Speed Limits
TLDR: Under-enforced too-slow speed limits weakens the principle of law. Signage should reflect target speeds, not speed limits. Utopia enforces speed limits through machines in a way that gives fast feedback-loops and removes bias. Fair incentives emerge through use of day-fines.
Prerequisites: Congestion Pricing
Driving fast is good. As I mentioned way back in the essay on boarding airplanes, commuting is one of the worst ways to spend time, and time is life. Hours spent stuck in traffic should be compared to lives lost. The faster people drive, the less time is spent on the road (and/or the more trips can be made, which is also good), which can be thought of as similar to lives saved.
But of course one shouldn’t drive too fast. A curving road with no shoulder in the fog should be taken slowly, while a large freeway with no other cars can be taken much faster. Clearly there’s a speed that’s too fast for a given time/place, and traveling at or above that speed will predictably lead to accidents, property damage, injury, and death. Among those younger than 55 years, car accidents are the leading cause of death in the USA.
The right balance between going fast and being safe is a difficult thing to find, and is going to depend on the values and culture of the drivers and the locals, as well as the science and engineering of the specific road. To make matters worse, having a low speed limit is not always sufficient to get motorists to slow down. People often drive as fast as they feel is safe, regardless of the posted speed limit, which is why many road engineers promote making streets feel more dangerous to motorists by reducing lane size, adding curves, planting roadside trees, and more. A road that has a low speed limit but feels intuitively safe produces a disparity in traffic speeds, which can be a source of accidents all in itself, meaning that in some cases roads would be safer with higher speed limits.
Let’s step away from the art of selecting what the right speed limit is, and instead assume that the local government has successfully identified what the optimal speed for vehicles on a particular road should be. What’s the best way to actually ensure that vehicles travel at that speed?
The traditional approach is to post signs indicating the optimal speed as a speed limit, and to occasionally post a police officer on the road to pull over speeding vehicles. Unfortunately, because people (understandably) want to go fast, and the best speed for the road is the posted speed limit, almost all drivers try to drive at least the speed limit (when conditions are good). Worse, because speed limits are poorly enforced, almost all motorists regularly drive over the speed limit. About half of drivers are breaking the law at any given time.
Casually turning normal people into law-breakers has a deep impact on respect for law and relationship with police. As people believe that they can get away with the “crime” of speeding, traffic speeds diverge, which as we’ve seen can be a major cause of accidents.
Utopian Speed Traps
As I proposed in the essay on congestion pricing, Utopia tracks vehicles by using radio transponders and networked antennas at every intersection. This system of surveillance is used to tax drivers for the negative externalities of using roads, such as wear-and-tear, noise, and congestion.
But of course, this system can also be used to enforce speed limits. By tracking each vehicle as it moves from intersection to intersection, one can automatically calculate the average speed that vehicle was traveling along a section of road. A fine can then be automatically sent to the vehicle owner whenever their car exceeds the speed limit on any road anywhere.
It’s worth noting that this system punishes those with an exceptionally high average speed, rather than a high peak speed. This means it’s totally legal to accelerate to a high speed when passing a truck, for instance (as long as the maneuver wasn’t reckless), as long as one slows back down after passing.
The pervasiveness of automatic enforcement means that no police are necessary, except to handle the occasional reckless driver or people who otherwise are violating traffic laws (such as by not having a working vehicle identifier). A reduction of human involvement in issuing speeding tickets results in fewer wasted police hours, and less bias in how tickets are handed out. In Utopia, cops, thugs, and little old ladies get the same tickets for speeding.
Large meta-analyses of cameras for enforcing speed limits in the USA and UK found that they have a significant impact on safety and accident rates. For instance, a 2010 paper by The Cochrane Collaboration says: “Twenty eight studies measured the effect on crashes. All 28 studies found a lower number of crashes in the speed camera areas after implementation of the program. … For crashes resulting in death or serious injury reductions ranged from 17% to 58%, with most studies reporting this result in the 30% to 40% reduction range.”
Utopian Speed Indicators
People are almost never pulled over for going slightly over the speed limit. In fact, many countries have explicit regulations specifying how much faster a vehicle must be going over the “limit” before a punishment can be issued. This contributes to a sense that the posted speed limit is in fact the ideal speed, and going a little over that limit is okay.
In Utopia the word “limit” means the line that people are punished for crossing, which is higher than the target speed. Instead of “speed limit” signs, Utopia has signs that say “speed norm” or just “speed.” The speed limit is then a function of the speed norm, like 110%. Drivers are then expected to drive at the speed norm, with impatient drivers going a bit over.
Because speed limits are usually enforced intersection-to-intersection, country roads can vary the speed norm dynamically when the road curves vs is straight without changing the overall speed limit. Utopia has painted indicators on roads that indicate the norm is slowing down or speeding up compared to the previous section of road. Good drivers will then slow down on dangerous sections of roadway and speed up when it’s safe, knowing that their overall speed is what’s being measured.
Drivers are also alerted to their speed by their vehicles. Fancy cars will track the vehicle’s location and warn the driver when they’re going fast enough that they’ll get ticketed unless they slow down. But by the nature of having a radio transponder in every car, even the simplest cars have the ability to be warned in real-time when they’re detected to be close to violating the law. The road network simply sends out a ping to motorists when they travel a section of road just below the speed limit.
