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by crc32 2643 days ago
There is already a speed limit, this is just enforcement isn't it?

Do you agree with speed limits?

3 comments

The speed limits are out of date. For highways, the original limits were set by breaking distances. Braking systems have improved tremendously (almost all disk brakes nowadays, ESC and ABS), reducing breaking distances, while the limits were never updated. So yeah, one can disagree with speed limits.
Human reactions however, have not. Don't know where you live but most EU countries have a speed limit of around 100 km/h on the highway. This gives a stopping distance of around 100m for a modern well-maintained car (Which, let's be realistic, most are not). That's a long distance. Now if you take into account that a lot of countries have higher limits (France at 130 km/h for example) and that the braking distance increases exponentially I would disagree that they are outdated.
I disagree that the line between safe and unsafe speed can be distilled down to the same number for every car, every driver, and every weather/road condition. If you’re a good driver in a good car driving on a clear, dry day you should be allowed to drive faster than a bad driver in a bad car on a foggy/icy/rainy day.
Sure. If you then take personal responsibility for every accident even when going at or below the speed limit, I could quite live with this. "Personal responsibility" of course means making good for any and all damage you caused, something which you are typically quite unable to do.

The fact that people still have "accidents" and that these "accidents" are ruled "accidents" and not "willfully crashing their 2 tons of metal into something" suggests that people are not ready to take responsibility for their actions and that they cannot be trusted, even with the current speed limits already in place.

That's right. You should be driving well under the limit if it is foggy, icy or rainy or if you are in a poorly maintained car.
This is no enforcement as long as it's just an alert. Those who want to follow speed limits can do that already, there is this new thing called speedometer that comes with every car. More electronic gadgets solve nothing but build infrastructure for EU dystopia that monitors everybody.