Fast cars are required to escape raging wildfires, tornados, or getting a rattlesnake bitten kid to the hospital. What are you proposing Charles, a device to control the throttle to a speed decided by your beloved marxist buddah?

1000 tornadoes a year. 5 deaths a year from snake bites. raindrop, you really proved my point. thanks.

Good Afternoon Charles,
Good post. You bring up an interesting question. I don't own an automobile and am no mechanic. But, I do possess a Washington State Drivers' License and do drive both manual & automatic transmission cars. In fact, I like driving on occasion. But, that is largely because I drive rarely. I can also operate a motorcycle and have an endorsement to do so.

That said, I don't need to drive 'fast', least of all greater than 100 mph. I have driven the Autobahn in Germany. It has (had?) no speed limit. And, I believe some states have highways that don't have speed limits either. I have nothing to back this up but I believe in automobile engineering 'speed' might be related to 'performance'. With well conditioned roads, driving faster may be more practical. Back in the Carter era, many moaned that 55 mph was too slow and arguably dangerous. They had a point. Which is why many states changed the limit back to 65 or 70 mph.

Still, you're correct. Speed reaches a point of 'diminishing returns' um ... rather quickly. There's no rational reason for a vehicle to roar down Aurora Ave. at greater than the speed limit. It's crazy to do so. Hence, the predictable accident. Most unfortunate. On the other hand, 70-75 mph on an Interstate seems all right. I don't like to drive over 75 myself. And if I do, it's usually to pass a slower vehicle.

However, at the end of the day, I don't need to 'speed'. Car are dangerous machines. To me, driving fast is just more precarious. I DO believe police cars need to speed. Thus a high performance vehicle is necessary with a speedometer of 100 mph or greater. But, the ordinary citizen with a valid Drivers' License shouldn't need to speed except on rare occasions cited by @1.

Imagine how many lives would be saved if we required everyone to wear protective bubble suits. But alas, humans are willing to tolerate a degree of risk for convenience, autonomy, fun, etc.

@4) You obliviously swallow the car advertisers' line that the carnage humans cause with automobiles is just the "cost of doin' bidness". Try and think a bit larger than that if you can. It's not true just cuz it's on TV.

5) i did not study ethics in college. just continental philosophy, biology, and literature.

Regarding the surface point of what do we do about speeders: You can't outrun the radio. Especially in a city. Especially in a city that owns helicopters. I'd be curious how many people ever actually outrun the police.

@4 I wonder how drivers and passengers avoided a requirement that everyone wears a helmet. Think of the lives that would be saved. #bicycleparity #safewaroncars

@9 all the time. And SPD does not have a helicopter.

Wow, did anyone else play the Steve Jackson Games game called Car Wars back in the day? The post-apocalyptic premise was that there was little to no fuel, so all cars were electric, with a limited maximum speed, ...and generally outfitted with a range of advanced weaponry.

We have the electric cars...
We are now proposing a limited max speed...
...all we need are mounted-machine guns, rockets, and oil-slick sprayers and we can finally take our aggressions out on each other on the streets, like God intended.

@9 - JonnoN is right, the Guardian One chopper belongs to King County. And anyway, a car could easily drive & go hide in garage somewhere long before a chopper managed to get airborne and get to the 'last seen' vicinity of said speeding car.

Hey, blame dj jazzy Jeff. He's the one who taught me that driving fast turns chicks on.

Returning to the 55mph speed limit (and lowering limits in general) would save lives and fuel.

People want to get places quickly. Wasted time means wasted money (wasted possible economic output). There's a reason why we moved away from transatlantic voyages to planes. From horses and buggies to cars. Should we move back to horses and buggies? Charles wants everyone to just slow down ,for heavens sake. Why do you have to get anywhere quickly? Oh, I don't know, maybe a medical emergency requiring surgery? Woman in labor? We already have speed limits and fines. The only reason for the 55 mph speed limit was to save oil. The effect on safety and traffic fatalities was insignificant - improvements in vehicle safety, seat belts etc accounted for a much greater share of lives saved. One report even cited an increase in fatalities in the beginning of the 55 mph limit. Plus there was a >80% non compliance rate with the 55 mph speed limit.

Instead of lowering the limit to 20 mph, why not make getting a drivers license more difficult and costly. Require more safety training. Almost anyone in the US can get a drivers license and compared to most countries it is cheap. German roads are safer than US roads despite the high speeds because of the much higher bar for obtaining a drivers license and much more driver training.

Limiting everyone to 20 mph is just ludicrous. But perhaps Charles will get his way secondary to congestion and bicycle lanes being put where there's no room for them.

