Democrats have been the party of government mandates for some time now, typically under the justification “everyone should give up some freedoms, because otherwise a few people might be harmed”.
The real surprise is that AOC voted against it, along with a sole other democrat whose name escapes me.
The only exception to this pattern I’m aware of is in the abortion debate, but only under the worldview that unborn children aren’t people (not the time or place to make any claims one way or another about that, just saying it how it is).
Sadly, they're generally in favor of nanny state approaches, where government is given control over every possible aspect of people's lives where someone or something can theoretically do something bad. Sometimes it's sensible, but sometimes it's very questionable.
What truly sucks is that there is no third option.
Possibly unpopular idea here, but I want cars to enforce a speed cap inside cities. They have all the relevant speed limit and GPS data. And hopefully this would stop those cars from going 45mph on my 20mph street.
Why not pass a law to cut off the hands of speed violators? Would that not solve the problem?
Why invade the cars of every single person. Absurdly heavy-handed, and not necessary nor likely as effective at stopping people speeding on your street.
Narrow, targeted enforcement against violators of existing laws would suffice. Keep incrementally increasing the penalty until it works.
Of course it would work. Harsh punishment in Singapore works fine. When has that been tried? We don't even do this to stop retail theft let alone residential speeding. What on Earth are you referring to re:the first time?
That doesn't sound very american of you. A real patriot would solve the issue by buying a bigger car, so if you're hit, it's the other guy who gets hurt
I wouldn't object to this as long as implementing it doesn't require the car to talk to any servers.
Edit: I'm curious (not complaining) as to why this comment is being downvoted. Is it because people disagree with me about not objecting to the idea of speed-limiting in cities, or because people disagree with me about not wanting to talk to servers?
Unless you’re a character in an action movie, no. Your dying patient is going to be worse off when you get t-boned driving that aggressively or simply shaking them around. The primary limiting factor in a city are other vehicles, not speed, and not having a siren matters more there.
What you’re hoping is that a police officer would agree with your decision and choose not to write you a ticket. That might work, but if you try this you are gambling on that and almost certainly not saving any meaningful amount of time.
Not debating the legality (it surely isn't), but I suspect in some cases a speeding ticket may end up costing less (even including the increased insurance premiums) than the ambulance fees.
Likely but I was simply responding to the false assertion that it was legal. It’s a common lie people use to present the most positive spin for their unwillingness to drive safely in conditions which are exceedingly unlikely to be more serious than “didn’t feel like waking up prudently early”.
Look, I get it, it’s fun to pretend that you’d have an excuse to drive like Tom Cruise but that kind of thing doesn’t matter in real life. If you need to get to the hospital, the limiting factor is traffic and safety: you can’t go faster than the guy ahead of you and the things which could save you time are things like running lights which have a high risk unless you live somewhere with no cross traffic and excellent visibility. In most cases, the time you save is likely to be less than you save by not parking when you get there and less than you’d save by having an EMT drive them in a vehicle which has both legal permission and lights & sirens to get traffic out of the way.
I’m not the one arguing against something which would provably save thousands of lives annually. You’re welcome to show your homework that there are a comparable number of cases where the difference between life and death comes down to being able to exceed the speed limit in an urban area.
That is a completely different argument than you made above
.
It may be the case, and I agree likely, that automated speed limits save lives on net.
Speeding on the way to the hospital is a very small subset of speeding, and you claimed that speeding on the way to the hospital caused more deaths than delay, and seemingly implied that it was impossible for delay to be more deadly, even on a case by case basis.
It’s still the same argument: it’s never legal to break the speed limit (the false claim I was responding to), and speed governors are a good idea because 99.999999% of the time they’re improving safety. There are vanishingly few cases where someone going 45mph on a city street with a 20mph limit - the scenario in question – is going to make a difference in an emergency, but every single day many people are killed or seriously injured by drivers who chose to speed.
> you claimed that speeding on the way to the hospital caused more deaths than delay
Here’s what I actually wrote:
> Your dying patient is going to be worse off when you get t-boned driving that aggressively or simply shaking them around. The primary limiting factor in a city are other vehicles, not speed, and not having a siren matters more there.
