California Senator Scott Wiener is introducing a new set of bills to make streets safer across the state, including one that would change how you drive.
You don’t have to track a car to limit how fast it goes. Speed governerors exist inside gas powered cars already. All that has to be done is 1) legally require a manufacturer to limit speeds of their vehicles, and 2) prosecute them when they do not implement those restrictions. The rest is lawyers and lines of code (and lines of coke I guess)
I have a hard time believing it would be impossible to wire up a device that sends out a wireless signal with the local speed limit at every speed limit sign.
Why does it need to go to a database for it instead of have a receiver on the vehicle itself to pull data as it passes speed limit signs?
In fact, a centralized database would likely have more problems with not being accurate or current. Have you ever dealt with government databases?
Edit: Part of the reason the database would be trash is because speed limits are set by cities, not by the state. So in the database scenario every time a city updates their speed limit, they have to document all the zones and upload them to the database. All it takes is paperwork getting backed up a week for that to cause problems.
EDIT: Also I’m fairly sure that destruction of government property is a felony and if it’s wired for this, it could easily be wired to take and send photos when tampered with, but you do you. I guess people do just hate infrastructure more than *checks notes… being spied on. Because when given an alternative without a database, they shit on it.
i don’t think they’d spend the money to add cameras too for every sign, when you can just put on a mask for them. i was half joking but yeah, i would definitely prefer not to have transmitters control the speed of my car
The problem with proposing infrastructure is that people hate it. Even if it would be beneficial. Train traffic is limited to 79 mph in the US because the companies in charge were told “put in more safety devices or you’re limited to 79 mph”, and they said “okay sure”.
They usually act like anything that wasn’t around when they were born is impossible. I can’t imagine trying to get a smoking ban passed now, or capping the national speed limit at 55 because of an oil crisis.
Generally temporary speed limit changes just go down, so the worst case is for a little while your car will let you speed. And if it goes up but the town fucks up and doesn’t update the database, people will complain while being forced to drive a little slower than the new maximum.
They don’t need real time updates to accomplish their goals. The car just needs accurate days most of the time. Having the car download periodic updates to a database that covers the whole state is perfectly feasible and involves no tracking.
You should be worried more about tracking through license plates and cameras.
Cars can already read speed limit signs without any form of tracking. What’s funny is it will read unofficial speed limit signs on private driveways. It’s anecdotal but a 2021 Camry I drove recognized a 10 mph sign that looked very similar to a DoT sign and displayed it on the dash.
Working in the industry on these technologies, this is a horrible idea. I’ve driven vehicles that already have it, and it’s nice when it’s optional, but would legitimately be a hazard if it was on all the time.
What happens when it’s dark and/or rainy, and it reads the 45MPH sign on the side road you were on, but misses the 70MPH sign when you’re actually on the highway? It limits your ability to actually accelerate to the flow of traffic as well, since it generally won’t change the speed until after you pass it. Or even better, you’re doing 70 and it catches a 35MPH on a side road adjacent to the highway? What happens if you just cover the camera and it can’t read anything? Does the car just go into limp mode and limit you to 25MPH?
This isn’t a hypothetical, I see it happen very, very regularly in even the best systems available. They also probably won’t work for the lighted school zone speed limit signs by me, or the express lane type signs.
Map based also eliminates school and construction zones, which is where you want this most,
As it stands today, covering or disconnecting the camera results in the car throwing a warning. The system will either partially disable only the directly related features, or will disable entirely. With the Camry I drove, you lose lane keep assist, sign detection, collision avoidance and automatic cruise control. All of the driver assistance features rely on the front camera. Some cars use a combination of radar and camera so not everything is lost.
That’s a perfectly valid reason for it cars to not do it today.
That’s not a valid reason for saying we shouldn’t legislate it as a requirement. “If a car can’t prevent itself from going 10mph over the speed limit on our roads, it’s not allowed to drive on our roads”. Done.
Nothing is fool proof. There will be failures, and that’s okay. We can handle them the exact same way we handle them today: speeding tickets.
