Alcool et vitesse au volant des jeunes: un coroner réclame un couvre-feu

[Cyrus]

I've slept in the car too don't worry, I am just saying the reason

 

And for 140 / 50, well... he was drunk, whee! Read what I quoted, he is the smart one not us, no getting to be an old loser for him!

 

There is another major point here to consider. The guy was 24. You can have a curfew thing between 16-18, but at 18 you are an adult by law. How can you restrict someone from doing a normal activity when they are legally an adult? Driving is a "priviledge" but you have a right as an adult to do anything you want to a certain degree, like drive at night if you have a driver's license. How can such a curfew be truly legal under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and etc.

 

I think Cataclaw's suggestion is good, but I think it is pretty much what they have already. When I got my license they gave you one with a ceiling of 4 demerits and then after 2 years it was 15. I think now there is an intermediate step with 8 demerits for 2 years.

 

I had 4 demerit ceiling, did not get any ticket, and I drove 150 km/h to CEGEP there and back every day. Except on the first day of class, every single semester there was an SQ parked right there in the median, like clockwork. I just marked the day on my calendar and drove... 150 and then slowed to 120 before the cop hiding place Good times! I only drunk during class but probably the sleep deprivation in the morning was worse than the afternoon...

Modifié 11 mai 2011 par Cyrus

[Cataclaw]

This is a little off-topic, but out of curiosity Cyrus, have you ever gotten any tickets? I'm just wondering how effective our cops are at busting guys like you that regularly do 150km/h You seemed to dodge the bullet pretty well in CEGEP, but have you ever been caught? I don't mean this in a holier-then-thou kind of way, frankly I don't care what you do, i'm just curious like what % of the time you speed you get away with it and what % you get caught. (By speeding i mean 130km/h and above.) This has more to do with my curiosity of how effective the cops are than anything else, really.

[Cyrus]

I don't want to say anything because of superstitions but no I am clean as a whistle

 

I don't really drive that quickly, and even then, usually only on a route I know well and know where they are hiding. If you just randomly drive 130+ you will get busted very quickly. If you know where the hiding places are, if you know what a police car looks like, if you are paying attention, many times you can just see them before they see you. Other times you just get lucky...

 

When I did my downtown-WI commute I usually ran 130-140 where it wasn't clogged with traffic (basically A-20 through Dorval) and then "as fast as traffic" for the rest of the way, which was 120 if I was lucky and 10 if I wasn't. Sometimes going home at night I'd run mostly 140-150 but nobody is around, and never too fast around that curve west of the circle... I wouldn't really call it "speeding" since it isn't really fast, just normal...

 

The A-40 seems to have a lot more police presence than the 20 does at least in the western part of the Island where they run alongside each other. Often the police play a dirty trick and back their car up right behind the concrete pillars supporting the overpass, so you can't really see them very well until too late. Often they do that on the overpasses in the A-13 area and in the St. John Blvd overpass, and sometimes Des Sources. Around Parkway / Technoparc they sit in the median. Where the road jumps up to go to Decarie and drops to 70 km/h is another favorite spot, but it is usually jammed anyway.

 

One favorite spot for the Montreal police is the 40 service roads. I usually drive 80 (like everyone else) on the service roads. What is nice is there are some streets and parking lots you can access. About 3 times so far I have spotted a cop waiting in one of these accesses lasering me right out his car window as I am rolling along at 80, but still a good kilometre or so away. So what I did was just turn right into the other street, so long sucker I live in the area so I know where I am going... PS in the East End, in Laval, the service roads are posted 70 and I drive the same 80, like everyone else.

 

Anyway it is mostly all about experience and paying attention. Of course what is really the best is when you get one or two cars to drive just as fast and you can run in a convoy. Try to run in the middle of the convoy. If you are two cars, usually people like to be the last car. This is not always useful, since often as not the cop will just take the last car, easier to catch. But if you stay far behind the first car, you can see his brake lights and slow down well in advance.

 

PS I have noticed my speedometer reads pretty high. The other day I was driving an indicated 70 (or 71) and passed an electronic radar sign that said "votre vitesse : 66". So when I am saying 140 imagine 132 Cars from Europe always seem to be like that.

