Comment by aftbit
2 days ago
>(Do note that people can't just "not pull over" because they know there are no penalties involved; they would still be considered police, and "not complying with a police stop" would, as always, be a real crime with real penalties; if you run from the drone, it would summon actual cars to chase you!)
Or perhaps people will not be able to just "not pull over" because the police drones will be given the power to remotely command their car to stop. Heck, why even have the drones? Just require that the car monitor speeding infractions and report them for fines. Serious or repeat offenders can have their throttles locked out to the speed limit of the current road.
Presumably because non-autonomous vehicles will still exist. Heck, there are moving violations you can perform on foot.
Sure, in the same way that vehicles without backup cameras or even airbags still exist. They will become less common over time. Vehicles don't have to be fully autonomous to provide this "service". They just need to have a reliable grasp of which road segment they are on and what the speed limit is. It will take some time but it won't be long before there are no cars left on the road that lack the (at least theoretical) ability to be controlled via cell radio. Heck, even without a police incentive, this will happen just because remotely disabling a car is a great way to simplify repossession.
I personally happen to think this is a terrible idea, just one cyber attack or regime change away from crippling everyday Americans ability to get around and live their lives, but that probably won't stop it from happening.
I would note that motorcycles, ATVs, tractors, etc. still don't have seatbelts or airbags. And sure, that's partly because, for some combinations of safety feature x vehicle class, they fundamentally can't. But we could have just outlawed public road use by those vehicle classes because of that. We didn't, because the lack of much more basic safety features (e.g. a roll cage) was already "priced in" to our decision to allow those vehicle classes on the road to begin with. These vehicle classes represent different trade-offs in safety-space, that operators of all vehicles sharing the road are highly aware of, maintaining a sort of mutual understanding of vulnerability of the different types of vehicles they're sharing the road with.
(That is: it's not just that motorcyclists themselves are more aware that they could be fatally T-boned (and so drive more defensively / keep more distance to avoid that outcome); it's also that drivers of heavier vehicles who encounter a "trolley problem" where they can either veer to hit a car, or to hit a motorcyclist, are aware that there's far less metal protecting the motorcyclist from the impact — so they are very likely to choose to veer to hit the car instead.)
And because of this, I would expect that we would never truly see the elimination of speed-limiter-less road vehicles, even if all cars were mandated to have them. There's just too many other things on the road (motorcycles, ATVs, tractors and construction equipment, e-bikes, etc) that are designed with these different safety trade-offs, such that they would likely never end up having the speed limiting imposed on them.
And that's enough things still on the road that could be dangerous if they hit someone, that would need to be pulled over for speeding, that I wouldn't imagine we'd see "off-board" speeding enforcement go away any time soon.
To wit, in some places you will be issued a DUI (of sorts) for riding a bicycle home from the bar. And it's actually enforced. Talk about the police shooting themselves in the foot.