Oh it is. Pretty much every automaker selling a mid and high level trim for any model has the feature. If it has the driver assistance features included, it can read signs. Base models are less likely to have it, but it’s not unheard of. A 2018 and later base model, 2wd, 2d Tacoma comes with lane keep assist, collision avoidance, automatic cruise control, and sign reading. It’s a $22k truck.
The car itself has GPS, knows it’s own speed, and can read speed limit signs. This can easily be done without the government needing to know the exact speed, position, and velocity of every vehicle on every section of road.
Those systems are shit. I had one in a fleet truck and I had to explain to management why I was going 65 in a 45 mph zone. I was on the highway, but the GPS system placed me on the frontage road that runs next to the highway.
Now imagine if instead of an alert to the management it slowed my vehicle down suddenly. That’s a problem on a busy highway.
Implementation and regulation are separate. It doesn’t matter if the systems to implement it are shit, it’s still the government’s responsibility to put regulation in place on how the roads can be used.
If electric cars can’t implement a system to keep them 10mph or lower under the speed limit, then they can’t be sold in the state. And if they are sold in the state, they get fined, and if electric car drivers are found going more than 10 mph over the speed limit, they get a speeding ticket.
It’s not a complicated system. There’s no need to bring state wide fleet monitoring of every car on the road into this. It can be solved with much simpler systems, and more mature technology.
Sounds like a roundabout way to track everyone
You don’t have to track a car to limit how fast it goes. Speed governerors exist inside gas powered cars already. All that has to be done is 1) legally require a manufacturer to limit speeds of their vehicles, and 2) prosecute them when they do not implement those restrictions. The rest is lawyers and lines of code (and lines of coke I guess)
You need location data to be able to determine what limit to impose.
And I bet you anything it will be a cloud based system.
How do you think GPS receivers work?
They don’t transmit the speed limit of the current road, and for things like construction they’ll need real-time updates.
I’m certain they won’t want to push the entire database out to every vehicle for every update…
I have a hard time believing it would be impossible to wire up a device that sends out a wireless signal with the local speed limit at every speed limit sign.
Why does it need to go to a database for it instead of have a receiver on the vehicle itself to pull data as it passes speed limit signs?
In fact, a centralized database would likely have more problems with not being accurate or current. Have you ever dealt with government databases?
Edit: Part of the reason the database would be trash is because speed limits are set by cities, not by the state. So in the database scenario every time a city updates their speed limit, they have to document all the zones and upload them to the database. All it takes is paperwork getting backed up a week for that to cause problems.
i’d sabotage those signs’ transmitters so fast
We got a tough guy here.
EDIT: Also I’m fairly sure that destruction of government property is a felony and if it’s wired for this, it could easily be wired to take and send photos when tampered with, but you do you. I guess people do just hate infrastructure more than *checks notes… being spied on. Because when given an alternative without a database, they shit on it.
i don’t think they’d spend the money to add cameras too for every sign, when you can just put on a mask for them. i was half joking but yeah, i would definitely prefer not to have transmitters control the speed of my car
The problem with proposing infrastructure is that people hate it. Even if it would be beneficial. Train traffic is limited to 79 mph in the US because the companies in charge were told “put in more safety devices or you’re limited to 79 mph”, and they said “okay sure”.
They usually act like anything that wasn’t around when they were born is impossible. I can’t imagine trying to get a smoking ban passed now, or capping the national speed limit at 55 because of an oil crisis.
Generally temporary speed limit changes just go down, so the worst case is for a little while your car will let you speed. And if it goes up but the town fucks up and doesn’t update the database, people will complain while being forced to drive a little slower than the new maximum.
They don’t need real time updates to accomplish their goals. The car just needs accurate days most of the time. Having the car download periodic updates to a database that covers the whole state is perfectly feasible and involves no tracking.
You should be worried more about tracking through license plates and cameras.
It would work everywhere except construction sites, where we can just have cops like we do everywhere right now.
