Apparently, in London the busses have this device on them that uses GPS to find the local speed limit, and prevents the bus from going faster than that, no matter what.

And now some local governments are testing it over here in the real world. I can't be the only one who thinks this is a terrible and dangerous idea. And not because I like to speed, but because sometimes the best way to escape danger on the road is to SPEED UP.

You probably don't take the bus anyway.

And yes, I hear London has a lot of silly transport things.

uh, can you please give an example of when speeding up would be the SAFEST option?

(and dont mention situations in which have lots of forwarning that can be avoided by just not driving in the first place).

I see that alpha1 never watched the movie Speed.

but if the bus had the governer, it never would have gone above the limit anyway. :p

as in, it had to go above 50 before the bomb became active in the first place.

The dangers involved with speeding buses outweigh the dangers of not speeding up. So they'll try to stop the one that happens the most.

Sounds fine really.

Besides, speeding up almost never helps, if ever. If you can name me 5 things that speeding up helps you with to "escape danger", then I'll agree with you.

and as i said, dont mention the ones where the danger could have been avioded by either conditions being obviously not suitable for driving, or by leaving the area earlier.

Most disaster scenarios that appear fast enough as to not have any obvious warning are not going to be something that one can outrun in a car, and will probably also have poor visability, making speeding even more stupid, as one could easily rear end another car that you could not see until too late, as reaction time would mean you travel even further before you react (due to higher speed, you travel further in the same time), and then there is the issue of the longer stopping distance.

Not get hit by the car behind you because you slam on the brakes, causing a multiple car pileup, for starters.

I've had cars pull over into space I am occupying with my car, and due to conditions, the best out I had was in front of me, which required me to speed up to get into.

Or when your GPS thinks you're on the access road that runs parallel to the highway, then shuts you down to 35mph when everybody else is doing 70...

uhh, if you are slamming on the breaks, you must be trying to avoid running into something, then speeding up again, (which, unless you have a very powerful car, you probably wont be able to get back up to speed before the car behind hits you) would just result in you hitting what you were slamming on the breaks to avoid. Also, if it would cause a pileup, then conditions are probably such that you should be below the stated speed limit to begin with.

if it were required, they would probably require a good quality GPS by would either require very good quality ones that wouldnt have the issue, also, wouldnt everyone be using the same thing (as a thing that is required would be under a license) and everyone would slow down.

We all know how technology is 100% reliable and everything is 100% consistent..

you are a police officer, you wouldnt have one in your car.



(your work car at least)

I have a GPS in my work car.

It just doesn't restrict my speed.

Not if the vehicle you're trying to avoid hitting is lateral to your position and moving into your lane.. If there is space in front of your car, stepping on the gas and going forward is the safer option because you don't have to count on cars behind you being able to slow down to avoid hitting you.

If you really can't see speeding up as a viable option to avoid an accident when appropriate, you are limiting your self as a driver.

I was passing a semi truck with trailer one time and was at the rear of the cab when the truck driver started to move over into my lane. Slowing down would have resulted in me being hit by the trailer. I sped up and avoided an accident.

i know, i was talking about the restrictor.

We should just not let humans do anything anymore or make any decisions because we just mess up. We should let people much smarter than us design systems which keep us all in check.

Id just like to point out that the Nissan GTR has something similar. Theres a speed governor on it that only gets disabled if the GPS detects you're on a race track >_>

So if a bomb is strapped to a bus and the only way to prevent it from going off is to go over the speed limit of say 70 MPH, the passengers are pretty much screwed?

I don't think I've ever seen a bus do 70 anyway.

I have.

I object on the usual leave-me-the-****-alone-government grounds as well.

so, you are saying that if the government no longer owned the roads then there would be no accidents. /sarcasm (who was it that started that crazy thread anyway?)

I didn't say or imply that in any way.

How do you sleep with all that straw stuffed up your ***?

That's a really dumb idea and I can't believe this is for real. There's so many reasons that is a bad idea.

such as?

I think this is a bad idea for cars, I can think of several situations where speeding up is an appropriate response (typically in low-speed limit areas).

For a bus, however, I can see it as acceptable. The acceleration of a bus is going to be so low that by the time the bus could accelerate to a speed higher than the posted limit, the danger has already passed (or impacted).

I'm fine with it buses having it, that kind of makes sense. Buses can't accelerate fast enough to do any good anyway. A governor limits top speed, not acceleration.

For cars it's stupid. Speed is dangerous in certain cases, but it's not the main reason for accidents.

I haven't read this whole thing, so forgive me if this has already been resolved. I can think of probably 6 or 7 times when I've avoided being in car accidents by speeding up (usually to avoid the yahoo who tried to change lanes directly into my car).

Not to mention, often times when say merging onto a freeway, you need to accelerate to get into the gap in traffic. What happens when you punch the gas to speed up and suddenly your car doesn't do anything and you broadside the traffic already on the freeway cause you expected your car to do what you told it to.

Bottom line, taking the power away from a cognitive, operator and giving it to an automated, blind system is NOT a good idea.

[edit: ok, now I've read the whole thing, and basically the situation that Avenger described with the semi accounts for about 90% of my examples. If the semi's doing 65 and you're doing 70 and you're towards the front of it when it starts to move over, your best bet is to accelerate to get in front (not to mention that doing so will put you into direct line of sight with the semi driver. On the other hand if you brake, you are staying out of view of the semi driver, and potentially putting yourself at risk to be rear ended by another driver behind you. And you'll still probably not be able to brake fast enough to avoid getting hit by the trailer anyway.]

[edit2: in fact, just in general, braking is FAR MORE DANGEROUS than accelerating, under any condition. You are waaaay more likely to lose control of your vehicle braking than you are accelerating. And you can see what's in front of you easier than what's behind you.]

I was once faced with a decision to either speed up or slow down in a traffic situation, I chose to slow down. The result was a totalled honda on my back bumper, ambulance ride, and 5 figure medical bills.

Forever paranoid about slowing down.

Anyway, I agree with the above about taking power out of the hands of the driver being a bad idea. I think it would be more productive to simply track the speed, so the driver can be "talked to" if he does over the speed limit.

What about passing on a two-lane highway?

Not to mention, if you're driving a bus filled with refugees in a low-speed area, you may need to accelerate to outrun such hazards as fast headcrab zombies!

...

what?

I'm waiting for the day that our cars have printers in the dash that just print out tickets for us when we speed...

As for the GPS thing, they do that on emergency vehicles here. Usually they beep at you as a warning, and then if it beeps more than once you get warning points. Which is basically like being written up.

Like it's possible for a bus in London to reach the speed limit anyway.

Speed limiters are a bad idea, simple as that. I don't condone driving excessively fast, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to break the speed limit in the name of safety.

Our camera systems automatically turn on at a certain speed...

Let's not forget that this is for BUSES, and BUSES only. *sighs*

You're "speeding up is better" idea just can't apply to a bus. It speeds up so slowly that I can jump out of the window and RUN to safety, and the bus will still be in the danger zone.

I have gotten away from what would have been certain death by speeding up -turning right on the red light (legal btw) and the light suddenly turning green, had a truck almost nail my window.

But in that situation, a bus would have never made it. lol

Would you like some sea shells with that?

There are so many things wrong with the idea of putting it into general use on cars.

The immense amount of work required to make sure every single road was appropriate speeded, not to mention the most important issue:

Who's going to pay for this? Us? What about older cars? Are they excempt?

You're all completely missing the point by referencing Speed.

Thread over.