I too hate videos and didn't watxh this one yet, but the slides seemed clear even without the talk:
- Tazer/Axon makes some kind of police oriented hw/sw platform thats deployed on police bodies and cars
- which uses BLE
- Tazer/Axon has their own BLE MAC address prefix, which is published by the FCC
- The less significant bytes of BLE MAC address are a unique id for the hardware, which usually maps 1:1 with 1 officer or 1 car
- So by listening to or probing some BLE crap you can infer cops are present close to where that MAC address prefix is, and by recording over time and area figure out movement patterns even to the level of individual hardware.
Maybe I'm missing something but it does seem like a nice hack if a little overmarkted: It is technically unremarkable but clever and practical.
When I saw the headline I assumed it'd be about the P25 unencrypted metadata leakage issue (specifically Unit Link ID) described in https://www.mattblaze.org/papers/p25sec.pdf - that indeed carries a lot further than BLE
In the UK we cant listen into radio communications, we can still identify it using the same techniques that is used to work out encrypted internet communication, namely the traffic patterns of the radio devices.
In more than 100 countries, Tetra (Trans European Trunked Radio) is used.
Ooohh the software[0] runs on Ubuntu and optionally uses a GPS receiver... I happen to have a computer with such a receiver - a Panasonic ToughBook CF-31, which happens to have been formerly used by local LE (they all have them mounted in their cars). Would be pretty hilarious to use one of their old laptops to "snoop unto them as they snoop unto us", right? hahah ;)
How so? It's a really obvious approach these days. Doing it this way provides a web-accessible front-end and the actual hardware may be something compact like a tablet, phone, headless SBC, etc. (whatever can provide BT and promisc. wifi basically)
The web offers a fairly universal cross-platform, network-accessible GUI that can be developed with really high-level languages which happen to offer tooling that includes an extremely-empowering degree of readily-available utility libraries. What other language or ecosystem is as easy and broadly-accessible?
Anecdata, but I regularly see people exceed the speed limit by 30mph in Houston without much intervention by police.
The city has (imo) a psychotic driving culture, but is still roughly middle-of-the-road in us news and world report's ranking of most dangerous US cities to drive in.
Large speed deltas are (conjecture I haven't bothered to research) probably unsafe under any conditions. Exceeding safe speeds for the conditions is obviously dangerous, but the size and design of the road and it's lanes are some of those conditions.
I don't particularly care which, but in order to minimize speed deltas I do think it should be incumbent on the state to either set low speed limits and fastidiously police them or else set speed limits that are close to the natural speeds a given road supports to cut down the gap between people who drive the road as it feels and those who drive the signage.
Not Just Bikes has a great set of videos on Youtube about how road design and driver psychology help to tame speeds much more than simple road signs.
By now the evidence is clear: people will drive at the speeds they feel comfortable at given their environment (sight lines, spaciousness, density, etc.). Just putting a sign on the side of a wide and spacious road is not going to do much to affect driving speeds.
The most interesting one to me was how tree-lined streets encourage slower driving without any speed limit signs, because it feels more like a tunnel and less like an open road.
> tree-lined streets encourage slower driving without any speed limit signs
Somewhere near me (south UK) has a dual carriageway that approaches a roundabout. There is a fence on the side of the road as you approach the roundabout, so that you cannot see what traffic on the adjacent road is doing, forcing you to slow down on the approach, rather than maintaining a higher speed when it appears you might get away with it. Seems to work quite well.
I used to get tickets for speeding. These days I let Autopilot set the speed and just chill. I'm not as concerned with passing or being passed when I've delegated the accelerator, and the trip time difference is negligible.
Hills are the exact reason to use the speed control. It drives me crazy that drivers don’t know how and when to engage it, go 50 up hills and 85 down the other side.
Unexpectedly changing speeds seems riskier to me. I’d much rather be near somebody who was happily cruising along at 10-15 over, than somebody who just see a cop and might decide to switch lanes or slow down erratically in an attempt to hide.
