I don’t disagree, but the fact is that traffic fines are a large revenue stream, and if that revenue stream disappears or is severely reduced the money to replace it will have to come from somewhere. I foresee a surge in jaywalking citations!
Won’t traffic cops be altogether obsolete once self-driving cars are ubiquitous? Personally, I wonder how municipalities are going to handle the reduction in revenue.
Well, two obvious ones:
[ul]
[li]Not impeding traffic.[/li][li]Forcing the speed limit to change to one that’s reasonable. A lot of traffic management policies follow the 85% or 90% percentile rule.[/li][/ul]
I have no idea where you drive, but around here anyone driving on a highway 2-3mph over the speed limit will be passed by 95% of the other drivers around.
Even in town, most drivers are doing at least a few mph over the speed limit, but not usually more than 7 or 8 mph.
The only places I see drivers strictly adhere to the posted speed limits are through school zones.
A lot of cops spend their time dealing with breakdowns, which are still going to happen. Given court costs etc., I’d be surprised if most places make a lot of money on tickets. If California did you’d think more cops would be out there.
Interesting. In Victoria we get bombarded with messages about how speeding kills and even had a advertising campaign “Wipe off 5” suggesting people drive 5kmh slower than the speed limit.
I routinely on freeways set the cruise control for 2kmh over the speed limit and pass almost everything on the road.
Most people simply mail in the fine and don’t use court time. The last time I had a ticket (this was sometime before 9/11) I did take it to court, and everyone there had to pay court costs in addition to their fine. I had my ticket dismissed, but still had to pay court costs that (probably not coincidentally) were equal to the would-be fine.
Good point–the car could just contact the police and ask them to submit a ticket by email whenever it breaks the speed limit. That’d be a great time-saver, and paper-free as well.
:dubious:
When legislatures finally get around to creating laws allowing the public’s use of driverless cars, on public roads, I assume that driverless cars will not be allowed, by law, to exceed the legal speed limit.
If the software/hardware malfunctioned, and driverless vehicles were to routinely, or even occasionally, exceed the posted limit, the manufacturer could be held responsible for creating an unsafe vehicle. Unless the same legislators pass a law exempting the manufacturer from liability.
Oh, it’s a lucrative enterprise.
And that is evidently per all police officers across the board, not just traffic cops. So the revenue traffic cops generate must be extremely large to bring the per-police-officer average that high.
I routinely drive on many roads where my GPS doesn’t know the speed limit, and also many roads where it thinks it does, but is wrong, in some cases by as much as 10 mph off.
Yes, I like the idea of driverless cars and using computers to automate driving if possible.
However, I see big problems with the implementation and I don’t think they have been fully thought through just yet.
Okay, so one and his/her family gets on a driverless car and tells it to go to San Diego and then goes to sleep while driving overnight.
How well do you think the group is going to sleep while this driverless car is going down the road with all the bumps and bounces and road turns.
What about bad weather? How would it deal with that? Try driving through an ice storm with one. Lots of work to deal with that. How about through a blizzard and a snow storm
How about a deluge of rain where there is high water. Is it set up to deal with that? How would it detect the high water?
Cars right now are not set up for sleeping accommodations right now and to add that in would make the car a lot more expensive and more thirsty for fuel.
This would have the effect of increasing the fuel consumption nationally (I am just taking about the USA) as it would be much more common to travel with these driverless cars at night and the number of trips would increase dramatically
Not only that it would have repercussion’s on the entire hotel industry as instead of staying in a hotel, why not use these driverless cars for the overnight stays.
What about the wear and tear on the roads with the increased traffic? Who pays for that?
Could these driverless cars be retrofitted to older existing models.
There are lot of vehicles that have been paid for and are still in great shape. Adding this option to an existing car would be a great idea, if do-able but it may be easier to just rebuild it completely
This whole thing reminds me a an old cartoons magazine issue (The magazine was called Cartoons) and in one story, the entire state of California was paved over (this was in the 70s no less) and instead of having freeways, you just pointed the car in any direction and went that way. I will see if I can find if that issue is online somewhere.
It was hilarious in a way
Sorry, can’t find that issue but the story was that with California completely paved over, people just lived in their cars and keep moving all day and night all over that state
If I remember right the kids went to school by transferring from their car to a school bus where they learned their lessons while travelling on the school bus only to return to their car at night.
Don’t remember much more about the issue aside from that.
What that has to do with self driving cars, I don’t know but it made me think of that old comic
I put this in the wrong thread on driverless cars but I don’t know how to move it to the other driverless car thread:smack:
There are several cars already that can read the speed limit from roadsigns and automatically adapt the cruise control speed or alert the driver for overspeeding
Something as advanced as the googlecar wouldn’t have the slightest problem with that.
One day soon your car will be able to do things like that for you.
I don’t think you’ll find any place in Canada where people don’t routinely drive 15% - 20% above the posted speed limit and no one bats an eye. School zones may be the exception.
I drive on a 90 KPH highway 5 days a week and set my cruise control at 110. The OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) don’t even give me a second glance.
Actually, there are very few scenarios where it’s NOT acceptable for a human driver to go more than 2-3 mph over the speed limit.
If she were driving in a parade, for instance. Although in that case it’d be more of an ad hoc parade speed than the normal speed limit for that road.
Why does everyone keep bringing up bad weather? That is indeed a major difference between human drivers and computers, but it’s exactly the other way around: Humans cannot safely drive in bad weather, but computers, which have access to a variety of sensors humans lack, can.
The driverless board monk* won’t make that mistake in the first place.
*Driverless became the preferred adjective for anything automated as driverless cars led to the necessary improvements and approvals for intelligent systems to take over most everything. Board monks were named in honor of Douglas Adams’ Electric monks from the first Dirk Gently book, which were devices that believed for you.