Slashdot Mirror
Britain to Pilot GPS Speed Governors
Rich0 writes "In a new twist on traffic speed enforcement, The Times is reporting that Britain is piloting a new device which will use GPS to actively prevent speeding. The device will initially be offered in conjunction with discounts to the London congestion surcharge." From the article: "A study commissioned by London's transport planners has recommended that motorists who install it should be rewarded with a discount on the congestion charge, which tomorrow rises to £8 a day. The trial Skodas were fitted with a black box containing a digital map identifying the speed limits of every stretch of road in Leeds. A satellite positioning system tracked the cars' locations. "
In response to the earlier Slashdot article which argues that innovation has slowed down...there is now a risk of Skodas exceeding the speed limit. I'd call that progress.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
in police cars.
I can't even begin to count the number of times I've seen police in the US get away with speeding because they're the police. For some reason, I can't imagine it being much different elsewhere around the world since government corruption doesn't know geographic boundaries.
They'll come up with excuses like people trying to track law enforcement or something like that and that's why they won't be on the grid.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Plus, everyone's seen school buses with their regulators, going 60mph on the highway. No one wants to be like them/
I've NEVER seen an unreasonable speed limit anywhere in my travels.
That's only because you have a maladjusted sense of what "reasonable" is. That, or you drive a huge top-heavy truck.
Speed limits have been intentionally set 5-15 mph too low in all but the most settled areas, where a low speed really is a safety concern.
But on many, many, MANY of the roads in this counry, a halfway incompetent driver can still be as safe at +10 as they are at 0 or -10 (relative to the current posted speed limit.)
Why are the limits set where they are? Not because it makes drivers safer--it doesn't, those that die in high speed will ignore whatever limit you set--but because it generates revenue for the local court system.
What does one have to do with the other? Anyone who can speed in Central London during congestion charge is pretty fortunate.
I really don't like this sort of thing. can we lose the attitude that driving past the speed limit is the be all and end all of road safety. There is never a speed at which driving abruptly changes from "safe" to "dangerous".
Even better, disable your own limiter and build a short-range transmitter to spoof the GPS of your fellow motorists into thinking they are all on a 25mph road, even tho its an interstate highway. Make life on the freeway a lot more interesting.
That's fine just as long as you stay the hell out of the left lane.
We'll all be going much more slowly once all the oil runs out. Those of us who haven't starved to death in the ensuing famine and political upheavals.
Bitching about intrusive government limiting the speed of your luxury vehicle will seem utterly petty by around 2015-2020.
And besides, they invent a device called a "governor" and then expect the government NOT to put it on every vehicle? Who couldn't see this coming??
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Congrats on achieving total faith in the infalibility of all transport authority figures, it's a rare and difficult creed. Not one in a hundred million match your devotion. BTW, your turn signal's been on for the last ten miles.
Folks- speed doesn't kill, and this is something few people (especially the "won't someone please think of the children" types) fail to understand. They point to statistics where "police site speed was a factor". It's not the speeding itself- it is usually a lack of judgement (very often obliterated by drugs, including alcohol) or experience, or going too fast for conditions. It is compounded by a driving public that has, for the most part, absolutely no idea (much less experience) at controlling a vehicle near its limits, or regaining control of an out-of-control vehicle.
An example- a high school kid in my town got a Mistubishi Eclipse when he passed his driving test. Two friends in the car, he's doing sixty down a local road. That's pretty damn fast, and yes, too fast for a country road with limited visibility. How did he crash? His friend at the last second yelled "turn here!", and the guy tried to do a 90 degree turn. At 60mph. Instead of just keeping on the road. Speed didn't cause the crash- stupidity and lack of experience with what the car was (and was NOT) capable of did. A huge number of accidents are caused by people being very reactionary, like risking taking a short space to turn, instead of waiting 5-10 seconds for a much longer one.
It is similar to the lack of distinction between "accidents" and "collisions". If an asteroid hits your car and you crash, that's an accident. Pretty much everything else is driver error.
Most people don't have the foggiest idea of how to control their vehicle. The simplest concepts, such as weight transfer, basic cornering technique, or friction circles (which describe the capabilities of a tire) - aren't taught or tested at all. Most people also have a "I put gas in it and oil, that's all I should have to do" mindset to car maintenance. When I'm talking to someone about car maintenance and I ask how old their brake fluid is, they a)can't remember and b)ask why. Brake fluid is like a dessicant- it absorbs water from the atmosphere. When it does, its boiling point drops substantially (brake fluid should be changed at a minimum of every 2 years, and that means flushing, not just siphoning out the reservoir).
Improving driver education would be a huge step in the right direction. Teach people what maintenance is required typically, and teach them HOW TO CONTROL a vehicle!
Please help metamoderate.