I’ll never understand how people can blame speed radars for this, and not the people doing the speeding. Don’t speed and you won’t need to unexpectedly change speed.
Much like Doctors having a rather different definition of 'binge drinking' or 'heavy drinking' than most of the public, general (dis)agreement may not mean terribly much in the end.
Quite the opposite. Doctors can think what ever they want until some kind of social behavior in generally accepted by the society. Any amount of alcohol is bad and likewise any travel is dangerous. It's only about acceptable degree.
There is a lightly trafficked, mostly straight, 2 lane highway between where I live and the closest city large enough to need 5 digits on its population signs. The speed limit is 65. I drive 75 on it. Most people drive 85. In fair weather, with the right vehicle, 95 would be safe for most of it. A few years ago, the limit was 55, and at that time, a sheriffs deputy told me they don’t bother anybody going under 70.
I don’t know what you really mean by acceptable, but there are plenty of roads with a 65 mph speed limit where 80 miles an hour is perfectly safe, and there are of course plenty of roads with a 65 mph speed limit where 70 mph is and unsafely fast. And there are road conditions in all of those roads where 45 mph would be on unsafe. It is difficult to make blanket statements about what a safe speed is knowing nothing other than the posted speed limit.
To put the same point in a different context, remember that it wasn’t really that long ago that there was a national 55 mph speed limit, and many of the same interstates that used to have a 55 mph speed limit now have an 80 mph speed limit.
Depends on what state you’re in. In Montana, Texas, Florida, you can do 85 in a 65 and a cop won’t blink an eye. In some cases if you’re the one doing 65 you are a hazard and an unsafe driver.
IMO roads with 80 MPH speed limits are much safer. Even the crazy folks don’t go much over, so you don’t get a huge delta in speed, which is a lot more dangerous than any absolute number.
For sure it is. Have you never been outside your city?
There's stretches of flat, straight-ish interstate in the US that continue for dozens of miles with near-perfect visibility. Sometimes, there's no traffic. Go 120 for all I care, just slow down when you're near something.
Seriously. Why can't people in NA follow this basic, simple protocol? It makes driving so much easier in every way. Need to slow down because your turn is coming? No problem, move over to the right. Want to actually get somewhere sometime today? Pass and then return to the lane you were in. It's so easy! Imagine actually having protocols around traffic flow, and following them! Just wait until you hear about roundabouts, which allow traffic to continue moving (rather than waiting at a red light for minutes on end when there's no one else there!)
I knew someone would respond to the "move over to the right". Yes, it doesn't apply to every single situation. In general, though, particularly for highway driving, it's a system that works well.
> In general, though, particularly for highway driving, it's a system that works well.
That depends on the highway. If it's a limited access motorway, like the interstates, Autobahn, or M-class then sure. Perhaps not coincidentally, that is where the right lane rule you propose is mandated.
Otherwise, it fails often. Reality is messy.
If you truly want to make the roads safer, follow the posted speed limits. (Energy follows the square of the speed.) Also, always ensure you leave enough room to stop (the "2 second rule").
I've driven many tens of thousands of kilometers throughout close to 20 countries in Europe, and multiple hundred thousand kilometers here in Canada, and have yet to find a multi-lane highway where "keep right except to pass" doesn't make total sense and work well. As traffic gets congested everyone naturally relaxes adherence to that policy since it's not realistic to uphold in all conditions. I mean, if you have citations that support the argument that it "fails often" I'm all ears, but my lived experience with this highway protocol has been universally positive.
I observed that it especially works best in concert with a rule that people entering/merging from the right have the right-of-way, since this reduces uncertainty around "who will go?" that I often witness here in NA (where "keep right to except to pass" is merely a suggestion, or not enforced even if enshrined in law).
