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I don't think you could have missed the point any harder -- the problem that teleo has noted boils down to lack of agency; to counteract this, you need to take some.
If you think that car accidents 'just happen', you are experiencing the downstream consequences of the widespread promotion of this (terrible) feeling -- you will probably struggle with countermanding it no matter what if 'speeding' or 'not wearing a seatbelt' carry too much risk for you. (start slow, try one at a time!)
Possibly you are too habituated to care, but if not I guess you could chip away at it --
Helmetless bike riding?
Midnight playground maintenance?
IDK, find something man.
Midnight playground maintenance is at least in theory positive-sum; however, there are ways to fuck this up that are non-obvious. For example: you use regular hardware-store bolts in a coastal playground, they rust out after ten years and catastrophically fail. There are probably other things, that would be fine for Joe and his son Joe Jr. but not good for a neighborhood playground...
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Speeding has substantial benefits alongside the risks - you waste significantly less of your life travelling and thus get more done.
What are the benefits of not wearing a seatbelt while you're sitting in a car anyway? I might disagree with punishing people for failing to wear a seatbelt since the risk is almost entirely to themselves, but seriously, this one is a good cost-benefit. Having agency for yourself does not mean doing the opposite of everything They tell you to do - that is still refusing to make decisions for yourself, insofar as your actions are still 100% predictable from Their edicts. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence; the goal is not to invert the system, but to ignore it.
Probably not. Very rarely will speeding significantly change travel times, you have to be doing a Cannonball Run to see a real difference in your life once you factor in things like getting into and out of the car and stop signs/lights (which I don't think anyone can recommend ignoring in most cases).
Rather, the benefit of speeding is that it is fun, and once you remove the idea of aesthetic enjoyment from your cost benefit you are lost as a human being. But I'm not interested in having the argument about my speeding habits here again.
Speeding is fun (or at least more fun than driving the limit), but it also significantly changes travel times. Not for trips to the mailbox, but many longer trips. Including with lights, since the lights are typically not synchronized to the speed limit (and as I mentioned elsewhere, sometimes they are synchronized to a speed significantly above the limit). For trips mostly on the highway it's basically linear.
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You feel a bit free, take some agency -- maybe notice that being slightly safer is not the be-all or end-all. Like I said, the exact thing that you do is not very important -- although if your risk tolerance doesn't extend to not wearing a seatbelt sometimes, you are probably going to struggle with alternatives.
When was the last time you crashed your car? On average you can go like half a million miles without your seatbelt becoming relevant -- quite a bit more if you aren't also drinking or whatnot. Consider how your opinion has been formed, and whether this is truly too risky for you -- it will give you the tools to evaluate other risks in your life.
All this plus you look cooler. I felt like a complete dork when I was riding in a car putting my seat belt on and everyone else was just freeballing it (in another country of course, with a lower standard of safety).
ABC man -- Always Be Cool
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I've always thought that the core idea of coolness is not caring what other people think in the moment.
Coolness is associated with freedom and relaxation and confidence yes. So caring less about what others think is usually cool, but the neurotic person dutifully buckling seatbelts for a 5 minute pickup jaunt is not cool. (not to say they aren't cool in general, just in this specific moment. they could very well be cool to give a moving eulogy when a drunk driver ends the merry ride early for anyone not wearing a seatbelt)
I've used some adjectives to stack the deck unfairly here of course, because this pup would be cooler than a try-hard wannabe that would like to buckle seatbelt but avoids doing so because they care so much about what other people think.
There's something about the fact that the doing (seatbelt) is uncool and the actively-non-doing (unbuckling to fit in) is double-uncool and the passive-non-doing (jaunt) is the cool thing.
Additionally: consider proportionality of safety-ism. Teen wearing a helmet for a razor scooter is uncool. Neil Armstrong triple-checking industrial buckles is very cool. (source: my opinion). Whether wearing a seatbelt is cool or not depends on which reference class a car-ride feels like.
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Strongly agreed. Cool people aren't doing what makes them look cool, they are doing what they feel like doing. The things they do become cool because the person is cool, not the other way around.
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For small values of significant. As a toy model, let us assume a daily commute of half an hour. Say 50% of the time, you are hampered by traffic and traffic lights from going faster. The other 50% is spent in situations where you could save time by speeding.