"High-Speed Police Chase on Aurora Predictably Ends With Crash" Hey, I can play this headline/click bait game too!! "Hip Hop Dance Party in Renton Predictability Ends with Shoot Out".

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news…

This is fun. Everyone can create click bait just like The Stranger!!

Seems a pretty easy answer; if the occupants of the speeding car are suspected of a serious crime, a high speed police chase is warranted; if it's just someone speeding, the police call ahead to their comrades but do not endanger the public by giving chases.

Otherwise we have this: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.c…

The young man killed in the story had just spent a day hiking with his fiancee, his brother, a few other friends and my sister. They had driven two cars there and back; my sister was in the second car, which came across the wreck of the first on the way home.

Because of the work I do I am involved in a high speed drive at least a couple times a year. Rarely over 100mph, but usually pretty fast. It is exceptionally dangerous.

Humans are poor at assessing risk. Things that seem exceedingly dangerous to one culture will be mundane to another. Because of this, it is easy to pick apart any given decision.

As a 'for instance' according to the CDC in the US 25.4% of unintentional drownings of females happen in the bathtub- nearly 5x the rate of males (5.7%). These are not small-potato numbers, over 500 bathtub drownings per year-way more than are killed by police chases. If we use these numbers and uninformed logic, the conclusion we come to is that women cannot be trusted to bathe in a bathtub. Should we maybe consider a ban? a bathtub training/license?

@18 Guys don't take baths. You might as well cite the gender difference in ovarian cancer.

@14, thank you. Limit engine size and increase fuel economy requirements.

Okay, no more comments — that's plenty.

@Achaiwoi: You obliviously swallow the car advertisers' line that the carnage humans cause with automobiles is just the "cost of doin' bidness".

Nope, never seen that ad.

It's just a matter of values. If we took a vote to reduce the speed limit to 55 mph, a majority would say no, they'd rather take their chances at 70 mph.

@19- that is exactly the point (although your conclusion is inaccurate). If we don't think about why a number is as such, and just react to the stat, then we end up w/ cars that are limited to 20mph or some other raw stupidity.
@22- No, those would be Intentional drownings or the OD would be listed as the COD. The cdc does not fuck around with COD.

How did I know who wrote this without bothering to read who the author was? More drivel from Charles.

@8

You should have studied journalism.

Old Charles, the curmudgeonly, plump journo' still lurking around the liberal lunchroom of the Stranger, trying to engage the righteous, angsty, idealist journo-kids it tales of a better way.

Seattle's Emmett Watson of the underclass, (look it up), waddling back to his keyboard, unhearing comments of his irrelevance....

Name one person on The Stranger staff that wants to drive <20 miles an hour to get on the Pabst tonight, and I will show you a staffer who doesn't think you're a tiring, crotchety douche.

....and stay tuned on details of the accident.....

This post is a good, thoughtful one.
Certainly worth discussing.

Sometimes you need the option to accelerate to avoid a crash, just as you need the ability to stop quickly. People who know how to drive are aware of this. Unfortunately, most people don't know how to drive. Speed limiters---which exist on many cars, but well north of 100MPH---would remove that option.

Weirdly enough, the fastest cars are also the safest cars. Unfortunately, they're often driven by those people who don't know how to drive.

The car in this story is not, however, a safe car at any speed.

As with the use of lethal force, I think the issue is whether the kind of officers our police departments recruit and retain have the temperament and judgment to decide when a dangerous high-speed chase is appropriate.

@2 - Charles doesn't prove any points. He lazily uses stats of my retorts as to say that the infrequency of those is negated by his altruistic (in his own mind) ill-conceived regulation. He fails to understand why a vehicle would not need to go fast in emergency situations.

This is the essence of Charles's, and other left pundits' philosophy, who fail to understand the ramifications of their ideas on those who should they feel should simply acquiesce to their superior social engineering.

I would like to ask a personal question of Charles Mudede (not too personal), have you ever driven a car and if so with any form of regularity (not just on one or more occasions)? You have indicated in other blogs that you do not drive. I ask this question to see if you really understand what it is to drive a car, especially on a routine basis.

@raindrop Okay, but maybe avoid making assumptions about leftists. I'm one myself, but so far I've agreed with what you've said in this thread (and very often in others). And your comments could apply to conservatives, too.

@Charles You've presented a worthwhile thought experiment, but it is not a myth by any means that personal cars provide freedom. They do. Something isn't a myth just because you declare it as such, and somebody isn't blinded by their own ideology just because you don't agree with them.

1200 people were killed by police last year. Why don't we ban cops?

88,000 people die from alcohol-related causes every year. Why don't we ban alcohol?