Slowing Cars to Save Lives
This post was originally published March 5, 2024. It was updated to add an Assembly Transportation Committee vote.
CalBike is a sponsor of Senator Scott Wiener’s Safe Streets package, which includes the Complete Streets Bill (SB 960) and the Safe Vehicles Save Lives Bill, SB 961, a bill requiring side guards on semi trucks and speed governors on passenger cars. Both provisions of the Safe Vehicles Save Lives Bill are commonsense safety measures that will significantly reduce the risks of death and injury for people outside of cars.
The measure goes up for a vote in the Assembly Transportation Committee on Juen 17, 2024. Please email your assemblymember and ask for their support.
How do speed governors work?
Anyone who has ridden an e-bike or electric scooter has experience with speed-limiting technology. E-bikes stop providing an electric boost at either 20 mph or 28 mph, depending on the class, and most e-scooters have a top speed of 15 mph.
Speed governors on cars are slightly more complex because cars will travel at varying speeds on freeways and local streets, but that problem is easily solved (see below). The technology is known as intelligent speed assist, or ISA.
There are two types of ISA: active and passive. Passive ISA provides feedback to drivers via auditory or physical feedback, making it annoying but not impossible to exceed the posted speed limit. Active ISA stops a vehicle from accelerating at a specific limit above the posted speed limit. AB 961 would require active ISA on passenger cars sold in California starting in 2027, limiting drivers to no more than 10 mph above the speed limit.
How does a car know the speed limit?
By now, you should realize your car is basically a giant computer on wheels that knows everything about you, from your favorite Sirius station to the fight you had with your spouse over the speakers last week to the coffee you spilled taking that left turn. The same GPS data that lets the map software on your phone or in your car tell you the speed limit can communicate with speed-limiting software to keep you from driving too fast.
Fast and deadly California streets
Speed is a killer on our streets. Excessive speed is a factor in at least one-third of road fatalities, and it’s a particularly lethal factor in collisions where a car driver hits someone walking or biking. The chance of a pedestrian being killed when hit by a car more than doubles if the driver is traveling at 20 mph vs. 30 mph, as described in Streetsblog. Seniors are particularly vulnerable to dying from the impact of a motor vehicle.
Yet many urban streets in California have speed limits of 35 mph, and many drivers travel above posted speed limits. Speed governors are only part of the solution. We need lower speed limits, particularly in areas with dense bicycle and pedestrian traffic. And we need infrastructure improvements — such as narrower lanes, speed humps, and chicanes — that force drivers to slow down.
Still, speed governors that prevent the worst excesses of drivers are a technology that’s available now and will start saving lives as soon as they’re deployed. The provisions in the Safe Vehicles Save Lives Bill are critical to making California roadways safer for everyone.
Long history of resistance to automotive safety
An automaker first introduced seatbelts in 1949, but they didn’t become mandatory in new cars until 1968. Despite decades of evidence that seatbelts reduce injuries and fatalities for people inside cars, you can still find whispers about seatbelts causing injuries (wrong) and restricting, I guess, an American’s god-given freedom to fly through a windshield on impact.
Similarly, airbags were invented in the 1950s but weren’t required for U.S. cars until 1998. Modern cars have all sorts of safety features, including blind spot detection and cameras for parking assistance, that we now take for granted.
Yet the idea of speed governors that would require drivers to — gasp! — follow the law has many people clutching their pearls. The San Francisco Standard came out against Wiener’s bill within hours of the press conference announcing it, and Fox host Laura Ingraham is convinced that breaking speeding laws is a constitutional right.
Insistence on behaving in ways that are clearly harmful and refusing commonsense safety measures is uniquely American. In Germany, drivers follow traffic laws just because. In Australia, speed cameras guarantee a ticket, so drivers simply don’t speed. And the EU is mandating passive ISA in all new cars starting this July.
Driving fast on California streets might feel like survival when everyone else is speeding, even if you don’t want to. If you’ve driven on the freeway, you’ve probably had times when everyone passed you because you were the only one poking along at 75 in a 65 mph zone. Speed governors could change that.
Will speed governors really slow down California drivers?
Even if the Save Vehicles Save Lives Bill passes, only a few vehicles will have speed governors at first, and it will take years before older cars age out and speed-limited driving becomes the norm. Of course, some people will figure out how to disable speed governors, and the market for older cars that can go fast might heat up.
But speed limiters will have an impact even if only a fraction of the vehicles on the road have them because everyone else driving will be stuck behind them. We might even change our culture around driving to one of following the rules and valuing safety over speed (we can dream).
Even if speed governors don’t pass this legislative session, they are coming. Autonomous vehicles observe all the rules of the road, including the posted speed limit; as more of them circulate on our streets, they will slow other drivers. Washington, D.C., and New York City are piloting speed-limiting technologies on municipal vehicles, a test that will show the impacts on other drivers.
CalBike strongly supports the Safe Vehicles Save Lives Bill because shaving a few minutes off the time it takes to get to the store isn’t worth someone’s life. We hope you’ll join us in speaking up for this vital measure.
