Take Vehicle-To-Vehicle Step by Step
Perhaps this should really have been categorized under Innovation, but what caught my eye in this article about vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications was the National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendation that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should mandate V2V. The suggestion is that if we had V2V on the highways now we could have avoided a couple of recent school bus accidents. That may be true, but we could have prevented them if we had time travel too. Who knows what V2V will look like when it’s off the drawing board? Let’s wait until we have something to talk about before we pass laws about it.
One thing we have learned from the history of private passenger vehicles might be called the law of conservation of risk. For every danger that gets mitigated people adopt offsetting behavior that increases their level of risk. The safer cars get the faster we go. The suburban craze for SUVs, for example, came from the solid feeling of security they grant; but studies showed that while they may improve the odds for the occupants of the SUV, they roll over more often and increase the likelihood of a fatal accident when striking a smaller car. It’s not a perfect conservation law: highway fatalities have nearly halved in the last 25 years. V2V could well contribute to that downward trend in road deaths; I certainly hope it does. But it’s seems a little soon to be mandating a gestational technology that could arrive any number of ways and with any kind of unintended consequences.
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