There are so many things we could do in the US to reduce the tens of thousands of road deaths every year. The odd thing is, we seem to be choosing to do none of them. I think the problem is that a meaningful number of assholes, I mean Americans, truly think they have a right to zip down freeways at 100mph, swerving form one lane to the next with no blinker. We see it every day. As far as I'm concerned, driving like that is akin to a violent crime and should come with a prison sentence.
Speed is not the issue. Weaving in and out, tailgating and other similar behaviors are.
Just came back from Germany and drove on the no speed limit part of the autobahn. It was orderly and I felt perfectly safe with family going equivalent of 120mph. No one cutting you off, unless passing, no sitting in left lane. Getting passed at that speed like you are standing still takes a bit getting used to, but again, it’s very predictable. Did not witness any accidents in 2 weeks of driving. It can be done, just need proper rules, penalties for breaking them that are actually enforced and of course good roads (didn’t see any pot holes either).
A truism, which is not very useful. The strategy of reducing speed to reduce collisions/severity compared to reducing dangerous behavior that leads to collisions is like the failed war on drugs.
I’ve been hit a few times in US and always it’s a distracted driver going fast and not following any rules. Speed limit didn’t slow them one bit. Not even in a school zone. Training, enforcement and more training is in my view a better answer. Not perfect, but better.
You can't train people to not get distracted, you can only train people to try to avoid distractions like phones or arguments in the car. But regardless how much you try there will always be distracted drivers on the roads.
Being distracted behind the wheel has a lot of cultural aspects - in US driving is viewed as almost a right, else where it is a hard earned and expensive privilege. People tend to value what they had to work hard for. Of course there will be those who don’t, but increasing the barrier to entry to operating dangerous machinery might be a good thing. Look at licensing approaches around the world and you will see places with higher barriers having a bit more order on the streets.
Slowing traffic is a component in Sweden's very successful "Vision Zero" to eliminate pedestrian fatalities. Not the most important component, but an important component.
It’s not the fact that people pretend they don’t know that speed kills, the problem in America is that people don’t care unless an immediate family member is killed by someone else.
The problem here is the problem of casinos, people here buy into the illusion of control.
Not that I'm a fan of cars in general, but I 100% agree with everything you've said here, there's no good reason for the absurdly low speed limits on major freeways, especially since the average speed of traffic is often 20mph over, making it actively unsafe to do the speed limit. Though I will say some of the potholes we've got on 880 are unsafe at any speed.
Sounds like you've driven in the only part of Germany where people behave. My experience is it's as bad as everywhere else in neighboring countries with the tiny difference that the lanes are a bit wider than in most places. I usually don't drive in the left lanes and I still get the impression people want to check what I'm transporting in the back all the time.
The German autobahn is not orderly, every 5 minutes someone with more than 230 kph drives on the left lane and wants to kick you out of it when you dont get out of it asap. If you want a good example go to the Netherlands, i've never had issues there in several decades.
The point is that people in the left lane should not need to be "kicked out" because they should always be looking for the first opportunity to get out of the left lane, not travelling there
This is mentioned all the time but the cost to get a driver's license in Germany is incredible high. And even after spending a lot of money on training, most native Germans fail the exam the first time. Then, like you said - there are rules and very stiff penalties in place for after you get your license.
Realistically, most freeways are built for 100mph, and it’s weird the US doesn’t just allow that like Germany does.
What the US really needs (also like Germany), is to make it much more difficult to get a license, and make it much easier to lose one for bad driving. Unfortunately that’s a political nonstarter since decades of poor zoning policy have resulted in nearly everything requiring a car to get to.
Smart roads and car speed limits are obvious solution and is being worked towards in Europe.
Despite vivid imagination, there is 0 reasons for you go 10-20% over speed limit, ever.
Why should you endanger everyone when you are in emergency? Why overtake someone if they are driving within 10% of speed limit?
If you want experience speed - get trained and go to a racetrack.
There's no reason why your car (and road agency) shouldn't exactly know speed limit and state of every single road. We live in a global realtime SAR imaging sat coverage and global sat internet coverage. We can track every single car in the world and you say we can't make a realtime database of speed limits? Get outta here, decel.
I'm not sure about there, but here in Vancouver, I try to drive as much as possible at the posted speed limit, because I have family and I want them to be alive (and they need me to be alive).
