look, and you didn't accidentally pass a cop. you were fine. So basically, if you get caught by a human, it's because you took a risk by running through a blind area at high speed. You don't do that more than one time in your life unless you are stupid or have the right contacts to help you keep your license.
Isn't that a felony? Years ago when I was in college I talked to a post-doc or visiting professor from Germany who got am aerial speeding ticket for going really fast on some desolate part of the I5 on his way from San Diego to San Francisco.
He said it turned out to be much more serious than he expected (coming from the Land of Chocolate and the Autobahn) and it was a pain in the ass to sort out.
my understanding [IANAL] that speeding more than 30mph falls under "reckless driving" which is a misdemeanor. It is a serious PITA, especially for immigrants. Felony is much more than something "to sort out", it is more like a catastrophe.
More than 20mph in some states, such as VA. My partner was doing just over 70 in a 65mph zone on an empty highway on Sunday afternoon, and didn't slow fast enough when it became a "construction" zone of 50mph, and had to retain an attorney to avoid more consequences than the fine.
In VA, currently, any speed over 20mph the posted speed limit or above 80mph is reckless driving. If the posted speed limit is 65mph or 70mph, which means you hit the reckless driving limit at 15mph or 10mph respectively.
Last month, the governor signed a law raising it the max speed to 85mph. It takes effect 01 July. (The 80mph limit was put into effect when speed limits were raised to 65mph.)
(IANAL) Believe the more serious charges are "reckless endangerment" [1].
Exact definitions vary state to state, but you can generally argue that reasonable circumstances precluded felony endangerment.
E.g. Doing 120 mph on a straight, flat, southwestern road with horizon visibility in all directions would be speeding, but a reasonable judge would probably weigh the unlikelihood of you posing a danger to anyone other than yourself.
He might have expected less, as Germany treats speeding comparatively casually. Two years ago I got a ticket for 50mph in a 40 zone (construction on the Autobahn, on a Sunday, with a radar trap behind a bridge) and it turned out to be a whopping 30 euro. Paid via the Internet and bank transfer.
there's no one to invalidate them ! even validating them is a game of trust as it's illegal and most of the only other people interested are competitors who are reluctant to be beaten.
the vinwiki guy has made himself out to be an arbiter because he gets more views on his youtube channel and app subscribers from it
"other people interested are competitors who are reluctant to be beaten".
So this! Ed became a kind of a de facto PR for the run but his bitterness seeps through his reporting all the time...
It still amazes me that the US, with all its red light cameras, doesn't adopt the European speed cameras that create a lot of tickets (at significant fines) for relatively minor speeding infractions.
Top Gear did a test years ago to see just how fast you would need to go to defeat a speed camera, and it was well beyond what the Cannonballers would be running. You just can't fool a high speed camera easily. Of course, you can black out your drivers license, but you'll still risk the human patrols.
On the other hand, if the roads are empty, and nobody gets hurt... who cares! Film it, please.
>> You just can't fool a high speed camera easily.
There are some tricks. If you have staff, people prepping the road ahead of you, then you just slow down for the cameras. I suspect that these recent records are being supported by the same people, the same camera/cop location data.
I'm interested in what tech might be used by this team. I've been waiting for SDR dongles to transform into radar detectors/jammers. Cop cars emit so many different dedicated frequencies that anyone with a dongle and a laptop should be able to build a very functional "copdar".
maybe not what the above commenter meant but some euro speed camera systems compare pictures and the time they were taken from multiple cameras to get average speed. so imagine a camera that logs every on and off ramp of i-80 and if you the times you enter and exit indicate an average speed above the speed limit, you get a ticket.
If you know where those are, you just don't let them read your plate.
There are products out there that can turn your license plate "off" with the flick of a switch. But if you are modifying car for a cannonball run you can build one yourself. Google "smart glass". Remember too that many US states do not require front plates. So it is not unusual for a car to be seen without one, leaving only the rear plate to worry about.
If you're doing a cannonball run you don't slow down for cameras. That's wasted time and the tickets come later anyway. You only slow down for actual cops, because they could end your run.
I built a radar jammer, when in college, back in the 90’s. The issue is you end up setting off other people’s radar detectors, which just slows down traffic.
Most police traffic is on a trunked radio system shared with other users, and is typically encrypted. It’s easy find the transmission with a scanner, but trying to localize a transmission using only a power measurement is difficult due to multipath and fading.
You could flag the most egregious violators in real time and send a police interceptor. That would enable us to shift more highway patrol into other roles.
Lol. No police car could 'catch' anything at these speeds. Even if they could match the raw speed, catching up would take hours. You could organize a roadblock ahead but US cops, the local boys doing highway patrol in the dead of night, aren't going to deploy all those resources to maybe catch a speeder.
This happened to a friend of mine on a motorcyle. He was doing over 250KM/hour at 3am on a tuesday, flying back towards Vancouver for an emergency work thing. The first cop attempted to catch him, so did the second a few exits later. By the time they accelerated to highway speeds he was over the horizon. When he eventually hit a "roadblock" (one cop car he could easily have outrun) he had covered almost 60km. He honestly never saw the first two cops. At those speeds you don't bother with mirror checks. Judge found no streetracing or evading police. Simple (big) speeding ticket.
Hennessey (with permission of the Texas Department of Public Safety) ran 203 mph (325 kph) on SH-130 outside of Austin to "test" the electronic toll collectors. The toll transponder was successfully read at 170 mph, and the radar in the patrol car clocked the Camaro at 203 (that's one ticket you wouldn't be able to talk your way out of)
The US doesn’t have a lot of red light cameras. The ones that they do have are usually privately owned and administered. The owners puts them in for free and gets a cut of the fines. Now that’s American.
Americans tend to vandalize speed cameras. As long as repairing/replacing the cameras costs more than the revenue they generate from tickets, they’re not worth deploying.
Same happens in the netherlands. A favorite method here is to fill the camera with expanding foam which basically makes the camera take part in a slow-motion explosion. Another (less damaging) method I've seen is simply wrapping the camera in cling wrap, making the image terribly fuzzy but not destroying anything in the process.
AFAIK over here speed cameras are only allowed to be placed if they demonstratively improve traffic safety, so we don't have a crazy amount of them.
Of course the best way to beat a speed camera is to not speed ;-)
When red light cams were introduced, they sucked, did a lot of false positives for things like doing a 1mph rolling stop for a right turn at a dead intersection, etc.
If you haven't seen the reluctance/defiance of American culture with the coronavirus pandemic, well... for better and worse, we don't like being surveilled by the government. Or at least, we like them to do us the honor of masking it or pretending not to.
I wish we would adopt automatic ticketing for speeding. It’s been tried in some places near me and there was public outcry about privacy issues. I don’t know what they are exactly, I believe there is no reasonable expectation of privacy while driving on public roads, especially when you’re breaking the law, nonetheless it seems to be working to prevent photo ticketing.
It was super interesting driving a rental car in Iceland last year. They have automatic speed cameras & ticketing. And we didn’t ask for it, but the rental car’s computer knew where they were and beeped every time we approached one.