Regarding speed limit, I'm not arguing against speed limits or adhering to them, and indeed the more consistent the speed of traffic, the safer it is. On that note, my observation is that simply adhering to the speed limit (and attempting to stay at that speed) means regularly passing vehicles -- that is, in most cases, people are indeed following speed limits and a "keep right except to pass" policy correlates well with maintaining consistent speed and flow of traffic. People who want to drive slower can stick to the right lane without any hassle or problem (it's accepted and normal for them to drive slow there), and those who are driving faster can safely pass and then return to that right lane. If there are deep flaws in this process, I'm absolutely not seeing them and have not observed them.
(yes, of course, the "two-second" rule makes sense and is a minimum IMO - I imagine if more people followed this, crashes would be massively reduced)
Because there's a large segment of America that sees themselves as the arbiter of laws and purposefully sit in the left lane to slow down people they (incorrectly) see as law breakers.
I almost want to become a cop just so I can write tickets for this.
In the northeast US at least, highways have 2 lanes, are narrow, congested, have short on-ramps and little/no merging area. So it is common practice to travel mostly in the left lane and leave the right lane free for people entering the highway, common etiquette to travel at 20-30mph over the speed limit and move over for faster vehicles.
Speeding isn't great but speed tickets and traps clearly are doing nothing to stop speeding.
There's really only one solution that works to prevent speeding: road design. Make roads less straight, less big. Add more obstacles and flow interrupts.
Private cars are obsolete anyway. Replace more lanes with bus lanes and be done with the problem altogether. It's frankly insane that we allow people to operate a private car with nothing more than a license they got at 16 years old and never tested again for for the 70+ years after they'll be driving.
Private cars aren't obsolete (how could they be?), and banning them is a freedom of movement issue. Not everyone lives in New York City. Not to mention the joy of driving should be taken away
More space, time, and energy efficient transportation options have existed for nearly 200 years. These options move more people further more quickly and safely than private cars. Furthermore, these options are more environmentally friendly, and improving them as technology advances can be done through retrofitting. My friend does retrofitting of classic cars with electric drive, it's prohibitively expensive for mass adoption.
These options being cable cars and trains. Modern electric busses are pretty good too.
It seems quite obvious to me the private car is obsolete. What advantage is there considering that mass adoption of the private vehicle leads to more death, more environmental harm, and less people getting to less places, slower, and more pissed off because they had to stay focused the entire drive?
Not everyone hates driving, and public transportation only works better in high density areas. Retrofitting cars with electric motors isn't better for the environment, it's just destroying pieces of history. (If you're going to retrofit, use alternative combustible fuels).
Obsolete doesn't mean, "I don't like it so it should be gone".
> public transportation only works better in high density areas
But... this simply isn't true. Group transportation is the only viable way across the least dense places on earth: oceans. You almost always take a plane with hundreds of other people on it. Not to mention the fact that high speed rail is vastly superior way to get across a country than a car. Taiwan has several massive freeways running the length of the west side of the nation. The drive time north to south is between 6-10 hours depending on traffic. In the high speed rail, it is 2 hours, every time, to the minute. It moves 130,000 people per day, far, far more than the capacity of the freeways.
Exactly, retrofitting cars is not economical. Right now everyone drives combustion vehicles, those will all essentially need to be thrown away or recycled as we switch to electric. Think of all that waste. Meanwhile a diesel train needs the engine, or whole engine car at worst, swapped, and a third rail installed or overhead power installed. Every other aspect of the thing can remain the same: the cars, the tracks, the stations, everything. For a retrofit of an entire city's train transit system, you have maybe 20 or 30 train engine cars in the garbage or to be recycled, maybe some supporting diesel fuel infrastructure (the piping for which can be re-used for power transmission if necessary), that's it. Meanwhile millions of cars are about to be trashed or need to be recycled. You can't even reuse their tires.
