Speed enforcement has been extensively studied, and there are a lot of publicly available articles on the subject. The results are basically universally in favour of speed enforcement reducing motor vehicle collisions, reducing injury and cost.
> The results are basically universally in favour of speed enforcement reducing motor vehicle collisions, reducing injury and cost.
Yeah this argument comes up a lot in the UK from people advocating 20mph speed limits everywhere. It's a super dumb argument though. Obviously increasing speed is never going to decrease danger. But if "slower is safer" is the only argument for 20mph then the logical conclusion is 0mph.
Clearly there are other factors at play, but the 20mph people never acknowledge that for some reason...
(To be clear I'm not advocating for 30mph everywhere. I feel like 25mph is actually the best trade-off for most suburban roads.)
It is very hard to think clearly about driving too fast given both how much fun it is and the monumental amounts of money that the car industry has pumped over decades into promoting their empty road, drive fast without consequences propaganda within our societies.
However, as with tobacco, the evidence cannot be papered over forever and there are many studies that indicate they are a bad idea (tm) in urban environments. And in particular with respect to the setting of speed limits that they should be lower than many of us have been influenced to think because the rate of injury and death increases disproportionately with speed.
For instance https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi... states that a "1% increase in mean speed produces a 4% increase in the fatal crash risk and a 3% increase in the serious crash risk". And that for pedestrians "The risk of death for pedestrians hit by car fronts rises rapidly (4.5 times from 50 km/h to: 65 km/h.".
So yes, slower is safer - not in some reductio ad absurdum sense that implies '0mph', but in a public health sense where a fair and practical compromise should be sought.
To my mind, 15 - 20mph in urban areas is that compromise.
It allows practical vehicle use, while also respecting the rights of other road users - especially pedestrians and cyclists - to exist and move about without significantly elevated risk.
The idea that some people should be granted the ability to move through shared space at speeds that make them dangerous beyond anyone else simply because they're encased in a car is not just unfair - it creates noisy, dangerous, and ultimately unliveable environments.
> So yes, slower is safer - not in some reductio ad absurdum sense that implies '0mph', but in a public health sense where a fair and practical compromise should be sought.
> To my mind, 15 - 20mph in urban areas is that compromise.
This is precisely my point. None of the "slower is safer" people even acknowledge that it is a compromise. Their entire argument is "slower is safer" which does lead to 0mph.
It's impossible to have a proper debate if some people are saying "I know slower is safer but I don't want to go at 20mph everywhere" and others are saying "but... it's safer!"
My problem with the 20mph speed limits in the UK is that they seem to be imposed fairly randomly.
There are many cases where wide roads with good visibility and few pedestrians crossing have 20mph limits. In one egregious case I experienced recently near identical stretches of the same road (it was a main road, I think an A road, passing through a built up area) switched between 20 and 30 mph limits. If anything it created a significant distraction keeping track of the limits.
There are a number of other roads like that have 20mph limits. On the other hand narrower side roads in the same areas has 30mph limits.
My road has a 20mph limit. On the bit I live on it makes no difference - narrower, parked cars etc. means you drive very slow anyway. Further down the road is broader and clearer. I think the reason maybe to encourage people to use the bypass instead of driving through the village so it may be reasoned- although I suspect the speed bumps are more effective at doing that.
20-to-30 causes a step change in pedestrian outcomes, so no, the logical conclusion isn't 0mph. Also the average speed on 30mph roads before the changeover was around 20mph.
It improves traffic flow and reduces pollution too.
My only objection is that it's been applied in a somewhat blind way. Long sections of road with no houses and no reported accidents should probably be 30, or even 40mph.
I think we do in practice apply 0mph (i.e. banning cars) in some major cities, turning roads into pedestrian areas! 0mph happens!
It's obviously a trade between various participants, who have their own interests. 30km/h limits have had good success. If people think the number of fatalities is a problem, there's a solution waiting for you.
The argument is, going 0 mph, meaning not driving at all is safer than even slow driving. Meaning the argument is, there has to be a compromise, all driving is dangerous.
Speed, of course, affects not just how many accidents there are but also how bad they are. A key argument for 20mph is that collisions with pedestrians at this speed are mostly survivable. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/cmtl...
But without transport significantly more people will die from other things, due to reduced access to healthcare, employment, food, etc.
In a modern society, road transport is a critical part of our life support system. Those pushing for a what they see as a car-free utopia tend to ignore this.
30 km\h limit in densely populated and heavily used by pedestrians first\last 2-5 minutes of your travel does what? Extends your travel time by 1 minute? At the same time making it nearly impossible to kill a kid, cat, dog or human in these places.
Same goes with the right of way in these places. You're in a car, you're getting where you're going much faster anyway, so you let pedestrians go first. On pedestrian crossings, and often even without them in such "last leg" places.
It's completely logical. You don't go faster in places where somebody can suddenly walk out from behind a parked car, bush, whatever. But it's a cultural thing in Scandinavia.
