Everything has a limit. The natural world is full of them. For example, there is no such thing as an unboilable liquid. Every liquid will boil if you heat it up enough. The same holds true for man-made things. It is impossible to build a mile-high brick tower with parallel sides, because after a few hundred feet, the weight of the bricks on top would crush the ones at the base.
(Source: physbot.co.uk)
There are mental and emotional limits as well. There is a limit to how much a person can remember or learn. There is a limit to how much stress a person can take, and so on.
Laws have limits, too. Many people mistakenly think laws are magic spells that alter behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take speed limits, for example. How many people drive the speed limit? Hardly anyone. Almost everyone drives over the speed limit – most by a little, some by a lot.
If there were no speed limits, most people would drive faster, but only up to a point. This is because there are mechanical limits to how fast it a car can go, as well as psychological limits – such as the driver’s sense of fear.
Many people do not realize what a law is. Laws are not suggestions or friendly pieces of advice. They are enforced with violence. A law is essentially a formal threat. “Do this or else.”
People weigh risk when they make any decision, including whether to follow a law. Even if a law carries a very harsh punishment, it will not deter many people if there is a low risk of being caught. For example, in 19th century England, many minor crimes such as theft were punishable by death. Thieves were hanged in public before huge crowds. And while those people were gawking, pickpockets would take advantage of the distraction to steal.
In brief, laws are like language – they only work when a community is in near universal agreement on them. Imagine if each person in a town spoke a language differently. That language would be useless because the same word would mean different things to different people.
Fuck this guy.
Another point to consider is that since laws are made by imperfect people, there will be imperfect laws. Things which were once illegal are now legal and vice-versa. And in many cases, those bad laws were only repealed because many people were breaking them, and this put pressure on politicians to change them. All moral progress comes from lawbreakers – the abolitionists who defied slavery laws, the suffragettes who defied sexist laws, the anti-war protesters who defied draft laws, and so on. The United States itself was founded by outlaws.
Shakespeare wrote, “None call treason as treason if it prospers.” So it is with laws. If a group of outlaws are successful in getting a law repealed, they are no longer outlaws.
One last point to consider: there are limits to how well a law can be enforced. There is only so much that can be spent on police, courts, jails, and so on. Given that, the sensible thing would be to focus those scarce resources on preventing actual crimes – the kind that actually have a victim.
Laws can also have awful side-effects. In Boulder, CO, for example, the city built many speed bumps in residential areas to prevent speeding cars from hitting children. Unfortunately, those speed bumps also forced ambulances to slow down, and for heart attacks, a minute or two can make the difference between life and death. The speed bumps lead to a great increase in heart attack mortality.
Research in the USA supports these claims. One report from Boulder, Colorado suggests that for every life saved by traffic calming, as many as 85 people may die because emergency vehicles are delayed. It found response times are typically extended by 14% by speed-reduction measures. Another study conducted by the fire department in Austin, Texas showed an increase in the travel time of ambulances when transporting victims of up to 100%.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. If you want to make A better, you will make B worse.
When most people hear of a problem, they reflexively say “there ought to be a law.” They ought to remember these words:
“The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen;… that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.”
―Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s not illegal enough!
STEVE SMITH HAVE CERTAIN LAWS HE WOULD LIKE REPEALED.
Clearly the solution is to spend billions in government grants to develop emergency vehicles that can safely speed over speed bumps.
Have they considered making heart attacks illegal?
It’s covered in the lay against dying without permission. (Theft of a tax generator is a crime)
So that’s what they mean by legally dead.
Sounds like the paramedics need a Bearcat.
There ought to be a law against writing things I disagree with…
They could call it the “Campus Free Speech and Tolerance Act of 2017”
Campus
Respect
And
Freedom from
Tramautic
Speech
Act
There is, just not here in the US yet. Canada, England, Germany, France….already done.
There we go again, lagging behind other industrialized first-world nations!
Yes, if they could just fix that healthcare law that allows you to wait mere months for that urgent surgery, to waiting years like they do in those enlightened countries, that would fix things. No wonder the Eurotards are so happy. All of the sick ones have died.
Europe has always been the inferior version of Enlightenment. And Canada, always suffering an inferiority complex due to America, is more than willing to be just as backwards as the Europeans. No offense to any Canadians here
The U. S. got Enlightened through the Scottish philosophers. Plus Montesquieu.
Mainland Europe was Enlightened through Rousseau and Voltaire.
An article discussing pickpockets and the gallows
‘Better to hang a dozen innocent men than to appear soft on crime’ I always say.
Harsh penalties discourage prosecution, but you can always them by pleading down.
I accidentally my post.
“In brief, laws are like language – they only work when a community is in near universal agreement on them.”
“Given that, the sensible thing would be to focus those scarce resources on preventing actual crimes – the kind that actually have a victim.”
That’s why laws against abortion, drugs, gambling, guns, prostitution, can’t work. Too many people disagree with them. And it’s why laws against “actual crimes” generally do work. It’s because almost everyone agrees with them.
You’re going to put half of government employees out of a job right there. What sort of monster are you?
A happy monster?
“laws against *abortion,*…”
Don’t forget lynching. There used to be a lot of people in this country who opposed such laws and prevented them from being enforced.
Likewise “honor killings” in certain countries.
The abortion and lynching things are similar. In both cases half the people out there see human beings being mercilessly slaughtered in cold blood and the other half don’t really see what the big deal is. Can’t even agree whether there’s a victim or not.
Lynching was opposed by people who were protected and culturally re-enforced by laws against blacks.
Regardless, if abortion were outlawed today, it would not work. Just like it didn’t work back when it was illegal.