I don't like cars, you're right, mostly because they keep killing people, but I'm really not trying to be annoying here, I literally see no advantage. Even in the USA, one of the more rural-focused countries on earth, you have a deep history of using public transit to access the remote regions of the country, that you simply stopped using over the last hundred years. I have had the delight of visiting some of these old train lines and encountered stations sprinkled all throughout places that are now accessible only by car - and some of these small towns even had street or cable cars for local transportation connections! You had it, you just got rid of it. And nowadays you can have even better - combine trains and streetcars with public electric bicycle infrastructure (take your pick of tens if not hundreds of cities with functioning examples) and you have a wonderful modern transportation system that serves the needs of people rural or otherwise, without poisoning the environment and without getting people killed every day.
Apart from the occasional overtaking which you might need the extra speed, the odds you get a ticket from a hidden camera are very low if you just respect the speed limits. Or am I missing some point?
I used to think this before I moved to the Eastern seabord of the US. Many freeways have the speed limits randomly oscillate to values ranging from 50 to 75 with the flow of traffic pretending the speed limit is always 65. There are definitely speed traps set up in many unexpected 55 zones which I only know to slow down at from familiarity.
But this doesn't invalidate the OP's point... regardless of how reasonable you believe a change in speed limit to be, you're still obligated to follow it, and if you don't then you might get a ticket. And it's not like these changes are unannounced; there is a sign for every time it changes. Surely if you're going to listen to some "speed trap detecting" contraption, you could also look at the signs that announce the change in speed limit? Or better yet, whatever app you're using to detect speed cameras should give you an equivalent ping every time it detects a change in speed limit...
The argument is not that the law isn’t technically followable. The argument is that the law is not based on safety and is capricious and designed to catch and fine people, which could justify ways of avoiding getting caught.
> the odds you get a ticket from a hidden camera are very low if you just respect the speed limits
And the comment I was responding to was about how speed limits are unreasonable. So I maintain that the comment did not refute OP's point. The reasonableness of the speed limits is irrelevant to whether or not you get fewer tickets when you drive below the posted speed limit.
This is the driving equivalent of "just follow instructions"; you're ignoring that they are intentionally making the speed limits difficult to respect in order so that they can ticket you. Telling people not to get tricked is just victim blaming.
Just because the system works in a certain way doesn't mean it's working correctly.
I could get a ticket for jaywalking a red light even though it's 4am, dead silent and can't see a car for a mile. "The law is the law", if some traffic cop came from around the corner he could ticket me. Now is that right? I think it isn't. Now what are my options? Spend an inordinate amount of time trying to change the way society works or figure out ways to go about my life without having to obey some over-bearing public official's rules.
In the southwest, we have what's referred to as one-light towns. Maybe this translates to other parts of the world as well, but essentially a town so small that they only need one stop light to regulate traffic. These are the definition of a sleepy town. As a specific example I'm well traveled is a stretch of state highway in Texas between Ft Worth and Amarillo called Hwy 287. As you get away from Ft Worth, and even west of Wichita Falls, the speeds are 75mph in places. This highway is dotted with these one-light towns. Just before each town, the speed limit slows to 35mph. It's easy to say it's just for revenue purposes, but as a sibling comment points out, the noise is the primary issue. Sure, safety for those that might dare to cross the street as a pedestrian is just a side benefit. However, the opportunity to pad the county coffers near these speed limit changes is too great to not be heavily speed trapped
Which is why some of these towns have signs saying “No Engine Braking” because people in the cars/trucks pay no mind what so ever to the people living in the podunk town, or worse get off on the fact they are disturbing everyone
Many speed limits are set lower than they need to be. On many roads, including freeways, the average speed of traffic is higher than the speed limit. Driving the speed limit on these freeways is dangerous.
Additionally, many speedometers read slightly higher than the actual speed. Driving the exact speed limit on many roads as shown by your speedometer means you are actually driving quite slow.
Repecting the speed limit as a strict rule is dangerous.
> Many speed limits are set lower than they need to be.
...the only correct response to which is to contact the state government and complain while continuing to respect the law. Breaking the law while remaining silent is diametrically opposed to the democratic system that the US, at least, aspires to.
