California Senator Scott Wiener is introducing a new set of bills to make streets safer across the state, including one that would change how you drive.
What, that up to date speed databases are an impossible problem to solve? Or that you couldn’t possibly get current speed limits from a non-GPS method? These aren’t hard problems.
You’d be amazed how many problems can be solved when the people involved have legal liability. My first GPS unit was out of date from the moment I bought it. It wasn’t because keeping a map up to date was hard, it was because they didn’t care, you’d already bought the GPS and it was better than not having one at all. This isn’t a technological problem.
Your car’s GPS-localized speed map is wrong because no one cares enough to make it right, not because it’s an unsolvable problem. It’s a gimmick to get you to buy the car, and you already bought the car.
Apple and Google also have problems with speed limits being updated, and they actively attempt to keep their maps updated. Even Waze has incorrect data sometimes, and that can be corrected by anyone. So I don’t think it’s quite as simple as you think it is.
Isn’t the idea that the government would provide an official speed limit database that is updated as soon as a new sign is posted? Seems like a lot of extra work to do it any other way.
Edit: the infra is still exploitable either way, I don’t see how this won’t cause issues.
Again, they don’t have any liability or financial need to be right. It’s a free tool that’s better than not using the tool. No one is going to get in trouble if it’s wrong, you’re not going to buy a competing brand if they’re wrong. It’s a neat add-on. I don’t know why people assume that just because they’re a big company they’re especially dedicated or competent at managing minor features of free apps. Apple and Google apps are regularly worse than third party developed apps. They’re not bad because this is a hard problem, they’re bad because they don’t care.
And all this “but sometimes they’re wrong” is for exceedingly rare errors. 99%+ of roads are right, for the simple fact that permanent speed limit changes are rare. Maybe a database doesn’t update for temporary construction speed limits, but in that case we’re no worse than we are right now, where your car is perfectly capable of going as fast as you want if you ignore all the posted signs. The only time a limiter impacts driving is when the speed limit goes up, which almost never happens, and simply means people drive a little slower than the maximum while lodging complaints to the repository.
Sure, the car knows its forward speed from its speedometer.
It doesn’t know the speed limit of the road it’s currently riding on, that’s not as easy to directly measure. Currently the most straightforward way to do this is have it look up its location using GPS, use that data to look up what road the car is driving on, and then look up the speed limit for that section of road. This is far from error prone; GPS isn’t perfect and could, for example, confuse your current position for another road nearby; it might think you’re on a slip road next to the interstate you’re driving on, or think you’re on rather than under an overpass, that sort of thing. The database might be out of date or in error, the data connection to that database might be unreliable…
The California legislative process: First, say something totally reasonable. “People should be able to tell if the products they buy contain poisonous or carcinogenic chemicals, let’s require consumer goods that contain hazardous chemicals to bear a label describing them as such.” Next, do absolutely no research, consult no technicians or engineers, only lawyers and yoga instructors get a say. Once you’ve got all the spelling errors ironed out, have it carved into adamantium so that it’s more permanent than god. Finally, strictly enforce the letter of the law in any way it could be interpreted. Which is why literally every single product that might get sold in California up to and including bottles of mineral water all say THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER on the label, and since literally every manufactured good is labeled as hazardous, consumers have exactly no more information than they used to.
I’m a software engineer with colleagues who work with various localization and short range communication. This is totally technologically feasible. All the “what if it’s not sure” cases just default to the higher limit. It won’t be sufficient for self-driving cars to know how fast to drive, but it will prevent the vast majority of excessive speeding.
The what-ifs are just people either flailing around to not have their speeding curtailed or people who assume half-assed apps from companies that don’t have any reason to care if they’re right are the state of the art. They always come up with absurd reasons why they need to speed or why implementation is impossible whenever any road safety improvement is proposed. It’s a boring and pathological response.
One of our cars uses GPS and a lookup to show the current speed limit on the dash. It’s often wrong. This will not go well.