Not to be a wet blanket here, but what's the point? Bicycle across America... That's cool. Very impressive at any speed. Break the speed limit laws and potentially put others at risk... Not cool...
The laws of physics are the same for everyone. E_k = 1/2 m*v^2. If something were to happen, whether the drivers' fault or not, there would not be enough time to react and everyone involved would die.
Why would different skill levels imply there shouldn’t be a ‘static’ speed limit? I’m not seeing the connecting logic.
What is the alternative, and how do you propose to enforce a dynamic speed limit that adapts to the drivers’ skill level?
Who determines skill level, and how do you determine skill level, and why would we want a public system where people are near the limits of their skill level?
Also curious - are you sure that skill level is the primary cause of traffic accidents and fatalities? Do you have any data on that? How does it compare with race drivers who’ve died in crashes, are those due to skill level?
I don’t think speed limits are “static” because of skill level. I presume speed limits are static because 1) physics - energy of impact is proportional to the square of your velocity. Double the speed is 4x the damage / chance of death. 2) There’s safety in a low speed differential in traffic regardless of the limit. It’s safer to pass at 5mph faster than it is to pass at 60mph faster. 3) It’s fair to all, in the sense that the same rule applies to everyone, and enforceable.
As to an alternative, we've come a long way technologically since 1974. If we wanted to, RF enabling cars to be remotely interrogated, and encoding driver qualifications is well within our reach.
As to skill level, the current system has a cursory driver's test, coupled with (in some states) minimal re-qualification criteria. This means that an 18 year old new driver, a 40 year old experienced driver, and an 80 year old with barely passable eyesight are effectively lumped into the same bucket. To me, that feels like safety theater. And as with any theater, leads to widespread law breaking. In my opinion, any law which is commonly ignored is a bad thing and should be reworked to be more enforceable / in line with expectations.
As to accidents and fatalities normalized per skill level, we have general motor vehicle fatality statistics [1] (specifically note fatalities per million VMT pre-1995 and post-1995, when the federal speed maximums were substantially relaxed [2]). Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any comprehensive driver skill level test, with sufficient sample size, on which to draw statistics.
We can say that, per the 2018 NHTSA report [3], alcohol impairment was involved in 29% of overall fatalities. We can also say that ~50% of fatalities were unrestrained by safety devices (given ~90% documentation of restraint use at time of accident). They also note that "distraction-affected crashes" comprised 7.8% of total fatalities. Which is to say it's tenuous to hold skill as proxy for responsibility, but there are some very large percentages of fatalities exacerbated by non-speed-related irresponsible driving behavior.
I feel like race drivers would be a poor comparison, due to limited sample size and confounding effects (e.g. leading / high performance drivers more likely to take risks and push limits).
(1) absolutely has merit. (2) is debatable, but I'll agree also has merit. (3) seems like my real bone of contention with the current system.
It's naively "fair," in that it treats everyone and all vehicles identically. It's also incredibly sub-optimal, given the vast variance in drivers and vehicles.
If I had my druthers, I'd mandate all cars / drivers support remote interrogation (license class, if you don't want to open the privacy can of identity), then have a graduated series of license tests between standard (C) and commercial (CDL).
Then drastically increase speeding fines & automated fining, if you're caught speeding without an appropriate license qualification.
Also within our reach is automated photographic enforcement. That would be much easier and way more realistic to implement than somehow trying to manage different speed classes based on skill or whatever.
I still just don’t see a real problem with a static speed limit, or why something graduated by skill is called for and what it would help.
Having fines graduated by ‘skill’ would just be more of a declaration that it’s okay to break the law and speed if you’re a ‘better’ driver, whatever that means. It doesn’t make that much sense to me, the better drivers are already the ones choosing not to speed. Personally, I’d rather have more enforcement so that people just didn’t speed. I honestly hope that self-driving cars eliminate aggressive driving from our roads and let people relax while they travel. Speeds are already too high in a lot of places, and people have unrealistic expectations while they drive.
The last thing I want is some clowns claiming to be better drivers expecting to be allowed to drive 100mph through traffic. The very desire to driver faster that current speed limits is solid evidence in my book of a lack of driving wisdom, which I would call a lack of skill. The choices we make to avoid bad situations are more important than our reaction times or ability to recover from them. (Just like coding!)
I don’t know if that’s what you’re suggesting, because you didn’t make it clear, but that seems to be your implication. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Your suggestion is sounding a little to me like it could be a way for richer people to pay for more licensing to get traffic advantages. Speeding tickets already favor wealthy people and hurt poorer people disproportionately. The licenses we currently have don’t measure skill, they establish only the minimum standards needed for driving a motorcycle or car or 18 wheeler, no licensing in our system is capable of distinguishing the skills of different drivers.
It’s not really the case that the law is lumping everyone into the same bucket based on skill, I think that’s a misinterpretation, a specious framing but not what the law intended nor what it communicates. The speed limit is a declaration of what the safe speed of a given road and today’s vehicles are - again, because physics.
Speed limits are affected by popular opinion, and in some places, like in the western US where the speed limits have been hiked up to 80 mph, or even 85 in Texas, these limits have been raised in some locales by law makers in spite of the Highway Patrol’s objections and evidence that accidents and fatality rates are higher with the raised limits.
> It’s also incredibly sub-optimal, given that vast variance in drivers and vehicles.
So by what metric is it sub-optimal? How do you arrive at the conclusion that it’s “incredibly” sub-optimal? What does optimal mean, and what are you suggesting? I don’t get it yet. Are you saying more skilled drivers should be allowed to driver faster than other people, or just suggesting that fines should be lower? Who, exactly, is being harmed by speed limits, what is the damage being done, and what is the alternative? There are statistics showing increased rates of death in higher speed limit areas, so you need to have a pretty convincing argument that a thousand people being stuck at 70mph are being hurt more than someone getting killed.
I just don’t see it being realistic for some people to be allowed to drive much faster than others in traffic. This would add extra tension to already tense heavy traffic commutes, how does it solve anything? I suspect the unintended consequence of increasing the speed differential would be more road rage and more road fatalities.
> Having fines graduated by ‘skill’ would just be more of a declaration that it’s okay to break the law and speed if you’re a ‘better’ driver, whatever that means.
You misunderstand. I'm proposing actual limits be different for different classes of drivers. So C1 gives you 50 mph max on a given road, C2 60, etc.
> no licensing in our system is capable of distinguishing the skills of different drivers
A CDL clearly requires additional knowledge beyond a standard license. E.g. brake failure modes and technical operation.
> The speed limit is a declaration of what the safe speed of a given road and today’s vehicles are - again, because physics.
So between 1994 and 1996 all roads and vehicles became substantially safer?
> these limits have been raised in some locales by law makers in spite of the Highway Patrol’s objections and evidence that accidents and fatality rates are higher with the raised limits
To put it bluntly, Highway Patrol does not seem like an objective third party in this matter.
>> It’s also incredibly sub-optimal, given that vast variance in drivers and vehicles.
> So by what metric is it sub-optimal? How do you arrive at the conclusion that it’s “incredibly” sub-optimal? What does optimal mean, and what are you suggesting?