There was a long period when the laws against lynching “didn’t work” – nor did the Fourteenth Amendment.
Was it “teach racists not to murder” or “wait for them to die off” that did it?
It was “keep pressing for enforcement, recover the right to vote, so that if you don’t prosecute a lynch victim the black voters will throw you out of office,” etc., etc.
So the plan is to give the vote to zygotes? /kidding
The part you’re avoiding is that ‘enforcement’ will basically require a new War on Drugs style massive law enforcement campaign.
” ‘enforcement’ will basically require a new War on Drugs style massive law enforcement campaign.”
What do you base this on? There’s a previous history of such laws being enforced, are you citing that history?
You mean that previous history of black market abortions and thousands of years of chemically induced abortions regardless of what the law said? Combine that with the internet age and things will get even more fun.
I know the first thing I’d be doing as a batshit feminist in a complete abortion ban scenario is distributing information through the internet about how large amounts of Vitamin C and nutmeg just happen to induce miscarriages.
But this is just a variation on the utopian fallacy.
Because police can’t catch every murderer, is not an argument for making murder legal.
“I was almost aborted After the rape, the police referred [my birthmother] to a counselor who basically told her that abortion was the thing to do. She said there were no crisis pregnancy centers back then, but my birthmother assured me that if there had been, she would have gone if at least for a little more guidance. The rape counselor is the one who set her up with the back-alley abortionists. For the first, she said it was the typical back-alley conditions that you hear about as to why “she should have been able to safely and legally abort” me — blood and dirt all over the table and floor. Those back-alley conditions and the fact that it was illegal caused her to back out, as with most women.
“Then she got hooked up with a more expensive abortionist. This time she was to meet someone at night by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Someone would approach her, say her name, blindfold her, put her in the backseat of a car, take her and then abort me . . . , then blindfold her again and drop her back off. And do you know what I think is so pathetic? It’s that I know there are an awful lot of people out there who would hear me describe those conditions and their response would just be a pitiful shake of the head in disgust: “It’s just so awful that your birthmother should have had to have gone through that in order to have been able to abort you!” Like that’s compassionate?!! I fully realize that they think they are being compassionate, but that’s pretty cold-hearted from where I stand, don’t you think? That is my life that they are so callously talking about and there is nothing compassionate about that position. My birthmother is okay — her life went on and in fact, she’s doing great, but I would have been killed, my life would have been ended. I may not look the same as I did when I was four years old or four days old yet unborn in my mother’s womb, but that was still undeniably me and I would have been killed through a brutal abortion.”
In fairness, anecdotes are a terrible way to discuss abortion, because not only can either side marshal a whole long list of sympathetic anecdotes, they tend to be heart-wrenching with the intention of subverting reason into goading people to make an emotional judgment.
For me the question is simple: Is abortion a violation of the NAP? If it is, then it ought to be illegal, just like any other violation of the NAP. If enforcing this law is difficult, then that is a practical question on how it ought to be enforced without simultaneously creating a police state that would shred our rights in different ways.
She’s using an anecdote to illustrate a point – if it weren’t for those “repressive abortion laws” more people would have been killed in the womb, and she challenges “pro choicers” to look at her and say she and those like her ought to have been killed.
But this is just a variation on the utopian fallacy.
It’s not a matter of utopianism, it’s a matter of enforcement. I’m specifically pointing out that it’s driven underground, and you need to be willing to provide an actual framework for enforcement. If you actually believe that abortion is murder you need to be willing to catch and prosecute potential murderers in the same way any murder case is treated, what matters is the evidence standard and how we define it for these cases. Many anti-abortion activists refuse to actually consider or argue about this.
Take the batshit feminist example I give. So I set up a website talking about how certain naturally occurring abortifacients work, but I’m not really telling people to get abortions, I’m providing them information on women’s health issues because the evil socons/republicans/Christofascists/whatever are restricting information on women’s health! And if they happen to ‘accidentally’ use these chemical methods to induce miscarriages, I can’t be held responsible, can I? It’s obvious that I’m promoting this information to facilitate abortions, but the precedence is that I’m going to be treated in the same way that the anarchist cookbook or instructions on how to make drugs is (at least we hope this is the case). That’s fine initially, but what happens when you have miscarriages that are cropping up with medically confirmed high levels of Vitamin C? How do you determine whether it’s intentional or not? You’re effectively saying that I can easily make an untraceable murder and that you’re totally unwilling to actually address this in the context of the law. The difference between it and our general concept of murder now is that it’s far, far more easy to cover up.
How do you report or prosecute abortions? How do you, in court, successfully argue that a chemical abortifacient was used maliciously? What’s the punishment? Is it really a good idea to repeat the drug problem for overcrowded prisons, but with women who get abortions instead? If these are effectively murders that are extremely easy to cover up and render completely untraceable, why won’t the natural state response be to begin policies that abuse individuals fundamental rights from a libertarian perspective? These are things many in the anti-abortion movement are complete cowards on (and credit where credit’s due, several people here openly admit to saying it should be equivalent to first degree murder with several decades of jail time. That’s a more respectable position than the pussy footing a lot of anti-abortion people do).
Yes Eddie, this is the point where you start pulling out anecdotes and ignore the broader legal and social implications of what an abortion ban entails. Let’s just ignore the fact that chemical abortifacients were known by bloody Anglo-Saxon apothecaries and midwives and instead focus on the unsubstantiated feel-good claims of someone in the anti-abortion movement. Which is again, my point: “Refuse to address the problems and just pretend everything will be fine, and no rights abuses will ever be spawned from having to actually investigate a very difficult to investigate crime.” You never argue in good faith about this and I don’t know why I even try.