At least 80% of the cars pass me constantly and I constantly see drivers pissed off at me driving slowly.
I have no solution, I feel unsafe going slower but I also don't want to go faster, it stresses me (tickets, losing driving license etc.), but I also don't want to endanger anybody.
If you have suggestions, great. I'll keep going at the posted speed limit.
That’s already illegal. The problem is enforcement. Ever since the pandemic and the “defund the police” nonsense I’ve hardly seen the highway patrol on the roads at all, much less pulling anyone over.
Actually defunding the police turned out to be something that didn't happen, at least from the democrats (who are still blamed for it). The main defunding was from the republican leadership in the house who insisted on reducing the budget or multiple federal law enforcement agencies, such as FBI and ATF. The republicans defunded the police.
But the effective outcome of all the sound and fury is that police enforcement seems way way down. I can't understand why they allow so many drivers to go around with expired license plates and worse (no plates, hand written plates, etc). They just don't stop them any more. There was a claim that laws about safe pursuit were a reason to not stop them, then they reversed the laws, still happening). I'm very ticked about it.
What does the Congress have to do with police forces?
What do FBI and ATF have to do with traffic enforcement?
Actual police (one that enforces traffic laws) had actually been defunded and by democrats:
You don’t need police to enforce speed laws. You just need cameras, which have the advantages of being cheaper and safer.
There are two kinds of speed camera systems. One uses two cameras in short succession to measure instantaneous speed. You can dodge this by slowing down right before it.
The second uses the same concept but puts the cameras a mile or so apart to measure duration over that distance. This is harder to game.
This feels so true. I don't see enforcement across any of the portions of the US I travel. I rarely if ever see cars pulled over. It is a contrast to what I felt growing up.
You don't need highway patrol at all for enforcement, we have cameras and radar. Just send them a ticket in the mail and impound their car after that (the same as Austria and Switzerland). We don't enforce it because we don't want to.
Is it really the freeway that's the problem?
They go fast down residential streets, or driving while texting, and eating. I've literally seen someone reading a book while driving before.
It was introduced a few years ago in Denmark with good results, too.
Companies that lease out cars complained a bit, but I suppose they have since learned to be more careful when issuing vehicles to punters. This, of course, also applies to people who just lend out their cars – you really want to ensure that it will be driven responsible.
The US is pretty permissive about speeding. In many states there are highways on the outskirts of cities where the average speed of cars is 20mph higher than the speed limit. We've abandoned automatic speed cameras because people want to be able to speed. In South Florida you can take your traffic ticket to The Ticket Clinic, lawyers who for $80 guarantee to get the points against your license removed or your money back.
We have so many technological fixes for it too. Modern cars can actually read speed limit signs, yet they don't have a feature to limit the speed of the vehicle to that limit. Some cars have a feature to limit the speed limit depending on whose car keys are in the car, but the owner has to enable it. Even if sometimes you have to speed for some extraordinary circumstance, the car could limit it to <85mph after 30 seconds (the fastest public road speed limit in the US is 85mph). And to reduce the number of drunk driving incidents, all cars could have a built-in breathalyzer.
But we don't do these things for the same reason people refused to wear masks during the pandemic: fear of an attack on personal liberty. We care much more about our ability to do terrible things than our responsibility to not do harm. Humans suck. But culturally, some do more than others.
Mine only tells me and often picks up the signs for wet weather (reduced to 90kph) and sometimes from the parallel road which usually is either 50 or 80.
Sounds like a bad idea (though limiting to the countries max is reasonable and safe).
I'm not sure HN isnthe right place to discuss political issues, but this is a horribly toothless law.
> The law applies when a driver within a city is going 60-plus kilometers per hour over the speed limit. Outside the city, the vehicle must be going 70 or more kph (44 mph) over the limit. But at that level, the vehicle is only confiscated for two weeks. For repeat offenders, as well as for those who go 80-plus kph (50 mph) over the speed limit in a city or 90-plus kph (56 mph) outside a city, the vehicle is permanently confiscated and sold.
Doing 110 kpm in a 50s zone is willingly putting people's life at risk. It's beyond reckless driving, and might be considered as a super weak form of attempted murder (and suicide) even. And you get your car taken away for 2 weeks. Unless you're doing the Autobahn max Speed in a 50s zone or be a repeat offender for it to actually trigger.. What the hell?
