These days a roadside camera can capture a car's license plate. That technology can be on-boarded into every car. Soon car bodies could be covered in materials which cam be programmed to change colour. Take these two ideas and combine them into a proposal for improving road safety in illiberal but seemingly benevolent cultures like Singapore.
The idea is this: every car has a button which its driver can press to register a 'dislike' of any other car in the vicinity. You 'dislike' a nearby car if you see its driver behaving badly - cutting someone up, not stopping at a light, double parking in a red zone, being stationery in a hashed zone. Those dislikes are aggregated centrally and a signal goes out to the offending car, changing its colour to one which becomes socially recognisable as 'bad'.
A normal distribution of colours soon emerges. Many drivers improve their road behaviour through social shame. Safe drivers avoid or pay special attention to clearly dangerous drivers. Road accidents dramatically reduce. Roads become sufficiently safer for all that users accept the limits on their driving lives and any additional risks the scheme introduces.
We already have this system. Cars that have body damage tell me 2 things. 1) they are a bad driver 2) they either don't care about outward appearances or are too poor to get it fixed. Either way its best to be cautious.
ReplyDeleteTrue - damage is a cheaper solution, though the signal contains a lot more noise. Some noise which it is hard to avoid : being poor isn't strongly linked to poor driving ability; also if a bad driver dents your car, you inappropriately carry that false signal. Perhaps even car-proud drivers, being likely more regular journey-makers, are actually more likely to have accidents than those who care less about the outward appearance. Damage misses all of the ephemera of bad driving which doesn't result in dents. Finally, you can see the colours more clearly at a distance and under a wider range of driving conditions. Thanks for your comment.
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