One of the striking features of the debate over road safety is the extent to which the opinions of blogosphere residents can be predicted on the basis of political affiliation. Rightwingers, both libertarians and law-and-order types, are in favor both of soft laws (high speed limits etc) and weak law enforcement, and leftwingers the opposite. A number of commentators on both sides have made this point.

So I was interested to see this pro-speeding site [thanks to TJW for the link]. The main argument is fairly standard (everybody speeds, so travelling at the speed limit is dangerous so speed limits should not be enforced). But what’s interesting is this para

In the United States, just two speeding tickets can increase your insurance premiums by 50%! In BC, the penalty points from two speeding tickets will cost you $300.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), a powerful lobby group funded by the US insurance industry, has been the chief opponent of moves to raise speed limits.

Insurance companies in the US (and ICBC in BC) frequently purchase radar and laser guns for police forces to issue more speeding tickets.

which presents an obvious paradox for libertarian supporters of speeding. A fully privatised system would give more power to the insurance companies to impose their own conditions on insured drivers and, if this site is correct, the companies would be keen to tighten the rules.

In my experience, libertarians love the kind of intellectual gymnastics required to produce free-market solutions to puzzles of this kind, so I’m offering it for their enjoyment.

Like most academics, I’m somewhat ambivalent about strike action. On the one hand, given the nature of the work, a one-day or even a one-week strike would barely be noticed by the employers (and, as I’ll mention below, it’s not clear whether the employers are the universities or the government). On the other hand, the right to strike is an important one, that has been struggled for and defended for nearly 200 years, and we have plenty of reasons for wanting to exercise it.

In practice, there’s never been a national strike of more than one day, and my response has usually been to stay home and work there, occasionally turning out on a ‘picket’ (more accurately, ‘protest’) line. Even the loss of pay has been spotty. For the same reasons as strikes are somewhat ineffectual, it’s hard to verify who is on strike and who is simply out of the office for some other reason on a given day. So the university is generally reduced to asking people to dob themselves in and the old-style unionist in me objects to helping the boss in this way.

But on this occasion, I’ll be doing things properly. I’m going to spend the day catching up on non-uni jobs (including, I hope, polishing up the blog) and I’ve already advised the uni so they can dock my pay for the day. The issues are worth a strike

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The comments thread for the previous post raises the issue of tailgating. I’ve seen surveys in which the two most common annoyances are (1) tailgating and (2) slow drivers. Given that, in my experience, at least 95 per cent of drivers drive within a few k of the speed limit whenever they can, I’d guess that a large proportion of those giving response (2) are the people who annoy those of us giving response (1). Road safety would be greatly enhanced if these people could either be deterred or delicensed.

But there’s no obvious way of enforcing laws against this species of dangerous driving. I can think of various possibilities, but I can also think of technical difficulties with all of them. About the most promising would be a fixed video camera that would record all passing traffic. It ought to be able to infer both speed and distance between cars, and then prosecute tailgaters, but the computational requirements of recording this digitally and processing it automatically would be immense. Still, Moore’s Law is on our side, here.

I stayed at the Gold Coast last weeked, at Tugun Beach near Coolangatta. A nice enough spot, with miles of uncrowded beaches and not overdeveloped by Gold Coast standards, though the towers of Surfers Paradise in the distance produced a rather surreal effect. We stayed at a pleasant place called the Golden Riviera, and the neighbouring places had the usual names – Costa del Sol, Malibu etc. I haven’t been to the Riviera or Costa del Sol, but Malibu is not a patch on Coolangatta, and the pictures of European beaches I’ve seen don’t impress.

So the thought struck me – do villas on the Riviera have names like Noosa and Bondi? I doubt it. Still, Australia has at least advanced since the days when beachside locations were named after Brighton and Margate.