GPS is a great solution, it already tells you what the speed limits are depending on the software.
In the cloud…
You don’t, just just need localized broadcast and a receiver in the car. Or cameras and signs as other people have mentioned.
How do you determine the location of the car and the speed limit on that section of road? Sounds awfully close to tracking it.
Cars can already read speed limit signs without any form of tracking. What’s funny is it will read unofficial speed limit signs on private driveways. It’s anecdotal but a 2021 Camry I drove recognized a 10 mph sign that looked very similar to a DoT sign and displayed it on the dash.
Working in the industry on these technologies, this is a horrible idea. I’ve driven vehicles that already have it, and it’s nice when it’s optional, but would legitimately be a hazard if it was on all the time.
What happens when it’s dark and/or rainy, and it reads the 45MPH sign on the side road you were on, but misses the 70MPH sign when you’re actually on the highway? It limits your ability to actually accelerate to the flow of traffic as well, since it generally won’t change the speed until after you pass it. Or even better, you’re doing 70 and it catches a 35MPH on a side road adjacent to the highway? What happens if you just cover the camera and it can’t read anything? Does the car just go into limp mode and limit you to 25MPH?
This isn’t a hypothetical, I see it happen very, very regularly in even the best systems available. They also probably won’t work for the lighted school zone speed limit signs by me, or the express lane type signs.
Map based also eliminates school and construction zones, which is where you want this most,
As it stands today, covering or disconnecting the camera results in the car throwing a warning. The system will either partially disable only the directly related features, or will disable entirely. With the Camry I drove, you lose lane keep assist, sign detection, collision avoidance and automatic cruise control. All of the driver assistance features rely on the front camera. Some cars use a combination of radar and camera so not everything is lost.
That’s a perfectly valid reason for it cars to not do it today.
That’s not a valid reason for saying we shouldn’t legislate it as a requirement. “If a car can’t prevent itself from going 10mph over the speed limit on our roads, it’s not allowed to drive on our roads”. Done.
Nothing is fool proof. There will be failures, and that’s okay. We can handle them the exact same way we handle them today: speeding tickets.
Thanks. Now I could easily see the havoc one troll with a sign can do with over-regulating like this.
Yeah I’ve seen that technology. But it definitely isn’t widespread.
Oh it is. Pretty much every automaker selling a mid and high level trim for any model has the feature. If it has the driver assistance features included, it can read signs. Base models are less likely to have it, but it’s not unheard of. A 2018 and later base model, 2wd, 2d Tacoma comes with lane keep assist, collision avoidance, automatic cruise control, and sign reading. It’s a $22k truck.
Tracking is the action of a 3rd party.
The car itself has GPS, knows it’s own speed, and can read speed limit signs. This can easily be done without the government needing to know the exact speed, position, and velocity of every vehicle on every section of road.
That would only be true if there was only one speed limit everywhere. Which there isn’t.
A car can tell it’s own speed, can know where it is, and can read speed limit signs. It’s not rocket science.
I drove a rental car 10 years ago in the Netherlands that would beep when the GPS said I went over the speed limit.
This system can easily be implemented without needing a government spying program. You just need legislation, and enforcement.
Those systems are shit. I had one in a fleet truck and I had to explain to management why I was going 65 in a 45 mph zone. I was on the highway, but the GPS system placed me on the frontage road that runs next to the highway.
Now imagine if instead of an alert to the management it slowed my vehicle down suddenly. That’s a problem on a busy highway.
Implementation and regulation are separate. It doesn’t matter if the systems to implement it are shit, it’s still the government’s responsibility to put regulation in place on how the roads can be used.
If electric cars can’t implement a system to keep them 10mph or lower under the speed limit, then they can’t be sold in the state. And if they are sold in the state, they get fined, and if electric car drivers are found going more than 10 mph over the speed limit, they get a speeding ticket.
It’s not a complicated system. There’s no need to bring state wide fleet monitoring of every car on the road into this. It can be solved with much simpler systems, and more mature technology.