You, just like the grandparent, confuse egregious 0% tolerance speed enforcement with speed limits. Speed limits dictates stopping distance and is a key factor in collision avoidance. No one is asking to abolish speed limits.
The problem is when passenger cars that require a fraction of stopping distance of a truck at given speed limit are fined for going 3-4 km over limit. Essentially, fined for driving at a speed where they can stop many meters before a truck going the sign posted limit. Revenue raising in the name of safety, down playing other factors like attention, driver training, road design, maintenance, and so on, but they don't bring as much money.
I don't see anything in the parent comments referencing or advocating for 0% tolerance speed enforcement. In the UK speed limits are typically enforced with a 10% grace factor.
Instead, there's a push to reduce limits ever closer to zero.
30mph was close to the sweet spot and had been for decades. Or it would have been with a reasonable level of enforcement.
But as the ideological and/or climate-driven war on cars ramped up there's been a big push to reduce ever-more areas to 20mph, which is just too slow, especially when deployed widely/indiscriminately as it has been in Wales. (Used very sparingly, e.g. outside schools, 20mph limits were a good 'take particular care' signal to motorists - but that effect is lost when they're widespread)
Is it really about safety or is it about 'fuck cars'?
If you look at outcomes, 50km/h (30mph) is much less safe than 30km/h (20mph). If you look at the physics, that’s not surprising - stopping distances increase super linear. At the point where a 30km/h car would have come to a stop, a 50km/h car still impacts with 30km/h.
On the other hand, average speeds in populated areas usually are way lower than 30km/h, so lowering the top speed to 30km has negligible effect on travel times.
If you consider 50km/h the sweet spot, you prioritize vehicle speed over the very real risk of bodily harm for all other traffic participants.
> At the point where a 30km/h car would have come to a stop, a 50km/h car still impacts with 30km/h.
At that point it's barely superlinear. That means instead of dropping by 30kph it dropped 20kph.
Personally I'd focus more on how even a linear increase in stopping distance is a problem when pedestrians are around.
> On the other hand, average speeds in populated areas usually are way lower than 30km/h, so lowering the top speed to 30km has negligible effect on travel times.
Negligible speed impact also means negligible safety impact.
So, assuming you do support some enforcement for passenger cars, at what speed would a ticket be warranted? Because this is exactly the dumb setup they have in California for example.
Speed limit is 65, everyone is doing 80. When you pull over someone how do you explain why only that person gets a ticket?
A limit is only a limit when it's enforced. Anything else will become arbitrary.
There was a study [0] in Paris that demonstrates a signifiant life expectancy and positive benefit/risk ratio of bicycling or commuting by public transports: the effect on physical and psychic health largely outweighs (sometimes to x30) the risk of accidents and pollution disease.
> without transport
Nobody argues to remove all cars altogether, and certainly not other forms of transport. However we certainly can rethink the millions of individual cars in each cities: does everybody needs its own 1ton vehicle to bring food back from the local supermarket? To go to work 2-20km away?
Yep. Something worth considering is also building long-term parking spaces to the outskirts of cities, accessible with public transport. I know lots of city-dwellers who pretty much never use a car for intra-city transport, but need to own one anyway to reach other important places that are beyond reach of public transport.
In case of Finland summer cottages are one such case. They're extremely common, and located in areas that usually have no public transport. Lots of people have also older relatives who live in middle of nothing.
It's pretty common for people to stay in their summer cottages for a week or more, several times a summer. Renting a car for all that time gets very expensive, and it will be just sitting idle most of the time. At that point you may as well just buy a cheap used car for the same yearly cost.
The need for car ownership would plummet if we had self-driving cars that can autonomously drive back to the city, and to pick you up from the countryside.
A lot of people seem to want to live in cities though. Scroll through this graph, especially the broad categories at the bottom of the page, and there is a consistent global trend to urbanisation: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...
House prices are almost far higher in big dense cities, so people are clearly willing to pay a premium to live there.
I live in a small village on top of a hill. Most people drive, but I don't. When I need to get some heavy stuff up the hill once a month or two, I get the bus. The rest of the time I walk.
As for trucks having the same speed limit as cars in general: 1) a lot of the time there is a lower limit, 2) the truck itself has a lower max highway speed, 3) there a far fewer trucks on the road so it doesn't matter a much, 4) they are driven by professional drivers with things like electronically enforced daily driving limits, so many of the common causes of accidents are less likely.
The legislation in the Anglosphere countries? Are you slow?
Where in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, UK, Canada, or even most of US can you go 10 km/h over speed limit and not get fined?
For your other points.
1. Where? other than steep grades, differential speed is not a thing.
2. Where again? Which trucks? Majority of trucks can do highway speed just fine, despite their 3 to 10x stopping distance.
3. Fewer tracks where? Most of Australia and New Zealand runs on trucks. But even if they're rare, truck accidents over 60 are often fatal due to their weight and energy.
4. Professional drivers can't adjust the laws of physics. Stopping distance is stopping distance.
You were replying to a comment saying "studies have shown lower speed limits reduce accidents" with something along the lines of "but who cares if I go 10 over the limit, trucks have more mass and are more dangerous at the same speed". I can't even see your original comment since it was flagged, presumably for being total nonsense.
