The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
Let's decrease the speed limit to 55mph (and other bad ideas)
Posts
What the fuck is all the angst about.
If you drive an hour to work at 75, and then you have to scale back to 65 it adds like eight or nine minutes.
Abloo bloo bloo.
But hey, go 90 mph because it's just soooo important to get places that much quicker.
Driving in the Atlantic Provinces kind of freaked me out.
The roads aren't crowned.
It was raining. I felt unsafe.
I still laugh at the people who go 100km/h in an 80km/h zone, zooming past us, only for us to meet them again at the next set of traffic lights.
What do you call disco then?
I think that if a fuel consumption meter was added to the required automobile equipment list, you would see people slow down. It's not really an expensive piece of equipment to add, and to the best of my knowledge any car sold since about the 90s has the same damn computer interface to poll to find out what's being squirted into the cylinders.
Of course, I say that, and I still haven't put a gauge into my car like I've been meaning to do since I got it in 2003. Maybe I think they're overpriced or something.
Bonus points if there's actually a dial to set the price you just bought gas at, so you can see your consumption in $/mile driven or something.
Does the movie Flash Dancer count as disco?
Except for the fact that life rafts do not come with massive social costs for everyone on board.
Analogy fails.
I'm a little confused about the massive social cost of spending an extra 18 minutes in a car.
Less time with your family.
XBL: DoctorTwoCents242
Again, this isn't a panacea, it's an improvement.
Yeah.
Less time reading and watching sunsets and playing with puppies too.
18 minutes of less time.
An interesting position to take on interstate highway speed limits, given the original purpose of the interstate system.
Uhm... in the manufacturing industry, the supply side of the equation takes years if not decades to adjust to permanent demand spikes. It's not like these companies will suddenly start producing millions of new small cars to meet the demand. Rather, they'll have to take new loans, make new investments such as buying new equipment and opening new plants, and then hire new personnel and train those. This shit doesn't happen overnight.
But let's suppose that in the long run the supply shifted up and finally met demand again, and we're living in a future where small cars are available for cheap. You know what the problem is with that scenario?
Because small cars are cheap, now more people can afford them, which means more cars and less public transportation. Pollution is the same because instead of X million expensive big cars you now have X * Y million cheap small cars. Except now the traffic is moving slower. You haven't solved the problem. You have just made it worse.
The first interstate highways were built here because Eisenhower, reflecting on his experience in WWII, thought we needed a network that could move military troops and equipment rapidly around the country.
I just think it is ironic, because the road exists for a social purpose, yet you are hostile to regulating it for a social purpose.
Yes, massive.
You're having trouble seeing it because you're thinking "oh, it's just a few minutes they lose." Whereas it's not just time you lose. It's money. Think about the opportunity cost. If you lose 30 minutes because of this stupid idea, opportunity cost-wise that's 30 minutes you could have spent making money. From this perspective people are not actually saving any money overall. In fact, I suspect that for the vast majority of people who would be affected, it would be a huge loss. A software engineer who makes 40 bucks an hour: oh look, it's costing them 20 bucks per day, 600 bucks per month. Investment banker at 200 bucks an hour? 100 bucks per day, 3000 a month. Doctor or lawyer? In that case you're truly fucked, but who cares because you're rich as hell anyway, right? :x
Add all of that across the spectrum and you end up with "massive" social costs. Furthermore, it's completely unfair, because not only does it punish people the further they live from their work, it also punishes them more the more money they make.
And how much pollution would it save you? Probably not much, because the amount of additional gas mileage people would get from driving at 55 instead of 65 is extremely small.
I don't see any massive social cost adding 18 minutes to an hour long commute.
Did society bust apart in the 70s due to lowering the speed limit?
On the other hand, high gas prices accompanied by higher prices on commodities? That probably deprives a few hundred thousand people of jobs every month.
What's the social cost of involuntary unemployment in a country with a negative rate of savings? Of inflation that erodes wages?
That's besides the point. When trying to calculate the total social cost of a public policy, you calculate its opportunity cost for each affected individual, and add it all up. They don't actually have to be "losing" the money in the literal sense. They're losing it in the economic sense.
Then again this is all inaccurate because for most people, their leisure is far, far more valuable than the amount of money they would make during that time. So it's possible that I am grossly underestimating the social costs here.
I mean, otherwise, my opportunity cost for that commute is hundreds of millions of dollars per day, because I could be winning the lottery with that time.
You argued there was a monetary opportunity cost. If you don't have the option of making money with a certain amount of time, then you aren't losing a certain amount of money.
If you want to measure the opportunity cost of someone's leisure time, you don't look at how much they are paid per hour. In any case, you stated specifically that people couldn't afford to lose the money out of their budgets - that kind of statement has no place in the kind of macro value-of-leisure calculation you are claiming to be making.
You aren't actually estimating anything, just making hyperbolic statements.
Obviously not an end all solution, but a short-term fix to curb the demand with the added benefits of safety.
Of course you can.
The opportunity cost of something is the next best thing you could have done with the resource used. There are plenty of things you can do with 30 more minutes per day. You can work overtime(I gave this example because only this has a monetary value attached to it; whether or not you can actually work is irrelevant for what I'm demonstrating). You can spend time with your family. You can take the time to cook yourself dinner instead of ordering. You can go to the gym and workout, improving your health and fitness. Whatever is most valuable for you will be the opportunity cost of spending those extra 30 minutes on the road.
I mean seriously, "let's take away people's free time for a minor benefit to the environment" is really an asinine suggestion. It is estimated that 75% of all pollution from cars is caused by 15+ year old cars that cover only 25% of total miles driven. They won't be affected very much. For the rest, the benefit of a few more MPG won't make much difference. This is why ELM is right when he says this won't address the actual problem. Yes, it may help a little, but the costs are too much, not "end of the world" too much (thanks for the strawman btw Speaker), but still too much for most people.
But dude, you should obviously move closer to the city! What is this sense of entitlement you have for living so far away?!?
:roll eyes:
Like I said, it's very short-sighted and it punishes a lot of people unfairly.
Lowering one state's speed limits (even if that state is California) isn't going to make much of a difference.
People need to stop saying that like it's some kind of iron fact.