This kind of automated ticket (or beyond, think apple on devices scanning) enforcement is straight up police state/Fascism - do you want to live in a world where your existence is at every second scanned for illegal acts?
Enforcing traffic laws is good, actually. Automated enforcement is even better so that we don't need to use armed police and can enforce consistently.
Speeding, reckless driving, running red lights and stop signs is absolutely rampant where I live and people really do die because of it.
I'm tired of entitled assholes thinking that they can drive however they want, endanger everyone around them, and that they just have the right to do that. Even if they don't value their own lives, we value ours.
So I strongly support red light and speed cameras, traffic calming, and physical pedestrian and bike barriers. Not sure sure about cars self-reporting, only because you could just buy a different car. There is a pretty strong argument that cars have no need to be able go 50+ mph over the speed limit like they can now.
> So I strongly support red light and speed cameras, traffic calming, and physical pedestrian and bike barriers.
That's because you (naively) don't think it will be abused. You can easily find articles and news reports where they report shortening the yellow lights so that the cameras were profitable.
because people don’t disclose when they’re acting nefariously, and there are no automated systems monitoring that, so you’ve got an uphill battle to prove that it even exists as a problem let alone that someone did it intentionally, etc.
in short: because
of the presumption of good faith and innocence on the part of the ticketing authority (and especially their agents, once it’s inevitably privatized etc)
Enforcing traffic laws are good. Automating that is bad. Who is to say what the sure limit is? My car has sign recognition. There is some construction and the freeway drops to 35 mph. There is a sign that says that. But at the exact same place is an off ramp to another freeway. Speedlimit is greater then 35 mph, but my car thought it was 35 because it saw the sign.
Sure it is an edge case, but there are a lot of edge cases.
Automatic law enforcement is a bane on society. It is there to increase revenue, not to make the roads safer.
For one thing, automatic enforcement is imperfect, and people who can't afford to miss work to go to court will be disproportionately impacted by false positives.
More importantly, this kind of infrastructure as a whole is dangerous to put in the hands of the government. Next election cycle it could be put to use for purposes you certainly don't agree with. The government rarely gives any power back that it's given.
I don't personally know of false-positive rates, but I know you can contest automated tickets, and I wouldn't assume that the false-positive rate for cameras is actually worse than for human police.
One thing that is true though, is that traffic fatalities are higher in poorer communities that tend to have less enforcement. Putting red light and speeding cameras in those areas will disproportionately save lives.
Regarding the danger of it all - I think armed police are more dangerous.
> and I wouldn't assume that the false-positive rate for cameras is actually worse than for human police.
Seems like a strange assumption. A 24/7 camera system automating tickets will produce infinitely more infractions than any human, leading to infinitely more false positives.
Regardless, the challenge is to implement a robust system that allows for and streamlines appeals.
Here in our jurisdiction traffic infringements are issued with a clear good resolution image of an alleged infraction, a link to view raw data on police servers, and fast means to pay and a choice to lodge an appeal.
To appeal means full raw evidence can be viewed in person, frames before and after event can be seen, and individuals can challenge equipment calibration or assert they were not driving or that the plates were on wrong vehicle (stolen vehicle ID), etc.
Appeals have been won on the grounds that "other events" caused infraction making it reasonable, that vehicle was incorrectly ID'd, that another person was driving at time, etc. Technical nerds have even won appeals by arguing that radar gear wasn't calibrated and angle of setup made accurate reading impossible with the margin of error claimed.
> the challenge is to implement a robust system that allows for and streamlines appeals.
The challenge is how do we get people to not commit infractions. Any other goal creates perverse outcomes. Automating those other goals creates even worse outcomes.
There is no such solution that doesn't in the process eliminate free will, given the ability to speed (or drive the wrong way, turn against signal, etc) some will speed (or otherwise infract) to some degree or another.
A well implemented and fair system that catches a proportion of speeders will result in fewer speeders overall. The more that pressure to catch them all increases the more unrest and pushback is provoked. At some point there's an acceptable comprimise between the public and the system employed by the public to improve order on public assets.
Or you can go full autocracy if you wish. Most prefer not to.
The best way I can describe the courts setup around automated red light cameras is as a kangaroo court. They have very little oversight, the owner of the vehicle gets ticketed regardless of the driver, and the fines are fairly high (depending on where you live). The fine tends to be some kind of civil penalty, but it also has the ability to block your drivers license renewal. Yes, it takes the cop out of the equation, but it also takes accountability out of the equation as well. There's also the fact that red light cameras just flat out don't improve safety, but they do increase municipal profits. The only reason they ever got installed over bumps and road barriers is due to lobbying: https://web.archive.org/web/20110526113001/http://www.motori...