Total travel time has an economic cost. Very few people work at full productivity while driving their cars.
An optimal allocation would be permitting everyone to drive at a precise maximum speed, calculated on the basis of all their attributes which effect likelihood of accident, and standardizing for likelihood of outcome.
Some of those attributes are constant from driver to driver (road geometry, weather).
Some of those attributes are variable (driver skill, attention, tendency to drive drunk, vehicle performance, vehicle maintenance).
Unless you're willing to argue that the variable attributes have neglible effect on accident likelihood or that their variable range is negligible, I'm not sure how you arrive at anything less than "incredibly sub-optimal" given static speed limits for everyone.
> Are you saying more skilled drivers should be allowed to driver faster than other people, or just suggesting that fines should be lower?
The former.
> Who, exactly, is being harmed by speed limits, what is the damage being done, and what is the alternative?
Everyone, but particularly drivers, by economic inefficiency. The alternative is my modest proposal.
> There are statistics showing increased rates of death in higher speed limit areas, so you need to have a pretty convincing argument that a thousand people being stuck at 70mph are being hurt more than someone getting killed.
See earlier points about the difficulties in normalizing statistics for proposed driver skill level.
> I suspect the unintended consequence of increasing the speed differential would be more road rage and more road fatalities.
Possibly, in additional to innumerable other things we haven't considered.
But my point is that we can't, on the face of things, defend the current system as the best we can possibly do.
Using cars at all isn’t the best we can possibly do.
> Very few people work at full productivity while driving their cars.
Very few people work at all while driving their cars; their commute is outside of their paid working hours. What is the economic cost of commuting time? This is a serious question. You’re not paid for non-work hours, so by choosing to live far away from your job, or work far away from where you live, you’re choosing to trade away your own free time, and choosing to pay more in gas (often, but not always, in return for lower rent/mortgage). There is no loss to the economy in terms of the time spent.
So what — exactly — is optimized economically by having higher speed limits? Where — exactly — would more money come from if the speed limits were raised for some people? And are you proposing to have the speed classes only apply while commuting to work, or at all times? What would be the justification for doing it at all times?
It would help if you’d elaborate on your proposal with real numbers. Do you want to drive at a higher speed than you can right now, or do you want people you believe to be unskilled to have to slow down compared to today? How fast do you want to drive? How much faster will your commute be? 50mph roads probably aren’t as common as 65mph highways. What do you imagine the actual speeds to be on the highway in your system?
Your calculus, as presented so far, is completely ignoring:
1- the economic costs of safety, or lack of it. Every crash can cost those involved tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it goes up when there’s serious hospital time involved. See the term “expected value” in statistics. You have to account for the risks and probabilities of a negative outcome in order to even know if your proposal can pay off.
2- the fact that drivers in a lower speed class would need to be able to react to the faster drivers; in effect they would need to be as skilled in order to share the same roads safely.
3- traffic, not the speed limit, is the limiting speed factor almost everywhere that long commutes exist.
But hey, if you’re proposing that we make new, separate roads for the multi-speed-class system, maybe I’m for it. Everyone who thinks they’re better drivers and wants to ignore the risks can go drive together on their own road.
> So between 1994 and 1996 all roads and vehicles became substantially safe?
No, but both the US interstates and the cars have together become substantially safer over the last 50 years.
I’m curious why you’ve dismissed the Highway Patrol? You’re not objective either, why are you ignoring the people who actually have to respond every time some idiot in a fast car who thinks he has “skill” loses traction and hits someone else or wraps himself around a telephone pole?
> Using cars at all isn’t the best we can possibly do.
Granted. But any solutions to that are several orders of magnitude more expensive.
>> Very few people work at full productivity while driving their cars.
> Very few people work at all while driving their cars; their commute is outside of their paid working hours. What is the economic cost of commuting time? This is a serious question.
Employers are not the only economic productivity in a person's life. Child care and raising, socializing with friends, shopping, starting a business, learning new skills.
Point being, nothing economically productive (in the broader sense) is generally happening when someone is driving in a car.
> It would help if you’d elaborate on your proposal with real numbers. Do you want to drive at a higher speed than you can right now, or do you want people you believe to be unskilled to have to slow down compared to today?
The former. It'd be batty to suggest that the current speed limits, justified as the maximum possible speed for a minimally skilled licensed driver, should in fact be lower for some drivers, if we were actually differentiating drivers!
> How fast do you want to drive?
As fast as balances safety concerns! With current performance vehicles, taking into account hypothetical differential speeds using current highway and interstate speeds, I'd say ranges of 70 - 100 mph for the same piece of multi-lane (on one side) road.
> How much faster will your commute be?
Given the above, you'd arrive in 70% of the time at 100 mph, no?
> Your calculus, as presented so far, is completely ignoring:
> 1- the economic costs of safety, or lack of it.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm valuing it as balanced against the economic inefficiencies of alternatives. If optimizing safety were our primary goal, no one would be allowed to drive at all.
> 2- the fact that drivers in a lower speed class would need to be able to react to the faster drivers; in effect they would need to be as skilled in order to share the same roads.
Not sure that completely holds, but I catch your drift. You'd definitely still want to limit speed differentials according to road section, as they effectively do in Germany.
> 3- traffic, not the speed limit, is the limiting speed factor almost everywhere that long commutes exist.
> But hey, if you’re proposing that we make new, separate roads for the multi-speed-class system, maybe I’m for it. Everyone who thinks they’re better drivers and wants to ignore the risks can go drive together on their own road.
I look at traffic as a failure of transportation policy. You're not going to speed your way out of traffic, because it's a throughput problem. So this is irrelevant where speed-limiting traffic is concerned.
>> So between 1994 and 1996 all roads and vehicles became substantially safe?
> No, but both the US interstates and the cars have together become substantially safer over the last 20 years.
I was using those years, when the federal speed cap was removed, to poke a hole in the idea that US speed limits follow intrinsically from any sort of physical principles. I would say that they're more governed by a political process, attempting to balance multiple competing interests.
> I’m curious why you’ve dismissed the Highway Patrol? You’re not objective either, why are you ignoring the people who actually have to respond every time some idiot in a fast car who thinks he has “skill” loses traction and hits someone else or wraps himself around a telephone pole?
Because they're substantially funded by speeding fines? [1]
And if you think local government and officers are blind to their primary sources of revenue, then I've got a bridge to sell you...
>> Using cars at all isn’t the best we can possibly do.
> Granted. But any solutions to that are several orders of magnitude more expensive.
Strong disagree. Right now - the state of Covid work-from-home - is partial evidence. Other countries and some US cities like New York offer more evidence. Try to estimate the amount of private money spent on cars and car maintenance annually by all citizens, and guesstimate what we could buy in shared transportation resources, with the same amount of money. It would be extraordinarily difficult to change America's habits, but I don't buy that it would be more expensive. I'd argue the opposite, we are currently spending way more money than necessary in return for fictional ideas of personal freedom.
> I'd say ranges of 70 - 100 mph
Well, we're already there in much of the west, we already match speed limits on the Autobahn. In urban cities, I can't think of a highway I've ever commuted on in the east coast or west where it's possible to safely sustain > 70mph for long stretches, and I've never, in decades, had the opportunity to do that while commuting. Raising the speed limit simply wouldn't change that.