Let us say that you go twice the speed limit when speeding. This is breakneck speed, public menace level. Instead of going 50km/h in residential neighborhoods, you go 100km/h. Instead of going 100km/h on two way traffic roads, you go 200km/h. By risking your life and everyone else's, you save a whopping 25% of your commute time, or 7.5 minutes. Of course, for every second saved you will also spend a second in high concentration ready to slam the brakes at the slightest trouble ahead, knowing that every 50ms in reaction delay will make it even more likely that you will kill someone.
Now, there are certainly examples where going faster will save you substantial time. "It is 3am, I am at a highway junction in Munich and want to get to a highway junction in Berlin." Sure, going 280km/h will save you about half the time compared to a more leisurely pace of 140km/h (if there are no construction sites which will bottleneck your time, and you ignore speed limits meant to cut down nighttime noise). But for the average road trip, the time saved just is not all that big.
As another intuition pump, consider ambulances. Clearly, getting a patient into the hospital as soon as possible after an accident is beneficial, and this is why we allow them to turn on their siren and run red lights. So we want them to be reasonably fast. An ambulance capped at 70km/h would be comically slow. But once you get to 160km/h or something, you quickly hit the point of diminishing returns in most scenarios. I am sure it would be technically feasible to build an ambulance with a top speed of 300km/h, but nobody wants that, because the scenarios where the maximum expected utility would require an ambulance to go that fast are very rare indeed.
I said "travelling", not "commuting". I was thinking of going to visit family or going on a holiday, which (unlike commuting) often involves driving through long stretches of nothing (my general feeling is that the speed limits in built-up areas are generally about right, but those on highways are frequently far too low; many of the high-end divided roads and outback highways in Australia, for instance, could support far more than their speed limit of 110 km/h).
Also, here in Australia, there are certain highways where you're not just saving days, but potentially saving the need for a bloody caravan because the towns are over a day's drive (at the speed limit) apart.
I mean, the Royal Flying Doctor Service here in Oz has 500 km/h and even 800 km/h ambulances, which are in fact very handy. That particular solution doesn't work so well for random people travelling, though, because lol piloting is hard.
It still doesn't make much sense. Say you're on a 150 mile road trip. 50 miles are on normal roads where you can expect to average 50 mph accounting for traffic, hills, lights, stop signs, slowing down for curves, and all the other little things that keep you from maintaining constant speed. The other 100 miles are on open highway with a 70 mph speed limit. An hour is already accounted for either way. Strictly doing the limit will get you through the stretch in 86 minutes. Averaging 90 will get you through in 66 minutes. So 126 minutes vs 146 minutes, or about a 20 minute savings over more than 2 hours.
Except most people would bump that up to 75 and not consider it speeding, so now you're down to a 15 minute advantage. Which completely evaporates when you realize that if you do 20 over the limit for 100 miles straight your chances of getting pulled over are close to 100%. Plus you're now skittish and won't drive over the limit. If it happens halfway through the stretch you got dinged 33 minutes in, and it will take you an additional 43 minutes to complete the stretch. So you've completed it in 86 minutes, saving a grand total of 10 minutes in travel time, less the 10 or 15 minutes for the traffic stop, less the cost of the fine, less the additional fuel you used going 90 miles and hour. If there's a benefit here I'm not seeing it.
I'm definitely wanting LaTeX support, because even though it's just a derivative, it would look soooo much prettier.
I've found it interesting to think about it marginally. What's the time savings of each marginal additional mph? A derivative gives a very good approximation of this, and particularly for highway speeds, it's a good enough approximation to be reasonable over at least a handful of individual mph changes without recalculating.
Governing equation, which everyone should know from high school: d = rt, distance = rate*time.
We care about time. t = d/r.
dt/dr = -d/r^2
(Yes, this would be a nice place for LaTeX, because the d's for the derivative should be visually different from the d for distance.)
One has to be careful with units, because we're often talking about changes in time in terms of minutes, but we have rates in terms of hours. What we ultimately want is something mixed, like minutes/mph.
We're starting with [miles]/[mph]^2, so we need to correct by [60min]/[1hr], meaning if we just plug miles and mph into our formula, we need to multiply the result by 60 to get the units we want.