>The best way I can describe the courts setup around automated red light cameras is as a kangaroo court. They have very little oversight, the owner of the vehicle gets ticketed regardless of the driver, and the fines are fairly high (depending on where you live).
I'm not sure how this is a kangaroo court. If the machines are generally known to be working correctly, and have an up to date calibration certificate, it makes sense that you can't dispute the validity of the evidence. It's not any different than limiting the avenues of appeal for breathalyzer results in DUI cases. Otherwise, the courts would swamped with people trying to drag out the case by doing the same appeal process over and over again. The fact that the owner gets penalized rather than the driver is more sketchy, but if the owner authorized someone else to use his car, why shouldn't he be on the hook for infractions? For instance, you lent your car to someone else and it got towed, do you think it's acceptable to use the "you can't prove I did the parking/driving" excuse to get off of it?
Not sure what you are arguing here, people should be penalized without justice and there shouldn’t be accountability on the part of the blaming party because these people will block the court if they have a chance? Are you reinventing the law?
I'm not sure where the "penalized without justice and there shouldn’t be accountability on the part of the blaming party " is coming from. At least where I live if you get such a ticket you can always dispute the ticket in court, although you'll be rarely successful because the cops/government has done this enough times that the usual excuses (eg. "the machine isn't reliable!") doesn't work.
> The City is not authorized to delegate police power by entering into a contract that allows a private vendor to screen data and decide whether a violation has occurred before sending that data to a traffic infraction enforcement officer to use as the basis for authorizing a citation.
This is generally how all of them work and that is why you go to civil court to fight a civil penalty if you appeal the ticket. That is a de facto kangaroo court when the consequence can overlap with drivers license revocation for a civil matter.
Source? At least in my jurisdiction they're reviewed by police officers. A recent story[1] about red light cameras work in a town in Florida also describes something similar. Moreover, while delegating ticket issuing powers to a private company might come with procedural issues and raise questions about impartiality, it's hardly enough reason to call it a "kangaroo court" if you're able to dispute it in court. That's the case for both my local jurisdiction and the florida town mentioned in the story. That's not to say that there aren't any red light camera kangaroo courts out there, or even that most of them aren't, but there's no reason why red light cameras are "kangaroo courts" in and of themselves.
I would suggest you experience the process. Go run an automated red light and see how it works, all the way up to trying to appeal before you boldly claim the process works and is fair.
There is now usually a police officer in the mix, but they're not actually doing much if anything other than clicking a button. They just believe whatever the machine and video paints and use the existing assumptions about car owners being responsible over drivers.
>There is now usually a police officer in the mix, but they're not actually doing much if anything other than clicking a button. They just believe whatever the machine and video paints and use the existing assumptions about car owners being responsible over drivers.
Which part do you think is unfair? The police/courts blindly trusting the machine, or the owner being fined rather than the driver?
The whole shabang is a big, abrupt departure from how we enforce traffic laws. Normally you had the option to face your accuser, there was room for interpretation and discernment, and the law was sufficiently nuanced.
It's interesting how much more concerned Americans are about winds of change in enforcement than European countries who have had speed cameras for decades; It (and local speed trap laws based on bad actor precedent) really reveal the perversions of, it seems, local government implementations.
Maybe a better middle ground is that other people can record and report you instead of being forced to report yourself. This way, people can freely drive how they want so long as they are respectful of others around them.
If it’s manually reviewed, then that sounds much more palatable. Basically a dash cam with a submit the cops button, sure. Automation of this is very dystopian however.
I just got a super annoying ticket for going a reasonable speed (30) in a spot with an unreasonable limit (20mph) pretty sure the automatic enforcement is about revenue not safety.
40,000 people a year aren't dying from chat apps, and driving is a public activity done on public roads, unlike chatting. The analogy doesn't hold at all.
I'm sure you can get somewhere close to that amount of you include all the violence committed by gangs/organized criminals, and include indirect deaths like drug overdose or whatever.
>and driving is a public activity done on public roads, unlike chatting.
Fine, how about having your movements in public published for all to see
> Enforcing traffic laws is good, actually. Automated enforcement is even better so that we don't need to use armed police and can enforce consistently.
