> Or, more importantly... can you provide a reason why this hypothetical, extremely unusual edge case should take precedence over the 12,000 speeding deaths per year in our calculation?

That one's easy. Because the 12,000 "speeding deaths" are caused by 300+ million people, so the probability that one is caused by any given person is extremely low. And even 12,000 is an overestimate because those statistics count every fatality where speeding was occurring, but some large fraction of those fatalities would have occurred regardless. And this measure would prevent only a small fraction of that smaller number of actual speeding fatalities.

Meanwhile more than 3 million people die every year of something else, so it doesn't take a large percentage of those being impacted to add up to a larger number.

> For example, I'm willing to wager more people get hurt speeding TO the hospital while their wife is in labor than preventing any sort of injury due to out of hospital birth.

That's because child birth outside of a hospital isn't actually that dangerous, not because some large fraction of people die in car crashes on the way to the hospital. But there are a lot of things that are more dangerous than child birth and are very likely to be fatal if you don't receive prompt medical attention.

> Speed cameras reduce crashes and fatalities, and car breathalyzers reduce the incidences of drunk driving.

Speed cameras don't actually stop you from speeding. If you had to get to the hospital then you can make your case to the judge after the fact instead of having a dead kid.

Car breathalyzers "reduce the incidences of drunk driving" by causing the same problem. What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?

> Even still, humans (judges) review these cases individually and decide which offenders' cars to put breathalyzers / speed limiters on.

The issue is there is no judge available on site to take it back off again in an emergency.

> What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?

A drunk person on the road while a lot of people are panicked and trying to get out of town as quickly as possible sounds like a terrible idea. The winning strategy here is you get help from somebody sober who is able to help you escape. And this is a remarkably rare situation in comparison to harm caused by drunk drivers.

> What happens if you've been drinking not expecting to go anywhere before you learn you need to evacuate immediately because of a wildfire?

I have my own concerns about the technology in question, but frankly this is a terrible example. If you have already proven to make such terrible decisions that you have been court-ordered to have a breathalyzer installed in your car and then you choose to get drunk as a wildfire approaches or at least is highly likely...

Well, then you make terrible decisions and now you sleep in the bed you made. Maybe forever.

You are really reaching here. We're talking about speed limiters on cars, not accidentally murdering alcoholics who would be able to escape from a wildfire by speeding except that they can't drunk drive because their car has a breathalyzer on it.

I would instead say that people who cannot legally drive should avoid living in places where driving is likely to be essential to their survival. But also I have nothing but contempt for drunk drivers. If you're addicted to alcohol, there's a simple solution: don't drive, at least not at the same time you're drinking. Maybe plan a little. You have to spend a lot of time placing your petty convenience over the lives of others before you get your license taken away.

People with that medical condition should make alternative plans. If you are an alcoholic, so much so that you have driven drunk so many times that you were caught and convicted multiple times and required to have an interlock device installed, then you need account for that. There are plenty of people who don’t own a car at all, so lets not pretend that we are talking about taking away someone’s pacemaker.

I agree with you that the road deaths caused by repeat offenders outweigh their personal safety, but if a b-double decides to side-swipe you when you're next to its cabin then you're going to need to accelerate past the speed limit for a few seconds.

Train crossings. I live in a port city with tracks that run right through the middle of the city. No, the safety lights don't always work. No, you can't always hear them coming. Yes, I've had to floor it to avoid being hit. This just seems like a bad idea on the face of it to me. It makes people drive in a way that other drivers may not expect them to, and that's always dangerous.

This isn't an acceleration limiter. How fast did you need to be going to cross those tracks before the train arrived? And why was stopping not an alternative? Are you a stunt driver for '70s action movies?

I don't understand this scenario, how long is the piece of track that you had to clear? Does the road not simply cross over the track? Even at 10km/h, you'd clear the <2m of track in 0.72 seconds, barely enough time to notice the train was coming and start accelerating. Is this instead a situation where you were nearing the track with too much speed to stop before reaching it, so you had to accelerate instead to clear it?

It's a bit more than 2 m because trains are wider than the tracks. In the US they can be up to 3.25 m wide and in Europe up to 3.15 m wide.

    > No, the safety lights don't always work.

Do you report the incident to the local city when they don't work? Or you can send a letter to your national safety board that regulates freight trains.

    > "avoid being hit"

You were not careful enough when crossing the train tracks. When you get a driver's license in Japan, they strictly train (and test!) you to stop at a train tracks (regardless of lights), roll down the window, and listen. If we are talking about a 200 ton diesel locomotive, you shouldn't have any issue hearing it. If you follow these simply instructions, you can avoid most safety issues at railroad crossings. Many trucking companies are required by company policy to do the same.

Trains move quickly enough that even someone on foot may not hear them before being run over. It's why one should never walk along railroads.

If someone on foot may not hear a train in time, how well is someone in a car with the windows down going to do?

if you are a serial speeder that has been caught multiple times doing 100+ mph, then maybe you shouldn't be speeding over the train tracks in the first place. Maybe, go over them traveling, you know, the speed limit so you will be able to floor it for a couple of seconds if need be.