> need to be
...oh, and vehicle inefficiency increases superlinearly with speed[1]. Until the majority of the vehicles on the road are electric, lower speed limits help fight climate change. Speed limits don't "need to be" anything, and picking lower limits when there's a good reason is good.
> On many roads, including freeways, the average speed of traffic is higher than the speed limit.
Because drivers follow this flawed line of thought en masse - which doesn't excuse it.
> Driving the speed limit on these freeways is dangerous.
I guess we need more enforcement, then. Plus, I've never encountered a dangerous situation while driving in the right lane. I suspect that there's an implicit "...in the left lane" on your claim.
> Driving the exact speed limit on many roads as shown by your speedometer means you are actually driving quite slow.
Citation needed for the claim that you're "driving quite slow". I've never seen a speedometer that was off by more than 4 MPH (measured as the difference between that and GPS), and a difference of 4 MPH when you're going 55 is not "quite slow".
> Repecting the speed limit as a strict rule is dangerous.
It's called a "limit" for a reason, and the only reason it's non-trivially dangerous is because of other drivers significantly breaking the speed limit, too.
This has inspired me to contact my local state's transportation department and request that they step up enforcement of speed limits.
Actually not accepting the given speed limit is a form of voting against said speed limit (especially when done en masse). Yes, it is not formal, but it is voting nonetheless. If the system was really democratic and not tyrannical then it would take it into account and would not resort to more control and punishment.
I guess I’ve always viewed it from the standpoint of, at what speed are crashes rarer and most survivable (do those even coincide?) I think a lot of people really overestimate the difference highway speed makes in their overall transit time. If everyone going 55 led to far fewer fatalities, better fuel economy, and less delays because of accidents, I’d imagine we’d do it already.
that is, btw, the history of why we have a 55 speed limit. In 1973 there was a gas crisis, so in 1974 President Nixon drafted the National Maximum Speed Limit (NMSL), ostensibly to conserve gasoline.
> I guess I’ve always viewed it from the standpoint of, at what speed are crashes rarer and most survivable
They're most rare at 0 mph. In fact, they're so rare to be impossible.
Once you've accepted non-zero speeds (including walking), you've also accepted some level of risk. We're just arguing about what level of risk is acceptable.
The users of the roads -- drivers -- are the ones who should decide what the speed limits are. The current system is a type of tyranny because the users are subject to rules without input nor representation.
People seem to have a distorted view on what freedom means.
If the majority of users say the speed limit is 80mph, then that is the just speed limit. Localities which decide -- for what ever reason -- that they know better have the seeds of tyranny inside them. History is filled with people who "knew better" for the populace.
We have the technology to measure in realtime what the mass consensus for things like speed limits are. This type of voting is implicit, automated, and accurately captures the will of the people without friction. Right now, this technology has been hijacked by creepy advertising vermin to sell us things we don't need. I think that a time is coming soon when it is reclaimed and put to proper use.
> The users of the roads -- drivers -- are the ones who should decide what the speed limits are.
Correct, and there's a way to do that: by contacting your local transportation department and/or representatives.
> The current system is a type of tyranny because the users are subject to rules without input nor representation.
I don't know where you live, but in the US we have these things called "elections" where you can vote for who you want and the policies that they implement, and after the election they'll usually even listen to their constituents if they're contact on large enough scales. There's no tyranny.
> If the majority of users say the speed limit is 80mph, then that is the just speed limit.
You're intentionally conflating terms. The "speed limit" by definition is something that the state sets - it cannot be set by drivers.
> Localities which decide -- for what ever reason -- that they know better have the seeds of tyranny inside them.
This is absolutely crazy. One of the primary functions of a democratic government is to determine and then implement consensus, such as how fast cars should travel on roads. The speed limits around my area literally reflect my preferences. Taking the public's desire and implementing it is the exact opposite of tyranny.
