Viswanathan K's Thoughts

While caught in Bangalore’s infamous traffic jams, Pranay Kotasthane stumbled upon yet another example of the unintended consequence of policy actions. Once upon a time, it was common for large trucks to be lumbering through city roads at all hours, including inevitably peak hours. So those heavy goods vehicles (HGV) were banned inside the city during busy hours. “The goal is simple and well-intentioned: reduce congestion, cut down on pollution, and make streets safer.”   Sadly, even such a well-intentioned policy has side-effects. “While the big, regulated trucks are kept at the outskirts, the demand for goods doesn't just disappear. Instead, it’s displaced onto a shadow fleet of smaller, faster, and unsafe vehicles.”   One half of that shadow fleet consists of “repurposed” agricultural vehicles. “Designed for low-speed farm work, they are dangerously unstable on paved roads.” But the bigger threat comes from the other half – the illegally modified mini-truck...

If vehicles could “talk” to each other, would driving be better and safer? That question isn’t in the realm of sci-fi anymore. Turns out we (as in mankind) have already been collecting data on this topic. For the past 10 months, about 2,800 volunteers in Michigan have been driving vehicles fitted with this vehicles-to-vehicles communication technology. But until now, it’s been (mostly) just been transmitting data, not processing or acting upon it. The intent was to check how effective this data exchange is in the real world street. But now we are ready to move to Step 2: the US Department of Transportation will be evaluating a demo to be organized this week by the University of Michigan. This demo will have the software process all that incoming data and then act on it, like issuing warnings to the driver and making choices. If it gets the green light (pun intended), the eventual plan is to extend this communication beyond just vehicles to include traffic lights and toll boo...