The radius of turns, and weather conditions are confounding factors for your wish. You're advocating speeds that don't leave adequate reaction times for unforseen situations, crap in the road, motorcycles, large trucks, or any number of things that regularly occur in the real world.
> Given the above, you'd arrive in 70% of the time at 100 mph, no?
Extremely unlikely, you're jumping to an invalid conclusion that raising the speed limit on the highway by a percentage would yield a proportional average travel reduction. To achieve that average, you typically have to peak much higher. You're not accounting for the off-freeway portion of your trip. And you'd have to perfectly sustain top speed the whole time, which is most places and in most traffic not possible, unless you're making assumptions you haven't explained yet.
I'm still not seeing the money. You've made a hand-wavy purely theoretical argument with logical gaps that somehow more money would appear in my pocket if only I could drive faster. How would that happen? What makes you think that people wouldn't respond by moving 30% further away for even cheaper housing (which would then rise in price due to increased demand)?
> I look at traffic as a failure of transportation policy.
Why? There are more cars on the road every year, that will automatically yield more traffic. And it's just as much a failure of transportation infrastructure, which was intentionally crippled by the lobbying of automakers in the US. It's also a failure of urban planning. We wouldn't have to commute if we lived closer. How would increasing speed limits as a policy fix traffic?
> Because they're substantially funded by speeding fines?
I believe that claim is false in most states. Can you provide a source please? The Highway Patrol in most states is primarily funded by taxes, and tickets in metropolitan areas are normally a small minority of their general fund. Often the revenue from fines goes to other city & state projects, and not back to the Highway Patrol.
Your theory fails to adequately explain why the Highway patrol is constantly begging people to slow down and be safe, posting signs about limits, being as obvious as possible about their speed monitoring, and not enforcing anywhere near as much as they could. You may want to take a few minutes to read the annual Highway Patrol report for your state and a few others. They are dominated by a focus on safety.
You're already trying to sell me a bridge with a gap in it. Call me completely unconvinced, let's agree to disagree.
>>> Using cars at all isn’t the best we can possibly do. >> Granted. But any solutions to that are several orders of magnitude more expensive.
> Strong disagree. Right now - the state of Covid work-from-home - is partial evidence. Other countries and some US cities like New York offer more evidence.
I'm not sure 25% unemployment and one of the densest American cities are applicable counterexamples.
> The radius of turns, and weather conditions are confounding factors for your wish. You're advocating speeds that don't leave adequate reaction times for unforseen situations, crap in the road, motorcycles, large trucks, or any number of things that regularly occur in the real world.
See earlier points about variability in vehicle performance, driver skill, and reaction times.
>> Given the above, you'd arrive in 70% of the time at 100 mph, no? > Extremely unlikely, you're jumping to an invalid conclusion that raising the speed limit on the highway by a percentage would yield a proportional average travel reduction. To achieve that average, you typically have to peak much higher. You're not accounting for the off-freeway portion of your trip.
I was assuming both of us could apply Amdahl's law.
> I'm still not seeing the money. You've made a hand-wavy purely theoretical argument with logical gaps that somehow more money would appear in my pocket if only I could drive faster. How would that happen? What makes you think that people wouldn't respond by moving 30% further away for even cheaper housing
You seem to be focused on individual money, as opposed to costs / benefits to the economy, in aggregate.
> Your theory fails to adequately explain why the Highway patrol is constantly begging people to slow down and be safe, posting signs about limits, being as obvious as possible about their speed monitoring, and not enforcing anywhere near as much as they could.
I believe we have very different views of law enforcement, and their motivations as a branch of executive government.
> Call me completely unconvinced, let's agree to disagree.
Probably for the best. This doesn't feel like a good faith debate at this point.
> RF enabling cars to be remotely interrogated, and encoding driver qualifications is well within our reach.
Half the country wants a government so small it can be drowned in a bathtub or be unable to respond competently to a public health crisis. You think we should institute elite certification so that some people can be allowed to drive fast on public roads...
Yeah, I agree safety requirements should be more stringent, but I’m not sure I support that as a means to allow more speed.
As a motorcyclist, when I see cars driving aggressively and at high speeds, I think to myself, “there is a person who is too safe...”
The party line among "reasonable" people (particularly back in the days of 55 everywhere) used to be that it isn't speed that kills, but speed differentials. I mean, I think this was the sort of thing I would read in Car & Driver, from people like Brock Yates. Doesn't seem compatible with your opinion though.
I used to think I was a skilled driver, but then I got in a terrible car accident because I was going too fast and the driver of the other vehicle wasn't as skilled as I was. Now I'm a much better driver.
Humans have in incredible talent for self-deception. Static speed limits are not a joke if you accept that our understanding of physics is real and have a basic understanding of how increasing speed increases energy at impact in a non-linear way.
You can be the best driver in the world (and you are almost certainly not), but someone blowing through a red light will still be unavoidable at times.
What are these guys trying to prove? Who the biggest and irresponsible asshole is? If you want to go fast, go to a race track and race against real drivers. If you don’t like tracks, do rallye.
It's strange how in other areas such behavior is encouraged. Where is the anger when people try to set speed records on boats? Every time some rich idiot gets into trouble on the high seas, other people have to risk their lives to save them. Setting aside rescue personnel, many innocent bystanders have also been killed by racing yachts.
"On the night of 19 March 2007, while around 22 kilometres (14 mi) offshore from Guatemala, Earthrace collided with a local fishing boat. No Earthrace crew were hurt, but one of the three crew members from the fishing boat was never found." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MY_Ady_Gil#2007
2012 "A yacht involved in a race off the coast of California and Mexico apparently collided at night with a much larger vessel, leaving three crew members dead and one missing, a sailing organization said early Sunday."
https://www.guelphmercury.com/news-story/2698368-collision-s...
And if you want to compare statistics, how many people died on Titanic as it was racing across the Atlantic? Including that tragedy would probably make ocean racing more dangerous than the cannonball run even on an hourly basis.
I think it's probably a function of how big the risks are to themselves vs. others (both relatively and absolutely). I don't think ocean yacht races are as dangerous to bystanders as pirate road races are to even an order of magnitude, probably several.
That speaks to the danger factor, but the OP wanted to know why they do take these risks. I'd say that those on the cannonball run have exactly the same motivation as Ellen MacArthur. She was knighted for setting an around-the-world yachting record, making her an official hero, but in terms of motivation she is no different than these people trying to break the across-the-us driving record. Different vehicles, different legal regime, but same drive to be the fastest.
Speaking as someone who doesn't race or watch racing, it seems like the fun has been taken out of racing, in order to quite deliberately make it a game of human skill, eking out tiny gains against a pointless ceiling.
As someone who enjoys driving fast on a racetrack and occasionally watching racing, this comment is entirely nonsensical to me. How is "deliberately making it a game of human skill" in any way "taking the fun out of it?"
Every sport ends up with its elite participants taking it very seriously and eking out tiny gains to win. That's just the nature of competition. This is orthogonal to it being fun.