We don't use armed police to enforce traffic laws. Police mainly monitor traffic as a revenue device. It's already been proven that monitoring traffic and automating fines in fact promotes reckless driving and causes more accidents than it stops.
> We don't use armed police to enforce traffic laws.
In what world? In the US "manual" traffic enforcement is almost exclusively done by armed police and sheriffs. Unarmed civilian traffic enforcement is only done in Berkeley, CA, and a town in Minnesota, afaik.
> It's already been proven that monitoring traffic and automating fines in fact promotes reckless driving and causes more accidents than it stops.
Do you have a citation for that? There are numerous studies that show significant drops in accident rates in areas with red light cameras. On the order of 10-23%!
There is no privacy value of vehicle speed. But it offers great value to society when it's being automatically enforced according to law. I think the pros outweigh the cons heavily here.
It's a little bit different, but not very different. I object strongly to the idea that if something is in public then unlimited surveillance is acceptable. Cameras everywhere magnifying the eyes of the government by orders of magnitude is a very bad thing.
People exist in public. There should be very little tracking as a baseline.
> Putting up speeding cameras on public roads is not “unlimited surveillance” or “cameras everywhere”
Not by themselves, but public roads are a huge portion of everywhere when you look at person-hours spent in public.
Street corner cameras are also neither unlimited nor everywhere. But the combination of those two gets extremely oppressive.
Even just one is enough to track almost all your movements. Everyone's movements are not supposed to be in a database somewhere just because they moved through public spaces. And sure lots of those cameras are not centrally connected today, but the "it's public" argument allows it just fine.
They definitly can be. That's the slope. Where do you stop. Any totalitarian worth thier salt can easily make that leap. Use monitoring to curb one type of crime and "undesirable" behavior, why not use it for other types and before you know it, your entire existince is monitored in detail just to make sure you're acting exactly the way "they" want you to. That's how it works. The "I have nothing to hide" is a long debunked argument.
Then why enforce any laws? Any enforcement is on the same slippery slope.
I don’t think slope is nearly as slippery as you claim. There are miles of high friction slope between enforcing traffic laws on public roads and totalitarianism.
It absolutely is not. Police State does not refer to excessive policing. It means police enforcing political agenda. Frankly, the US has a disgusting excess of traffic fatalities and no Constitutional protections to driving. I think heavy-handed safety enforcement is entirely warranted.
I do agree with your point, but I wanted to mention that lately I have found that, in a philosophical way I guess, everything is political whether we want it to be or not. What's not an agenda to you, IS to someone else. Even if it's merely your inaction to do something, whether calculated or not.
Unfortunately this seems to be the cause of a lot of debates... just differences in opinion over terminology basically, but I think people all too often don't look at it that way.
In the last few days I've taken a few Waymo's around SF and driven back and forth on I-80.
I-80 is definitely a hotbed of aggressively dangerous driving and the violent use of vehicles against others that aren't driving how you want them to (and I'm a fast driver).
Have those two experiences very much back to back, I joked about how once we get robo-taxis we'll never go back. Human drivers are dangerous enough of the time -- it's not like I've ever driven on I-80 and NOT seen crazy, pants- staining driving. It's every mile or two of the whole stretch.
(Waymo feels so much more mature and pleasant than the last FSD Beta I tested.. Elon should be embarassed.)
I'd argue that the main issue on US highways is a lack of discipline.
US drivers get away with murder in terms of undertaking, tailgating, camping in fast lanes under the speed limit, not to mention driving vehicles that are in such states of disrepair that it's a miracle the drivers get anywhere.
I'm way more relaxed cruising at 160km/h in Europe than literally any stretch of the I-5.
> US drivers get away with murder in terms of undertaking, tailgating, camping in fast lanes under the speed limit, not to mention driving vehicles that are in such states of disrepair that it's a miracle the drivers get anywhere.
Great, so why aren't those things ever candidates for this kind of automated enforcement? Why is it always "speeding"? In addition to the ones you listed, there are so many distractions now, too. Take a ride down any US freeway as a passenger in some kind of elevated vehicle (like a double decker bus) such that you can see down into people's cars: Probably 1/2 or more are totally out of it, distracted zombies scrolling on their phones. Nobody is calling for this to be cracked down on either.
It's always just "speeding". Like if we solve that, we're done.
Speeding is a lot easier to solve than distracted driving. It is pretty trivial to measure it objectively from outside the offending vehicle. Speeding also makes everything else worse due to stopping times and kinetic energy. It is also a black and white thinking fallacy to argue that just because someone promotes one thing that they necessarily demote everything else.
