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Comment by tallowen | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if we had the tech to apply speed governors in places with high crash rates! What if departments of transportation could lower speeds dynamically to make sure that risky road infrastructure is made safer.

I can't help but feel a little bit salty about these baindaid solutions to our ever increasing rate of road deaths in the US. I'm not sure what the right solutions are to keeping people safe while allowing them to get where they want to go but the solution of adding yet another notification on an electronic device seems disheartening to me.

An article about increased pedestrian deaths: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...

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Competent authorities don't ask for technology to be added to the car to deal with very dangerous spots: They redesign them. The dangerous spot was designed by an engineer, and approved by an official or eight. If it's that dangerous, it was designed putting safety too far down the priority list: It happens. So why add a speed governor, with its bonus risks, instead of just redesign that section of road correctly?

It's the same as with the pedestrian deaths: It's dangerous vehicles that hit in the chest, and roads that make pedestrians cross a surface of cars going way too fast to react. We can avoid the situation altogether by fixing the road.

I agree with the idea that I would like to see roads redesigned to make them safer.

I'm not sure why it's an either or though. Redesigning roads can certainly slow people down and make them safer but that often comes at the cost of a large planning process and a lot of money spent. Dyanmic speed limits and speed governors could be much simpler to manage.

I think most proposals for speed governors would make it difficult to go over 10 mph above the speed limit under non emergency operation. I don't think anyone would argue that it's safe to drive 10 mph over the speed limit on a redesigned street so why wouldn't a speed govenor be another tool in the toolkit?

Arguably your plan would take longer to implement as you would need standardization across vehicles, implementation into actual cars, extensive testing, adoption by drivers, codification into the law with some enforcement mechanism and implementation on selected locations. It's a cool creative idea but redesigning a junction seems like something more within reach and that can actually prevent crashes in the meantime.

If you want to tackle speeding on highways, income-based fines from speed cameras seem like the way to go. It is more feasible, can be implemented more quickly and easily and is cheaper overall.

So really, it seems like a new expensive tool with questionable relative benefits that would take really long to deliver (not to mention the privacy / freedom concerns its existence would raise) while the existing tools haven't even been used yet.

I agree that we would need testing and trials before it could be rolled out. Many trucks in the US are already implementing these for various reasons. Other countries are already mandating this.

The European Union is introducing mandatory “Intelligent Speed Assist” in 2024 which requires a lot of the technology that you’re referring to.

I think the real obstacle to this is no longer technological but political

Fair, I didn't know about this. They are farther ahead than I knew.

But Intelligent Speed Assistance is way more lenient and it is up to the car maker how stringent they are. It can be as little as a beep which should be very easy to wire into a dashboard that already shows the speed. Indeed, this removes a lot of plausible deniability for speeding and arguably really is helpful to the driver.

Standardizing and implementing a limit, however, would take more time and testing. Mistakes could result in dangerous situations.

> I don't think anyone would argue that it's safe to drive 10 mph over the speed limit on a redesigned street

Speed limits are set for many reasons. In good conditions, such as very light traffic, good visibility, dry road, limited access, reasonable maintenance of vehicle and road, it's not unreasonable for the safe speed to be 20 mph or more over the posted limit, depending on what went into setting the posted limit.

"Imagine if we had the tech to apply speed governors in places with high crash rates! What if departments of transportation could lower speeds dynamically to make sure that risky road infrastructure is made safer."

This, of course, could be done, but what if people driving fast are rushing to flee a rapidly advancing forest fire, tidal wave, active shooter, etc?

As a check on the ever-growing power of government and surveillance tech, anytime a system is capable of taking away someone's liberty, there should be a human in the loop on the other side to make sure those decisions are reasonable.

Edit: Or just don't take away their liberty at all

Sure, reasonable. But not a this-or-that kind of thing.

Hit a button - override! Be your own boss. There was a fire, everybody will understand.

But you just press that button because you're a type-A dick, well pay the ticket then.

Liberty!

Sounds nice, but eventually, the button is always taken away.

No, the button stays but the price increases so much so only rich assholes can use it.

So... a speed camera?

Curiously, different in a particular way. See, your car is reporting your speed. Self-reported speeding is a different niche.

Maybe you could have a speed governor that can be overridden if the gas petal is fully pressed to the floor. (Fine for gas cars but probably not a good experience in EVs).

I live near a blind turn into an intersection where the speed limit is 50. When there’s heavy fog, it’s deadly. I’ve seen 2 fatal accidents, one with a dump truck and school bus, multiple people died. Another one I witnessed the next year was someone head on hitting a telephone pole. Same intersection. Same conditions (heavy fog).

Right now the only other solution is to reduce the speed limit or to add a red light. Or do nothing and let the accidents continue

How do we balance safety regulations with these emergency situations?

