[acdha]

Unless you’re a character in an action movie, no. Your dying patient is going to be worse off when you get t-boned driving that aggressively or simply shaking them around. The primary limiting factor in a city are other vehicles, not speed, and not having a siren matters more there.

[s1artibartfast]

This reduces a complex tradeoff between risk of speeding and patient delay to a declaration that it is always better to delay.

It is dogmatic and antiscientific.

[acdha]

Look, I get it, it’s fun to pretend that you’d have an excuse to drive like Tom Cruise but that kind of thing doesn’t matter in real life. If you need to get to the hospital, the limiting factor is traffic and safety: you can’t go faster than the guy ahead of you and the things which could save you time are things like running lights which have a high risk unless you live somewhere with no cross traffic and excellent visibility. In most cases, the time you save is likely to be less than you save by not parking when you get there and less than you’d save by having an EMT drive them in a vehicle which has both legal permission and lights & sirens to get traffic out of the way.

[s1artibartfast]

I dont think you get it. The problem is the arrogance to think you can draw blanket risk conclusions without even bothering to know the circumstance.

You simply imagine a scenario, make up some predictions, and call it a universal truth.

[acdha]

I’m not the one arguing against something which would provably save thousands of lives annually. You’re welcome to show your homework that there are a comparable number of cases where the difference between life and death comes down to being able to exceed the speed limit in an urban area.

[s1artibartfast]

That is a completely different argument than you made above . It may be the case, and I agree likely, that automated speed limits save lives on net.

Speeding on the way to the hospital is a very small subset of speeding, and you claimed that speeding on the way to the hospital caused more deaths than delay, and seemingly implied that it was impossible for delay to be more deadly, even on a case by case basis.

[acdha]

It’s still the same argument: it’s never legal to break the speed limit (the false claim I was responding to), and speed governors are a good idea because 99.999999% of the time they’re improving safety. There are vanishingly few cases where someone going 45mph on a city street with a 20mph limit - the scenario in question – is going to make a difference in an emergency, but every single day many people are killed or seriously injured by drivers who chose to speed.

> you claimed that speeding on the way to the hospital caused more deaths than delay

Here’s what I actually wrote:

> Your dying patient is going to be worse off when you get t-boned driving that aggressively or simply shaking them around. The primary limiting factor in a city are other vehicles, not speed, and not having a siren matters more there.

The point was simply that even in a time-critical emergency, a driver who doesn’t have training driving like that or things like ambulance lights & sirens is going to make things worse. Driving as fast as you can is a recipe for losing control or hitting someone you didn’t see in time. It’s also unlikely to be good for the patient in most scenarios: if they have an injury that serious, whiplash probably isn’t a good addition.

Additionally, it’s usually pointless: in the city scenario in question, you’re most likely to simply be dangerously getting to the next backup without significant reduction in door to door travel. Even an ambulance with its lights and sirens on will be slowed significantly by people who aren’t paying attention or won’t/can’t get out of the way, and an ordinary driver is going to have a worse time than that. That’s even more pronounced for the moves which potentially save more time like running red lights or using the opposite lanes to pass, which I’ve only seen ambulance drivers do when they had a police officer running cover for them.

To summarize: this kind of situation is rare - maybe once or twice in your life, if ever – and even in such cases it’s a very high risk scenario which is unlikely to save enough time to be worth it. That’s why it’s not legal - nobody wants the inevitable deaths which would come from giving carte blanche to anyone who panics over indigestion and decides they should drive to the ER at 90mph - and also why I don’t think it’s a serious argument against safety technologies.

[reaperman]

It is legal to do it though.

[acdha]

No, it’s not legal:

https://www.progressive.com/lifelanes/on-the-road/speeding-i...

What you’re hoping is that a police officer would agree with your decision and choose not to write you a ticket. That might work, but if you try this you are gambling on that and almost certainly not saving any meaningful amount of time.

[drdaeman]

Not debating the legality (it surely isn't), but I suspect in some cases a speeding ticket may end up costing less (even including the increased insurance premiums) than the ambulance fees.

[acdha]

Likely but I was simply responding to the false assertion that it was legal. It’s a common lie people use to present the most positive spin for their unwillingness to drive safely in conditions which are exceedingly unlikely to be more serious than “didn’t feel like waking up prudently early”.