UK to Put Monitors in Every Car?

wackoman2112 writes "The Sun is reporting that the UK government has plans to put a computerised spy in every car. This "spy" will record every single time a motorist goes slightly over the speed limit, into a bus lane, or stops on a yellow line! It will report this information to roadside sensors and you will soon receive a fine in the mail."

Comments

Inflexibility means brittle.

[Dutchmaan]

It seems to me that people *need* a certain amount of flexibility in the law.. Something this rigid is bound to fail...it simply goes too far against human nature.

Re:Inflexibility means brittle.

[agentchaos]

Seriously. This plan looks like a perpetual drivers' test. And if anything could raise the collective blood pressure of a nation, that looks like just the thing.

Re:Inflexibility means brittle.

[sensate_mass]

Might not be such a bad thing, we might wind up with more sensible speed laws then.

I'm not so sure. Although the US moved to greatly increase enforcement of drug laws, we haven't yet wound up with more sensible drug laws. All we got were more jails with more people in them. More draconian laws do not necessarily produce an effective backlash.

Re:Inflexibility means brittle.

[jdreed1024]

IF they really wanted to keep cars from speeding, they'd make the sensors work the other way, tell the car not to exceed 100kph or whatever, and a simple rev-limiter/electronic throttle would maintain the speed.

This is an insanely stupid idea. There are times when you need to speed up to get out of a dangerous situation. For example, I was once driving down the highway, and this guy in the lane next to me (obviously drunk) was weaving in and out of lanes, and other cars had to swerve to avoid him. In that case, the safest place to be is in front of him, not behind him. However, I was already going 65mph (the speed limit) and was in one of the left hand lanes, so I couldn't safely slow down enough to get behind him. So I had to speed up to 75 to pass him and some other cars, and then slow back down to normal speed. And about 15 minutes later, there was a five car pileup, caused by this guy (I found this out on the news when I got home).

Also, how is such a device going to be regulated? Will it "know" what the speed limit is? How will it enforce it? If I'm on a highway where it's 65, and then it drops to 55 in a populated area (which is not at all uncommon), will it slam on the brakes until the car gets down to 55? That's a great way to get rear-ended.

Even if the device is smart enough to know what the speed limit is at all times, I'm not sure I want something like that in control of my car's accelerator. I was in a car once where the computer malfunctioned and the fuel-injector was locked full-on. This is equivalent to flooring the accelerator. Fortunately, this happened on an empty street, but had I been in stop and go traffic, or in a parking lot next to a building, I'd probably be dead.

A car is, like anything else, something which can be used for good or evil. It's up to the operator to decide which they choose. You wouldn't want a program on your computer preventing you from using it to copy MP3s, or view pr0n, or read communist newsletters, would you? Why would you want a device on your car preventing you from exceeding the speed limit when necessary?

Re:Inflexibility means brittle.

[GeckoX]

So I head into a long pass, and the car I'm passing is being a dick and speeding up some as well...that's ok a bit more gas and I'm just about there...oops, my 30 seconds is up and all of a sudden I'm dropped back to my limited speed, parallelling the car I'm trying to pass...and here comes a car coming the other way....

Yeah, good solution.

Re:Inflexibility means brittle.

[lordcorusa]

Aside from the percentages of people who violate the two kinds of laws, as other responders said, the most relevant difference between this proposal and drug law is enforcement. While we have very strict drug laws in America, they are not enforced very often. While I don't use any drugs, I know a number of people who use them (pot, E, etc) on a regular basis, and yet none of them have ever gotten so much as cited for it.

This proposal is not merely a strict regulation on driving, it is (theoretically) the perfect mechanism for citations. Presumably it will give you a citation for each and every violation of a traffic law. It is the equivalent of putting a government mandated sensor in your body that phones home every time it detects illegal chemicals in your body.

Once drivers realize how often they break the laws and how much it costs them, they will demand a change in the law. The only way to avoid this would be to have the prosecutor choose to not prosecute most people, like the police currently choose to not pull over most violations they witness. However, a traffic officer has at least some leeway to decide the dangerousness of a particular violation as he witnesses it; a prosecutor after the fact won't have nearly as much insight. The end result would be enormously unfair, and I am not sure if even the government has enough spin power to make people ignore it.