The obvious mental math version to just get your bearings on the magnitudes of things is to consider r=60mph, because then one of our denominator terms will cancel with our unit correction. It's also not too far off from the nominal speed of many state highways. This case gives us that a quick approximation, with inputs in terms of miles and mph and output in terms of minutes/mph is -d/r. That is, again, kind of assuming r=60, then if your trip is, say, 150 miles, you're saving (note that it's negative, because this is a reduction in time spent) about 2.5 minutes per mph you increase.
Some things to note. Time savings is linear in distance. I personally don't think it matters much until we're getting to pretty significant distance trips (I think trying to speed a bunch to save time on your 20mile commute is kinda dumb). It's also a 1/r^2 in rate. That is nasty in terms of diminishing returns. It's also why I'm kinda fine with the nominal 60mph mental math to make the unit change "free"; yes, I'm slightly overestimating the value of speeding if the nominal speed limit is 70, but it's probably not huge error. I haven't bothered actually quantifying the error; this is all just to quickly get into a ballpark.
I think the economist would probably want to slap a utility on this derivative and set it equal to something representing your estimation of the likelihood of getting pulled over. I think it's easy enough to handwave that a little bit and just think a little about the trip you're planning and this marginal rate of improvement and come to some approximation that you're comfortable with.
Time savings per hour spent speeding is constant. The shorter distance also has a shorter speeding time.
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LaTeX also doesn't interpret repeated * symbols as a request to hide them both and italicize the text between them. ;-)
Oof, yes. Fixed.
That one's bitten me too many times before, but these days using Unicode for x·y·z when I want an explicit symbol works well and is almost second nature, when I'm thinking in "math mode". If I'm thinking in "programming mode" then I default to
x*y*zbut the whole expression is inside backticks and markdown doesn't ruin it.What markdown still wrecks for me is the use of "~40" to indicate that the number is a loose approximation, which then sometimes turns into a big strikethrough if I use it a second time. Unicode gives us ≈, but that doesn't feel right to me when there's nothing to the left of it.
I like your preferred method of analysis, BTW. It reminds me of the old argument that the US should be expressing vehicle efficiency in gallons per mile (or per 1000 miles, whatever) rather than in miles per gallon, because the latter leads us to overestimate how large the additional savings are when we further improve already-high-efficiency vehicles and to underestimate how important improvements are for the remaining gas guzzlers.
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They can consider it what they like, 75 in a 70 is speeding. You're not demonstrating that speeding isn't faster by showing that driving 5mph over the limit is indeed faster than driving at the limit.
LOL, no it's not. I've driven from Florida to the Northeast twice -- about 900 miles each time -- and gotten pulled over once per trip. A warning once and a ticket the other. And yeah, I was doing 20 or more over most of the time (note that the speed limit was mostly 55 and 65, not 70). On one of those trips I averaged nearly 70mph, including stops.
Nope.
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Piloting is easy, unless you mean helicopters. Dealing with all the nintendo-hard licensing and air traffic control stuff is the problem.
I mean, I guess, but I'm still not sure that replacing all/most Christmas car travel with personal aeroplanes would end very well (still wouldn't be as hilariously doomed as trying to do it for commuting, though; Manhattan's skyline would look a bit different after a month of that even if you handwave the parking problem).
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Midnight playground maintenance has an actual purpose. It's agency for something. Unbuckled driving or helmetless biking achieves nothing (unless you're in the autism-adjacent minority who find the sensation of having to wear seatbelts and helmets actively torturous, I guess). It's just contrarianism.
Helmetless biking at high speed is awesome. Especially when it's kinda hot.
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Yes, and?
That's the whole point!
Contrarianism is the whole point of unbuckled driving; I don't think it's the whole point of unsanctioned playground maintenance. Therefore I object to them being listed as examples of the same phenomenon. I'm not even knocking the joys of contrarianism! But it's more of a niche pleasure, and many people can and should see the appeal of the playground thing even though they have no interest in contrarianism-for-contrarianism's-sake.
Taking back agency in a practical, goal-oriented sense is, IMO, not the same conversation as letting yourself be contrary for the hell of it now and again - and while both are valid causes, the former is more societally important (while fortunately also being an easier sell).