> I'd argue that the main issue on US highways is a lack of discipline.
That is a fair point, but unfortunately there is no good solution to that... otherwise we wouldn't need laws and their enforcement in the first place.
It's all about risk... if people are speeding too often and too fast that it's becoming dangerous (which I 1000% agree with), then I think more strict enforcement is warranted.
Conversely, we don't outlaw going outside just because someone could run you over... the risk is not high enough. But I think the risk of injury or death from speeding is very high.
If I go in a crowded night club and start swinging a golf club around, but not at any specific individual, is the end result violence? Was my action violent?
To me it's an extremely clear yes. The only reason I can see why we view this differently is just because we've all agreed this doesn't apply to choices made while driving. But I can't see why that would be the case.
On your first point, that sounds like violence to me, sure. It's almost guaranteed to cause harm, and the club swinger probably knows that.
On your second point, the likelihood that speeding will cause actual harm to another person is vastly lower, and certainly not an outcome expected or intended by drivers generally speaking. Seems silly to call that "violence" when we can just call it irresponsible, negligent, etc.
The risk of pedestrian death in a collision goes from about 10% at 25mph to over 50% at 40mph, and this level of speeding is absolutely normal in the american city I live in.
A pedestrian dying because of a driver's decision to speed in this way is predictable, absolutely expected. Shit I doubt my odds with a golf club at a party are anywhere near 50%. So why is one violence and the other not? I think only because we have decided it is not. But again that decision is exactly what I'm challenging. Calling it silly is not a convincing argument to me.
Those things aren't really equivalent though. The percentage of pedestrian deaths in a collision at given speeds is starting from a 100% rate of incidence. So whilst it's predictable, it's not necessarily probable. How many pedestrians is a driver actually likely to hit driving at 40mph? Generally speaking, zero. How many people is a lunatic swinging golf club likely to hit in a crowded club, quite a lot more than zero.
Nevertheless, I appreciate your point. I was thinking only of speeding on highways. Speeding is an issue and shouldn't be minimised.
Of the subset of unintentional crashes it's hard to say how many of them are from irresponsible driving behavior. But I do know that the vast majority of people driving around me on highways/freeways/etc do not obey the speed limit and instead just sort of travel in high speed flocks. Like they don't care that they're operating extremely dangerous vehicles doing an extremely dangerous thing. This is not intent to cause harm but more like playing catch with a loaded firearm.
People driving at the speed of surrounding traffic are not creating a particularly high risk even if their speed exceeds the posted speed limit. People driving at a different speed from surrounding traffic do create an unusual risk, even if that speed is legal and the other drivers are speeding.
This becomes less true in places like Germany where lane discipline is very strict. It's not rare to see extreme speed differentials on unlimited speed sections of German Autobahns, but it is rare to see crashes there.
> People driving at the speed of surrounding traffic are not creating a particularly high risk even if their speed exceeds the posted speed limit.
The whole "everything is fine as long as everyone is doing the same speed" bit is a myth.
For every percent increase in speed, this leads to a 2% change in injury accidents, a 3% change in severe injury accidents and a 4% change in fatal accidents.
Just to be clear, are you and others in this thread advocating driving the posted 45MPH speed limit on a highway where the actual flow of traffic is going 65MPH? And you don't think that's going to be disruptive to the point of causing accidents?
Just to be clear, are you and others in this thread advocating for driving 20 mph faster than the 45 mph speed limit just because you see other criminals doing the same? That's wildly illegal and would probably get your license revoked.
That's essentially the situation on the highways through Atlanta. It's so extreme that some students made a video[0] demonstrating the extreme effect on traffic when drivers in every lane maintain the speed limit.
Their conclusion is that the speed limit should be increased; there are other reasonable conclusions one might draw, but I would argue against the one that follows from your comment: that nearly every driver on the road deserves punishment.
Changing the speed limit to the current status quo "speeding" is the reasonable thing, yes. We've already accepted that rate of lives lost at the higher speeds so make it official. Law breaking while driving should not ever be the status quo. It's an absurd situation that one almost has to break the law to drive.
I would be very interested in if people would then go the reasonable new speed limit or if they would continue in their speeding flocks and only travel even faster. To me it seems like their speed is mostly something they evaluate relative to the rest of the drivers and not to absolute speeds so it'd take quite a change in behavior.
