Really we just need to transition away from car-based city design. We don't need to further empower out-of-control law enforcement with new reasons to harass people. We could make huge strides just by redesigning existing streets.

I hate that the reason we give for not seriously enforcing traffic laws is basically "ACAB". Selective enforcement is one of the strongest tools that Bastard cops have. That said, I'd prefer enforcement that doesn't require a police person to be present and making judgement calls. I honestly believe we can do this more-or-less objectively.

For traffic control, I would be very happy with widespread automatic enforcement, if it was done equitably. I think e.g. speeding fines should be a % of your income, but they should also be small enough that even a poor person can get dinged and not have it derail their whole life.

Even better, I'd be all for mandated manufacturer limits on vehicle power. There is no reason to let 300hp machines onto public roads. They could be manufactured to be mechanically impossible to get above ~120 km/hr. 99.7% of people are not going to bother modding their cars to go beyond that, and that's good enough for me.

For the modernists, we could even mandate that newly manufactured cars all have position-awareness and would know the speed limit at any given time. Then they could electronically limit themselves to that maximum. It's possible this turns into a dystopian surveillance state, but it's also totally possible to design a system like this that is transparent and just (i.e. the street broadcasts the limit to the car, rather than the car asking for the limit for its position). Again some fraction of people will hack their cars to go faster but I'm concerned about public safety overall.

For the people who say "sometimes it's safer to speed!" shut the fuck up and think about it for a second. The only times when it might be safer are in the current broken-ass sytem where everyone is speeding all the goddamn time. If 99.7% of people are following the speed limit, those cases where "speeding is safer" basically disappear. Not to mention the speed restrictions would still save more lives overall even if speeding in those rare cases where "speeding is safer" would have prevented a crash.

just this week, residents of Kathmandu saw Mount Everest for the first time in decades

a pandemic is not a good thing but maybe it can lay bare a few other horrible things about the world

The positive environmental impact of the shutdown is really stark and will unfortunately be coopted by ecofascists who will try to form a coalition between far right, far left and liberals even more aggressively and probably with a lot of success over the next few years.

The future is nazis, tankies and upper class libs all working together to screw the rest of us.

I want to get us to a place where nobody needs a car for local transportation, and cars are intentionally made inconvenient to use where they should be discouraged from being used (like in high-density cities) but I don't see any justification for horsepower limits or enhanced speeding enforcement from an environmental angle. Speed limits are created to generate revenue and have very little relation to safety and even less to pollution control.

Modern cars reach peak efficiency in terms gas consumed/distance travelled at ~85 km/hr. This is partially a design choice but physics and chemistry limit where this peak can be tuned.

I don't care where speed laws were used unjustly in the past, they can and should be used for environmental impact reasons.

The likelihood of a pedestrian dying from a collision with a motor vehicle follows as logistic function of the motor vehicle's speed. The transition point where the likelihood is 50% is at around 40 km/hr. The transition is somewhat narrow, in that at less than 30 km/hr the likelihood of survival is really high, but at greater than 50 km/hr it's very low.

Whatever political slant you want to apply, speed limits historically and officially are motivated by safety considerations. I think we should continue to use them as a tool for safety. As I mentioned before I would be in favour or more uniformly-applied traffic control with smaller penalties for drivers. I do not think the fines (if we use fines for enforcement...) should be considered as income for the city. We have administrative tools to get around this, we just have to be willing to use them.

Goddammit jf I'm an AMERICAN. If you cut me, do I not bleed Campbell's tomato soup? So what the hell is this km/hr you keep talking about?

Stupid dangerous things being illegal is okay, including this stupid race that doesn't clear the roads it used. Dom DeLuise was setting a bad example.

Long live tequila!

So this stance that Americans are entitled to break the law occasionally (if you're white and rich, obviously), ignore social norms and do things that will harm society (because freedom) is the exact reason America leads the world in covid19 infections and deaths.

While the societies that Americans look down on for being too socially conscience are doing a great job containing the pandemic.

"Modern cars reach peak efficiency in terms gas consumed/distance travelled at ~85 km/hr."

There are so many variables in play here that I can't imagine how you'd determine this. Also I think it's futile to try and continue to develop more efficient combustion engines when clearly what we need to do is transition away from combustion engines as the primary method of powering transportation anyway.

Opposition to further empowerment of police *is* a safety issue. Any time you give the police new avenues of enforcement they will use it to abuse racial minorities. There is a cost paid (primarily by black men) for every new power we grant to police in this country. That has to be taken into consideration.