Still missing the point -- the idea here is to build some risk tolerance, and notice that many of the things that a giant propaganda machine has been blaring are way too dangerous since the day you were born -- are not.
The responses here are a great example; you'd think I was suggesting BASE jumping every weekend or something.
The agency you are taking is not strictly contrarianism; it's also that you are taking responsibility for your own actions in the car. Making it clear (to yourself) that your life is in your own hands. Bird on a wire stuff.
It is anyways, we are all fragile and hanging by a thread -- making that apparent to oneself has intrinsic value. Like I said, there are other things you could do that would work -- but the options that are strictly safer than taking your seatbelt off and going for a drive are probably much fewer than you think.
I want to agree with the sentiment but the thought process that lets one realize that seatbelts don't actually do anything if you don't crash your car is also what allows people to realize that you can sell cocaine and get rich as long as you dont get busted.
Risk aversion has its place in the world, but just like snorting cocaine some things are best in moderation
Yes!
Granted becoming a cocaine dealer is beyond my (current) risk tolerance, but if you are struggling to develop a sense of agency in the face of increasingly totalitarian bureaucracy, it would certainly help!
Pro tip: One way to increase your risk tolerance is to start off as a cocaine user.
nobody starts off as a loser you have to work to get there
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Helmetless biking (and skiing, omg, the 0-to-100 in the uptake rate of ski helmets in Europe in the past decade is making me fume) achieves a lot. It makes the difference between a bike being something you can just hop onto, go from A to B with and leave wherever, and it being an activity that requires locating a particular piece of gear and hauling it with you everywhere at the destination, leaving you with either -1 hand or -1 head's worth of volume in whatever bags you bring until you return home, unless you engage in extra planning to be able to leave it somewhere.
Seatbelts are ok because the delta-inconveniencs to driving is small. Bike helmet advocates, though, belong together with Rust programmers and playground securers on the scrap heap of history for being scolds that would sap all efficiency and convenience out of life by a thousand cuts for the sake of their padded-cell utopia.
The reason for the 0–100 uptake in ski helmets is that once you've worn one, you can't imagine going back to not wearing one. The safety advantages are controversial. The comfort advantages are not. On most days the helmet is all the insulation you need. On unusually cold days they hold underlayers in place better than a knit cap possibly can. On warm days they have vents that open up. On all days things are much more put together than they were in the days when you'd try to cinch all your headgear down with the goggle strap, and if you were unfortunate enough to crash, lose everything and get a nice crush of snow on your neck and head. And then have to pick up a hat that was covered in frost inside and out. And when you go inside, the snow doesn't melt and soak your helmet. And you can put bluetooth speakers in the ear pockets and have headphones that you can easily control with a gloved hand.
Helmetless biking is fine if you're riding on bike paths or flat roads with little traffic. If you're riding in traffic or on more topographically interesting terrain they're a good idea, and if you're mountain biking they're a necessity. Every once in a blue moon I'll see someone in the woods without a helmet and it's almost always a guy with a cheap bike not suited to the trail and nothing else to indicate he has a clue what he's doing. Either that or kids in West Virginia who can't really ride anything to begin with because the trail is too rugged.
I don't buy into the traffic part (though it might be more applicable in the US, where drivers are not trained or compelled to give cyclists proper room?), but mountain biking, sure. At that point you are doing a hazardous sport rather than utilitarian transportation; I'd accept the necessity for parachutes when high-altitude tightroping too, without being for making them mandatory while walking on firm ground.
I really don't want people who are wearing headphones on my piste (or, on that matter, on the road)...
I was actually convinced to try wearing a ski helmet once. It was not only uncomfortable, but also messed with my situational awareness (since it restricts wind flow around my face and heavily buffets my ears), though perhaps if you are the sort of person to want to wear bluetooth earbuds while skiing you don't particularly use that sense anyway.
Relevantly, perhaps, I don't see what gear there really is to hold down. I'd use a single heavy knit cap with lining, which holds itself in place just fine, and maybe add polarized sunshades if it's a sunny day. If I am going to engage in skiing where I expect head-down crashes of the type that would get snow on my neck, then sure, there is an argument for helmets, as there was for mountain biking - but again, we would be engaging in a strange conflation where we force the safety standards of an adjacent high-risk activity on a lower-risk one that doesn't need them, unnecessarily encumbering the lower-risk one in the process. Most biking does not involve uneven dirt paths that weave between trees, and most skiing does not involve doing 360-degree flips or unmaintained mountainsides.
