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Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

Connected cars are going to create a much safer world .... the other month someone was in the news after a hit-and-run, the vehicle phoned the police and reported it itself. Eventually when all the cars have cameras, sensors, autonomous power to report to police things like speeding, reckless driving, hit and runs etc will go instinct as every vehicle around you is recording, reporting...

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Undoubtedly some aspects of life will become safer, but the interesting question is "At what expense does that safety come?"

Just because something is the new normal, doesn't mean it is "right".

In terms of traffic control it's probably going to be mostly beneficial for people. Bad drivers will surely be annoyed, just as they were when running red lights and speeding became things that could be enforced 24/7.

If it spread to security cameras ... consequences could be a grave new world where a young Dennis Leary is caught in his very first act of subversion.

Bad drivers will surely be annoyed, just as they were when running red lights and speeding became things that could be enforced 24/7.

I like to consider myself a good driver, I'm mostly concerned about black-and-white application, where we had officer discretion in the past. (Discretion is hard to teach computers)

The traffic light I "ran" yesterday springs to mind. Second in line at stoplight (behind a cop no less). Light turns green, we roll into intersection. Light changes to yellow, then red, before either of us exit the intersection. An officer would not ticket me, but a computer that was not meticulously programmed probably would.

Situations like that won't always be easy and probably require manual arbitration which also creates work unfairly too.

But I'm much more interested in the egregious stuff in the rest of the world that goes largely unpoliced and kills millions a year - the Costa Rica version of your story is intersections routinely blocked by busses that are eager to cross when there's no space and an orange light!

I don't know what the law is in your state, but in some states (like AZ), the law is that you only have to enter the intersection when it's green or yellow. If it turns red while you're still in the intersection, that's no problem for you, but other drivers have to wait for you to clear the intersection. So it's perfectly normal for turning drivers to enter the intersection and wait there, and then after the lights turn red and the straight-through drivers clear the way, the people turning will finish their turn, and the oncoming traffic with a green light has to wait for them to do this.

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