There was a time when the competition was about who could build a better car. Eventually this was turned into yet another game of depending on the human element. With limits on engine output or other mechanical improvements, there's no way to have impressive gains, any more. It's just another way to pit one person's reflex against another's. You'll never see anything surprising from Nascar, because they literally ruled it out.
The entire point is to make it a game of skill, yes. In spec racing, you can't just buy yourself a win by having more money to spend on a faster car. Thousands of amateur-level racers deliberately seek this type of competition out specifically because it's more fun to them to have a competition where it's all about skill rather than how good your equipment is. The idea that this is "taking the fun out" seems precisely backwards to me.
"Every time some rich idiot gets into trouble on the high seas, other people have to risk their lives to save them. Setting aside rescue personnel, many innocent bystanders have also been killed by racing yachts.
"
I dunno, if my government created an ocean with my tax money to move people and freights, and some rich idiot with a yacht is racing down the artificial ocean endangering other ships, I guess I would be also pretty angry at that.
> Where is the anger when people try to set speed records on boats?
These do not seem to be remotely comparable.
Wikipedia has a list [1] of several people that died in water speed record attempts. This list does has several names on it. This pales in comparison with the 36,000 people [2] died in auto-collisions in just the US in 2018.
Driving 100mph+ on public roads is completely reckless. If you fuck it up, someone's going to die.
The cannonball run isn't comparable to streetracing any more than "motorboat" racing is comparable to ocean racing. Note that wikipedia article doesn't include any of the accidents I listed above. It's like comparing baseball and tennis because they both involve hitting a ball. Actually, it's worse than that because yacht racing doesn't even involve motors. The only similarity between motorboat racing and ocean/yacht racing is that they both involve some sort of water. I'd say "things that float" but motorboats don't really 'float' while racing.
Getting it into the 26 hour range is important for take off and landing. I haven't seen details, but you'd likely want to leave New York at 3:00 AM and thereby arrive in LA at 2:00 AM, avoiding the heaviest city street traffic. I know from personal experience that roadways are the lightest overnight Sunday-Monday. Maybe depart on Sunday 3:00 AM and arrive Monday 2:00 AM.
I pitched an idea for punishment for this behavior a while back (I'm in Portland, where street racing is a major issue right now), and got downvoted like crazy for it, but I'll try again here. Each time they are caught, surgically remove one finger. Either they'll take the hint that people want them to stop, or if they keep it up they won't be able to grip the steering wheel. Win-win.
For anyone who is trying to understand what the Cannonball Run is all about and resorts to some of the movies inspired by it, the reference movie is "The Gumball Rally". The actual "Cannonball Run" movies with a laundry list of "stars" were, frankly, not so great.
Having driven the stretch of road in this article many times, the idea of going more than three times my typical speed on it makes me break out into a cold sweat. It is not flat, not straight, and is directly adjacent to oncoming traffic. Other articles indicated the driver failed a DUI test as well.
How do you claim the record and not incriminate yourself?
A few people in Australia have been fined for uploading a photo they took while driving to social media. One was a politician who was stopped at some road works. He uploaded it to facebook and some people complained he broke the law. So he went to a police station voluntarily and I guess made a statement and was issued a fine. (You can't touch your phone even if stationary, or in a drive through, car park, etc)
In many states, the statute of limitations clock stops running when you leave the state, so you could find the expiry date still hasn't arrived if you come back.
110 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadAccording to Bolian, who has been in contact with the new record holders, the time to beat is now less than 26 hours. A sub 28-hour Cannonball Run was once unthinkable.
While he has not disclosed the exact time, that frame of reference means the drivers would have had to achieve an average speed of at least 173km/h (107 mph) for the 4507km (2801 mi) journey.
Accommodating for fuel stops, the team’s peak and cruising speeds are probably far in excess of that figure.
Bolian states that the new record holders averaged 193km/h (120 mph) when crossing “several” States. It is unknown what car the new record holders used.
Note, if you get caught at these high speeds on public roads, you will be arrested and vehicle impounded. Most of the time police officers will draw their weapons when making vehicle stops of this nature. Most state laws have a zero tolerance policy for vehicles exceeding 90mph on public roads.
But if you got bail money, GODSPEED
I love it man.
Being white and polite (and generally having a bunch of things about you that scream the opposite of "criminal scum") counts for a lot. In most states officers have discretion to choose between the civil and criminal version of whatever the state's "ludicrous speed" violation is.
My question is, do you actually PREFER that people reach reckless speeds in more crowded conditions?
SCCA roadrally events are about pace-setting and arriving just on time, not fast OR slow. Because of that, the setting is much more about clinical analysis, and less about having the worlds' fastest cars and the highest speeds.
Very little about SCCA RoadRally is anything like any other motorsport, actually. It's closer to a scavenger hunt most of the time.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1COvnSjLLw4&t=201s
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmNXCJt7K3Q
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_State_Classic_Challenge
https://twitter.com/CHP_HQ/status/1253087393567014912
I don't know if it was because there weren't many other cars out there, or because "we're all gonna die, abandon law and order!"
He said it turned out to be much more serious than he expected (coming from the Land of Chocolate and the Autobahn) and it was a pain in the ass to sort out.
Last month, the governor signed a law raising it the max speed to 85mph. It takes effect 01 July. (The 80mph limit was put into effect when speed limits were raised to 65mph.)
Exact definitions vary state to state, but you can generally argue that reasonable circumstances precluded felony endangerment.
E.g. Doing 120 mph on a straight, flat, southwestern road with horizon visibility in all directions would be speeding, but a reasonable judge would probably weigh the unlikelihood of you posing a danger to anyone other than yourself.
Whether or not you get such a reasonable judge...
[1] https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/reckless-endangerment/
That said, in computer speed runs, it's generally said that once someone says a run is unbeatable, it'll be beaten...
the vinwiki guy has made himself out to be an arbiter because he gets more views on his youtube channel and app subscribers from it
Top Gear did a test years ago to see just how fast you would need to go to defeat a speed camera, and it was well beyond what the Cannonballers would be running. You just can't fool a high speed camera easily. Of course, you can black out your drivers license, but you'll still risk the human patrols.
On the other hand, if the roads are empty, and nobody gets hurt... who cares! Film it, please.
There are some tricks. If you have staff, people prepping the road ahead of you, then you just slow down for the cameras. I suspect that these recent records are being supported by the same people, the same camera/cop location data.
I'm interested in what tech might be used by this team. I've been waiting for SDR dongles to transform into radar detectors/jammers. Cop cars emit so many different dedicated frequencies that anyone with a dongle and a laptop should be able to build a very functional "copdar".
There are products out there that can turn your license plate "off" with the flick of a switch. But if you are modifying car for a cannonball run you can build one yourself. Google "smart glass". Remember too that many US states do not require front plates. So it is not unusual for a car to be seen without one, leaving only the rear plate to worry about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85AVojj7rJ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ6rLhkZ3Hg
And here is one on a lambo being prepped for a run:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcUgxSizDRQ
The only thing that seems legal is letting your plate 'degrade' with corrosion to the point where the automated readers can't make out the characters.
