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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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This is probably true. However weather and other factors can add a loss of visibility. Every other vehicle on the road has a lighting system for a reason. It's safer. Children are not usually roaming around at night.
And you should adjust your speed based on those factors. If you can't see a giant object, even with reflectors, you are going far too fast.
We should only drive 5mph because a kid could run out into any street, theoretically.
The actual answer is that we take calculated risks all the time and trade safety for convenience every day.
You should be going slow enough that someone can step out suddenly into the road suddenly right in front of you. I've had adults do that to me. Guess who didn't drive into them? I was probably going like 20mph because that's the speed at which I could do that if needed.
Drive that slow on a rural county road at night and you're going to have a bad time. There really aren't that many people just stepping out into the road in front of a car at that time, your speed shouldn't be dictated on that one factor alone.
You seem to be missing the point that if any people would be walking or biking down a rural road, they can be completely off the road, likely wearing something reflective or high visibility. Buggies are low visibility by design and take up a large portion of the road even when they are as far over as they possibly can be.
I don't think forcing them to use electric lights is the proper approach, though.
I wouldn't expect someone to drive that 20mph on a rural street. In that case, it was near a shopping center and I could clearly see people walking on the sidewalk along the road. Hence why I was going slow. It was an example of driving a speed appropriate to the situation, despite what speed limit signs might suggest are okay on the road. In rural areas around here, its things like deer that are an issue. If you're lights aren't good enough to see something as big as a cow in time to stop, you are going too fast for the road. Doesn't matter if its a 70mph road and you have to go 40mph to be reasonably safe.
Don’t take any guff from these swine man. I’m glad to see another safe driver in the thread.
People be like “Well sometimes accidents just happen; can’t be avoided”. Like fuck, where did that idea come from??
It can be avoided, but as I said elsewhere we make calculated risks all the time. Individually and as a society. 1 in 5 Americans will get skin cancer at some point but we allow tanning salons. Red meat is linked to stomach cancer. Alcohol. Tobacco. Backyard pools. There is none-to-limited legal or medical protection granted to people from a huge range of dangers to ourselves and others and they are broadly accepted as in the realm of "personal freedoms" or in some way necessary to society, like the dangerous jobs of logging or roofing or firefighting.
I'm not saying safety shouldn't be a goal, I'm saying that risk-free is functionally impossible and people disagree on "acceptable risk."
On a rural country road a person can’t step out in front of your car because the road generally has about twenty or thirty feet of clearance on both sides. If the road is literally so narrow that there’s trees right beside the car, same as a tight city street full of parked cars, then I’ll definitely go 20 mph there.
I’m armed so any rednecks want to give me shit for going too slow next to their kids they can deal with my own inner redneck.
I’m not going to go faster than is safe, period.
You should definitely drive like 5 mph if you’re passing right next to spots where a kid might be.
The only thing that warrants extra speed is when there’s enough visible, open space such that a kid would be visible for a few seconds before getting to the road at a full sprint.
Like the roads in front of my apartment are listed as 30 mph but I go 20 because it’s so tight with cars on both sides. 30 is simply not a safe speed there.
I’m an Uber driver. I grew up in the country and started driving at age 13. I fucking love to drive, and love to race and do stupid shit. I respect driving and I hope it remains. But stopping distance needs to always be less than visible distance. And if you’re three feet from a hiding spot to the side of your car, your car needs to be going very very slow.
I just always assume there’s a suicidal two year old behind literally everything, just waiting to dive out in front of my wheels. That’s my standard for driving speed. A toddler absolutely determined to get hit, and I’m going to thwart him.
That is 100 percent not true. I run a fleet of commercial vehicles and have driven trucks and buses for two decades. For the most part you are correct. Speed is a factor. But it does not eliminate ALL hazards. Lights mitigate it much more.
If you are driving in conditions where 0.1mph is too fast to see an entire buggy without hitting it, you are going too fast
Look at it from another perspective:
If you're driving a buggy on a public Right-of-Way, you should ensure it's visible enough to be seen by someone obeying the speed limit driving on the road.