She’s using an anecdote to illustrate a point – if it weren’t for those “repressive abortion laws” more people would have been killed in the womb, and she challenges “pro choicers” to look at her and say she and those like her ought to have been killed.
“Blatant emotional manipulation and anecdotal statements are fine as long as they support what I support.”
“you need to be willing to provide an actual framework for enforcement. ”
Why?
Talking about implementation of any potential abortion ban is only a distraction from the main issue IMO. Is abortion a violation of the NAP, or isn’t it?
” If you actually believe that abortion is murder you need to be willing to catch and prosecute potential murderers in the same way any murder case is treated, what matters is the evidence standard and how we define it for these cases. Many anti-abortion activists refuse to actually consider or argue about this. ”
I am willing to consider a wide variety of options for how violations of the NAP may be prosecuted, whether it be about abortion or not, according to methods that don’t involve violating other people’s rights in the process. How about that?
For example, I think we would both agree that theft is a violation of the NAP. However as a practical matter I am willing to see some thefts go unpunished if it means that we don’t create a draconian police state with armed officers of the state on every streetcorner surveilling every innocent citizen who might be a potential thief. But none of that has any bearing on whether or not theft is or is not a violation of the NAP.
Are you under the assumption that the laws against lynching are what put an end to the practice?
If so you really should check your assumptions.
The fact is as you yourself admit those laws were in place and on the books but the lynchings STILL occurred. The practice of Lynching only ended when enough of the public came to find the practice reprehensible and made it impossible for the perpetrators of lybchings to get away with their crimes.
On the plus side, “Black Market Abortions” is a good band name.
At least if it was illegal, those opposed to it wouldn’t have to fund it.
“Many people mistakenly think laws are magic spells that alter behavior”
All progs believe this.
I don’t believe in silly magical beings who Grant wishes. Now if only we could pass this minimum wage law, we could really fight poverty.
Yeah, and if employers refuse to hire, then we go after them. Arrest the bread bakers, they’re waging economic warfare! Forward, comrades!
One of the reasons why I’m not in the “rule of law” camp.
Or more precisely, rule of positive law camp.
On speeding, America needs its own interstate Autobahn. Maybe carpool, HOV, toll roads can be transformed or have additional high-speed lanes added.
Dodge Charger SRT392 2015 on German Autobahn, 182 mph / 292 kmh – totally legal
I mean c’mon, to do a very ‘Murican thing in a ‘Murican car in everyday life, you need to go over to Germany.
You know who else needed to go over to Germany to do their thing?
Christian Pulisic?
Arminius?
Churchill?
Cartman’s mom?
Lindbergh?
Stalin?
The Beatles?
David Hasselhoff?
They LOVE him!
Saw a clip of him singing on the Berlin Wall in 1988 or so.
David Bowie?
German truckers aren’t as scary as American truckers though. American truckers would make a point to fuck up any high speed/autobahn type road. Those guys are scary as hell when they drive.
FKK truckers are scary as hell.
And both will be a relic of the past within a decade.
Technologically, perhaps. Doubt the regulatory bureaucracy will keep up with that pace.
Fritz Kuhn?
What relevance is the Ideal Gas Law here?
(and it’s only an approximation anyway…)
The ideal gas law explains how a government expands to fill any new volume of powers that it has taken.
When I get gas, it is decidedly non-ideal.
It expands to fill any space in which people are eating.
I was kinda wondering the same thing.
But all the cool people in Austin (no, not the poor people pushed out to the periphery due to skyrocketing property taxes and godawful land use policies) can just use the ever expanding bike lanes to get to the ER.
There’s one area of the city that I drive in on a way way street. That street is typically congested with traffic and has cars parked all down the left hand side. So they decided to make a bike lane on the right side. They made it about 10ft wide and moved the middle line over to the left. Now, if you are driving in the left lane, you have to drive with your right tires in the right lane because the road is too narrow for you to fit in one lane because of the parked cars. So then the people in the right lane are driving with their right tires in the bike lane, which is illegal, but no way to avoid it. In the 6 months or so since they’ve done that, I’ve seen maybe 2 bikes in the bike lane.
‘one way’… sigh…
My city council rep has yet to respond to my request for the actual v. projected numbers of bike lane users. Which is odd, because I am SURE that they followed up on that and any day now will loudly be trumpeting the success. Right???
When I do see an occasional bike, they are typically not in the bike lane, but riding right down the middle of one of the car lanes. It’s almost like nothing happened.
We still have people riding their bikes on the sidewalk right next to the goddamn bike lane. I’ve gotten into three scream matches with bikers so far over it. You assholes whinged and moaned to get your god fucking holy bike lanes, so start fucking using them. goddamn.
Don’t get me started on Albuquerque taking a heavily trafficked thoroughfare and reducing it from four to two lanes with a dedicated bus lane and train station-styled islands to accommodate literally tens of commuters who actually use that line from its origin in the suburbs to downtown, in the process eliminating most of the left-hand turns and seriously fucking over the businesses on that street in an already blighted part of town where small ventures find taking root exceedingly difficult, especially given the preexisting congestion and parking issues, using money mostly gifted under Obama which has yet to materialize under Trump.
The project is so fucking backward and stupid I can’t even.
Perhaps if more people rode bikes in Albuquerque, things would be better.
It’s funny, the council here seems not to have much to say about cycle commuting anymore. It might have something to do with all of these popping up in the last decade.
…using money mostly gifted….
well, there’s your answer.
Nothing causes government’s bad ideas to reach fruition than ‘free money’.
