All new cars must have the devices from 7 July, adding fuel economy as well as safety. Will mpg become the new mph?
In the highway code and the law courts, there is no doubt what those big numbers in red circles mean. As a quick trip up any urban street or motorway with no enforcement cameras makes clear though, many drivers still regard speed signs as an aspiration rather than a limit.
Technology that will be required across Europe from this weekend may change that culture, because from 7 July all new cars sold in the EU and in Northern Ireland must have a range of technical safety features fitted as standard. The most notable of these is intelligent speed assistance – or colloquially, a speed limiter.
The rest of the UK is theoretically free, as ministers once liked to put it, to make the most of its post-Brexit freedoms, but the integrated nature of car manufacturing means new vehicles here will also be telling their drivers to take their foot off the accelerator. Combining satnav maps with a forward camera to read the road signs, they will automatically sound an alarm if driven too fast for the zone they are in.
No, it’s really quite easy to argue against them.
I live in a rural area. If I call an ambulance, that’s a minimum–minimum–of 20 minutes for any ambulance to get to me. Then it’s another 20 minutes to get to an emergency room. I know someone who is a doctor that lives close to me, and their husband got stung by a bunch of yellow jackets. Their husband is allergic. They gave their husband a shit ton of meds, and made it to the ER in under 15 minutes. As it was, he barely avoided getting put on a ventilator, and that was with perfect care and driving 90+ mph on two lane mountain roads to get to a hospital. (He has an epinephrine pen now.) With a “smart” speed limiter on their car? He wouldn’t have been breathing by the time they got to the ER.
When you live in a rural area, and emergency help is a long way away (honestly, 20 min ain’t that bad compared to other parts of the state where it can be more like 45+ minutes just to get an ambulance out), it’s really, really easy to argue against that kind of nanny state nonsense.
Presumably ambulances and other such emergency vehicles would be exempt from such devices? But I agree with you anyway since ambulances are expensive and having to choose between driving slow in your own car with a limiter and calling for an ambulance and going bankrupt should not be a choice someone has to make in a split second during an emergency.
Ambulances are expensive? Tell me you are from the USA, without telling me you are from the USA.
I am. It’s a real fuckin’ problemo. Ambulances are actually kinda rare to see these days because people around where I live call rideshares to take them to the hospital instead.
An Ambulance is expensive anywhere in the world. The only question is how do you hide the expensive. Most of the cost is having several vehicle with trained personal sitting around doing nothing just waiting for someone in need. If there is ever a time when there is one vehicle not ready to go but doing nothing you don’t have enough service for a potential worse disaster. Of course that means there is lots of room to hide the costs if you don’t want to tell the truth - which many do not.
When I took an ambulance, they charged me $1800 (after insurance) for a 10-minute ride to the hospital. That covers a lot of “sitting around” time for a group of people earning $15/hr. Just 10 calls in one day is close to $20k in revenue, or close to four months worth of pay for those two EMTs, and that ambulance is running 24/7.
An ambulance is a truck, and handles like one, they won’t be going as fast as a car on a two-lane mountain road - it isn’t possible to keep it on the road with perfect driving at speeds a small car can go. (an ambulance could be made smaller, but that is at the expensive of equipment they have inside so not a great compromise.)
Okay, but that misses the point.
This doctor was driving at the speeds that an ambulance would have been driving, but only had to make the trip in one direction. It took them 20 minutes, from stings, to pulling into the ER (15 minutes of that being driving time). If they had called an ambulance, it would have been a minimum of 30-40 minutes, because the ambulance would have to get to them first.
And again - 20 minutes for an ambulance to get to you is not all that bad, relative to even more rural areas, and counties that don’t even have a hospital or doctors.
But the ambulance carries epipens and would have administered one immediately.
The drive to the hospital would have been precautionary and at a SAFE speed…
…If–and this is a big “if” in very rural areas–the ambulance has someone on it that can legally administer drugs, and the ambulance isn’t on the other side of the county dealing with another medical emergency at the same time. (In my state, you need to be a paramedic to administer drugs; there are different classes of EMTs in my state, and most of them are not paramedics. There’s a severe shortage of paramedics, largely due to the god-awful pay, and so not all ambulances will have a paramedic on them at all times.)
This was literally a best-case scenario: a doctor that had medications on-hand and could administer them, and able to get to the hospital faster than an ambulance could get to their home in the first place. And he still came very close to needing to be intubated.
Everyone can administer a epipen… And if you’re going to play “IF”…
The ambulance could also have been two houses down and there in 3 minutes. Or the more likely IF, the driver of the car, could have wrecked injuring them and likely killing the patient, or even worse injured another car’s passengers…
Great now explain how this works in every other type of medical emergency because for some reason only ambulances and EMTs are capable of driving fast safely.
That’s significantly less likely than the ambulance being either at the hospital or being farther away than the hospital. Let’s say that 33% of the time the ambulance is at the hospital, 33% of the time it’s farther away, and 33% of the time it’s closer. That means that 66% of the time it’s going to take you less time to get to the hospital on your own than it would to wait for an ambulance.
…And that’s only one specific type of medical emergency. What about uncontrolled bleeding? You want a real world example? Look at Kentucky Ballistics; he had a gun explode, and a piece of shrapnel went into his neck. If he had waited for an ambulance, he would have bled out before he made it to the hospital, and he was only about ten minutes away.
And that’s just one example of a medical emergency. A simple Epi-pen isn’t going to save you when you’re having a stroke, heart attack, or bleeding internally.
I 100% agree, I only brought up ambulances being exempt because you specifically mentioned them. I gather from your post that the value of ambulances in rural areas is probably less valuable than in urban areas simply because the main selling point of an ambulance is that it has right of way to overtake all traffic and ignore signals, but traffic is not the main issue, it’s long distances between hospitals or difficult terrain/winding roads that artificially limit speeds.
In the very rural areas I would assume there to be ambulance/rescue helicopters, boats and snowmobiles etc that get dispatched. I was born and lived most of my life in a very rural area with the closest actual hospital with proper 24/7 er and more advanced surgery etc capabilities being some 160km away. Roads and road-bound vehicles just aren’t a thing you’d want to use or depend on in an emergency, if you live that rurally. So that’s really not a good argument to make, in my opinion, though maybe if you lived in the US, you wouldn’t have that and if you did, it’d bankrupt you if you made use of it, so you were going to be fucked either way. It’s dangerous to depend on rural roads if your only recourse is speeding. That’s just endangering everyone else too, be it only you as the driver the extra casualty. So the answer isn’t keeping the current dangerous system dangerous, rather maybe reconsider the way emergency response and general welfare and healthcare is organized and structured… if something like this would one day push you guys there, then I’d consider that only good. This is assuming you are from US of course. But I can’t really see any other country lacking basic services and needs like that, if internet and proficiency in English language as well as access to cars is taken as granted, which would mostly rule out third world countries since we are talking about rural areas.
That, in particular, is especially fucked in the US. Life Flights/medevac helicopters are almost always private companies, and each insurance company has to negotiate with every medevac company separately. You can easily end up with a $100,000 bill from a helicopter ride to a trauma center because your insurer didn’t negotiate rates with the one company that was operating in your area, and you have no legal recourse aside from declaring bankruptcy.
Should we have socialized or otherwise single-payer medicine in the US? Absolutely. But are we realistically going to do that before some id10t decides to legislate ‘smart’ cars that prevent you from exceeding what the car believes to be the speed limit? Nope. (For reference, I’ve driven a car with driver assist; it tried to jerk the wheel out of my hands a few times because it thought the road was turning when it wasn’t, because it was misreading the lines on the road and the signs.)