As for [0], the traffic back-up proves only that the vast majority of people on that road are speeding.
Maybe there's better research available, but this DOT report found that changing speed limits has fairly little effect on how fast people drive: http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
My take on it is that when the speed limit doesn't match the 85th percentile speed of actual drivers, something should be changed. Sometimes, (often, in my view) it's the speed limit. Sometimes, it's the design of the road, especially in cases of neighborhood streets that are shaped like highways. Sometimes the answer may be highly-visible traffic cameras, as the advance warning and certainty of punishment will slow down almost every driver.
> People driving at a different speed from surrounding traffic do create an unusual risk, even if that speed is legal and the other drivers are speeding
Driving the limit in the right lane is almost always fine.
People who do not drive the speed limit are objectively breaking the law. And generally each flock travels at a different speed. After all, they have no way to communicate a common speed standard like, say, a speed limit.
I agree say this is generally true in the United States, where driving discipline on highways is basically non-existent. Although I would stop short of calling it "extremely dangerous".
How many people would need to die each year for it to be considered extremely dangerous? Literal wars have been started over fewer deaths than the US road network racks up in a year. OK I’m being facetious but the extent to which we’ve normalised 40,000+ deaths a year really is remarkable, can you imagine the reaction if smart phones killed that many?
But speeding-related fatalities accounted for 30% of traffic fatalities in the US for 2022. Which implies there are plenty of other issues, such that I think saying "speeding is violence" doesn't really do anything to address the problem.
Roadway injuries and deaths are both leading causes for many demographics and the US has a death rate three times Canada's, per capita. More than 4x the UK's.
> violence really does imply some intent to harm another person, or people.
That is one of the meanings/senses of the word, but not the only one.
It is perfectly reasonable to say that driving ~200km/h is a violent speed without saying the the driver is being violent because those are two different senses of the word.
> Within an individual human context, violence usually requires intent.
There is a sense of the word that implies intent, but that is only one of the senses and another sense that means "forceful or strong" is often used in describing traits of individual humans and their behavior emotions. A violent nod is not a nod intended to cause harm. The violence of someone's emotions refers to their strength, not their intent.
Oh wow. I definitely don’t want my car looping me into someone else’s legal issues. Any chance it’s gonna make me have to show up in court for something I had nothing to do with, is too much chance.
I've thought about that for a while now. My car knows how fast I am going and it now knows what the speed limit is, so all it needs is a little printer to print out the speeding tickets.
My car reads traffic signs to try and tell me what the speed limit is, it's wrong ALL THE TIME. The problem is signs that say things like "55 after midnight" or "65 for trucks" are interpreted as "55" and "65".
And when it is relying on mapping data, it's not uncommon for it to mistakenly think I'm on a frontage road because the GPS/map is off by enough.
My Honda frequently reads out god-knows-what as speed limits. 70 in school zones, 110 MPH somewhere. I think it sometimes reads gas station prices as speed limits.
Probably an artifact of being California centric. Afaik, California has an implied speed limit of 25mph (or is it 35?) when there's no posted limit. Oregon defaults to 55mph on most roads with no posted sign.
In my experience, it knows what the speed limit might have been at some time on some road. Not necessarily the one I'm actually on or at the current time.
Yeah, having driven long distances in all kinds of rental cars with speed limit information shown on the dashboard, the car "knows" the speed limit accurately about 50% of the time.
To promote self-driving cars, I would start by implementing intrusive surveillance, such as speed monitors. Next, I would lobby the government to allow this data to be used for prosecution.
Make it fearful to actually drive. a similar effect to speed cameras. Who doesn't go 10 over in typical loose traffic?
Clickbait title. In the patent “Ford discusses using cars to monitor each other's speeds.” Key word: others’. They’re essentially discussing tattle mode. I could see myself turning it on for e.g. 25 over on the freeway.
What do you mean, clickbait? Why is the 2nd car taking pictures of mine when I'm over the limit, and what is the intended use of that image? I'm not saying that you didn't read TFA, but I don't think you read all of it. Take a look at that flowchart that's toward the bottom. And what is referred to with the word "pursuit" in that flowchart?
I used to get a lot of tickets until I cruise control got reliable traffic detection. Now I have it on almost exclusively. The only places I get tickets now are usually places that the speed changes and I don't notice.