The point was simply that even in a time-critical emergency, a driver who doesn’t have training driving like that or things like ambulance lights & sirens is going to make things worse. Driving as fast as you can is a recipe for losing control or hitting someone you didn’t see in time. It’s also unlikely to be good for the patient in most scenarios: if they have an injury that serious, whiplash probably isn’t a good addition.
Additionally, it’s usually pointless: in the city scenario in question, you’re most likely to simply be dangerously getting to the next backup without significant reduction in door to door travel. Even an ambulance with its lights and sirens on will be slowed significantly by people who aren’t paying attention or won’t/can’t get out of the way, and an ordinary driver is going to have a worse time than that. That’s even more pronounced for the moves which potentially save more time like running red lights or using the opposite lanes to pass, which I’ve only seen ambulance drivers do when they had a police officer running cover for them.
To summarize: this kind of situation is rare - maybe once or twice in your life, if ever – and even in such cases it’s a very high risk scenario which is unlikely to save enough time to be worth it. That’s why it’s not legal - nobody wants the inevitable deaths which would come from giving carte blanche to anyone who panics over indigestion and decides they should drive to the ER at 90mph - and also why I don’t think it’s a serious argument against safety technologies.
Are either of those things really legal? I'm highly doubtful. In fact, at least for the latter, the official government position is to call an ambulance, don't take someone to the hospital yourself.
I don't think either of those are legal. The only law I can think of that has a relevant exception would be the law about phone use while driving, which has a 911 call exemption.
Regardless, I think those situations are relatively rare and the potential lives saved would pale in comparison to daily traffic deaths
I saw a post here recently about how even ambulance companies are considering revising their policies for speeding and disrupting traffic because there's data showing it leads to worse mortality outcomes. And that's WITH a professional ambulance driver using their lights and sirens
You could do all sorts of technological enforcement of traffic laws.
You could have cars not permit going above the speed limit on highways for more than X minutes [to facilitate overtaking]. You could dynamically lower the speed limit during inclement weather. You could lower the speed limit when approaching an emergency vehicle by the side of the road. I'm not sure we have accurate enough position info to somehow force people out of the passing lane after a certain amount of time.
Hell, you don't even have to make it outright impossible to drive a car fast -- add a manual override switch, that removes the governor while logging your location and speed with the appropriate authorities. Audit after the fact to distinguish between "automatic speed limits were incorrect", "someone in the car was bleeding out on the way to the hospital" and "I wanted to go real fast".
Like it's impossible to programmatically disable ICE cars? You've got a false sense of security. You'll have to buy used cars forever to be safe from such a law.
You do realize electric and drive by wire is completely orthogonal to the point here right? There are plenty of electric conversion kits for older vehicles that are "dumb", no internet connection and only enough intelligence to manage the battery and motor.
E-bikes have a speed cap so they don’t get classified as motorcycles, which would require insurance, registration, and extra licensing to use on public roads.
The problem with dynamic speed caps is that they fail in very dangerous ways. If you’re on a freeway but your GPS thinks you’re on a residential street, you’re suddenly going much slower than surrounding traffic.
A simpler solution would be to actually enforce traffic laws. It’s only a tiny fraction of drivers who endanger the public. The sooner we identify them and get them off the road, the safer we’ll be.
> A simpler solution would be to actually enforce traffic laws. It’s only a tiny fraction of drivers who endanger the public.
I don’t know where you live but in every city I’ve visited that fraction is close to half, and for certain behaviors like not stopping for a stop sign or turn on red it’s like 95%.
With regards to speed, I think a lot of this could be addressed by having the vehicle do something like turn off the sound system and play a warning that you’re exceeding the limit when you do more than a certain percentage over for more than a short time. That’d take the fun out of it and interfere with someone’s Zoom call while still allowing them to ignore it if there’s some GPS bounce or something while leaving the freeway.
There are insurance providers in the UK that fit black boxes that work using GPS to check you are following the speed limit. They offer you a lower rate if you obey the law. There are numerous cases of this technology not working and people's policies being cancelled as a result. You couldn't ever attach a limiter to such a system, it would be far too dangerous.
This exists in the US as well. In a situation where you need to make emergency maneuvers where you’re likely accelerating or decelerating quickly? Opps, your premium just went up.
