Insurance companies mandating pedestrians carry a beacon? That's even less likely.

They don't need to mandate it, at least not at first. They can just incentivize it the right way and people will willingly jump on board.

"Install this app on your phone to make traffic lights recognize you when you approach them, for a timely shift to green light"

"Install this app to collect pedestrian-points, exchange points for prices and discounts!"

"Get a better insurance tier for installing this app which tracks your fitness. Do your daily 10.000 steps for a free <whatever>!"

Once enough people jump on board, and it's generally accepted as being "normal because everybody uses it", then you can mandate it and the few people left who resist can easily be branded as "paranoid tinfoil-hat people" to marginalize their opposition.

If you're relying on a smartphone to host a beacon, isn't that already a solved problem?

Smartphones are radio transceivers, I would imagine any anonymous beacon technology wouldn't be noticeably louder than what smartphones are already emitting.

Several states already have laws preventing that requirement. In those states, location-tracking must be opt-in, and must offer an economic benefit to the policyholder.

Silly rabbit. We jack up the price without a location tracking and offer a 10k incentive to do location tracking.

No location tracking = new policy price

Location tracking = new policy price - 10K.

New policy price = old policy price + 10k

Any insurer which raises rates to pay for this would quickly lose most of its business unless they're (a) the only insurer in the state or (b) convince the rest of the insurers in-state to collude on pricing. The first isn't the case of any state with respect to auto insurance, and the second is a state and federal felony punishable by many years in jail for any executive stupid enough to participate.

And that's assuming they can get away with the rate increases in the first place. States like CA have insurance commissioners empowered to review and reject rate increases.

You do know that progressive has been doing it for a few years, right? With that little device that you can plug into your car to lower the rates?