In a country where nearly 43,000 people died on the roadways last year with deaths hitting a 16-year high in 2021, you’d think any safety precaution that saves lives would be given a fair hearing. But we are not always dealing with the clearest of thinkers in this world. Fox News’ latest attempt to stir up outrage is so ridiculous and lazy, not only did we laugh about it all yesterday afternoon, here I am, writing a post about.
It all starts with Laura Ingraham (always a good time) on her Fox News show “The Ingraham Angle.” She decided to wade into a “controversy” she knows nothing about and ended up making the argument that driving at illegal speeds is every American’s right.
She interviewed Ned Ryun, CEO of the American Majority, a nonprofit that trains folks to become conservative talking heads and politicians. To be clear, neither American Majority nor Ryun have anything to do with transportation, public safety, the auto industry or American infrastructure.
Just check out what this pair of intellectual titans come up with:
“This is why they love the lockdowns. They like to keep us all moving as little as possible. Permanently! What’s Mayor Pete gonna do here Ned? What does Mayor Pete want? Get back on the bike for him?”
It’s really impossible to say what she’s talking about here, but Ryun is game to respond:
“Lil’ Pete, Mayor Pete and the rest of the nanny state want to dictate how almost 280,000,000 Americans who have driver’s licenses. Their argument, Laura, is that it would prevent 12,000 speeding deaths. Which if you do the math is .000043 percent of all drivers.”
You know what? I’m actually with Ryun on this—fuck those 12,000 Americans (including children—car accidents are the leading cause of death and injury in kids, according to the National Highway Safety Administration) dying horrific and violent deaths over something as silly as going too fast. Fuck the millions of Americans dealing with crash-related injuries on a daily basis as well, and of course, all of their families who have to go forward every day knowing their loved ones died or where injured in a totally preventable and ghastly manner. Getting creamed by a Nissan Altima going 90 in a school zone is just a particularly energetic expression of American freedom.
Ingraham and Ryun even sound a little bit like sovereign citizens, confusing freedom of movement with the state’s very real interest in managing motor vehicle usage to keep citizens safe. It may not surprise you the Ryun spares no time in transitioning into the totally unrelated topic and proven winner for conservatives; abortion.
“If they were really concerned about saving lives, I’m sorry, most of the people advocating for this they don’t care about butchering babies, so this is about control—and they are rapacious in their pursuit of control. And the question then becomes, Laura, let’s say they want to curb your speed now, what if in the future becomes ‘Well we want a kill switch in your car. We don’t like the fact that your driving too far on fossil fuels.”
“Yeah that too.”
This is all in response to the National Transportation Safety Board issuing a non-binding recommendation that future cars should maybe should have Intelligent Speed Assistance technology after a horrific high-speed crash killed nine people.
And that’s certainly not the only horrific speeding story we’ve had recently. Like this 12-year-old killed by an off-duty cop going 95 mph in a school zone. Or this driver, who snagged 43 speeding tickets in 10 months before killing themselves and two other people, critically injuring another. If police enforcement, speed limit signs, and a fear of death were enough, these lives would have been saved.
ISA is the tamest of the emerging automotive technologies to get angry about, which is probably why Ingraham and her guest devoted such a boring, lazy segment to the topic. No prep, no real argument, just a couple of dorks vamping.
I experienced ISA while driving in Spain recently and was able to simply turn off the speed limiting tech (though the many speed cameras does have a way of making an honest driver out of you anyway.) We’ve written about ISA before, but here is a brief rundown from our own Andy Kalmowitz:
There are two different types of this tech: active intelligent speed assistance and passive intelligent speed assistance, the NTSB says. Active ISA technology would use a car’s GPS location, a database of posted speed limits and its onboard cameras to make sure drivers are going the speed limit. The system would include a mechanism that would make it “more difficult, but not impossible, to increase the speed of a vehicle above the posted speed limit,” according to the post. Apparently, there is also an option to electronically limit a vehicle’s speed so that it never exceeds the speed limit.
There’s also Passive ISA, which will warn drivers when they are speeding by using visual, sound or haptic alerts. However, unlike Active ISA, the driver is still ultimately responsible for slowing the vehicle down.
The thing is, this tech has a 0.00043 percent chance of ever coming to the U.S., despite U.S. automakers already putting it into vehicles overseas. We can’t even get our shit together to test for pedestrian safety in vehicles! The result? A sharp rise in pedestrian deaths. But, we don’t seem to care. The slaughter of our fellow Americans, our families, ourselves, doesn’t seem to give anyone pause until it’s too late.
A new survey out this week from AAA found that over half of American drivers engage in risky activity behind the wheel, with speeding and “aggressive driving” taking 40 percent of those bad driving habits—far more than distracted driving or impaired driving put together. Yet these lesser sins of the American motorist are the main focus of safety messaging. Why? Because there’s no way Americans would accept a actual limiting of their speed.
I’ve argued before that cars are either personal enjoyment and gratification machines, or they are transit. Pretending they are both is what is getting more and more people killed every year. It becomes clearer and clearer every year that no normal, public street-going transportation needs to travel over 90 mph. Why should the commuter have to share the freeway with a speed demon in a Dodge Charger looking to drag race on the 405?