The issue with strictly enforcing the speed limit on roads is that sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision, etc.

If we wanted to strictly enforce speed limits, we would put governors on engines. However, doing that would cause a lot of harm to normal people. That's why we don't do it.

Stop and think about what it means to be human. We use judgement and decide when we must break the laws. And that is OK and indeed... expected.

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ahtihn an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> sometimes, people must speed. They must break the law. Wife giving birth, rushing a wounded person to the ER, speeding to avoid a collision

I would argue that only the last one is a valid reason because it's the only one where it's clear that not speeding leads to direct worse consequences.

Speed limits don't exist just to annoy people. Speeding increases the risk of accident and especially the consequences of an accident.

I don't trust people to drive well in a stressful situation, so why would it be a good idea to let them increase the risk by speeding.

The worst part is that it's not even all that likely that the time saved by speeding ends up mattering.

	▲	tinier_subsets 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The “wife giving birth” exception for speeding is always so amusing to me. In the U.S., the average distance from a hospital is 10 miles (in a rural area). Assuming 55 mph speed limits, that means most people are 11 minutes from a hospital. Realistically, “speeding” in this scenario probably means something like 80 mph, so you cut your travel time to 7.5 minutes. In other words, you just significantly increased your chances of killing your about to be born kid, your wife, yourself, and innocent bystanders just to potentially arrive at a hospital 210 seconds sooner. Edit: the rushing someone to an ER scenario is possibly more ridiculous, since you can’t teleport yourself, and if the 3.5 minutes in the above scenario would make a difference, then driving someone to the ER is a significantly worse option than starting first aid while waiting for EMTs to arrive.
	▲	tekne 26 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		E(accident due to going faster) vs E(worse outcome due to waiting) Your argument only makes sense if the only possible bad thing is a car accident -- to make my point clearer, would you take a 1% chance of losing 100$ to avoid a 50% chance of losing 10$? Depends how much money you have, but it can be a perfectly rational decision.

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arcticfox 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The answer is not a governor but a speed camera, they have them all over in Brazil and they send you a ticket if you speed through them. Put an exception in the law for emergencies, provide an appeal process, and voila.