We're experiencing some of the highest traffic fatality rates in decades and I think the liberty of those dying and being injured on our streets need to be taken into account as well.

I prefer the technological solution of a speed governor to automated traffic cameras because I think automated traffic cameras can easily become surveilance devices while speed governors tend to be implemented locally (i.e. within the car).

Are there other solutions that you prefer that can protect liberty law abiding drivers and pedestrians from the recklessness of speeding and dangerous driving?

Ticket drivers who drive dangerously. Address the problem (the person's decisions), not the tool they're using.

Eh your right to drive like an aggressive maniac is not enshrined in the constitution.

People have consistently shown that they’re incapable of driving responsibly. If we’re not going to fix the actual problems, I’d prefer some limits on car speeds when inside cities and more populated areas.

> "People" have consistently shown that they’re incapable of driving responsibly. Therefore "You" should have less freedom and if it results in You and Your family dying because a device You paid for refused to do what You told it to, that's an acceptable loss to Me

That may not be the best line of reasoning. There's probably a lot of things you enjoy doing that aren't "enshrined in the constitution" that I might want to take from you in order to make me feel more comfortable, and the same can likely be said for a lot of other people as well. If we all played your game there's no telling how much you could end up being prevented from doing.

I like speed limits too, I'm glad that we already have them. Draconian enforcement of rules by machines is supposed to be a cautionary tale, not something to aim for.

You are driving on publicly funded roads in a licensed machine where the police have the legal authority to demand you submit to inspection at any time, and you legally must purchase insurance from a private company to operate it.

I would say local speed governors would be less authoritarian than many interventions that already exist for driving, which is an act that is already a leading cause of death in North America.

Just make it an IR blaster on the street lamps over the road that the municipality can remote command to send out the "low speed limit next N meters" signal. Let it be legal for drivers to override the governor, but doing so is effectively an admission of guilt that you're speeding.

> rushing to flee a rapidly advancing forest fire, tidal wave, active shooter

You design for the normal, not the "so unlikely that 99% of drivers will never be in this situation in a lifetime of driving."

So much of what engineers design for is the abnormal. 100 year flood, hurricane strength wind, web traffic surge, etc etc.

If you can't anticipate contingency in your design, it's not a very good design.

I am not actually in favor of speed governors, but it makes for a bit of an interesting thought experiment: I wonder if it might actually increase throughput in a widespread emergency–many of the worst gridlock situations I see in the NYC area are caused by aggressive drivers who crash and wind up blocking the road, so I could imagine it being the case that, at least in dense areas, restricting speeds could mitigate the stampede effect and keep traffic flowing.

Imagine if this country was not so car centric, then this problem would not exist at all. Highways that run through dense urban cores. Suburban sprawl (more expensive highway infrastructure to support). Bulldozing once walkable communities and replacing with parking garages, parking lots, and of course street parking.

Cars. Cars. More cars. Endless amounts of time spent in cars. Now we want aUtoMatEd cArS because of perceived safety gains.

I want walkable and other alternate forms of transportation to be viable for a majority of cities with efficient city planning.

We are digging ourselves into another massive financial meltdown. We won’t see corporations or individual families fail. This time it will be cities filing for bankruptcy because the private muni bond payments become exorbitant.

>>I'm not sure what the right solutions are

Giving the federal government the ability to dynamically control my car based on crash data is 1000000% NOT the right solution....

The black box is bad enough... giving them control HELLLL no

Curious to hear your objections to the black box.

Black box data (speed, steering+pedal input logs) were invaluable in determining fault in an accident involving one of my family members recently. As long as the data doesn't leave the car under normal circumstances, what's the harm?

There are a lot of people that don't want to be held accountable for their negligence and blatant disregard for the safety of others. Driving like you're the main character is so normalized that it will take generations to fix the problem.

I dont think giving the government the power to force by law people record their movement, operating conditions, and other factors is inline with spirit of constitution.

Sure it makes it easy to "determining fault in an accident" but same could be said if everyone was required to wear a body cam, or install surveillance camera's in their home that the police monitor 24x7.

I am opposed to any and all government mandated surveillance, I do not want to live in the surveillance state we do, I sure as hell do not want to see it expanded

I also reject the narrative that another commenter basically claims, one of "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", that old trope has been proven through out history to be moronic statement

I care very much about privacy. I use only free and open source software on my personal and work computers, as well as my phone and router. I do not use social media, except for this site. I do not connect anything to my network that I do not control. For this reason, I don't have a smart TV, smart speakers, or smart appliances. I drive a car from 2009 with no cellular connection or GPS unit. I agree that the "nothing to hide" argument is weak.

I am opposed to indiscriminate government surveillance. This is not that. I have seen what it looks like when this data is used as evidence in court. The EDR provides information about the driver's last inputs to the car, and it has a very small amount of storage. The data is only accessible through physical access to the unit.