I'm a transportation planner, and the great grandparent is incorrect. Slower speed has little to do with congestion, other than being a side effect. Up to a certain point, slower speeds actually allow more people onto the road. Congestion just has to do with the number of vehicles being too great for the amount of road, for the most part. Speed and capacity are related, but only in that speeds drop as congestion increases. You're just talking about the situation where someone is blocking you from driving as fast as you want to. That's just life. ;)
Cameras in public aren't too threatening - after all, it's public, where expectations of privacy come only from one's incompetence at spotting voyeurs, or their incompetence at staring. Embedding spies in private vehicles is across that essential line, even if it starts out voluntary. Only rich people will be able to speed, or even just afford to avoid the surveillance. Until the "nondiscount" fees are unaffordable.
The real invasion of this system is that the raw data will be used not only to trigger a GPS speed limit. No, it will inevitably be used to halt cars driven speeders, then suspects of other crimes, then any "person of interest" to the police, or their political bosses. The stored records will be used to track people wherever they drive. The entire population will be tracked everywhere we go, and people's sense of privacy will go extinct.
--
make install -not war
Passing another vehicle on the road is perfect example. You have to accelerate to pass the car that is in front of you. A legal move.
A car that decides to cross a road at a moment you are going through that road. In certain circumstances, the car could t-bone into you if the driver "assumes" you will continue to go faster. To avoid this, you speed up to miss him from hitting you from the side.
While probably very rare, if you are at a railroad crossing with about four tracks, and the speed limit there is 15 (I've seen areas with 5-10MPH signs near train tracks) and the gates start closing in on you, you can't accelerate to get out.
One time, a police officer sort of gave me "permission" to speed. It was an area where the highway forked, and traffic on the right side was at a standstill, and I was the only one of the left. Over the PA he gave me a "go ahead" to go faster than so he could get through to the other fork. There was no shoulder for me to turn off onto, so this was the only option of him to get by.
I'm sure there are a lot more examples where speeding is necessary on the road. Its the careless speeding that needs to be enforced. People that go 100+ on a highway of average 65-70 MPH drivers.
What the device should do, is somehow gather the average speed of cars in the area, and limit speed to the average so there are no careless speeders.
Bullshit. The speed limits havn't changed since the 50s, cars have.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What I would give a shit about is the implications for the insurance companies to rip you off even worse than they already do. As an American you probably don't know how bad it already is - for me (a 17 year old male) to be insured on a basic, old car (say a VW bug) would cost somewhere between $2300 and $3500 (converted to US$ for your convenience). If they're mining all this data about exactly how and where I travel, they'll do anything in their power to declare me unsafe and raise my premiums. If I refuse to have a GPS tracker they'll assume I have something to hide and stick a statutory (and massive) penalty on me.
Most people survive being hit by a car going 30km/h. Most people die being hit by a car going 50km/h.
You probably survive if you have a frontal collision at 65-70km/h in a modern car. You will probaly die in the same collision if you go 150km/h.
These are the facts, taken from accident statistics.
As for being above the law, my cousin is a police officer. Her boss (also a police officer, obviously) was disciplined for speeding in a police car. The boss is the assistant chief constable of that police force. There must be only about 30 officers of that seniority in the whole of the UK, so it's probably safe to say that the British police are not above the law.
On the other side of this coin, a couple of weeks ago there was a newsworthy court case where a British police officer was prosecuted for speeding, and the court let him off, basically on the grounds that he needed to do what he did.
I've never driven on Germany's autobahns, but I've *been* driven on them... and it was a scary experience!
Only two lanes (compared to a three-lane UK motorway with a 70mph limit), trucks zooming down both lines like mobile walls, and the nearest thing to 'lane discipline' being "Hey, my car will fit through that gap! Woohoo!"
Now I love driving fast, and I'll freely admit that given a chance and a stretch of empty motorway I'll top the ton. But my German drivers cheerfully exceeded that on busy roads with other cars whipping out of junctions right in front of them, and frankly it scared the shit out of me. No wonder the world's best Grand Prix drivers come from countries like Germany, Italy and Brazil, where driving is treated like combat!
You must think in Russian.
I follow the speed limits to the letter becasue I've NEVER seen an unreasonable speed limit anywhere in my travels...Sorry folks, but the roads are for people like me to get safely from one place to another.
So old timer how's life in the motorhome? Tell us some stories about vacuum tubes and punch cards.
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law', because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. -- Thomas Jefferson
"You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up
against -- then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful
gestures. We're after power and we mean it. Your fellows were pikers, but
we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to
rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack
down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes
them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible
for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding
citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws
that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted --
and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system...that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll
be easier to deal with."
Actually, traffic does behave like a liquid... kinda...
The traffic simulations I've seen use a particle model to work out traffic flows. The idea being that people over and under estimate the speed of their own car, and others on the road. The result of this is each car "vibrates" against others (with a certain air gap, hopefully).
