While current self-driving technology is obviously unsafe when given total control, I think it could be turned into an extraordinarily effective safety system: program it to only take accident avoidance measures and low-level corrections like lane centering, and crank up the thresholds so it only gets invoked in clearly dangerous scenarios.
I also suspect many people favor letting some legally over the limit people drive, at least short distances, in certain emergency situations, like transporting relatives who can’t walk away from a fire. Exactly what those situations are seems like a subject of contention.
There’s also the related interesting case of moving vehicles on private property. For instance, a couple has a few cocktails at home, their car is towards the bottom of a sloped driveway under a tree, and there’s an unexpected flash flood or high wind warning. Should the car prevent them from driving it forward a few feet to safety?
I think that is a pretty good solution. In any emergency/ edge case / false positive scenario, you are still able operate your car. But a "pull me over" light goes on so that cops will know to double check in "regular" scenarios.
If there were speed limiters, it would probably be reasonable to increase highway speeds in places where they are excessively low, but to also enforce the current speed limits on residential streets as hard limits or even lower them.
This would massively increase safety while eliminating any concern about speeding tickets at normal highway speeds that people actually drive at.
That's not the entire truth. They want speed limiters that _can be disabled_, in the same way as the Auto Off emissions control feature. And, right now, the discussion is leaning towards first employing mandatory speeding chimes - and doing away with speed limiting functionality altogether.
https://www.dadss.org/touch-technology
They also appear to have other approaches as well, but this one seems like it would be almost transparent to the operation of the car.
Honestly I have zero objection to something that worked in this fashion - I suspect it would save a ton of lives. I think the knee jerk reaction that it's somehow a big brother kind of thing is a bit disingenuous, like saying "The government shouldn't interfere with my ability to drive drunk and potentially hurt people". I think this is much more akin to when wearing seat belts became the law - people moaned and complained but at the end of the day it's better for both themselves and others in the vehicle.
The speeding thing is completely unrelated and really shouldn't be mixed into this - how about solving one problem at a time well, instead of lumping a bunch together and solving none. I've had friends badly injured by drunk drivers, and in all the cases the drunk driver wasn't exceeding the posted speed limit. In one they just smashed into a parked car and hit them on the sidewalk, in one they swerved into oncoming traffic and collided head on, and the last drove into a store at full speed. Thankfully these were three different people I know, and not one incredibly unlucky person. ;)
Yeah, "speed limits" are primarily a political game, not anything based in reality. Roads designed for 55 get labeled 45 (in 1990) then 40 (2000) then 35 (2010) and then "road dieted" to 25 (2020). Everyone's "speeding" on paper, but not in reality -- they're going the speed they're were always supposed to go. But politically, people just decided slower=nicer for their particular stretch of street (they already live there, so 'walkability' is just fine for them, strip out all the lanes, throw garbage into the street, whatever) without really caring about how badly it would impact public transportation for everyone in general. It's a textbook "tragedy of the commons" problem.
If you enforce this by vehicle, everyone's going to flip out (because the fake-posted-speed-limit is way below what any sensible person is actually safely driving) and you'll see a significant number of people instantly jailbreak their cars to fix it.
Some of those little farming towns are now rapidly frowning suburbs, teeming with housing tracts, and those fields are now shopping center upon shopping center.
This is utter absurd, it's definitely based in the reality of 1/2 m*v^2. Decreasing the speed decreases the kinetic energy of impacts, decreasing injuries and deaths. That's the reality.
The fact that American roads were designed as the beastly stroads and 6-lanes inner city avenues that are present all around doesn't mean their speed limits should follow that design, the speed limit should follow what utilisation occurs around the road.
You might be right that in some places speed limits can be a political stunt of sorts. Basic physics and the examples of multiple Western countries which achieved a less deadly traffic by implementing stricter speed limits (among other measures) should show you part of the reality you feel is lacking.
Look at Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and so on. USA's road fatalities per billion km-vehicle are on average double, you can do better and kill less people, in total amount of road fatalities the USA is only behind Brazil.
No road in a city centre should allow for faster than 40 km/h traffic around people. A road (non-motorway) with major separation between automobiles and people in a city shouldn't exceed 60 km/h. Traffic even flows better with larger windows for smart traffic control, lower the speed, lower the average travel time.
USA infatuation with left turns across roads posted at 45 mph or higher lead to deadly T-bone collisions. European roads often have roundabouts which naturally slow traffic and a collision would be a glancing side kiss. USA foot gun left turns kill people by design.
I wonder if we'd see speed limits increase if everyone followed them as-posted? Because right now there seems to be this assumption from both sides that everyone is speeding, so they post 70 because they want 80, or 25 because they want 30, etc.
While DUI is a legitimate problem, it isn't clear to me though what exactly the NTSB is proposing here? They have those "breathe into" systems (interlocks), but they have hygiene and maintenance limitations. Unclear how driver monitoring systems can determine if someone is DUI (in particular when you look at edge cases, like disabled drivers that move atypically while still be authorized to drive).
PS - I suspect, but cannot show data, that existing upcoming safety technology may decrease DUI caused fatalities in particular "driverless" automations like lane centering, automatic lane-changes, and autonomous navigation. While I don't consider this technology mature, it may still be safer than an inebriated driver.