Most police traffic is on a trunked radio system shared with other users, and is typically encrypted. It’s easy find the transmission with a scanner, but trying to localize a transmission using only a power measurement is difficult due to multipath and fading.
Lol. No police car could 'catch' anything at these speeds. Even if they could match the raw speed, catching up would take hours. You could organize a roadblock ahead but US cops, the local boys doing highway patrol in the dead of night, aren't going to deploy all those resources to maybe catch a speeder.
This happened to a friend of mine on a motorcyle. He was doing over 250KM/hour at 3am on a tuesday, flying back towards Vancouver for an emergency work thing. The first cop attempted to catch him, so did the second a few exits later. By the time they accelerated to highway speeds he was over the horizon. When he eventually hit a "roadblock" (one cop car he could easily have outrun) he had covered almost 60km. He honestly never saw the first two cops. At those speeds you don't bother with mirror checks. Judge found no streetracing or evading police. Simple (big) speeding ticket.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaJ3w_fAdoI
Tourist note: This is the road that runs past the Circuit of the Americas F1 track. And Lockhart has some of the best BBQ in central Texas.
AFAIK over here speed cameras are only allowed to be placed if they demonstratively improve traffic safety, so we don't have a crazy amount of them.
Of course the best way to beat a speed camera is to not speed ;-)
If you haven't seen the reluctance/defiance of American culture with the coronavirus pandemic, well... for better and worse, we don't like being surveilled by the government. Or at least, we like them to do us the honor of masking it or pretending not to.
It was super interesting driving a rental car in Iceland last year. They have automatic speed cameras & ticketing. And we didn’t ask for it, but the rental car’s computer knew where they were and beeped every time we approached one.
For us oldsters, there is a little cool-ness associated with the CannonBall Run from an old (but popular) movie. But it is a stupid thing, for sure.
So either you recognize the absurdity inherent in our speed laws, or you think the system is reasonable.
The Cannonball Run isn't for the latter.
What is the alternative, and how do you propose to enforce a dynamic speed limit that adapts to the drivers’ skill level?
Who determines skill level, and how do you determine skill level, and why would we want a public system where people are near the limits of their skill level?
Also curious - are you sure that skill level is the primary cause of traffic accidents and fatalities? Do you have any data on that? How does it compare with race drivers who’ve died in crashes, are those due to skill level?
I don’t think speed limits are “static” because of skill level. I presume speed limits are static because 1) physics - energy of impact is proportional to the square of your velocity. Double the speed is 4x the damage / chance of death. 2) There’s safety in a low speed differential in traffic regardless of the limit. It’s safer to pass at 5mph faster than it is to pass at 60mph faster. 3) It’s fair to all, in the sense that the same rule applies to everyone, and enforceable.
As to skill level, the current system has a cursory driver's test, coupled with (in some states) minimal re-qualification criteria. This means that an 18 year old new driver, a 40 year old experienced driver, and an 80 year old with barely passable eyesight are effectively lumped into the same bucket. To me, that feels like safety theater. And as with any theater, leads to widespread law breaking. In my opinion, any law which is commonly ignored is a bad thing and should be reworked to be more enforceable / in line with expectations.
As to accidents and fatalities normalized per skill level, we have general motor vehicle fatality statistics [1] (specifically note fatalities per million VMT pre-1995 and post-1995, when the federal speed maximums were substantially relaxed [2]). Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any comprehensive driver skill level test, with sufficient sample size, on which to draw statistics.
We can say that, per the 2018 NHTSA report [3], alcohol impairment was involved in 29% of overall fatalities. We can also say that ~50% of fatalities were unrestrained by safety devices (given ~90% documentation of restraint use at time of accident). They also note that "distraction-affected crashes" comprised 7.8% of total fatalities. Which is to say it's tenuous to hold skill as proxy for responsibility, but there are some very large percentages of fatalities exacerbated by non-speed-related irresponsible driving behavior.
I feel like race drivers would be a poor comparison, due to limited sample size and confounding effects (e.g. leading / high performance drivers more likely to take risks and push limits).
(1) absolutely has merit. (2) is debatable, but I'll agree also has merit. (3) seems like my real bone of contention with the current system.
It's naively "fair," in that it treats everyone and all vehicles identically. It's also incredibly sub-optimal, given the vast variance in drivers and vehicles.
If I had my druthers, I'd mandate all cars / drivers support remote interrogation (license class, if you don't want to open the privacy can of identity), then have a graduated series of license tests between standard (C) and commercial (CDL).
Then drastically increase speeding fines & automated fining, if you're caught speeding without an appropriate license qualification.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta...
[3] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
I still just don’t see a real problem with a static speed limit, or why something graduated by skill is called for and what it would help.
Having fines graduated by ‘skill’ would just be more of a declaration that it’s okay to break the law and speed if you’re a ‘better’ driver, whatever that means. It doesn’t make that much sense to me, the better drivers are already the ones choosing not to speed. Personally, I’d rather have more enforcement so that people just didn’t speed. I honestly hope that self-driving cars eliminate aggressive driving from our roads and let people relax while they travel. Speeds are already too high in a lot of places, and people have unrealistic expectations while they drive.
The last thing I want is some clowns claiming to be better drivers expecting to be allowed to drive 100mph through traffic. The very desire to driver faster that current speed limits is solid evidence in my book of a lack of driving wisdom, which I would call a lack of skill. The choices we make to avoid bad situations are more important than our reaction times or ability to recover from them. (Just like coding!)
I don’t know if that’s what you’re suggesting, because you didn’t make it clear, but that seems to be your implication. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Your suggestion is sounding a little to me like it could be a way for richer people to pay for more licensing to get traffic advantages. Speeding tickets already favor wealthy people and hurt poorer people disproportionately. The licenses we currently have don’t measure skill, they establish only the minimum standards needed for driving a motorcycle or car or 18 wheeler, no licensing in our system is capable of distinguishing the skills of different drivers.
It’s not really the case that the law is lumping everyone into the same bucket based on skill, I think that’s a misinterpretation, a specious framing but not what the law intended nor what it communicates. The speed limit is a declaration of what the safe speed of a given road and today’s vehicles are - again, because physics.
Speed limits are affected by popular opinion, and in some places, like in the western US where the speed limits have been hiked up to 80 mph, or even 85 in Texas, these limits have been raised in some locales by law makers in spite of the Highway Patrol’s objections and evidence that accidents and fatality rates are higher with the raised limits.
> It’s also incredibly sub-optimal, given that vast variance in drivers and vehicles.
So by what metric is it sub-optimal? How do you arrive at the conclusion that it’s “incredibly” sub-optimal? What does optimal mean, and what are you suggesting? I don’t get it yet. Are you saying more skilled drivers should be allowed to driver faster than other people, or just suggesting that fines should be lower? Who, exactly, is being harmed by speed limits, what is the damage being done, and what is the alternative? There are statistics showing increased rates of death in higher speed limit areas, so you need to have a pretty convincing argument that a thousand people being stuck at 70mph are being hurt more than someone getting killed.