Reflectors are a partial answer, but they require direct line of sight. If there's a buggy just over a hill, headlights won't hit the reflectors until the driver crests the top of the hill, while lights on the buggy will illuminate dust, fog, and nearby foliage that can be seen earlier.
I have lights on my bicycle. There's no reason a 6-8'-wide black buggy shouldn't also have them.
A road's speed limit is the lower one of these two values though:
If you can't stop within the same distance as you can look ahead, YOU ARE TOO FAST.
If you crash into a stopped car hidden behind a curve or hill, you went too fast. Traffic jams can occur for any reason at any road.
If you run over a child that ran across the road from behind a parked car in a dense urban environment, you went too fast. It is to be expected that children live in urban areas and that children are irrational.
Deer will no wear reflectors (except their eyes of you count that) nor active lighting. If you can't see a buggy with reflectors, you're going too fast.
While collision with deer can be dangerous, the reality is it can't be controlled for, and the result is usually a broken windshield and a dead or injured deer.
A buggy having lights is a minimal requirement that's easy to implement and helps prevent a much more dangerous type of collision with zero downsides. It doesn't even conflict with Amish beliefs about technology - not that that should even matter when it comes to policy on public safety.
It's cheap, effective, and will save lives. It's a no-brainer.
Simply not true. Deer have a top speed when they run. The distance from the tree line to the road, divided by a deer’s sprinting speed, determines how much time you have to stop if a deer heads into your lane at top speed. If your stopping time is longer than that you’re going too fast.
You can control for it by going below that speed. Lower speed, less stopping time.
I grew up in deer country. Tons of deer, every year, and I stopped for unexpected deer dozens of times without hitting any deer.
You are choosing not to take responsibility, based on this lie you’re telling yourself about how it can’t be helped.
A 65mph rural highway may have a 60 ft ROW, making it 23'9" from the trees to the middle of the near lane (30 feet to the center minus 6'3" for a standard 12'6"lane).
A white-tail deer can sprint 35mph, which comes out to just over 50 feet per second. So you have half a second between the trees.
A professional driver on a closed course with new tires and a dry road can control a car braking car at about 32 fpsps (1g). Clearly you're a perfect driver from what you say. Let's also assume you have an absolutely perfect reaction time of zero.
So assuming you have superhuman reaction times, the skills of a professional, and all other perfect conditions... you can certainly avoid hitting the deer - so long as you're driving under 9 mph.
Majority of animal-involved human deaths in the US are deer-vehicle collisions. Going slower can greatly diminish the frequency and severity of those collisions.
Amish buggy crashes combined (including those not even involving motor vehicles) had about a 2.5% fatality rate as opposed to about 1% for deer collisions. But even worse, if you normalize the rate of deaths by US population across 10 years and number of Amish buggy deaths by Ohio Amish population between 2009 and 2019 (best I can do for fair numbers in a rush), you'll find rates of 0.000013 and 0.000202, respectively.
That's more than 10x the fatality rate for the buggies. The Amish buggies are absolutely a larger threat to public safety per capita.
And if you drive slow enough for deer, you should be more than slow enough for buggies.
Ambulances driving the speed limit hit children sometimes. Should we outlaw medical transport? Of course not.
There will always be crashes because not all wrecks can be prevented through policy. So we have to balance the social, economic, environmental, and human cost of how we approach road safety.
If you drive 20mph in the driving lane of a highway with a speed limit of 65 just in case somebody wants to act like it's the 17th century, it's way, way more likely that either you'll be rear-ended or someone passing you is gonna hit someone rise head-on versus simply driving the speed limit and asking the Amish to install a fucking blinker on their thousand-pound black box in the right of way.
Find me a road with a 65 mph speed limit where 20 mph is the speed actually required to not hit a stationary hazard or an animal sprinting into the road.
I don’t believe you can until you can show it to me.
In case you haven’t noticed, when a road has a speed limit of 65 mph, the foliage is trimmed far back from the road. That open space, where nothing can hide to leap in front of the car, is part of the design of a 65 mph road.