In the event of a fatal accident, there are very few sources of information:

- Survivors (biased)

- Witnesses (not always present)

- Forensics (squishy)

- EDR data

The EDR is a crucial source of truth for determining the cause of an accident. When you drive on busy roads, you are taking others' lives into your hands. In the event of a serious accident, it's critical that the details of the seconds before the accident are available to inform legal decisions. If we remove the EDR, we are left only with less reliable sources of information.

I do not support making black boxes mandatory because it feels like it violates the 5th Amendment. I will also never purchase a car without one, because I think it is more likely to prevent harm than cause it.

> federal government

I had assumed it would be state government since they normally control traffic law?

What other solutions would you propose for enforcing speed/safety regulations on state owned infrastructure? Personally, given my experience interacting with police, hate our current system that relies on being pulled over and interacting with them. I would much prefer an automated solution (e.g. speed governors or automated speeding cameras).

>>I had assumed it would be state government

I dont want them either, but these types of things are really controlled by Federal Highway regulations in practice.

> I would much prefer an automated solution (e.g. speed governors or automated speeding cameras).

Well I have the right to face my accuser, and speed camera's have been ruled a few times to be unconstitutional for that reason. I for one DO NOT want automated speed camera's and much like Red Light Camera's you will find they are not deployed to increase safety but solely for Revenue generation, and often have the impact of REDUCING safety not increasing it.

red Light camera's caused more crashes then they prevented, and speed camera's would do the same

>What other solutions would you propose for enforcing speed/safety regulations on state owned infrastructure?

Well I would start with a reduction of said regulations, and a more rational objective way to not only set the regulations but also appeal them.

LOTS of speed regulations are less about safety and more about setting up revenue streams for towns and cities.

You seem to believe that all of these regulations and government actions are purely out some altruistic motive to protect you the driver. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of the regulations are designed to

1. Create Revenue stream 2. Give the police a pretense to look for other criminal activity

Safety is maybe 3rd on the list, maybe

in short, i do not trust government, and I do not look to government to protect me.

DOWNSIDES

- Your car can get hacked to extort you to pay the ransom to unlock normal/any ability to move

- The government can get hacked for the same reason crippling an entire region

- A terrorist or enemy state can strike a major blow against our economy

- The government now has the capability to use this to shut down protests. Nice protest you had there shame you can't get to it. Remember also that we are on the cusp of a dice roll to decide whether we slip into fascism

- The government now has a record of where you drive at all times. What if someday psychotic municipalities think they can punish you for driving through their county to get an abortion... wait that already happened.

- Your individual car could be hijacked on the road to rob you

- Your car could simply malfunction and not work right

- Your car could apply the wrong rules based on inaccurate GPS reading and cause you either an inconvenience or an accident

- Your car could make it hard to willfully exceed the speed limit in an emergency.

BUTTON OVERRIDE

- Governments often speed limits too low or impractically low given how much traffic has to traverse this space that if it was automatically applied would destroy throughtput to the point that traffic would utterly break down.

- Use of the button even though it might enable emergency traffic would be one more thing you have to do in an emergency that might well not get done. For example you got hit because you couldn't maneuver or you freaked out and mashed the pedal but didn't disable the misfeature in a timely fashion.

- There isn't enough courts to have time to hear why people did or didn't use the button it would end up being an automatic ticket unless you affirmatively hired a lawyer and harassed them and as a revenue center it would be optimized for sucking your money out of your wallet. Think about how red light cams lead to shorter yellows to extract rent not increase safety

COST

- It would cost 150B to outfit all existing cars

- Outfitting only new cars would still add substantially to the costs born by Americans, depress sales of new cars drastically, hurt the deployment of electric cars in turn, and probably be complete by the time it no longer matters.

CONCLUSION

A truly awful idea

How about instead of adding authoritarian restrictive technology to private vehicles, we just take cars out of the cities?

With proper public transit, this would be a no brainer.

we have the technology to engineer safer roads

I love the idea of a surface layer without cars at all (other than emergency vehicles, and some rare permitted / licensed construction stuff).

All of the motor vehicles on a dedicated layer beneath, an industrial transit zone.

Meanwhile we can't even agree whether automated traffic enforcement using cameras should be legal

Nah. What happens when the anti car urbanists take over and then your car gets disabled if it enters city limits?

Vision zero. In Europe it reduced road fatalities almost tenfold without any extra devices added to cars.

What about better driver training and much stricter requirements to get a license.

The right solution is to drastically raise the bar for obtaining a driver's license, and make it far more easy to lose one. Periodic testing and stringent enforcement of basic rules. Don't use your blinker when turning? No license for a year. Bobbing and weaving in and out of traffic like a maniac? Electric chair. (/s)

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