(cf. Rust: Most programming does not involve people dying if a use-after-free happens!)
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Yeah, I normally wear a helmet when I bike for recreation, but when I commuted partly by bicycle I certainly didn't. Both because it's inconvenient and because I'm not exactly screaming down hills at 40mph when I'm commuting. Ironically my commute put me through the one local town which requires bike helmets for adults, but fuck them anyway.
(Dorkiness when biking for recreation is not really affected by the helmet, because the rest of the kit already maxed that out)
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I mean, why are we scared to say that the bike and ski helmets are inherently unaesthetic, dorky, and weird looking? Riding a bike is already fairly unaesthetic, but riding a bike with a helmet is basically doomed to dorkiness, and the more the helmet is optimized for any functional purpose the worse it tends to look. I do typically wear a helmet when I ride any considerable distance, but I'm under no illusion that I look at all cool doing so.
That said, seatbelts I remain a fan of. The numbers simply are what they are, and I don't think avoiding a seatbelt is really any improvement in comfort in a modern vehicle. I do occasionally drive classics that feature no or minimal seatbelts, and I suppose I'm taking a risk there but there's a corresponding benefit. My favorite tuner car modifications to see young guys drive around with are the addition of aesthetically obvious safety features. The fire extinguisher ostentatiously anchored to the floor in easy reach, the two strap hanging off the bumper, the four point racing harness in the driver's seat.
The idea that bike helmets look "dorky" is very alien to my lifelong sensibility on this point. They look sporty. Professional competitive bikers on television have them - they're part of the same aesthetic as football helmets or hockey masks, they have a kind of paramilitary-looking toughness about them. I will grant @4bpp the point that they are cumbersome, though.
I dunno, pros seldom raced in helmets until ~2002, maybe a little earlier in cobbled classics, and I definitely think the sport was more aesthetic pre-helmet. Not saying it's not worth it, on net, but.
The UCI started requiring helmets during the Armstrong years (there was a year or so in which they were allowed to remove them on a terminal climb in a race). The aesthetics are maybe worse (Fignon's pony tail!), but there really have been (and continue to be, and I'm not going to look at rigorous stats right now) a number of fatal high-speed crashes in bike races that helmets may mitigate somewhat.
My understanding is that the occasionally-seen soft helmets of the 80s were less about mitigating concussion-type injuries and more about road rash on scalps. I'd like to think the science has gotten better there.
It was most probably the UCI requirement that did it. My recollection is there is (was?) a slight areo, cooling, and obvious weight, penalty. At least, excepting TT specific helmets on the areo front.
The science has developed quite a bit over the last decade, I think because the NFL poured money into helmet research to show they they were doing something about CTE. There's now coverage for a huge variety of helmet types, including most cycling disciplines. If you were ever unfortunate enough to actually need protection from a helmet, I assume anthing rated by any reputable agency would be better than nothing. The Virginia Tech lab seems to publish the most about the methodology and have an extremely extensive testing protocol though.
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I think this attitude comes from having grown up as helmet adoption was first spreading. The cool kids did not wear helmets. It was the dorks who had helmets forced on them by their parents, and were too obedient to discard them once out of sight.
The helmet campaign was totalizing and successful. Kids born in the late 90s see them in all the media they consume and every kid wears them. Though as an elder millennial of a toddler I do notice the other dads my age sometimes give in to their kids hopping on a balance bike while leaving their helmets on the ground.
People who graduated high school before roughly 1992 wouldn’t have been exposed to the dynamics introduced by the helmet campaign and so can reasonably view them as the domain of Lance Armstrongs.
Well, now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I saw no "aw, making sure to put your helmet first, are we? what are you, a baby?" grandstanding from wannabe-toughies. "It's dorky to wear a helmet" is not an alien sentiment to me. What I objected to was the idea that it is a truth universally acknowledged that bicycle helmets, as a piece of gear, look dorky. An oversized one painted in bright primary colors, such as a worrywart mother might give to a nine-year-old - sure, that looks a bit dorky. But a sleek pro-type one, I just don't see it.
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