I just don’t see it being realistic for some people to be allowed to drive much faster than others in traffic. This would add extra tension to already tense heavy traffic commutes, how does it solve anything? I suspect the unintended consequence of increasing the speed differential would be more road rage and more road fatalities.
You misunderstand. I'm proposing actual limits be different for different classes of drivers. So C1 gives you 50 mph max on a given road, C2 60, etc.
> no licensing in our system is capable of distinguishing the skills of different drivers
A CDL clearly requires additional knowledge beyond a standard license. E.g. brake failure modes and technical operation.
> The speed limit is a declaration of what the safe speed of a given road and today’s vehicles are - again, because physics.
So between 1994 and 1996 all roads and vehicles became substantially safer?
> these limits have been raised in some locales by law makers in spite of the Highway Patrol’s objections and evidence that accidents and fatality rates are higher with the raised limits
To put it bluntly, Highway Patrol does not seem like an objective third party in this matter.
>> It’s also incredibly sub-optimal, given that vast variance in drivers and vehicles.
> So by what metric is it sub-optimal? How do you arrive at the conclusion that it’s “incredibly” sub-optimal? What does optimal mean, and what are you suggesting?
Total travel time has an economic cost. Very few people work at full productivity while driving their cars.
An optimal allocation would be permitting everyone to drive at a precise maximum speed, calculated on the basis of all their attributes which effect likelihood of accident, and standardizing for likelihood of outcome.
Some of those attributes are constant from driver to driver (road geometry, weather).
Some of those attributes are variable (driver skill, attention, tendency to drive drunk, vehicle performance, vehicle maintenance).
Unless you're willing to argue that the variable attributes have neglible effect on accident likelihood or that their variable range is negligible, I'm not sure how you arrive at anything less than "incredibly sub-optimal" given static speed limits for everyone.
> Are you saying more skilled drivers should be allowed to driver faster than other people, or just suggesting that fines should be lower?
The former.
> Who, exactly, is being harmed by speed limits, what is the damage being done, and what is the alternative?
Everyone, but particularly drivers, by economic inefficiency. The alternative is my modest proposal.
> There are statistics showing increased rates of death in higher speed limit areas, so you need to have a pretty convincing argument that a thousand people being stuck at 70mph are being hurt more than someone getting killed.
See earlier points about the difficulties in normalizing statistics for proposed driver skill level.
> I suspect the unintended consequence of increasing the speed differential would be more road rage and more road fatalities.
Possibly, in additional to innumerable other things we haven't considered.
But my point is that we can't, on the face of things, defend the current system as the best we can possibly do.
> Very few people work at full productivity while driving their cars.
Very few people work at all while driving their cars; their commute is outside of their paid working hours. What is the economic cost of commuting time? This is a serious question. You’re not paid for non-work hours, so by choosing to live far away from your job, or work far away from where you live, you’re choosing to trade away your own free time, and choosing to pay more in gas (often, but not always, in return for lower rent/mortgage). There is no loss to the economy in terms of the time spent.
So what — exactly — is optimized economically by having higher speed limits? Where — exactly — would more money come from if the speed limits were raised for some people? And are you proposing to have the speed classes only apply while commuting to work, or at all times? What would be the justification for doing it at all times?
It would help if you’d elaborate on your proposal with real numbers. Do you want to drive at a higher speed than you can right now, or do you want people you believe to be unskilled to have to slow down compared to today? How fast do you want to drive? How much faster will your commute be? 50mph roads probably aren’t as common as 65mph highways. What do you imagine the actual speeds to be on the highway in your system?
Your calculus, as presented so far, is completely ignoring:
1- the economic costs of safety, or lack of it. Every crash can cost those involved tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it goes up when there’s serious hospital time involved. See the term “expected value” in statistics. You have to account for the risks and probabilities of a negative outcome in order to even know if your proposal can pay off.
2- the fact that drivers in a lower speed class would need to be able to react to the faster drivers; in effect they would need to be as skilled in order to share the same roads safely.
3- traffic, not the speed limit, is the limiting speed factor almost everywhere that long commutes exist.
But hey, if you’re proposing that we make new, separate roads for the multi-speed-class system, maybe I’m for it. Everyone who thinks they’re better drivers and wants to ignore the risks can go drive together on their own road.
> So between 1994 and 1996 all roads and vehicles became substantially safe?
No, but both the US interstates and the cars have together become substantially safer over the last 50 years.
I’m curious why you’ve dismissed the Highway Patrol? You’re not objective either, why are you ignoring the people who actually have to respond every time some idiot in a fast car who thinks he has “skill” loses traction and hits someone else or wraps himself around a telephone pole?
Granted. But any solutions to that are several orders of magnitude more expensive.
>> Very few people work at full productivity while driving their cars.
> Very few people work at all while driving their cars; their commute is outside of their paid working hours. What is the economic cost of commuting time? This is a serious question.
Employers are not the only economic productivity in a person's life. Child care and raising, socializing with friends, shopping, starting a business, learning new skills.
Point being, nothing economically productive (in the broader sense) is generally happening when someone is driving in a car.
> It would help if you’d elaborate on your proposal with real numbers. Do you want to drive at a higher speed than you can right now, or do you want people you believe to be unskilled to have to slow down compared to today?
The former. It'd be batty to suggest that the current speed limits, justified as the maximum possible speed for a minimally skilled licensed driver, should in fact be lower for some drivers, if we were actually differentiating drivers!
> How fast do you want to drive?
As fast as balances safety concerns! With current performance vehicles, taking into account hypothetical differential speeds using current highway and interstate speeds, I'd say ranges of 70 - 100 mph for the same piece of multi-lane (on one side) road.
> How much faster will your commute be?
Given the above, you'd arrive in 70% of the time at 100 mph, no?
> Your calculus, as presented so far, is completely ignoring: > 1- the economic costs of safety, or lack of it.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm valuing it as balanced against the economic inefficiencies of alternatives. If optimizing safety were our primary goal, no one would be allowed to drive at all.
> 2- the fact that drivers in a lower speed class would need to be able to react to the faster drivers; in effect they would need to be as skilled in order to share the same roads.
Not sure that completely holds, but I catch your drift. You'd definitely still want to limit speed differentials according to road section, as they effectively do in Germany.
> 3- traffic, not the speed limit, is the limiting speed factor almost everywhere that long commutes exist.
> But hey, if you’re proposing that we make new, separate roads for the multi-speed-class system, maybe I’m for it. Everyone who thinks they’re better drivers and wants to ignore the risks can go drive together on their own road.
I look at traffic as a failure of transportation policy. You're not going to speed your way out of traffic, because it's a throughput problem. So this is irrelevant where speed-limiting traffic is concerned.
>> So between 1994 and 1996 all roads and vehicles became substantially safe?
> No, but both the US interstates and the cars have together become substantially safer over the last 20 years.
I was using those years, when the federal speed cap was removed, to poke a hole in the idea that US speed limits follow intrinsically from any sort of physical principles. I would say that they're more governed by a political process, attempting to balance multiple competing interests.
