Future Ford's May Detect Speeding and Report You to the Cops
motorauthority.com
motorauthority.com
0 - https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/06/07/everyones-turning-i...
Are traffic cameras a slippery slope to cameras in your house to make sure your aren’t doing drugs or building an unpermitted additon?
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.
People exist in public. There should be very little tracking as a baseline.
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.
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.
That’s what this is. The patent is about reporting other cars. The title is clickbait.
Within the context of speeding and the driver having control over when the report is sent in, I think the safety gains are worth the trade-off.
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.
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%!
- https://tti.tamu.edu/researcher/tti-study-underscores-safety... - https://information.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2001-125.pdf
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.
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.
Additionally, you got the point and missed the mark about traffic fatalities and poorer communities: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019822...
The highlights, if you don't want to read the whole thing:
Car ownership
Lower-income households may be more likely to drive older cars with fewer safety features.
Road design
Poorer neighborhoods may have more high-speed roads, and fewer basic traffic safety measures like streetlights, crosswalks, and sidewalks.
Systemic patterns
Disinvestment and displacement may favor car owners and road expansions over community safety.
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?
> A kangaroo court may ignore due process and come to a predetermined conclusion.
Ref: https://www.cnet.com/science/tickets-issued-due-to-red-light...
> 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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
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 how do we get people to not commit infractions. Any other goal creates perverse outcomes. Automating those other goals creates even worse outcomes.
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.
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.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=shortened+yellow+light+to+p...
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)
People like you are why we have the current post 9/11 police state.
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
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.
Apple and Google have all of this information in bulk.
At any rate, I'm not attempting to say traffic fatalities and injuries aren't a problem.
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 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.
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.
Nevertheless, I appreciate your point. I was thinking only of speeding on highways. Speeding is an issue and shouldn't be minimised.
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.)
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.
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.
I am quite confident that most people do not think we should be comparing the risk of speeding to just veering into oncoming traffic, phone or not.
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.
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.
I'd call that extremely dangerous...
Focussing on speeding seems to ignore that there are other serious issues that contribute to the outsized danger on US roads.
[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...
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.
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.
https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/eu-road-safety-po...
More about speed vs injury/death rates:
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/new-crash-tests-show-modest...
https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/speedmgt/ref_mats/fhwasa1304/Res...
Why? Kinetic energy is a function of velocity squared, influencing injury severity and stopping distances.
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.
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.
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.
Driving the limit in the right lane is almost always fine.
Not really. The violence of traffic crashes increases as the speed increases.
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.
If I drive at ~200km/h on my way from Berlin to Munich, am I "being violent"?
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.
The trend of "slapping a 'violence' label after anything vaguely harmful but not actually violent" is so tiresome.
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.
does it really know what the speed limit is?
apple maps in Oregon is frequently wrong about speeds - there are rural routes near me that are 55mph, that apple labels 25mph and refuses to change.
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.
Make it fearful to actually drive. a similar effect to speed cameras. Who doesn't go 10 over in typical loose traffic?
Criminal speeding is typically 25+ over. If you’re doing 50 in a 25, yes, you should be prosecuted.
I read the “you” in the title to imply it’s reporting on its owners. That’s a massive breach of trust.
> Why is the 2nd car taking pictures of mine when I'm over the limit
I’ve snapped a license plate of a reckless driver and sent it to 311. This is the same thing, except the car is doing it for me.
I see the confusion now. "May Detect Your Speeding..." must have been one word too much for the headline editor.
Still, poorly-worded for sure but I don't think "clickbait" entails someone reading the title differently than intended.
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.
The one Tesla self-driving feature I want on my Subaru.
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.
> [...]
> 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?
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.
EDIT: data on speed variance vs safety (fig 4):
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/17098/...
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?
also, I suspect speed information gathered in this way couldn't be used as evidence in court, it would not be certified speed information.
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.
I think if we just took away cars and licenses, and eventually throwing people in jail, it would have a huge positive impact.
Japan values pedestrians. There, it's a 3-year prison sentence for drinking and driving.
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.
Like the "telemetry" on Windows?
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.