Originally Posted by
Headpost
My own pet/fantasy idea is that cars and trucks should have to have speed governors, variable ones that would work with a GPS to restrict the vehicle's speed according to where they are. For instance, if they're driving on a highway, they can go 65; on a road in town, 30, or whatever. Not a new idea, but my guess is that it would reduce the number of people killed in accidents by half (but really, who knows, maybe more than that). What it would also mean, though, is that you could actually have small, light vehicles for driving on local roads without the fear of being hit by some car doing 50 in a 25 zone.
Of course drivers--and car companies that are trying to push the fantasy of illicit speed in their sport models--would scream bloody murder; and police departments and local governments wouldn't want them either since they make so much of their revenue by handing out speeding tickets. So we'll all just keep going the way we're going, and another 40,000 people will die in traffic accidents this year. What a world.
40K people (plus) dying in accidents is very regrettable, especially if you are one of them or cared about someone in that cohort. But lets get serious. There are well over 300M people in the U.S. We can spare a few ten thousand annually for the sake of the almighty GDP and its 2% growth year over year. What would really suck is for the U.S. (and by extension the world) economy to crash and burn because Texas is inundated by floodwaters from sea level rise. If we don't start getting aggressive about limiting the size of vehicles and changing their energy source to plug-in electric we will be measuring population loss in the hundreds of thousands per climate event. You should have to RENT large pick-up trucks and SUV's. Vehicles like that should not be for direct sale to the public as personal transportation.