I would like to set my cruise control to just be "current speed limit". If these cars are going to start monitoring the speed limit to the degree of being able to tell if you're breaking the law, they better have such a setting. If they don't then it seems almost like some sort of entrapment.
blue cruise is amazing for that, though I'll note that there's a setting for how much above the speed limit you're comfortable with, so you could set it to 0, but you can also set it to 14 over limit and it'll cruise control quite well, turning and braking for you.
Might depend on where you live. Not all roads are created equal.
I'm thinking stuff like many posted speed limit changes within a short length, damaged or missing signs, non-obvious construction and school zones, road passes through varying types of neighborhood, speed limit unexpectedly low for the design, etc.
By far the most annoying to me are off ramp speed limits that are so unrealistically slow they'd probably cause rear-end collisions or pile ups if anyone actually tried to obey them.
> In the application, Ford discusses using cars to monitor each other's speeds. If one car detects that a nearby vehicle is being driven above the posted limit, it could use onboard cameras to photograph that vehicle. A report containing both speed data and images of the targeted vehicle could then be sent directly to a police car or roadside monitoring units via an Internet connection, according to Ford.
> [...]
> It's unclear what legal argument Ford would make should it try to implement this tech, as human police officers wouldn't be witnessing the alleged speeding being reported through the connected cars. Speed cameras already provide stationary enforcement of speed limits, but they can only issue tickets based on a vehicle's license plate number because they can't confirm who is driving.
That's kind of my first question - isn't there a chain of custody problem or something? If I took a picture of a car and texted it to a cop with the message "hey this guy is speeding", I would fully expect them to discard it on the grounds that they can't prove it and frankly have little reason to believe me. Why would they believe this? And if they do, how hard is it to abuse? Are we going to see "how to give anybody you want a speeding ticket" blog posts?
Simpler just to limit speed to the limit. Have the car do the policing for free. I just drove from LA to San Jose on I-5 (400 miles of mostly two lane freeway) using speed control set at the speed limit and it was very easy when everyone is going at that speed. Problems arise when there are slow trucks or people driving over the limit trying to pass any way they can. E.g. slow truck A passes even slower truck B and blocks the fast lane for speed limit traffic.
I suspect setting it at the exact speed limit leads to excessive passing of your car under good conditions, decreasing safety. In poor conditions, it might be too fast.
It is much safer to go with the flow of traffic, which can vary due to lots of factors, but on a clear freeway will generally be slightly above the speed limit.
I tried the telsa full self driving mode at the speed limit, and it leads to frustrated people behind you. There is also an AUTO setting that adjusts to the flow of traffic and it blends much better with traffic.
If anything, this system would be useful to help avoid high speed chases. This still wouldn't obsolete GPS darts though (unreported stolen vehicle scenario).
Otherwise I'd expect the cops to ignore almost all requests to catch a speeder, and I'd expect local courts to become so overwhelmed that they'd ignore reports without multi-dashcam evidence. They'd also have to implement their own validation against known posted speed limits vs what the car thinks the speed limit is.
There are also legitimate reasons to speed up such as avoiding an accident. What used to be an act of defensive driving is now a ticket to fight? That's ridiculous and by no means uncommon.
Shouldn't the patent office do a sanity check on decidability for ideas involving computers?
Look at red light cameras. New York City introduced red light cameras in 1994 to stop offenders. In 2022, NYC cameras issued 618,000 red light violation tickets.
If you want to limit behavior, use engineering. Add speed limiters to cars, or speed bumps to roads.
One of the core problems with enforcement right now is that municipalities rarely impound cars because of unpaid tickets. So often you'll see that someone that caused a major fatality crash had thousands in unpaid fines.
I think if we just took away cars and licenses, and eventually throwing people in jail, it would have a huge positive impact.
We've normalized car culture so much that we forget how dangerous cars can be to pedestrians. And, we've built cities to favor cars over people. Prioritizing pedestrian safety will take a lot of work.
Japan values pedestrians. There, it's a 3-year prison sentence for drinking and driving.
This isn't going into production, for the obvious reason that customers would flat out hate it.
This is on a patent because at many manufacturing companies legal comes by a few times a year to collect patentable ideas from engineering, and someone coughed this one up. Simple as that.
This is coming whether we like it or not. At least in the US the average driver seems to have this incorrect idea that driving is a right and speeding is a right.
Making the cars safer hasn't been working as drivers are managing to kill more people as the cars get safer by behaving more and more badly. So this is going to be the next thing once the public gets sick of the carnage.
Ford is likely working on this because the EU is finalizing rules to make cars warn drivers when they're speeding.