Maybe you should come to the US, where we actually have elections and you can email your governor if you don't like the speed limit - it sounds like you live in a non-democratic country. In the meantime, you've inspired me to contact my governor and ask them to step up speed limit enforcement.
You are incorrect. "Voting", by definition, involves a formal set of rules designed to best measure the preferences of voters. "Not accepting the speed limit" is illegal, dangerous, kills the environment, and does not have any sort of formal rules or any sort of mechanism for measuring consensus. It's extremely undemocratic.
> ...the only correct response to which is to contact the state government and complain while continuing to respect the law. Breaking the law while remaining silent is diametrically opposed to the democratic system that the US, at least, aspires to.
You've presented a false dichotomy here. Advocating for a change of the law while respecting the law, and breaking the law silently are not the only option.
You can also break the law while advocating for its change. This is called civil disobedience and is a very American thing, going back to at least Thoreau.
If you've never encountered a dangerous situation in the right lane, you don't drive very often or very far or both.
Electric vehicles are not actually better than gas for continuous use, they're better in the city when the traffic is stop and go.
Losing minutes (and hours) of your life for a minor improvement on the climate seems odd. Spending that energy on reducing corporate offenders (like shipping with bunker oil) would be more effective in achieving closer the maximum 20% reduction. Lobbying for better public transportation is better than slowing everyone down. (though it's unfortunate how often those lobbying want to replace instead of augment cars.)
If the majority of drivers feel the limits are too low, and the limits stay low, can you argue democracy is working? It's more likely you favor the status quo and know that contacting a politician is rather unlikely to get it changed.
Electric cars are more efficient in general, the relative efficiency is what I am comparing. Keep in mind, that the best path is to drive your current car until it's irreparable before buying any new car electric or not.
Have you actually contacted a state government and seen a response that aligned with what you consider to be moral? I believe this may be a fairy tale that politicians tell their children, corporations tell their politicians, and the rest of us tell ourselves to feel like we matter.
My understanding of basic physics tells me it's good for my health to match the flow of traffic, regardless of the signage. I haven't found that government makes similar decisions surrounding my health, or yours.
Ymmv.
> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law.
Of course. There is such a thing as a minimum speed for efficient traffic flow. Nothing's more frustrating than being forced to drive slowly. It actually causes road rage.
What about being forced to drive? Every time I find myself in a car in the USA I consider it a failure of local government to provide an actual good means for me to get where I'm going. In other countries I can go somewhere while relaxing and reading a book.
The speed limit conversation seems a distraction. Why drive at all? It's annoying.
I hate dealing with the other humans on the road and the stupid things they do. I hate the constant uncertainty, not being able to assume anything because people don't even signal turns properly. I hate the roads, poorly maintained, full of speed bumps, full of potholes, full of people walking around without a care in the world. I hate having to maintain my car.
I hate being forced to drive. I only do it because I hate other forms of transport even more.
> the only correct response to which is to contact the state government and complain
I have done this. It resulted in the gov asking me to prove it. I ran a study and responded that something like 80% of drivers (I don't have numbers with me any more) go above the posted 25 mph speed limit.
The results? Nothing. The gov said thanks for the data and ignored it.
To this day, that stretch of road continues to see daily speeding tickets given. It is not a speed limit for safety, but for revenue generation.
> ...the only correct response to which is to contact the state government and complain while continuing to respect the law. Breaking the law while remaining silent is diametrically opposed to the democratic system
No, this would take more hours than there are in a decade.
Majority of speed limits are in residential areas set up by the neighbour who complains, as the poster above just proudly did [1]. So the speed starts at 50kph set up by experts when the suburb is created, and 20 years later a random subset of streets is down to 20kph, because somebody somewhere lived there and was bored enough with their life to pester the city hall.
And while that may sound cynical and hostile, it is literally what happened in my last 2 neighbourhoods. There was no expertise, no statistics, no evaluation. Just complaints and no political will to ever refuse or re-examine.