Violators of the speed limit are sometimes issued warnings for going over, as long as the violation isn’t that large and the violator hasn’t been warned recently. But those who repeatedly break the speed limit, or do so significantly, are reported instantly. Regardless, both warnings and reports are sent to the vehicle in question in real-time, allowing drivers to correct for their mistake.
Aside: Taxes vs Fines
There are generally two kinds of laws: those that force people to pay for the externalities of their actions (e.g. carbon taxes), and those that punish people who deviate from a standard so that people can rely on it as a norm. These two kinds of laws work quite differently; the first kind adds a price to capture the damage done by an action, while the second is fundamentally about dissuading an action, even if someone could pay for the damage. I’ll generally distinguish the two by calling the first one a tax and the second one a fine.
To see the difference, consider murder. If someone deliberately kills someone else, we might naively say that they owe the victim and society whatever the value of that life was. It might be somewhat cold-hearted to put a dollar figure on a life, but it can and must be done in many cases. For instance, we must consider the cost of a life lost when evaluating the risks from a power plant, and be able to weigh that against other costs and benefits using a single number (i.e. a dollar value). But if we simply tax murder, then wealthy people can kill others for sport, which seems intuitively and obviously bad. (If we say that a lost life is worth $7.5 million dollars, then Elon Musk could easily afford to compensate society for killing four people per day.)
This value-of-life reasoning is wrong in that it fails to capture the peace-of-mind that people get from living in a society where they can expect not to be murdered. If we only have a tax on murder that captures direct consequences, then we lose this peace-of-mind, which is undoubtedly worth many orders of magnitude more. (This, I claim, is the best utilitarian defense of some moral intuitions being correct.)
When we want to have a law that is followed by everyone, rich and poor alike, the punishment must be such that everyone feels its sting. This sting need not be exactly equal — merely bad enough that even the rich try hard to obey the law. The natural mechanism for such a punishment is forcing offenders to pay with time. While money is very unevenly distributed, there is a way in which the cost of a lost day is comparable for people from all walks of life. Again, lost time need not be exactly equal in value between people to be the best mechanism for ensuring compliance with the law.
Unfortunately, taking time away from criminals by imprisoning them is extremely costly. Each prisoner costs more than $50,000 per year to support, and this neglects the opportunity costs that are lost by removing them from normal market activity. For instance, a business owner might contribute $2 million of value to society in an average year, so assuming they don’t commit further crimes by being free, the annual social cost to locking them up is more than $2.05 million. On top of that are the profound social costs from separating families and disrupting lives, often born disproportionately by the poor.
The solution is to, except where additional crimes are expected in the near future, punish criminals by fining them, rather than by imprisoning them. This direct transfer of wealth doesn’t come with any of the costs of imprisonment, leading to a wealthier society. The key is that a fine is not a tax — it’s a substitute for imprisonment. And thus, the level of the fine is not intended to be commensurate with the damage done, but rather of the value of the criminal’s time. A year in prison might translate to a $40k fine for the average US worker, but it might be $2 million for the business owner from earlier. By scaling fines to the wealth/income of the criminal, they can serve as effective deterrents even for the ultra-rich, comparable to prison.
Utopian Speeding Tickets
When someone is caught speeding in Utopia, they get pinged in real-time with a message on the radio informing them of how severely they broke the law. Law enforcement sends a letter to the vehicle owner informing them of the infraction and asking them to confirm that they were driving their vehicle at the time and that they agree that they broke the law.
If a vehicle owner indicates that someone else was driving the vehicle, they must identify the driver and provide law-enforcement enough details to locate them. If the indicated person denies being the driver, the issue goes to court. Likewise, if the driver denies that they broke the law then the issue goes to court. It is illegal to claim to be driving a vehicle when someone else was.
The driver of a speeding vehicle is subject to time in jail/prison automatically calculated based on how fast they were going and how many times they’ve violated speed limits or other traffic laws in the past. Punishment for violating traffic law cannot take away someone’s right to drive, but the punishments escalate quickly enough such that someone who repeatedly causes accidents will face many years of imprisonment.
Those caught for speeding can substitute their jail/prison time for a fine by sharing records of their financial situation with the state. Fines are set to be an estimate of the cost to the individual that would have come from being in jail, including the cost to low-income wealthy people (e.g. retirees) from not being able to enjoy the same standard of living. Because these costs are only estimated financially, and neglect social costs, most offenders choose to pay the fine rather than be subject to jail time.
To prevent conflict-of-interest, fines never go to law enforcement or other government budgets. Instead they are paid out to a mixture of other drivers that were on the same stretch of road as the offender at the time when they were speeding, and the people who live/work in the area where the crime took place. If the speeding takes place in an empty desert, the fine is donated to the families of those who were killed in car accidents — drivers should not be encouraged to speed if they think they’re alone, because they might be wrong.
What about corporal punishments?
Speed limits are a blunt force instrument wielded as though they were a scalpel. A grandma in an old car in the rain at night needs to go tens of miles per hour slower than a person with great eyesight and reflexes in a safe car in the daytime.
All rules are suggestions for the ignorant. If you know what your capabilities are, it's your ethical responsibility to stay within them. If you don't know, follow the rules.
In order for either freedom or responsibility to have meaning, people must be free to make their own decisions. If they're not capable of that, why do they have a license, and if they are, why do they need one?