Re:Inflexibility means brittle.

[4of12]

The problem with the new system, apart from its Orwellian intrusion into people's lives, is that it only monitors a limited selection of behaviors that define good driving.

Most of us have been in the situation where someone is a technically qualified driver - stops when they're supposed to, never exceeds the speed limit, etc. - but they can be among the more dangerous people on the road because they can act without much regard for other drivers, for the flow of traffic. Some of these correct but oblivious drivers don't actually become involved in an accident for every dangerous situation they create; but there cases where other drivers get into the accidents.

I think periodic tests are sufficient, but full time monitoring is overly instrusive and, though it will cut down some on the number of accidents, it will not completely eliminate the problem of bad drivers.

The Sun

[Nicolas MONNET]

Do you have any fucking idea what "The Sun" is?

Implied: why bother linking to any of their crap?

Re:UK road stats

[Biolo]

Once again the simple minded retoric strikes. The problem is NOT speed. The problem is INAPPROPRIATE speed. If you are driving a 30 year old car on worn tires, it's raining and the roads are busy you are probably driving far too fast if you are anywhere near the speed limit. On the other hand someone driving a modern, reasonable performance vehicle on dry, empty good condition roads is pretty safe well in excess of the speed limit. Despite this the law insists that the first case is perfectly legal (or at least they won't prosecute you for it), but the second case is, if the zealots get there way, a sentence for public hanging. Which car would you feel safer in, ignoring for the moment airbags, crumple zones and the rest?

Every advanced driving course you can go on will teach you about appropriate use of speed. If I'm overtaking a slower moving vehicle on a single carriageway road the safest thing for me to do is overtake as quickly as possible, speedlimit be damned. They call it "time exposed to danger" for a reason. In your ideal little world I would have to stick to the letter of the speed limit, which would increase the danger to me, the vehicle I'm overtaking and other road users.

Do you honestly believe that people fixating on the precise speed they are doing, staring at their speedometers, at least when they aren't looking out for the next speed camera, are driving safely? I've given up, now I drive to a speed reasonable for the road conditions, my vehicles condition and capabilities, and my level of alertness. Sometimes that means I'm over the limit, sometimes I'm under. I spend my time looking out of the window where I'm going, or in my mirrors, where my eyes should be, not fixed to the speedo. The only times I actually look at the speedo is when there is a speed camera. Now, ask yourself again, would you rather be on a road where everyone is spending more time looking at their speedos than the road ahead, or one where everyone was paying attention to their driving? We seem to be heading rapidly towards a society where the latter is in prevelance.

What the government should be going on about is increasing driver training. If you really want to reduce accidents on the roads every driver should have to take a practical test every 5 years (say). By this I do not mean a little 20 minute drive, I mean a really good, in depth examination of your driving skills. If you fail then you have to go on a course of some kind to sort things out, you have say 6 months to complete this and take the test again (perhaps an abbreviated one).

You can pick up bad driving habits even without realising it. Take me, I considered myself a good driver, I've been on a number of driving courses (off road, rallying, track sessions, skid pans), yet I went out on a "Performance Road Car" course and got picked up for a number of bad habits. None serious, but enough to make me stop and re-evaluate my driving style again. Look at what real "Advanced Drivers" (see http://www.iam.org.uk/) go through, and you will realise that these guys are an order of magnitude better drivers than most people on the roads. I'd rather be in a car with one of these guys at 120MPH than most people at 60MPH.

None of this is rocket science, none of it is surely beyond the whit of anyone of average intelligence, yet the Government hasn't ever made even a single move in this direction. The reasons for this are plain, to do the above, whilst very clearly achieving their stated objective of improving road safety, does nothing to line their own pockets. So instead they focus on the mantra of speed, because this means they can tax^H^H^H fine motorists easily and cheaply. That this has been shown to have very little effect on accident rates, and indeed some speed cameras INCREASE the local accident rate, is brushed off. Actually genuinely improving road safety in any reasonable manner would actually cost them money, so they aren't interested.

The same is true when it comes to