Comment on Get to work, crackheads

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tryptaminev@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨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.

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