The result of *that* is that traffic tends to slow *more* than the slowest driver would travel at. Which is why you get congestion at points of merging and corners for no apparent reason - nervous/careful people slow down, and it cascades into a near stop for everyone else.
Side note, slowing traffic down "for safety reasons" is inane. Traffic will slow itself down as volumes increase (eg, peak times) all you engineers have to do is make the road flow smoothly.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
" after all, it's public, where expectations of privacy come only from one's incompetence at spotting voyeurs, or their incompetence at staring."
There are two kinds of privacy, and they're getting mixed up every time this issue comes up. There is a privacy that comes from not being seen or having one's presence otherwise perceived by fellow humans. You don't have this kind of privacy in a public place, granted. You only have it some kind of seclusion.
But there is another kind of privacy - that comes from not being monitored and/or identified. From not being *watched*. Unless you have police or a private eye tailing you, in a modern city you're almost perfectly anonymous, even as you're being seen by hundreds of people, likewise anonymous to you.
I would argue that the latter kind of privacy is far more important and it certainly is the kind we're losing. This is the kind of privacy you lose when being monitored by CCTV, spyware, cookies, RFID, whatever technology does these days. Even if it doesn't identify you by name, it identifies you by a number of characteristics that's sufficient for purpises of marketing, law-enforcement and, if anyone wants, invigilation.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
The one major problem with this that I see is that it actively slows you down. What happens if I need to go faster due to road conditions? What if going slower is actually less safe? What if I'm passing an 18-wheeler in the left lane, and suddenly he starts moving into my lane? With this system I don't have the option of accelerating to the speed I need to avoid the collision. Granted, the article did say that there's a hazard button on it. But frankly, if I'm in that kind of situation, I don't want to think about 20 different buttons to press. I just want to step on the accelerator and go 70 mph instead of 60 mph.
If you really want to stop speeding, increase the speed limit to say 90 mph on major highways, maybe 70 or 80 on minor ones. Basically, as fast as any reasonable person would attempt to travel on those roads. Personally, I wouldn't go 90 mph on any road unless it was basically straight and I had a good car. And I wouldn't break the 90 mph speed limit. Then, instead of having the police hide out with their radar guns, get them to find the people who are interfering with traffic and making problems.
Every time I see a police car, I hit the breaks automatically. Even if I'm going the speed limit. It's just a natural reaction now. That causes the car behind me to hit the breaks, and every car behind that one. This creates a hazard. If I didn't have to worry about the police, and the police stopped people who drive aggressively instead of people who stay in one lane and just go 70 instead of 60, you wouldn't have this kind of situation anymore. Also, they'd need to stop the idiots who go slower in the left lane than those the right lane is moving. But in general, instead of causing accidents they'd prevent them.
With regards to the argument made by those who appose this idea - that foolish drivers will abuse this trust - that's what the police are there for. Instead of stopping people who are just driving at their comfortable speed, they can be stopping idiots who aren't paying attention to the road or don't know how to drive well.
The carrot is that having the GPS speed limiter will reduce the (recently raised) congestion charge in London. The stick is that the UK government is hell bent on introducing pay-per-mile road travel. Introducing this technology under the guise of maintaining proper speed limits allows the charging system to be implemented by default simply by adding a mobile phone to the black box. If everyone had a black box and kept to the speed limit, then speed cameras would become irrelevant - therefore no revenue - therefore a new revenue has to be found - therefore pricing roads per mile.
God, you're an idiot. You really think that the finding an illegal machine gun in Britain is easier than filling in some paperwork in Texas? Really? In that case, where do all these illegal machine guns go and what are they used for? From the evidence, it's certainly not gun crime.
We have about as many gun deaths in Britain every year than you have in the US every day*. Read that last sentence again, because I'm sure it's news to you. The US, which has roughly five times Britain's population, has roughly 365 times as many gun deaths per year. And the number of non-fatal incidents is similarly disproportionate.
Of the UK fatalities, almost all involved handguns and shotguns (most of them illegally owned; there are a few, heavily-regulated, legitimate reasons, such as farming use, why someone might be permitted to a gun licence and gun ownership in the UK). Gun incidents in the UK involving machine guns are all but unheard of: on the rare occasions that they do occur, the tabloid press isn't slow to sensationalise that element of the crime, so when it does happen we do hear about it. The lack of machine gun usage in the few gun crimes that do occur is a good indicator that the country isn't awash with them and that they aren't as easy to come by as you think.
You paint this picture that getting an AK-47 in Britain isn't much more difficult than buying a beer. Your picture couldn't be further from the reality. I suggest you check the facts first before making such pithy throw-away comments about something as serious as guns and gun crime.
(*US gun deaths for 2001, the latest year for which I could find statistics: 29,573, or an average of 567 a week, or 81 a day. UK gun deaths for July 2003 to June 2004, the latest records available: 81.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg