Comment on Get to work, crackheads
tryptaminev@feddit.de 10 months agoYou say that speed limits shouldnt be enforced as they would be a “symptom” of poor road design. This abolishes the speeding drivers from their own responsibility for violating the traffic rules.
You misinterpret the design choice as the opposite of bad road design, therefore goad road design, which implies a generality. However these design choices are made solely and explicitly to enforce speed limits. They have disadvantages in other ways e.g. if you make spots where only one car can pass at a time, it makes traffic less efficient. These disadvantages wouldn’t be needed if people would take their responsibility not to speed seriously.
Good design or bad design, many people will speed if they can get away with it. With a proper enforcement through speed cameras, and proper penalties for speeding, e.g. losing your licences for repeated offenses or having your vehicle impounded, could equally serve for enforcement. They are just more expensive, so making design choices is prefered by some countries.
But still people who speed chose to speed. They chose to violate the traffic rules and they chose to endanger other people and themselves. So speeding is never a “symptom” of road design. It is always a “symptom” of selfish assholes that should not be given the right to operate dangerous vehicles.
grue@lemmy.world 10 months ago
No, they’re designed to discourage people from exceeding the design speed, which is different.
Jeez, it’s not as if the vast majority of speeders are mustache-twirling villains doing it for the evulz who are incorrigible short of being punished by the law! They just think it’s safe to be driving that speed because the overly-generous street design misleads them.
Look, here’s the bottom line: the whole concept of a “speed limit” only exists in the first place because of a mismatch between the design speed and the speed people want to drive, which makes it unsafe. If you fix the geometry of the street to eliminate the mismatch such that the speed people want to drive at is safe, you don’t need the limit anymore and can just fall back on “reasonable and prudent.”
Y’all are acting like we need speed limits for their own sake, just to have something to enforce.
tryptaminev@feddit.de 10 months ago
And there is disagree. We don’t need speed limits for their own sake. They are the speed that is deemed appropriate in the area for a multitude of reason. Primarily safety, but also things like noise and emission reductions.
It is the same question of whether someone wants to uphold rules like right of way, or red lights. They have been implemented to order traffic in a way that is deemed beneficial. Anyone who deliberately violates speed limits is deliberately violating the rules that have been put in place to provide safety to everyone. subequently it is also people that are more likely to violate right of way and other rules.
Your argument again is to be apologetic for people deliberately violating the rules. Your idea of simply designing streets in such a way that everyone will drive safely doesnt work out. It is still individual actors with a highly subjective idea, of what it safe and what isnt. But traffic as a global system needs reliable actors, who can be predictable for other actors too. That is why we will always need a set of global rules, to which a speed limit belongs just as much.
I am all for designs like speed bumps to additionally discourage reckless driving. But being apologetic of people who are reckless and subsequently often killing or injuring people doesn’t fly. Especially as there is still enough people who are not stopped from driving over chilren in front of schools, despite speed bumps and other measures. The only thing that works for these kind of people is to permanently remove them from operating motorized vehicles and to give them some time in prison to think about what they have done. being apologetic of them instead, encourages lax traffic laws and lax consequences for people who are injuring and killing other people in traffic.
I am particularly aggrevated at that, because in germany drivers who kill pedestrians or cyclists are often given a slap on the wrist and allowed to drive again soon. This includes particularly elderly people who are clearly unfit to drive, but being a car nation and all that, it is apologized by the courts. But how do you design streets in such a way that it is impossible to drive on the wrong side of the road, which one elderly women did, killing two cyclists? How do you design the road in front of a school that an already convicted of traffic offenses mother doesnt slowly roll over a young girl on her way to school, smashing her under her SUV? You can’t. It is simply impossible to design car traffic areas in a way that makes them safe by design.
You can only make them more or less safe. But it will always be necessary to identify and punish reckless drivers. And if necessary that means prison sentences and permanent exemption from driving. Being apologetic of them is in no way helping traffic safety.
grue@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And there is disagree. We don’t need speed limits for their own sake. They are the speed that is deemed appropriate in the area for a multitude of reason. Primarily safety, but also things like noise and emission reductions.
No, that’s what the design speed is. Speed limits are just a crutch to enforce the design speed when the engineers screwed up and the design fails to do it itself.
Your argument again is to be apologetic to incompetent engineers, which is way worse!
I know, from first-hand experience, that traffic engineers in the United States are systemically bad at a lot of what we do. A lot of the industry’s standards of practice are outdated, misguided, or misapplied, and the whole profession needs reform. Often, the goals that we’re trying to accomplish in our designs aren’t even the correct goals to begin with.
And by the way: No. No, I am not, in any way, shape, or form, trying to excuse bad drivers. Never mind that you’ve strawmanned my argument to the point of unrecognizabilty, even if I did want to abolish speed limits like you seem to think I do, “reasonable and prudent” would still be a thing and it would still be possible to punish dangerous drivers!
Frankly, you’re way the fuck out of line.
You clearly don’t realize it, but in actual reality, attitudes like yours are part of the problem! Having speed limits divorced from design speeds breeds contempt for the law, which is why consequences are often so lax. Everybody speeds when the speed limit is set too low – that’s human nature whether you like it or not – so of course even judges and juries who speed themselves won’t think speeding is a big deal and will give offenders a slap on the wrist. By prioritizing enforcement of speed limits over fixing street design, you are actively trying to perpetuate that contempt.
I’m starting to think you’re so bloodthirsty to punish people that you’re willing to put more people at risk by accepting bad design just so you can manufacture more violators!
tryptaminev@feddit.de 10 months ago
Now you are just making things up. At every point i said, i think design to enforce the speed limit is a good thing. But you are claiming it is good design by itself, when it is only necessary as design, because people intentionally violate the speed limit, what you are still trying to be apologetic for. You switching cause and effect around and you do that in order to apologize for people who willfully endanger other people.