Sounds like the tiny town in rural Colorado I grew up in. Our local govt decided that our old elementary school had asbestos, so we need to build a new fancy elementary school that will “only cost about 40 million dollars.” They forced it through, then proceeded to hire a construction company that had been run out of all their jobs on the eastern slope due to the shitty quality of the work they did to build it. They fucked it up, of course, meaning they had to spend even more of our money to fix it. Then they put in a roundabout. No really. A tiny rural town, with a population of less than 2000 people, and they decide to put in a roundabout (the elementary school was not even in the center of town.) Then they reduced the speed limit from 40 to 25 all up and down that several mile long road and fenced off the old turn-in to force people to use the roundabout.
Oh, and they wanted to turn the old asbestos infested elementary school into an assisted living center.
That reminds me of something that my friend told me while he was briefly working as a network admin for a nearby school district:
He said that a lot of districts have old but serviceable school buildings. Well, these school administrators get jealous of other cities with brand new shiny school buildings, so they ask for a new building. They get declined. So, they purposely neglect to take care of their existing school building so that it gets so dilapidated that the district HAS to make them a new building.
I will never forget when I graduated with my BS in mechanical engineering. The speaker was a former alum who ended up working for a local power company. He said “I went into the wrong business. I should have been a politician. Those guys can make anything a law, even if it violates the laws of physics.”
When most people hear of a problem, they reflexively say “there ought to be a law.”
Most people are morons.
Most people are morons.
Hmm. A strong candidate for a new Iron Law.
More like a bronze law.
Peachy’s First Law (and only law, because I figured it covered everything that needed covering) : There are always more idiots than you counted on.
The thing about making something fool proof is that they will always make a bigger fool.
“Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” – Rick Cook
I disagree. The underlying factor has already been established as an Iron Law, and that is “the less you know about something, the easier it looks.” Most people aren’t morons. They are, however, convinced that they know better than others in areas where they lack actual experience, or where their own experiences are actually only tangentially related, or where their own level of introspection is weak. One of the quintessential examples is people who think they know what management is but have never been managers themselves, or who have only managed at one level (low, middle, or high), or who have only managed to fail. Knowing how to make a widget is not even half the battle of knowing how to manage a widget factory, or a corporation that owns a dozen widget factories, or a government that has nationalized all the widget factories.
Maybe a better candidate for an Iron Law should be, “The only thing more dangerous than not knowing the consequences is thinking you do”.
To tie what I said back to P. Brooks’ comment: law is the management of society*. Most people who say “there ought to be a law” are essentially saying “this looks easy, because I know so little about how it works”. They want to manage society but they have no real experience doing it (SLD: nor should they), yet the system of government affords them the power to do it and the illusion that they are the right people for the job.
* = With the important caveat that law is a much deeper concept than just “whatever the legislatures and courts belch out”.
Dunning-Kruger is the operative principle.
“Most people aren’t morons. They are, however, convinced that they know better than others in areas where they lack actual experience, or where their own experiences are actually only tangentially related, or where their own level of introspection is weak. One of the quintessential examples is people who think they know what management is but have never been managers themselves, or who have only managed at one level (low, middle, or high), or who have only managed to fail.”
Another example: the mostly leftist belief that CEOs “don’t do any work”. Whenever I hear this, I like to ask them why they don’t just go and become a CEO. I mean, if they did, they could put all of their social justice beliefs into practice… They could slash their own salary and pay the janitors and mailboys six figures a year. They could offer free health insurance and maternity leave to every employee. They could force the entire company to run on solar and wind power. They could donate all of the profits to the Clinton Foundation. If being a CEO is easy and requires no effort whatsoever, why not do this??
If being a CEO is easy and requires no effort whatsoever, why not do this??
I would assume their first response would be something to the effect of, corporate executives are like a modern aristocracy. You don’t just get to waltz in and be one, you have to be “one of them” first.
That’s true, to a certain extent, but not really for the reasons they think. Handing the reigns of a multi-billion dollar company over to somebody is actually kind of a big deal. You don’t just give it to any old schmuck. Moreover, many of the people who end up at the top didn’t start anywhere near there, so it’s hardly limited by birthright. And the corporate inheritor trope is actually not very common, at least not for publicly traded companies.
I think a better line of argumentation would be to start with “what do you think a CEO actually does?” and go from there. Somebody who is able to bring in $100 million in investment is worth $50 million in salary and benefits. The bigger, underlying problem is that the market is heavily skewed towards liquidity and short-term returns. But that requires addressing the 800 lb gorilla in the room, that the largest shareholders of most corporations are pensions and retirement funds.
Most people are average. Most people assess themselves as decidedly above average.
Off-topic but the speed limit reminded me of it.
From another site I frequent, if the city/county/whatever needs to put up one of those radar signs to tell you how fast you are driving and encourage you to slow down, then the road was designed wrong to begin with.
If cars are comfortably going 55 in a 35 zone, for example, then the road wasn’t designed to be a 35 mph road, Either the speed limit should change or the road should be narrowed or etc.
Sometimes I see a “35 mph” road and I’m like “really? This looks like a freeway!”
Traffic engineers notoriously overdesign. They literally use highway standards on non-highway streets.
for “safety”
Lake Shore Drive in Chicago is four lanes each way and (I think) a 45 limit… the entire thing is one giant fucking speed trap.
There’s some book for traffic standards they slavishly follow, because when some idiot teenager gets drunk and rides his ATV on a public road and hits a bridge abutment and dies, they can point to the book and cover their asses in court. For this reason, and others, I am glad that I no longer have to deal with BIA traffic engineers.
Same mentality as the FDA.