This is not one vs the other, multiple things can be true. Trucks are individually more dangerous than cars. There are far more cars than trucks on basically every road basically everywhere. Cars are driven by any idiot in all kinds of situations, trucks are driven by professionals during their regulated working hours.
I reply because "studies have show that claims of studies have show are often false".
There is absolutely zero chance any respectable study would support that focusing on maintaining exactly 110 km in a 110km is safer than allowing a 10% buffer (going 10km over) so you can focus on the road and spend more of your attention on spatial awareness than staring at the odometer.
Second, it is not about "who cares", it is about road design, a road that is up to standards of allowing a b-double doing 110km means a smaller car can safety do 140km or more. It is exactly one way or the other. It is either unsafe for B-Double to do 110km or a small modern car to do 140km. It is simple laws of physics.
You can't see my original comment, so opt to make some nonsense assumptions to feel good about yourself. By God,this place is a cesspit of arrogance.
Nobody claimed any study found that zero percent speed tolerance is beneficial. They said speed limits in general. You're arguing against something nobody ever said.
And no, it's not strictly "if a truck can safely do X then a car can do X+Y. It's not just about physics. There are more cars than trucks, so speed limits matter more for cars. A truck getting into a crash is worse, but less likely. Trucks also already have lower limits in many places, so this isn't even relevant in most places.
We're not talking about driving risk per km, that's not what laws are here tp prevent. They're here to reduce the number of accidents, injuries, fatalities...
And you're the one who brought "anglosphere" into the mix. And specifically in the UK, there seems to also be a lower speed limit for trucks: https://www.gov.uk/speed-limits
You're the one rambling off topic. You're the one calling people names. You're the one everyone is flagging. Log off and take a look in the mirror, you might find that I'm not the one "completely disconnected"
If you think the measure of driving rusk isn’t per km, then you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
And just repeating things doesn’t make them different, up to 7.5 tones, it is the same speed and that is plenty enough different weight for stopping distance.
But then again, it is a useless conversation because you have no idea what road safety is about as you seem to focus on absolute numbers and the best way to get absolute 0 is to close all roads and ban driving.
> There is absolutely zero chance any respectable study would support that focusing on maintaining exactly 110 km in a 110km is safer than allowing a 10% buffer (going 10km over) so you can focus on the road and spend more of your attention on spatial awareness than staring at the odometer.
You can accomplish that equally easily by sticking to 100 km/h.
What is it with the word "limit" that is so hard to understand? It's not the suggested speed, nor the target speed, nor the minimum speed. It's the maximum speed.
I am not familiar with poaching issues in the USA, but in Canada, one isn't allowed to hunt too close to roads; doing otherwise is poaching. It seems reasonable to not discharge firearms next to public roads, so stopping poachers who do so is a great use case here.
AMD's definition of "support" I think is different than what people expect, and pretty misleading - ROCm itself will run on almost anything, back as far as the RX 400/500 series:
There are out-of-bounds writes in the BLAS libraries for gfx803 GPUs (such as the RX 570). That hardware might work fine for your use case, but there's a lot of failures in the test suites.
I agree that the official support list is very conservative, but I wouldn't recommend pre-Vega GPUs for use with ROCm. Stick to gfx900 and newer, if you can.
The last time I checked, I was stuck with a pretty old kernel if I wanted to have the last version of ROCm available for my rx470. It's compatible at some point in time, but not kept compatible with recent kernels.
In terms of sheer game-theoretic value, sure, perfect knowledge will reduce value gaps. However, the thing with having your house insured is that you will have somewhere to live if you have a house fire. The +/- for the insurer might be close, but going from having a house to having no house is a bigger deal than going from one house to a twice-as-expensive house.
It seems that one or two European countries ban fluoridation; however few practice it. But "Europe banned this" is simply false. Moreover, it seems that there is fluoridation of salt instead (eg in Switzerland).
According to the other Wikipedia article, fluoridated salt where it is used (Switzerland and Germany) has about a 70% market share, so there is a choice for those who don't want it. It's a lot harder to opt-out of tap water.
I use it regularly on Android Auto. Not sure how representative my case is, but I have had to initiate playback from my phone. It doesn't seem to show up with a visible interface and icons the way that, say, Audible does.
My commute is about 20 minutes on bike. At -35 C I passed 5 cars in parking lots with the hood up and in best case jumper cables from neighbour cars. There were a lot of cars that just didn't start any more.
I used the 3m filter mask biking in the wildfire smoke a while ago. There is a blowout hole, which makes it much easier to get stale air out. The sport-specifc one from MEC made it hard to get fresh air when biking up hill.
I used the air warmer mask during this last cold snap. It made it so much more comfortable! Last year I was fine biking in the cold snap, except for one time biking up a hill. Actually breathing hard, I got a lot more cold air in my lungs, and ended up with a cough for a week. Wanted to avoid that this year.
