Los Angeles hit a new milestone in 2023. For the first time in a decade, the number of deaths due to traffic fatalities outnumbered homicides, according to the LAPD’s End of Year Crime Report released last week.
It’s not just a Los Angeles phenomenon though, since car crash rates have surged state-wide.
In 2022, traffic deaths alone claimed the lives of 4,407 Californians, according to the National Transportation Research Nonprofit. It’s a grim situation that the California Senate is hoping to change.
Earlier this week, a package of bills called “Speeding and Fatality Emergency Reduction on California Streets” was introduced to the California Senate by San Francisco State Sen. Scott Wiener. One of those bills would stop drivers from speeding by requiring the installation of speed governors — internal speed monitors — into all vehicles either sold or manufactured in California by 2027.
Speed governors use GPS technology to ascertain the speed limit in a specific area. If it detects that the vehicle is going 10 mph over the speed limit, it’ll make the car slow down.
The bill follows recent recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board to mandate speed-limiting technologies and warning systems in order to combat traffic-related deaths.
Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore said he was proud of the work that the LAPD is doing, even with a “diminished workforce” during his Wednesday end-of-year LA crime statistics press conference alongside Mayor Karen Bass.
“I look forward to taking on [these] terrible instances of fatal hit-and-run collisions and DUI’s,” Moore said. “This is an organization that constantly looks to improve.”
The objective of the bill is to make roads safer and to reduce the number of traffic fatality deaths, but Nizhoni McDonough, a junior majoring in law history and culture, said that the proposed legislation is “kind of insane.”
“I feel like that’s really unsafe,” McDonough said. “If it automatically stops you like that. I think there could be extenuating circumstances where you have to speed up if someone else on the road is driving crazy.”
The bill’s author — Scott Wiener — is open to the bill being changed, particularly in regards to what type of speed governor should be required. According to the LA Times, there are two types of speed governors: active and passive. An active speed governor physically forces cars to slow down whereas passive speed governors only make loud and irritating sounds upon detecting speeding.
“If you’re driving over the speed limit and [the loud sound] distracts you that greatly, that could just make more problems instead of solving the safety issue at hand,” McDonough said.
Pradeep Velidi, an electrical engineering master’s student, said that it makes sense that the bill carves out exceptions for the vehicles of first responders — firefighters, police officers and paramedics — who would be able to turn off the speed governor at will.
“Obviously the firefighters and the paramedics would definitely have to cross the speed limit to save someone’s life,” Velidi said.
But McDonough said that allowing police officers to bypass the speed restrictions can still be dangerous.
“If [the police] are trying to chase someone, they’re causing danger to other people around them on the road if they’re not being mindful of the pedestrians or other people driving on the road,” McDonough said.
If passed, it would be the first of its kind in the nation, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. If the bill makes it past the Senate, it’ll still have to get the signature of Gov. Gavin Newsom to become law. Newsom vetoed one of Wiener’s previous transportation bills back in 2019.
The bill comes on the heels of the European Union, which passed legislation in 2022 to require speed governors in vehicles starting in July of this year.
Velidi said there’s a chance that the speed governor might malfunction and put the driver in harm’s way.
“The law sounds good, but the thing is it’s also making us more constrained,” Velidi said. “It is also making driving more safer than you think. It has both bad and good [parts]. So we have to accept that if they are to put the law into action.”