Modifié 11 mai 2011 par Cyrus

[JFrosty]

Cyrus seems to be spending about 80% of his life in a car, so I bet he got his share of tickets.

[Cataclaw]

Interesting. 0 tickets you say.. I'm a little surprised! Cops can hide behind buildings where you can't see them.. even if you have excellent awareness, they can always surprise you. I'm amazed you've never been caught. Lucky guy!

 

I've never had a ticket either, but then again i never drive faster than the speed of traffic, even when i'm in a hurry. I find there's just no point.

 

I guess I'll never understand the point of speeding.

1. It's breaking the law

2. It doesn't really get you to your destination any faster

3. It wastes a ton of gas (E=MC^2)

[Cyrus]

Interesting. 0 tickets you say.. I'm a little surprised! Cops can hide behind buildings where you can't see them.. even if you have excellent awareness, they can always surprise you. I'm amazed you've never been caught. Lucky guy!

 

I've never had a ticket either, but then again i never drive faster than the speed of traffic, even when i'm in a hurry. I find there's just no point.

 

I guess I'll never understand the point of speeding.

1. It's breaking the law

2. It doesn't really get you to your destination any faster

3. It wastes a ton of gas (E=MC^2)

 

1. Fuck the law

2. Sure it does The key is to again drive properly... often you see someone rushing like crazy in traffic, zig-zag etc and they don't get far, but when the road is empty, distance can go quick

3. E=MC^2 has nothing to do with that

 

Remember, as your speed increases, your aerodynamic drag increases to the square... but also the efficiency of the engine increases as you increase the load (generally) so there is a happy medium at some speed, a rough zone of equal and then a noticeable decline. There isn't much for my driving style vs slower... if you drive 200 though your tank of gas goes in 200 km instead of 500

 

When I drive too slowly I am just... bored. I don't think it is very safe. But it depends on the car... when I drive the pickup, etc, I usually only go 90-110 max instead of 120-140 in my car... steering too vague, gas too expensive etc etc. But driving down the 20 past Saint Limon and Saint Siboire at 100 km/h is like going to the dentist... You said you go 120 in another thread, so you are the same like me

Modifié 11 mai 2011 par Cyrus

[Malek]

I drive very fast too, and in the 10 years i've had my permit, the number of tickets for speeding i got is maybe 5 total.

 

Out of those 5 times, most of them was because i was either talking with someone in the car or being stressed and not paying attention to cops (once i was rushing to get to uni for a final exam, I was late).

 

But so many times, when i speed, and i see the cop, i hit the brake and never once the cop came after me... it's like they see that you're paying attention and let you go.

 

I think they're really after the zombie type who is not paying attention to the road AND speeding.

[Cataclaw]

1. Fuck the law

2. Sure it does The key is to again drive properly... often you see someone rushing like crazy in traffic, zig-zag etc and they don't get far, but when the road is empty, distance can go quick

3. E=MC^2 has nothing to do with that

 

1. I tend to respect the law as a matter of justice and principle, so we'll have to agree to disagree on that one

2. Speeding will take you somewhere faster only if there's no traffic and no stopping. If you drive from L.A. to Las Vegas through the desert, you'll obviously get there faster. Speeding on a wednesday afternoon on autoroute 20 - or worse yet - any local road... yeah. Not so much.

3. Actually, that's flat out wrong. Once you're on your highest gear, increases in speed result will invariably demand more energy at greater ratios. It's a bit of E=MC^2 regarding engine RPM, but it's also wind resistence.

 

"Air resistance goes up as the square of velocity. The power consumed to overcome that air resistance goes up as the cube of the velocity. Rolling resistance is the dominant force below about 40 mph. Above that, every mph costs you mileage. Go as slow as traffic and your schedule will allow. Drive under 60-65 since air grows exponentially denser, in the aerodynamic sense, the faster we drive. To be precise, the most efficient speed is your car's minimum speed in it's highest gear, since this provides the best "speed per RPM" ratio. This is usually about 45 to 55 miles per hour."