On hwys in my area, experts and studies have repeatedly over years suggested increases are feasible. But it keeps getting delayed. Here's the reality - those who want to go faster will silently go faster. Those who want to go slower will very loudly insist that everybody goes slower. And bureaucratd will be bureaucrats and take the low risk route.
Same thing happened where I live. In my case these people didn't just lower the speed limits, they littered the streets with speed bumps and "raised pedestrian crossings" which are just speed bumps with pedestrian crossings on top.
Oh boo to the fake holier than thou virtue signalling :->
We will never have meaningful discussion if we pretend that the only safe speed is 0kph and we all need to stay home and anybody driving is a dangerous maniac. Because if you take the categorical stance that e.g. 40kph is reasonable and all people who want to do 50kph are dangerous drivers who must be stopped, be aware that somebody else thinks 30kph is reasonable and you are a ridiculously dangerous stunt driver for suggesting 40.
It's the old "everybody who drivers slower than me is a moron, everybody who drives faster is a maniac". Have the self awareness that your preferred speed is not the only way to be.
There are many dangerous driving aspects other than going 105kph on a 6 lane straight modern hwy.
Oh please. I don't even drive. Ever. And a big part of that is not dealing with race driver wannabes.
I absolutely think 50 kph is a bit high for small inner city streets. There could be children, animals, old people. Shit happens. Driving slowly lowers the risk. Also, fuck car sound. I hate it. I hate pointless driving, which happens to be most of it anyway.
Based on your handle, I'd say you are from Serbia or Hrvatska. Or something like that. It's been almost 20 years since my last visit. Here in Bulgaria there is a massive contingent of extremely dangerous fucks with 20+ year old cars. The type with "blood type audi" and such. Fuck these people. They shouldn't be breathing, let alone driving and breeding
Yeah sure. We should all be forced to drive at 10 km/h at all times because some dumbass might randomly jaywalk instead of staying on the sidewalk where he belongs. We should all be subjected to speed bumps every 50 meters until the end of time just because some morons with motorcycles raced down some street once and the people didn't like it. Some person stepped foot on the road? Gotta bring an entire queue of vehicles at 40-60 km/h to 0 km/h to accomodate the one person who couldn't wait a few seconds for cars to pass.
In many cases those experts are quite dumb and speed limits are arbitrary. You can see it most clearly in Europe where different countries have set different speed limits for similar road conditions. For example in one country the speed limit in highway tunnels is 80 km/h, but in others 90 km/h while the width of the road is similar, or even mostly wider where the limit is lower. The same kind of highway can have 30 km/h limit difference over countries. Some countries recognize higher variance of speeds in the cities than 30 or 50 km/h others don't.
In France, some *départements* adopted the 80km/h limitation while some other kept the 90km/h one, this has to deal with a compromise between safety, co2 emissions and current road behavior and population requirements.
The decision to transition from 90 to 80 has been backed by some test which tended to show a reduction of mortality by 12%.
Initially, most of the places where 90km/h is kept are huge countryside regions in which the traffic is low and the population has to drive actually quite some time in order to reach any city.
The difference may seem insignificant in terms of travel time, but it felt like it was a huge topic back in 2018-2019 where the new limitations appeared.
Now, more and more départements are asking for derogations to fall back to the 90km/h limitation, the main reason for this being 58% of the population in france doesn't follow the 80km/h limitation and doesn't consider 90 more dangerous than 80 (no test implied this time, 58% of france population is "optimistic").
So maybe for each country, before experts gave roads their current speed limitations, the way the population drove was taken into account by those experts or was taken into account *in place* of experts analysis, in order for the limitations to be a negotiation/compromise between current habits and experts analysis, in the best cases, and only an affirmation of the population *sentiment* in the worst cases.