Enforcement of the law with harsher penalties and a few speed-bumps would stop this. Seems more reasonable than some expensive, dystopian back-door in every car.
harsher penalties dont really matter. It all comes down to actual enforcement and general belief in the law.
If nobody thinks they will get caught, penalties dont matter. If the majority decides not to follow the rules, the police cant enforce them meaningfully, there simply not enough police to enforce all the rules against all the people, all the time
It'd be cooler if this wasn't another Third Party Doctrine abuse violating the spirit of the 4th Amendment with telemetry shared around to insurers and anyone else who wants it.
GPS is notoriously terrible inside cities with tall buildings and when you have overlapping roads, nearby roads with vastly different speed limits and so on. This would lead to way more accidents.
Just saying that the speed is limited to the maximum speed limit of any road within 1 mile would be a huge improvement. When nearby highways have speed limits of 55mph, there's no good reason to allow cars to drive 70 on surface streets.
> The kill switch mandate forms a critical element of the 2021 infrastructure law. Car manufacturers are bound by the legislation to incorporate advanced driving technology designed to proactively assess a driver’s performance and, if deemed impaired, limit or completely prevent the vehicle from functioning.
Not only that, but it's another mandatory system in cars that are already bloated with systems and features. More curb weight, more cost - both to purchase and to repair.
Not necessarily. We won't really know exactly what these systems will need to look like until the NHTSA releases their standard, but its possible that the standard will be satisfy-able while piggybacking off of already very common (and soon to be mandated) ADAS functionality like lane monitoring and automated emergency braking.
IF the standard goes that direction then automakers would probably need a little more compute but that's about it. If it mandates eye-tracking, breath or touch analysis, or anything like that then that will be a totally different can of worms.
It's going to be nasty when people figure out which cars implement this badly and start turning off their engines in the middle of freeways. Even nastier when it starts being used to prevent people from gathering in groups or driving away from protests/etc.
Thomas Massie tries to kill everything. His reputation for voting “no” on EVERY SINGLE piece of legislation seriously diminishes his ability to __actually__ get certain legislation nixed. He was a great engineer and probably understands this issue much more than his peers, but his historical actions doomed his credibility here.
Whichever way this goes, just the fact that it is being considered makes me definitely more interested in rebuilding and maintaining some good 1990s sporty car for daily driver use. After many structural crash-performance-improvement measures were common but before every manufacturer wanted to sell cars-as-a-service...
I am eager to find this kill switch and disable it. I regret to think that it will be baked into the computer but with right to repair movements, and good hacking, we can disable the kill switch. It is an unreasonable intrusion into the legal use of a legitimate product.
Where would this effort stop? A kill switch on your home furnace because you are using too much heat, which is burning fossil fuels and endangering the health of the people? Your phone is geofenced and disabled to protect national security?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadMassie (R) created an amendment to stop the mandate for a kill switch.
Two Democrats and 199 Republicans voted in favor of his amendment.
210 Democrats and 19 Republicans voted against his amendment.
His amendment failed.
The real surprise is that AOC voted against it, along with a sole other democrat whose name escapes me.
The only exception to this pattern I’m aware of is in the abortion debate, but only under the worldview that unborn children aren’t people (not the time or place to make any claims one way or another about that, just saying it how it is).
What truly sucks is that there is no third option.
ebikes already have this, why not cars?
Why invade the cars of every single person. Absurdly heavy-handed, and not necessary nor likely as effective at stopping people speeding on your street.
Narrow, targeted enforcement against violators of existing laws would suffice. Keep incrementally increasing the penalty until it works.
If it didn't work the first time, it's not going to work the second time.
Edit: I'm curious (not complaining) as to why this comment is being downvoted. Is it because people disagree with me about not objecting to the idea of speed-limiting in cities, or because people disagree with me about not wanting to talk to servers?
https://www.progressive.com/lifelanes/on-the-road/speeding-i...
What you’re hoping is that a police officer would agree with your decision and choose not to write you a ticket. That might work, but if you try this you are gambling on that and almost certainly not saving any meaningful amount of time.
It is dogmatic and antiscientific.
You simply imagine a scenario, make up some predictions, and call it a universal truth.
Speeding on the way to the hospital is a very small subset of speeding, and you claimed that speeding on the way to the hospital caused more deaths than delay, and seemingly implied that it was impossible for delay to be more deadly, even on a case by case basis.