“If someone gets killed on this, I don’t want to be blamed, so we’ll mark it as a 25mph zone”
And then a pedestrian gets killed crossing the way too wide street by the car doing a comfortable speed for the road conditions.
Much harder to pin that on the highway engineer.
Exactly. That other site I mentioned has been trying to do just that. They cover stories like that and the design decisions that led to the inevitable tragedy.
There is road in Chapel Hill, formerly Airport Rd now MLK Blvd (literally changed the name bc not enough people drove on the original MLK), that should be 45 but is 35 it just happens to pass by the police station too
Whenever anyone mentions MLK I think of that Chris Rock bit.
“I’m at the corner of MLK and-”
“RUN!”
In my experience I have never known that to be inaccurate.
Thats funny
Although both the old and new MLK of Chapel Hill are the exception, but it is Chapel Hill a tiny town of academics and NIMBY types. Case in point, Chapel Hill is one of only two city school disticts in NC (Asheville is the other). The rest of the state’s school discticts are the whole county. There is no way CH profs would let their dear children rub shoulders with the children of the people that clean the university’s toilets.
I have to admit that I’m going to take some guilty joy when, in a few decades, all of the Barack H. Obama Boulevards are ghetto war zones.
From another site I frequent
You slut.
I bet you’re naked under all those clothes, too.
The speed limit isn’t necessarily designed for how comfortably you can go a certain speed under ideal conditions; it may have have been designed based on how quickly you would need to stop under less-than-ideal ones;
Yes, but the road should not be designed to be comfortably driven significantly over said speed limit.
The exception being temporary speed reductions for things like school zones.
roads aren’t “designed” around preconceived automobile speed limits; roads exist where terrain permits, and are often simply the legacy of 100s-of-years-old horse-carts/indian-trails.
Additionally – back when speed limits were first conceived, 55 was not nearly as “safe” as it is today. Every year that passes we can go faster more safely due to improvements in tire technology and crash-safety. You seem to think speed-limit numbers are a dependent variable in an equation related to road-design and car-capabilities when they obviously aren’t and have never been.
simply the legacy of 100s-of-years-old horse-carts/indian-trails
I see you have driven in Boston.
I was actually thinking specifically of the roads between Boston and New York (e.g. Boston Post Road), and/or Broadway
My understanding is that they are, somewhat.
Not in the sense of rural roads like you are talking about, but in NEW streets and roads.
But the point is, there are ways to redesign, often in ways that lower the maintenance costs of the road, when a speed limit change is needed. And, actually, the older horse-cart roads were much, much narrower, even with a 55 mph speed limit, than currently designed roads.
(shrug) Ok. But i would probably not be far off in guessing that “new” roads (e.g. built after, say, the 1970s) are a tiny fraction of existing roadways, so if your point has merit it applies only to a negligible share
maybe. but i’d guess that in the few areas its actually relevant no one is interested in trying to align the ‘design’ of the road to the (theoretically) appropriate speed limit, as much as they are in creating speed-traps or campaigning for safety-for-safety’s sake.
The ones I am most worried about are the ones built after 1970.
And in the areas I have lived, that is a significant part of the roads, as rural areas have become suburban and urban.
And often it isnt so much built as rebuilt. Expanded and such. Most of that is in the last 20 years.
Fair enough. where i’ve lived, the idea of “New Roads” has always been … shall we say, ‘problematic‘
This is the kind of thing that concerns me:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2009/10/26/engineers-gone-wild.html?rq=road%20design
That is problematic. The interstate going thru cities is stupid. The orginal design avoided that, but some one got there way and changed the plans.
It is destructive to cities to split it with major highways like that.
Ignoring the whole minority/poor issue, but duh, of course their neighborhoods were more likely to get destroyed than the rich ones.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/5/22/engineers-should-not-design-streets?rq=road%20design
The article is about related ideas, but here is the key quote for this discussion:
There are two primary variables for designing a road: design speed and projected traffic volume. From those two numbers, we can derive the number of lanes, lane width, shoulder width, the width of clear zones and the allowable horizontal and vertical curvature. From those factors, we can specify all the pavement markings and signage that are necessary. We can then monitor things like the Level of Service, the 85th percentile speed and traffic counts to optimize how the road functions over time. Engineers are really good at this.
(bolding mine)
“The speed limit isn’t necessarily designed for how comfortably you can go a certain speed under ideal conditions; it may have have been designed based on how quickly you would need to stop under less-than-ideal ones;”
In any other city, this is true. Where I live, the speed limit is no longer tethered to anything except pushing people to ride bikes.
The problem with residential speed bumps is that it “solves” a non-existent problem. Pedestrians rarely get hit on neighborhood streets. They get hit on major arterials.
Yes, people speeding thru neighborhoods looks scary, but it isn’t that bad, and there are much better means of traffic calming than speed bumps. Although the other means probably have similar, but less bad, effect on heart attack mortality.
I find keying “Stop speeding thru the neighborhood asshole” into the side of their car works pretty well.
When I lived in California on a private street, the worst offenders at speeding thru the neighborhood were cops. They weren’t going anywhere in particular, they just didn’t give a shit.
the neighborhood were cops.
This so much. Around here every 5 years or so someone will write to the paper bitching about speeding cops. The invariable response from the PD is “just because the emergency lights aren’t on doesn’t mean they aren’t hurrying to a call.” Uh-huh, right.
Sure they were, they just got a 1057 call over the radio
What’s a 1057 call?
That means the local Kirspy Kreme just lit up the Hot Donuts sign
This is purely anecdotal, but when I was a child we lived right off the main inlet of a large residential area. It was one of only 2 ways to get into this particular neighborhood. The speed limit was 25 but people would regularly go twice that. We didn’t have any people hit but I think something like 8 of our cats were killed by drivers in the 10 years we lived there. We asked multiple times for speed bumps near our house but never got them. They finally put speed bumps right in front of our house… a few years after we moved out.