Some départements opted for another solution by putting some 70km/h limitation on dangerous sections of a road mainly limited to 90. The problem is that often, when I drive at 70km/h in these sections, some deadly stupid person is stuck full speed right behind me, nearly kissing the back of my car, flashing me with a stroboscopic lights-on lights-off motion because they do probably think that 90 is not less safe than 70 (ability to judge if a situation is safe : eternally damaged).
The problem is not the road experts analysis in EU, but the political decision to apply or not the analysis, and the population refus to follow the limitations.
We have entire highway segments that have variable speed limits that change with traffic density and weather conditions. The speed limit signs are digital and update whenever a change is necessary.
Probably useful to also have access to their tests + test data as well. We've probably all heard stories about corruption between the manufacturers of speed cameras and various public utilities.
The qualified experts aren't the same people who set the limits. It's very common for a low speed limit to be "backed" by a professional report recommending a significantly higher limit.
I think you are (missing the point). Often speed traps are about enforcing typically unenforceable regulations in bulk to reduce the effort. Among other problems. Also this advice doesn’t help if you do want to drive past the limit.
No, I agree with you. Especially since aside from the driver's safety, a lot of times, speed limits aren't about the safety of those in the car but to reduce the amount of noise due to tires, engines, breaking, etc... for those living nearby as well as pedestrians, cyclists, buses, animals, etc...
I'm not familiar with noise as a speed consideration by my State DOT. Do you have a reference to the noise consideration for speed limits in the law/rule for your locale?
Wow, noise measurements seem prone to manipulation. I am familiar with a State that measures actual travel speeds, throws out lows and highs, takes some %, and that is the speed limit ( <= max by law ).
After all the $300 radar and laser detectors that don't work quick enough, Waze has been the most effective solution for this. Nothing beats crowdsourced callouts.
Am I doing something wrong? The downloaded video mp4 seems highly broken. I see two side-by-side copies of the content within the frame, with artifacts that make it impossible to read anything.
It's definitely a playback issue. VLC is rendering it incorrectly while Firefox is handling the same file just fine (albeit with the expected low quality for the file size).
Your comment is an interesting reflection to me of the expectations people have for cheap or free software. You were willing to invest your time and schedule into seeing this talk live, which for many people is a much larger investment than $10. My default assumption of folks on this board is that they're well-off tech workers, which would make it seem even starker in comparison to $10.
My comment isn't anything about you personally, and I've had similar reactions to even cheaper software. But it still find it striking when I think about it more.
I like the feeling of hanging out with likeminded people or friends and showing each other the cool stuff we're working on. Asking for (or receiving!) even nominal amounts of money makes it a completely different kind of interaction and puts me in a completely different mindstate.
In my experience, doing the math on monetary value of time spent on random activities or interactions just makes everybody sad and doesn't lead to better decisionmaking.
Except that the various pieces aren't actually free,
so it relies on people being rich enough, or things being cheap enough, to not worry about the costs, but someone's paying money. Being realistic and sharing the costs is better than pretending they don't exist.
> My default assumption of folks on this board is that they're well-off tech workers
My family is well above the median household income in my state and my county (maybe almost 2x the median), yet due to horrible timing awards, the median house payment would put as at 40% of gross pay, or 62% of take home pay.
I wonder if it is about the $ value at all on some of these threads. If it's not offered for free, and open, then you're just a capitalist pig trying to make money off of software. The gall and gumption people would have to try to earn money off their labor banging code. At least, read enough threads, and that's the sentiment the can come across.
Oh, did I miss a link somewhere to some kind of git repo or similar? I checked the links on the defcon page and didn't see any kind of ... actual code/specs or anything. Just some manuals/videos ...
It's a quote from the movie Hackers from 1995. The line is "Snoop on to them as they snoop on to us", which is actually the name of the article, and the talk, but for some reason the title on Hacker News got mangled. Not sure what's up with that.
tldr; cop equipment uses BLE and you can detect this at a distance.
I always wondered if there was a particular RF signature to LE vehicles(say, the radiated IF from their radios). This seems more reliable and easier to setup.