Even better, if the racer doesn't own the car, there's (as they admit themselves) nothing they can do.
Why is this so weak? Is there some ethical concern about taking someone's car, or is this a political maneuver?
They did mention that someone was apprehended and punished under the law by 3 AM on the first day the law came into effect. Maybe it’s a case of starting with the most egregious and noncontroversial cases and considering broader approaches from there.
> Doing 110 kpm in a 50s zone is willingly putting people's life at risk
If 50 km/h limit is appropriate for a given road. I would expect speed limits to be reasonable in AT but if an organization which sets speed limits can profit from fines and forfeiture it creates an incentive to set the limit as low as possible.
In Russia I've seen a road going around the city (but formally still in the city) with the speed limit 60 km/h. With a central reservation and a large distance between traffic lights 80-90 km/h would be reasonable but guess police wanted to profit from fines. May be the speed limit has been increased eventually, don't know.
The issue always is, who keeps the proceeds from sale of the forfeited vehicle. If it is the police that issued the ticket, this amounts to a license for police to commit highway robbery.
If not a problem now in Austria, it eventually will be.
There are unfortunately states within the US that do allow civil forfeiture. Its become quite well known where people will get pulled over with larger amounts of cash $10k+ and the cops don't like the answer of why they have money and they take it. It then becomes the burden of the owner to prove they lawfully own that money.
> Why would the police keep the money? It doesn't get to keep other confiscated money, does it? Wouldn't the state be the "default" recipient?
That really depends on the jurisdiction. Many police departments in the US self fund via confiscations, sometimes even not as a penalty for breaking the law. In a big city, that's a small part of the budget. In some more rural counties, it can be a surprisingly large amount of the budget.
That sounds the same. It seems surprising to take the car. If I kill someone I don't have to give the state my house, or even my pen. Possessions - unless illegal goods - are not the state's to take.
I don't have any tolerance for people who put everyone else at risk. Take their license, take their cars, send them to prison if they try driving again.
Who should the proceeds go to? The offending owner? The local municipality in which the offence occurred? The regional government coffers?
Per the article you would have to be exceeding the speed limit by a very sizable margin to be eligible for this seizure, I find it hard to imagine the police engineering situations in which to take advantage of this.
Given that, as the article states, police have to prove the violation before they can permanently confiscate the property, that is not an accurate description.
It is only when you allow police to sieze anything and then require you to disprove the allegations (such as is currently the case in much of the USA), that you legalize highway robbery.
Those are good points, but I'm not sure the article is crystal on the details and anyway if a little exaggeration can net the police a big gain, this would invite public suspicion as, for example, in Menifee, Arkansas [1].
I think the size also makes a difference. Each speeding ticket is a small sum that isn't worth the travel to fight. Losing an entire car is several orders of magnitude more expensive. Since Austria already has speeding tickets, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
The issue in Menifee is that tickets were issued for speeding violations that were in the "acceptable" speeding range of less than 10mph over. No exaggeration was required because speeding small amounts was ubiquitous. Personally I like people to drive the actual speed limit and don't think consistent minor speeding should be as socially acceptable as it is. However, the article explains to the new law only applies in cases of extreme speeding and only when there is documented proof of such. Personally, I think criminal charges, jail time and permanent license revocation are also called for when someone goes 135 on a 80 mph road (barely sufficient to warrant permanent vehicle confiscation under the Austrian law under discussion.)
As I alluded to, civil forfeiture is very different in that you have you prove your innocence rather than having the presumption of innocence.
Austria is basically a money-thieving country. It's about money, not about safety.
What about dangerously changing lanes, jumping red lights, and tailgating? These actions can be more hazardous than orderly speeding, but there is no such punishment for them.
If speeding is such a danger, why even allow car makers to sell vehicles that can drive so fast? Because the money supply from fines will dry out fast; that's why.
This sounds stupid and pointless. Just take their licenses and fine them, and if they keep doing it, put them in prison. This is being goofy for media attention. If one guy drives a shitty souped up car and one guy drives an expensive car, it's simply arbitrary. Austrians think voters are stupid, or know it from experience.
This is a standard waste of time designed to make useless politicians look active.
I would be fully in support of something like "broken glass" roadway policing: speeding, expired/invalid plates, lights out, overtinted glass, poor emissions, obstructed windows, etc. You get a warning, then you get a fine. A few offenses and your car and or license is confiscated.