> you claimed that speeding on the way to the hospital caused more deaths than delay
Here’s what I actually wrote:
> Your dying patient is going to be worse off when you get t-boned driving that aggressively or simply shaking them around. The primary limiting factor in a city are other vehicles, not speed, and not having a siren matters more there.
The point was simply that even in a time-critical emergency, a driver who doesn’t have training driving like that or things like ambulance lights & sirens is going to make things worse. Driving as fast as you can is a recipe for losing control or hitting someone you didn’t see in time. It’s also unlikely to be good for the patient in most scenarios: if they have an injury that serious, whiplash probably isn’t a good addition.
Additionally, it’s usually pointless: in the city scenario in question, you’re most likely to simply be dangerously getting to the next backup without significant reduction in door to door travel. Even an ambulance with its lights and sirens on will be slowed significantly by people who aren’t paying attention or won’t/can’t get out of the way, and an ordinary driver is going to have a worse time than that. That’s even more pronounced for the moves which potentially save more time like running red lights or using the opposite lanes to pass, which I’ve only seen ambulance drivers do when they had a police officer running cover for them.
To summarize: this kind of situation is rare - maybe once or twice in your life, if ever – and even in such cases it’s a very high risk scenario which is unlikely to save enough time to be worth it. That’s why it’s not legal - nobody wants the inevitable deaths which would come from giving carte blanche to anyone who panics over indigestion and decides they should drive to the ER at 90mph - and also why I don’t think it’s a serious argument against safety technologies.
And know that whoever malefactors will not have that speed governor
Regardless, I think those situations are relatively rare and the potential lives saved would pale in comparison to daily traffic deaths
I saw a post here recently about how even ambulance companies are considering revising their policies for speeding and disrupting traffic because there's data showing it leads to worse mortality outcomes. And that's WITH a professional ambulance driver using their lights and sirens
Edit: here's the link https://www.ems1.com/ambulance-safety/articles/14-groups-iss...
You could have cars not permit going above the speed limit on highways for more than X minutes [to facilitate overtaking]. You could dynamically lower the speed limit during inclement weather. You could lower the speed limit when approaching an emergency vehicle by the side of the road. I'm not sure we have accurate enough position info to somehow force people out of the passing lane after a certain amount of time.
Hell, you don't even have to make it outright impossible to drive a car fast -- add a manual override switch, that removes the governor while logging your location and speed with the appropriate authorities. Audit after the fact to distinguish between "automatic speed limits were incorrect", "someone in the car was bleeding out on the way to the hospital" and "I wanted to go real fast".
The problem with dynamic speed caps is that they fail in very dangerous ways. If you’re on a freeway but your GPS thinks you’re on a residential street, you’re suddenly going much slower than surrounding traffic.
A simpler solution would be to actually enforce traffic laws. It’s only a tiny fraction of drivers who endanger the public. The sooner we identify them and get them off the road, the safer we’ll be.
I don’t know where you live but in every city I’ve visited that fraction is close to half, and for certain behaviors like not stopping for a stop sign or turn on red it’s like 95%.
With regards to speed, I think a lot of this could be addressed by having the vehicle do something like turn off the sound system and play a warning that you’re exceeding the limit when you do more than a certain percentage over for more than a short time. That’d take the fun out of it and interfere with someone’s Zoom call while still allowing them to ignore it if there’s some GPS bounce or something while leaving the freeway.
If nobody thinks they will get caught, penalties dont matter. If the majority decides not to follow the rules, the police cant enforce them meaningfully, there simply not enough police to enforce all the rules against all the people, all the time
I see no way that could go terribly wrong...
IF the standard goes that direction then automakers would probably need a little more compute but that's about it. If it mandates eye-tracking, breath or touch analysis, or anything like that then that will be a totally different can of worms.
Unfortunately existing manufacturers are unlikely to implement this in a local-first way.
[1] https://comma.ai
[2] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/selfdrive/m...
[3] https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/2436
I think the title gives a little negative slant on Mr. Massie, when the negative charge should be on the failed effort.
Where would this effort stop? A kill switch on your home furnace because you are using too much heat, which is burning fossil fuels and endangering the health of the people? Your phone is geofenced and disabled to protect national security?