Something like a grassy median would probably work just as well as a speed bump, look better, and wouldn’t piss everyone off.
something like 8 of our cats were killed by drivers
You know, after about the 3rd one you should probably have just kept them inside the house.
Paging Vaas Montenegro …
We also had dogs. If you have a doggie door there’s no magic IFF cat proof forcefield that’s going to keep the cats from going out as well. I guess relying on people to pay attention and not drive over living things is asking a bit much.
If you have a doggie door there’s no magic IFF cat proof forcefield that’s going to keep the cats from going out as well.
Technology marches on.
there’s no magic IFF cat proof forcefield
Technology marches on.
I guess relying on people to pay attention and not drive over living things is asking a bit much.
Do you have neon cats? I’ve got two cats myself, and while I would be sad if anything happened to them, I couldn’t fault a driver for hitting them (willful maliciousness excepted). Cats are small, fast, like to hide, and not half as bright as they think they are. Reduced speed is probably the only thing that would make a difference, but even forcing everybody to go 5 mph would not stop a cat from darting into the road. Personally, I’d rather have drivers watching for children and other cars than for cats.
” Take speed limits, for example. How many people drive the speed limit?”
Where I live? No one. Most go 10 – 15mph under.
No one drives the speed limit here or obeys any traffic law, ever. On the Expressway, the speed limit is 50. Everyone drives 80+ as long as traffic allows it, except for the few people who drive 35 in the left hand lane.
That’s more typical in the rest of the country. I was in Detroit recently and I was driving along at around 75mph and I was the slowest person on the road. It was glorious. It’s been so long since I’ve driven somewhere where people actually know how, it was almost jarring to see people driving that fast, safely.
The roads around here cannot be driven that fast safely, with a few exceptions. It’s almost as if someone tried to wind a major modern freeway through an ancient colonial road network.
Understand I’m talking about freeways. I don’t ask that people speed, I merely ask they do the speed limit. Ie, get UP to the speed limit. They’re on this ‘vision zero’ campaign kick and all the side streets are being reduced to 20 mph. Yes, you read that right. They’ve narrowed several major thoroughfares which used to be 35 and reduced them to 30. When it was 35, the average speed was about 22. Now it’s 16.
School zone speeds average around 4mph.
If you can get up to 50 on the freeway, you’re #Winning.
Ha!
My idiot city is on the Vision Zero kick, too. Shockingly enough, the people who try to walk across the interstate, drag racers, completely hammered drivers and other people who don’t give a fuck are doing their best to sabotage the goal.
The solution, naturally, is more money for the city.
Mmmhmmm.
NYC? Our mayor, the Commie shit-heel, has continued Bloomberg’s horror. Bloomberg, in a fit of pique because he did not get his congestion pricing plan, spent his last few years here reducing all of our 4 lanes down to 2 with a giant concrete median down the middle. The new ass has, contra his initial promises, reduced our 40mph parkways down to 25 and is spending every penny he can to install speed cameras everywhere.
Nah, Im one of the surprisingly many Austinites.
Also, the vids and reports of the Bloomerberg and DeBlasio motorcades speeding and running red lights warms my black libertarian heart.
Nelson Rockefeller fucked up the streets of Albany something good so he could have his vanity project.
The Egg should be blown up.
In Tucson, we have a nice mix of 10 over and 15 under. So it averages out, I guess, but holy shit is this a dangerous town to drive in. Mrs. Dean has 500 pound of aftermarket steel bumpers on her ride for a reason.
Speed differentials are always a problem. Keep right except to pass is a nice theory, but here, left-lane camping is so bad, the state patrol has started (or so they say) cracking down. I haven’t seen it, but…
Hey Prius Drivers: If you’re going to go 48 on the freeway, please for the love of God move the fuck over.
http://mynorthwest.com/20921/hey-left-lane-campers-june-is-left-lane-awareness-month/
The weirdest place for driving I’ve ever driven, is Portland. The first time, I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. Everyone was driving the same speed, 45 MPH, which was the limit. Then, even more astounding, I signaled to get over a lane and not only did the person behind me in the other lane NOT speed up so I couldn’t get over, they actually slowed down to let me in! WTF!?
Drivers in the northwest are very polite… to a point where they’re unsafe. I can’t tell you the number of near-accidents I’ve seen because someone stops on a major thoroughfare to let someone run across the road. I’ve also seen a number of stomach-turning near pedestrian hits because someone in the right lane stopped so a young woman could push her stroller across four lanes, but the people in the other three lanes couldn’t see her.
I hate it when the near lane of a multi-lane road stops and trys to wave me across. No, dipshit, I’m waiting for a gap in the traffic of all lanes, and you’re blocking my view of the others!
Which is different from down here, when, I’ve nearly been hit more than once, in a crosswalk, where someone decided they didn’t want to stop and drove around the car that was stopped waiting for me to cross (again, in a crosswalk)
I’ve seen people in roundabouts yield to people waiting to enter said roundabout… Like, that’s not how this shit works, asshole!!
I haven’t lived in many other places, but driving in Arizona is a daily game of “guess how the other drivers are going to try to murder me today.”
I drive exactly the speed limit or lower.
I come to full and complete stops at stop signs. Every time.
I signal as early as possible without being obnoxious.
There’s a very real interest for me in not being pulled over, so even if the laws are absurd… you bet your ass I’m still going to follow it.
Stoned outta your head AND drunk is no way to drive – even if you do observe all the laws.
