Not only could you avoid accidents, but you could also travel more efficiently. For years, there's been ongoing work in the area of developing reliable communication systems, but how much longer will it be before our cars drive us to the office?
Smart roads Giving roads the ability to inform drivers of conditions ahead, even through the simple use of large, electric billboards, makes for more rapid resolution of traffic incidents and bottlenecks; safer, smoother commutes; reduced pollution; and less stress on drivers--all good things. In the early 1990s, the United States Department of Transportation's (USDOT) Intelligent Transportation Systems program began to pay for some of the major arteries in certain cities to "get smart," including routes in Seattle, San Antonio, the New York metropolitan tri-state area, and Phoenix. But here we are a decade later, and there are still freeways that don't even have a billboard to warn drivers of slow traffic ahead and alternate routes. A few private companies have discovered a way to capitalise on the slow speed of government--namely, by using mobile phones, pagers, radio tags, GPS systems, or a combination of any or all of the above to gather traffic information and send advisories to their customers.
One way to provide these services involves piggybacking on the federal government's requirement that mobile phone operators be able to identify the location of an emergency call made by someone using a mobile phone. When the mobile phone carriers comply with these requirements, they'll be able to track the locations of not only emergency callers but also of all calls made on their networks. And several companies want to use this location information along with velocity estimates to determine the rate of traffic on any given stretch of road. US Wireless and TruePosition are two of the pioneers here. Their hope is to sell premium information on traffic conditions to subscribers, thus allowing drivers to choose alternate routes. To make their estimates, they would need just a few talkative drivers carrying on mobile phone conversations from their cars to provide a good estimate of traffic-flow data. Both companies swear up and down that they won't be able to identify individual callers or eavesdrop; they simply plan to monitor how the calls are moving along the road in aggregate.
One fly in this particular ointment is that local and state legislators across the country, in 40 of our 50 sovereign states, want to ban the use of mobile phones in moving vehicles. Brooklyn, Ohio, was first in 1999; then Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties in New York state followed suit. This past June, the state of New York enacted the first statewide restriction on handheld mobile phone use in moving vehicles, banning that type of conversation but allowing hands-free mobile phone use to continue.
There are other options: Frequent commuters on the New York State Throughway or on San Francisco Bay Area bridges can opt to use an E-Z Pass (called FasTrack in the Bay Area), a small radio transmitter that receives a signal sent from the toll booth to bill the car's driver for the fee from every toll booth it crosses. If receivers were set up all along the throughway, it would be possible to monitor the speed of traffic and provide that information to drivers. Of course, the transit authorities that issue these transmitters would then also know who is exceeding the speed limit. Whether they could penalise drivers for that in the United States isn't clear; it would likely depend on state and regional law. We would need to see this tested in court or have certain specific laws enacted before we will have a definite answer to that question.
