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Comment by padolsey | Hacker News Reader

Very problematic. How does the vehicle know which pole to talk to? How does it know it’s not incorrectly communicating with a pole on a parallel or perpendicular road, for example? Or indeed a road that is below another road, as sometimes occurs in urban environments. So so so many issues. How does the vehicle reliably know which road it’s on? How is the system kept invulnerable to bad actors? Etc etc

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Either via RF or line-of-sight IR.

The RF method works the same way ILS for aircraft works: multiple lobes of differing frequencies to a compatible receiver that will only accept the data if both frequencies are present and the interference pattern matches the conditions that it is looking out for.

IR is considerably simpler and would require a receiver to pick up on a well-aimed beam.

For bad actor mitigation, they could put a signature at the end of the speed data that signs the packet with the priority, route, datestamp, and TTL. The priority field could help enforce slower limit around construction zones.

I don’t agree with the proposed solution being entertained here, but all of these problems are solved. Because automated tolling systems work this way.

Automated rolling systems work on specific roads designed for it.

The suggested mandate is for all roads, which introduces crosstalk errors in the system decoding the environment.

There are tolling systems that assign different tolls to different lanes and different vehicles on the same road. It would be prohibitively expensive to put on all roads, but the technology exists and it works.

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