Lol!
More like, there’s a very real possibility there’s contraband in my vehicle. (Not necessarily under any influence).
Oh, and I also always have a gun in the car. Put those two together and what do you get? That’s right, boys and girls, a felony!
There goes my image of you as a female Hunter S. Thompson.
*dang*
Well, maybe/probably if I was on the highway. But not in town. Too many cops, especially now that I work downtown. Cop central.
But seriously, driving four hours on the highway? Yeah, why the hell not?
If the one time I was stoned while driving is anything to go by, no thanks.
Driving in London suburbs, a bit antsy. Got to a set of red lights, came to a halt, looked down into the passenger footwell, looked up and couldn’t figure out where I was. Police car pulls up right behind me, and the lights change to green.
“Drive off, real careful, looking like you know where you’re going”
Stoned outta your head AND drunk is no way to drive
Then it’s good that I only drive drunk!
Same here, although there is one stop sign on my commute that I just cannot stop rolling through. Oh, and I speed on the last stretch of road home, because the exact some road goes from 45 to 25 mph solely because there is a park that nobody uses. Except the birders, in the fall and spring, and they are easy to spot because they are standing on top of their vehicles with heavy optics.
Don’t get me started on Albuquerque taking a heavily trafficked thoroughfare and reducing it from four to two lanes with a dedicated bus lane and train station-styled islands to accommodate literally tens of commuters who actually use that line from its origin in the suburbs to downtown, in the process eliminating most of the left-hand turns and seriously fucking over the businesses on that street in an already blighted part of town
I think you’ve mentioned this before. Is that rte 66 (Central?) east of UNM? I used to live a few blocks away. I can’t imagine choking down that street. It was plenty busy in 1994.
It hasn’t gotten any better, and now it’s going to be a clusterfuck. I avoid it entirely, which I guess doesn’t really help my case since I expect they expect that most people will do the same and alleviate congestion that way. Still, the glimpses I catch of it are heinous: traffic backed up for blocks, having to detour several blocks to find a left-hand turning lane, speed reduced to 5-10 miles. The thing is, it’s never going to get any better: all of the construction problems are just baking in the problems that stretch of pavement will always have now because drivers will always have to contend with fewer traffic lanes, buses merging into traffic around old town where Central can’t accommodate the dedicated lane, left-hand turns at only the biggest intersections, pedestrians trying to get from the bus stop islands across traffic, the elimination of a ton of parking spaces in Nob Hill… all to the tune of 80 mil or so, most of it gratis from the feds, to improve on bus lines that already exist. It’s not going to be rapid transit, it’s going to be slower transit than ever before. It would have me piqued even if I didn’t live a few blocks north of Copper, but since I do it’s got me enraged.
What road did they fuck over in ABQ? I’m vaguely familiar with the town due to occasional visits.
Central, AKA Route 66. It’s not the biggest east-west avenue by a long shot, but it cuts through a lot of commercial real estate, as well as loads of empty lots and former fleabag motels where business already has a tough time eking out. Somehow I doubt appealing to the bus commuter crowd is going to bring in that top-dollar lucre to make investing in parking-starved lots appealing. And I can be pretty cavalier about bus commuters because I used to take the red line which connects Four Hills through downtown: it’s nothing but vagrants, students, prosties, and poor sods like me who couldn’t afford a car. And the thing about the terminal points at the east and west ends is that you already need a car to get to the stops. It’s not like these are heavily concentrated urban areas: they’re suburbs. You would need a car to get out of your suburb and to the stop in any sane amount of time. Just to illustrate my desperation when I resorted to busing it, I had to walk out of my little cul-de-sac, across an arroyo, up a cliffside, across a park, and down a sketchy alley to get to my stop. Half an hour walking, which isn’t terrible, but for a fifteen minute bus ride it’s just not feasible. Nobody with options is going to volunteer to do that. And here’s the thing: I could do that even before the city decided to drop eighty million dollars on this fiasco
/rant
Holy shit. Central?
Mrs. Dean has 500 pound of aftermarket steel bumpers on her ride for a reason.
I call them cow catchers. Cow elk, that is.
Prius catchers.
‘Roo bars.
She has ARB bumpers, which are Australian and thus actually qualify.
Plus, her FJ is jacked up about 3 inches or so from stock. When she rolls up behind you, you are looking at a wall of death-dealing steel, outfitted with a winch (to haul your corpse out of whatever ravine it landed in, presumably), d-rings, and fog lights (which she keeps on just so you know what’s coming).
The other day I had a 350 fall in behind me with those undercarriage fog lights on but not headlamps. I don’t know that it was intentional, but considering those headlamps would have seared out my eyeballs at six in the morning it seemed like a pretty kind gesture.
Good piece. I love the traffic calming/emergency vehicle tradeoff example.
Hey Derp, time for another SF meetup soon?
People treat laws and taxes as a panacea.
Same with leaders. See Obama cultists.
Speaking of “caution- wildlife on roadway”… I was wheeling along one day in my four wheel drive pickup truck, and came around a corner to find a large big horn sheep in my lane. He was a big battle scarred monster. Fortunately, there was plenty of room to get by him, but I have no doubt hitting one of those things would be little different than hitting a bridge abutment.
* I hesitate to call it “full size” even though it is; you can lay a full sheet of plywood in the bed and close the tailgate. But- side by side with one of the dreadnoughts they’re making nowadays, it looks like a min i truck.
Years ago, driving across Texas, my ex related a story of returning home to San Antonio from Austin after a show. Her then-boyfriend was driving, but was pretty drowsy, and didn’t notice the deer darting across the highway. My ex said “Deer… DEER… DEER!” to which her boyfriend got irritated and asked, “WHAT?”