> I’m curious why you’ve dismissed the Highway Patrol? You’re not objective either, why are you ignoring the people who actually have to respond every time some idiot in a fast car who thinks he has “skill” loses traction and hits someone else or wraps himself around a telephone pole?
Because they're substantially funded by speeding fines? [1]
And if you think local government and officers are blind to their primary sources of revenue, then I've got a bridge to sell you...
[1] https://www.governing.com/gov-d...
Strong disagree. Right now - the state of Covid work-from-home - is partial evidence. Other countries and some US cities like New York offer more evidence. Try to estimate the amount of private money spent on cars and car maintenance annually by all citizens, and guesstimate what we could buy in shared transportation resources, with the same amount of money. It would be extraordinarily difficult to change America's habits, but I don't buy that it would be more expensive. I'd argue the opposite, we are currently spending way more money than necessary in return for fictional ideas of personal freedom.
> I'd say ranges of 70 - 100 mph
Well, we're already there in much of the west, we already match speed limits on the Autobahn. In urban cities, I can't think of a highway I've ever commuted on in the east coast or west where it's possible to safely sustain > 70mph for long stretches, and I've never, in decades, had the opportunity to do that while commuting. Raising the speed limit simply wouldn't change that.
The radius of turns, and weather conditions are confounding factors for your wish. You're advocating speeds that don't leave adequate reaction times for unforseen situations, crap in the road, motorcycles, large trucks, or any number of things that regularly occur in the real world.
> Given the above, you'd arrive in 70% of the time at 100 mph, no?
Extremely unlikely, you're jumping to an invalid conclusion that raising the speed limit on the highway by a percentage would yield a proportional average travel reduction. To achieve that average, you typically have to peak much higher. You're not accounting for the off-freeway portion of your trip. And you'd have to perfectly sustain top speed the whole time, which is most places and in most traffic not possible, unless you're making assumptions you haven't explained yet.
I'm still not seeing the money. You've made a hand-wavy purely theoretical argument with logical gaps that somehow more money would appear in my pocket if only I could drive faster. How would that happen? What makes you think that people wouldn't respond by moving 30% further away for even cheaper housing (which would then rise in price due to increased demand)?
> I look at traffic as a failure of transportation policy.
Why? There are more cars on the road every year, that will automatically yield more traffic. And it's just as much a failure of transportation infrastructure, which was intentionally crippled by the lobbying of automakers in the US. It's also a failure of urban planning. We wouldn't have to commute if we lived closer. How would increasing speed limits as a policy fix traffic?
> Because they're substantially funded by speeding fines?
I believe that claim is false in most states. Can you provide a source please? The Highway Patrol in most states is primarily funded by taxes, and tickets in metropolitan areas are normally a small minority of their general fund. Often the revenue from fines goes to other city & state projects, and not back to the Highway Patrol.
Your theory fails to adequately explain why the Highway patrol is constantly begging people to slow down and be safe, posting signs about limits, being as obvious as possible about their speed monitoring, and not enforcing anywhere near as much as they could. You may want to take a few minutes to read the annual Highway Patrol report for your state and a few others. They are dominated by a focus on safety.
You're already trying to sell me a bridge with a gap in it. Call me completely unconvinced, let's agree to disagree.
> Strong disagree. Right now - the state of Covid work-from-home - is partial evidence. Other countries and some US cities like New York offer more evidence.
I'm not sure 25% unemployment and one of the densest American cities are applicable counterexamples.
> The radius of turns, and weather conditions are confounding factors for your wish. You're advocating speeds that don't leave adequate reaction times for unforseen situations, crap in the road, motorcycles, large trucks, or any number of things that regularly occur in the real world.
See earlier points about variability in vehicle performance, driver skill, and reaction times.
>> Given the above, you'd arrive in 70% of the time at 100 mph, no? > Extremely unlikely, you're jumping to an invalid conclusion that raising the speed limit on the highway by a percentage would yield a proportional average travel reduction. To achieve that average, you typically have to peak much higher. You're not accounting for the off-freeway portion of your trip.
I was assuming both of us could apply Amdahl's law.
> I'm still not seeing the money. You've made a hand-wavy purely theoretical argument with logical gaps that somehow more money would appear in my pocket if only I could drive faster. How would that happen? What makes you think that people wouldn't respond by moving 30% further away for even cheaper housing
You seem to be focused on individual money, as opposed to costs / benefits to the economy, in aggregate.
> Your theory fails to adequately explain why the Highway patrol is constantly begging people to slow down and be safe, posting signs about limits, being as obvious as possible about their speed monitoring, and not enforcing anywhere near as much as they could.
I believe we have very different views of law enforcement, and their motivations as a branch of executive government.
> Call me completely unconvinced, let's agree to disagree.
Probably for the best. This doesn't feel like a good faith debate at this point.
Half the country wants a government so small it can be drowned in a bathtub or be unable to respond competently to a public health crisis. You think we should institute elite certification so that some people can be allowed to drive fast on public roads...
Yeah, I agree safety requirements should be more stringent, but I’m not sure I support that as a means to allow more speed.
As a motorcyclist, when I see cars driving aggressively and at high speeds, I think to myself, “there is a person who is too safe...”
You can be the best driver in the world (and you are almost certainly not), but someone blowing through a red light will still be unavoidable at times.
2018: "One Fisherman Killed, 9 Saved After Boat Collides With Ocean Race Yacht" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjrq0NDL8r4
"On the night of 19 March 2007, while around 22 kilometres (14 mi) offshore from Guatemala, Earthrace collided with a local fishing boat. No Earthrace crew were hurt, but one of the three crew members from the fishing boat was never found." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MY_Ady_Gil#2007
2012 "A yacht involved in a race off the coast of California and Mexico apparently collided at night with a much larger vessel, leaving three crew members dead and one missing, a sailing organization said early Sunday." https://www.guelphmercury.com/news-story/2698368-collision-s...
And if you want to compare statistics, how many people died on Titanic as it was racing across the Atlantic? Including that tragedy would probably make ocean racing more dangerous than the cannonball run even on an hourly basis.
Every sport ends up with its elite participants taking it very seriously and eking out tiny gains to win. That's just the nature of competition. This is orthogonal to it being fun.
This shouldn't happen either.
These do not seem to be remotely comparable.
Wikipedia has a list [1] of several people that died in water speed record attempts. This list does has several names on it. This pales in comparison with the 36,000 people [2] died in auto-collisions in just the US in 2018.
Driving 100mph+ on public roads is completely reckless. If you fuck it up, someone's going to die.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_accidents_in_mot...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/05/10/ontario-police-19-ye...
Having driven the stretch of road in this article many times, the idea of going more than three times my typical speed on it makes me break out into a cold sweat. It is not flat, not straight, and is directly adjacent to oncoming traffic. Other articles indicated the driver failed a DUI test as well.
A few people in Australia have been fined for uploading a photo they took while driving to social media. One was a politician who was stopped at some road works. He uploaded it to facebook and some people complained he broke the law. So he went to a police station voluntarily and I guess made a statement and was issued a fine. (You can't touch your phone even if stationary, or in a drive through, car park, etc)
https://jalopnik.com/alex-roy-reveals-transcontinental-run-c...