 

Try it out yourself one day, you'll see there's a huge difference between just 110km/h and 120km/h. I once did the test driving to Ottawa and back, filling up upon departure and arrival. Doing the trip at 120km/h cost me something like 30km worth of gas more than 108km/h. That's pretty significant.

 

Another huge gas-waster is driving style. Some guys like to accelerate hard when the light goes green but this wastes something like 3-4x more gas than just a slow gentle acceleration.

I always laugh when i see people accelerate hard on Taschereau boulevard only to get stopped at the light.. intersection after intersection. It's like, "grats bro, you arrived to the red light a full 3 seconds before me. You must feel like a champion" *lol*

[Cyrus]

Dude I'm an engineer I studied internal combustion engines in school and aerodynamics

 

A hard acceleration is not necessarily bad. Remember, wide throttle opening reduces pumping losses and improves the thermal efficiency, and the eventual kinetic energy in the vehicle at, say 70 km/h is the same if you want to go fast or slow, only a question of how fast you add it. A hard acceleration to that speed can be less thirsty than a slow acceleration, but not always. If you are burning your tires then it is kind of obvious.

 

I remember a road trial study from BMW that had them running the car at a hard throttle (~75%), but only at low RPM and shifting the gears early, I remember they had a pretty good fuel economy in this way. Saab around the same time tried a different tack, running the car wide open in gears 1, 3 and then 5 skipping 2 and 4 and had a good economy with that.

 

When you have to stop at the light though, that of course is useless.

 

Remember what the throttle is... it is a valve that chokes the engine from sucking enough air and gas as it wants to. You are basically spending gasoline sucking air through a very small straw when the engine isn't doing very much. When you put your foot all the way down, the valve is open and the engine is breathing easily and not spending energy to pump air into itself (well, not a lot).

 

Engine RPM isn't necessarily relevant when you are talking in regards to speed. I've heard people get confused with what RPM is, it is only the speed of the engine. But there are two things... speed and load. Load is the power you are producing at that given time, the actual work, the RPM is just speed. Think of a bicycle going uphill, or downhill... your speed of feet can be high, but you don't burn many calories downhill.

 

You'd probably expect the best fuel efficiency to happen around 40-45 mph but the difference between 45 and 65 isn't much depending on the car. You can usually expect the best thermal efficiency of the engine at it's peak volumetric efficiency, which is typical at the same RPM as the quoted peak torque rating of the manufacturer, but there is a thermal efficiency chart that you can get better data from (if you have a friend who is an engineer at the car company presumably, you don't find these charts in a brochure). Usually we talk of thermal efficiency in g/kWh or pounds fuel per horsepower-hour. In thermodynamics class usually they talk % efficiency but that is awkward to use in real world.

 

E=MC^2 though still has nothing to do with that. Maybe you are thinking E = 1/2 mV^2 (kinetic energy)... E=MC^2 is Einstein's formula to find the embodied energy in the mass of matter that you could theoretically extract by destroying the matter completely and turning it to pure energy.

Modifié 11 mai 2011 par Cyrus

[Cataclaw]

Correct, a hard acceleration isn't necessarily bad, it depends on "How hard is hard". Similarly, a too-slow acceleration can actually be bad for your mileage.

 

Nevertheless, the fact remains (and you now seem to agree) that after a certain point, the faster you go, the worse your fuel efficiency.

The difference between 100km/h and 120km/h might not be much for very particular cars/engines, but for most vehicles, the difference is quite significant. I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but a plethora of studies have pointed to measurably significant fuel efficiency losses between just 100km/h and 110km/h for your average 4-door sedan.

 

Finally, yeah i'm th inking of kinetic energy, not mass-energy equivalence >_< My CEGEP physics is far far back right now. Regardless, the principle i'm describing is still true -- all things equal (gears and what not) the faster you want to go = the more resistance you encounter = greater force = more energy (^2+) and the worse your fuel efficiency.

 

 

All this comes back to the argument that speeding wastes gas. And it does, you've just admitted it If you don't care to waste some gas and you can afford it, that's fine with you and that's fine with me, but the fact remains... it does waste gas. A pretty fair amount too (30km worth over 210km from my own testing)

Modifié 11 mai 2011 par Cataclaw