They dragged the poor thing several hundred yards before coming to a stop.
Damned if I didn’t almost nail a deer ten minutes later.
Fuck driving in Texas.
When I picked up Mrs. Dean’s AMG in Austin, I drove it home through the Hill Country in mid-November, when the deer are the most active. I was terrified the entire time (of Mrs. Dean, not the deer; my plan if I hit a deer was to leave the car, start walking south, and hope I got to Mexico before she caught up with me).
One week later, I whacked a deer in my car.
What was the deer doing in your car?
The deer had it comin’
They were having a sit-down to discuss the deer’s complaints about its share of the heist money
*Sigh*
Look, the deer owed me money, OK? You can’t go easy on one of them, or the rest stop their payments, too.
Deers have strong opinions about public transit, too.
These euphemisms
Deer are shit animals. They’re basically rats with hooves.
When I lived in upstate NY I was driving home one night on a back road that led to the apartment complex where I lived. There fields on either side of the road where the trees and everything else were tall and thick enough that you couldn’t see anything. Was exhausted and I’d had a stressful day at school and wasn’t paying the best attention.
A deer at (nearly) the worst possible moment decided to bound across the road from one side of the field to another. Saw it at the last second, stood on the brakes, and stopped maybe 5 or 10 feet from hitting the poor thing.
Then again, I was driving a Dodge Neon at the time. It’s likely the deer would’ve done far more damage to me than I would’ve done to it.
I wrote a Subaru Outback off 5 years ago, from an impact with a 4-point buck. Would have done less damage if I’d accellerated into a utility pole.
I don’t recall what we were driving but it was sporty and low and mostly plastic and would have been trashed if we’d hit the thing.
that’s interesting… I drove an impreza into a larger deer than that and only had to replace the windshield.. I even drove the fucker home. Then again, that car was inexplicably tank like in its toughness. I drove away from stuff that would have totaled almost any other car.
“Huh, there’s a carolla stuck in my wheel well.”
The Outback was a 2000-ish one, quite a high radiator, and it was only a 4-pointer, so the center of mass hit right about where the hood catch is. Detached the hood, flipped it back into the windshield, deer comes back and basically plants right on top of the engine. Bent in the driver side panel and damaged the wheel.
The car was old, but if it had been a new car, it would have probably put the car beyond economic repair.
Deer can be bad news to hit but if you really want to fuck up a car hit a full size pig. As illustrated deer with the legs tend to flip up. Though my son hit a doe if the head and caved in the skull, if the animal was 12 inches slower it might have hit the front panel . He called me and I told him to throw it in the bed and bring it home so we would have extra venison.
Okay, back to pigs. Those shits with their short legs tend to roll under the vehicle tearing the engine area to shit. Plus they tend to be dark colored and run in groups at night. Where I lived in central CALI I hated to drive the road at night since on average 8-10 times a year a co-worker would heavily damage or total their car.
The speed over the limit generally decides the size of the bribe the cop gets in some parts…
There ought to be a law against too many laws.
Uh-oh. One of the Warhammer 40,000 nerds is going to post that clip again…
I thought about it… but wrote the text instead.
Rogal Dorn will be along shortly to inform the High Lords that making new laws is now illegal.
OT – Because they looked so hard for so long
this is still the official status of Omar Mateen and the San Berdoo folks, unless i’m mistaken. “No evidence” is the term of art for ‘they didn’t find his photograph in the ISIS/Al Q yearbook’
e.g. in the wiki write-up on Mateen, they note his 911 call where he repeatedly announced his intent and pledged loyalty to ISIS, but qualify it with = “”analysts noted that “at this point, it’s anyone’s guess as to how involved Omar Mateen was with either Al Qaeda or ISIL.”[88] Mateen had also pledged support for a suicide bomber who claimed to represent the al-Nusra Front, a Syrian branch of al-Qaeda and an opponent of ISIL””
basically, its this convenient false-ideal where “REAL Terror” involves people who went to one of those “jump through hoops of fire” training-camps, fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and then conspired for years on the DL with high-rankers in the global jihad…. and that anything that falls short of that is some cheap-knock-off undeserving of the title.
yet the same authorities seem to feel perfectly comfortable charging people with ‘Terroristic threatenings’ or ‘material support for terror groups’ if they so much as watch the wrong videos or make incendiary comments on Facebook. Its this selective conceptual-flexibility which irks me so much.
It’s called ‘co-opting’ ISIS terrorism for their own selfish and murderous means and impulses. Yet, they have no problem pointing and yelling ‘right-wing conservative nut!’ whenever a lone-wolf goes on a rampage.
Progs, it’s worth keeping to note, are supreme useful idiots.
If only the mainstream media and the left (but I repeat myself) applied the same standard to “Nazis,” “fascists,” “white supremacists,” etc….
Oh god, I have a co-worker who reads one of those “hate watch” magazines. I leafed through it one time, and it was just as stupid as I expected. It’s a bunch of over-the-top rhetoric about how the country is on the verge of a literal holocaust because some skinhead doofus in some podunk town in North Carolina spraypainted a swastika somewhere. And don’t forget: every group that does not enthusiastically endorse “progressive” leftism is a “hate group”.
We really should be thankful that genuinely hateful and violent groups are mostly just irrelevant footnotes, but instead we’re apparently supposed to treat a dozen inbred morons waving swastikas around like they’re one step away from getting the Enabling Acts passed.
Traffic calming is such a great euphemism. When I drive a road that was deliberately designed to be a shitty road, with speed bumps or narrow lanes or tiny roundabouts I’m anything but calm.