How Could Traffic Enforcement Play Out On Roads Of The Future?

On the roads of the future, it’s pos­si­ble that speed­ing tick­ets will be doled out by new auto­mated law enforce­ment sys­tems instead of by police offi­cers in patrol cars.

Sys­tems now being devel­oped by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to han­dle vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure com­mu­ni­ca­tions in an upcom­ing connected-car era may have the capa­bil­ity to more pre­cisely track the loca­tions and speeds of indi­vid­ual motorists.

Offi­cials behind the cre­ation of these com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems say V2V and V2I com­mu­ni­ca­tions are not intended for law-enforcement pur­poses, and a report issued by the National High­way Traf­fic Safety Admin­is­tra­tion last month said there’s not enough data in the trans­mis­sions to link such speed cal­cu­la­tions to indi­vid­ual motorists.

The agency’s top-ranking offi­cial said it was indeed pos­si­ble. He said the road­blocks were in the con­sumer accep­tance of such auto­mated enforce­ment, not in the capa­bil­i­ties of the system.

“I know there is poten­tial for law enforce­ment to opti­mize some of these things, but if we go too far, too fast in that direc­tion, it could cre­ate some con­sumer back­lash that could hurt its adop­tion,” said David Fried­man, NHTSA’s deputy admin­is­tra­tor. “The tech­nol­ogy is there, but our ini­tial design is not focused on that.”

Even if enforce­ment pos­si­bil­i­ties are not the intent of V2V and V2I sys­tems, the appli­ca­tions of connected-car tech­nol­ogy may even­tu­ally lie beyond the author­ity of its cre­ators: laws gov­ern­ing traf­fic enforce­ment are largely a func­tion of local and state governments.

With the advent of license-plate read­ers that record motorists’ pass­ing of fixed loca­tions and in-car GPS sys­tems that col­lect and store loca­tion data, pri­vacy advo­cates are already wary of dimin­ished pro­tec­tions in auto­mo­biles. Despite assur­ances to the con­trary, they feel it’s inevitable that V2V and V2I com­mu­ni­ca­tion will be used to mea­sure speed and penal­ize motorists who exceed limits.

“The fact you can start to track vehi­cles in real time, it’s too tempt­ing to not try to imple­ment this,” said John Bow­man, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor at the National Motorists Asso­ci­a­tion. “Any type of rig­or­ous or dra­con­ian traf­fic enforce­ment, at some point they’ll prob­a­bly try to imple­ment it. The temp­ta­tion is too great.”

By trans­mit­ting and receiv­ing real-time loca­tion infor­ma­tion to and from other cars and traf­fic infra­struc­ture, these sys­tems will dra­mat­i­cally reduce acci­dents, untan­gle con­gested areas, opti­mize routes and pro­vide infor­ma­tion to emer­gency responders.

Read the entire arti­cle as found at Aol.com.