You realize your car already knows what speed it’s driving without GPS, right?
I don’t think you’re following the implication.
What, that up to date speed databases are an impossible problem to solve? Or that you couldn’t possibly get current speed limits from a non-GPS method? These aren’t hard problems.
If it’s not a hard problem, it wouldn’t happen.
You’d be amazed how many problems can be solved when the people involved have legal liability. My first GPS unit was out of date from the moment I bought it. It wasn’t because keeping a map up to date was hard, it was because they didn’t care, you’d already bought the GPS and it was better than not having one at all. This isn’t a technological problem.
Your car’s GPS-localized speed map is wrong because no one cares enough to make it right, not because it’s an unsolvable problem. It’s a gimmick to get you to buy the car, and you already bought the car.
Apple and Google also have problems with speed limits being updated, and they actively attempt to keep their maps updated. Even Waze has incorrect data sometimes, and that can be corrected by anyone. So I don’t think it’s quite as simple as you think it is.
Isn’t the idea that the government would provide an official speed limit database that is updated as soon as a new sign is posted? Seems like a lot of extra work to do it any other way.
Edit: the infra is still exploitable either way, I don’t see how this won’t cause issues.
Again, they don’t have any liability or financial need to be right. It’s a free tool that’s better than not using the tool. No one is going to get in trouble if it’s wrong, you’re not going to buy a competing brand if they’re wrong. It’s a neat add-on. I don’t know why people assume that just because they’re a big company they’re especially dedicated or competent at managing minor features of free apps. Apple and Google apps are regularly worse than third party developed apps. They’re not bad because this is a hard problem, they’re bad because they don’t care.
And all this “but sometimes they’re wrong” is for exceedingly rare errors. 99%+ of roads are right, for the simple fact that permanent speed limit changes are rare. Maybe a database doesn’t update for temporary construction speed limits, but in that case we’re no worse than we are right now, where your car is perfectly capable of going as fast as you want if you ignore all the posted signs. The only time a limiter impacts driving is when the speed limit goes up, which almost never happens, and simply means people drive a little slower than the maximum while lodging complaints to the repository.
Sure, the car knows its forward speed from its speedometer.
It doesn’t know the speed limit of the road it’s currently riding on, that’s not as easy to directly measure. Currently the most straightforward way to do this is have it look up its location using GPS, use that data to look up what road the car is driving on, and then look up the speed limit for that section of road. This is far from error prone; GPS isn’t perfect and could, for example, confuse your current position for another road nearby; it might think you’re on a slip road next to the interstate you’re driving on, or think you’re on rather than under an overpass, that sort of thing. The database might be out of date or in error, the data connection to that database might be unreliable…
The California legislative process: First, say something totally reasonable. “People should be able to tell if the products they buy contain poisonous or carcinogenic chemicals, let’s require consumer goods that contain hazardous chemicals to bear a label describing them as such.” Next, do absolutely no research, consult no technicians or engineers, only lawyers and yoga instructors get a say. Once you’ve got all the spelling errors ironed out, have it carved into adamantium so that it’s more permanent than god. Finally, strictly enforce the letter of the law in any way it could be interpreted. Which is why literally every single product that might get sold in California up to and including bottles of mineral water all say THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER on the label, and since literally every manufactured good is labeled as hazardous, consumers have exactly no more information than they used to.
I’m a software engineer with colleagues who work with various localization and short range communication. This is totally technologically feasible. All the “what if it’s not sure” cases just default to the higher limit. It won’t be sufficient for self-driving cars to know how fast to drive, but it will prevent the vast majority of excessive speeding.
The what-ifs are just people either flailing around to not have their speeding curtailed or people who assume half-assed apps from companies that don’t have any reason to care if they’re right are the state of the art. They always come up with absurd reasons why they need to speed or why implementation is impossible whenever any road safety improvement is proposed. It’s a boring and pathological response.