It’s 2062. Meet George Jetson and his wife Jane. Both are holding the controls to their vehicles—and it’s 40 years from now! I figure most rural areas will likely still have drivers “driving” vehicles in 40 years. In the technological world of the future, our ability to visualize the safety benefits of a fully autonomous vehicle network exceeds the world’s transition from driver controls. Does that mean we won’t attain Vision Zero without Level 5? I say NO.
It’s 2020, and we’re more than half-way to the Jetsons. Let me share with you a vision for the next 40 years and how technology can help us zero in on Zero.
As part of transportation reauthorization, we set a five-year goal for all vehicles to be equipped with interlocks that prevents new vehicles from releasing from park without all occupants securing seatbelts and the driver not being under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Associated with this, we set a 10-year standard that if people unbuckle while driving, or become intoxicated while driving, their vehicle is autonomously routed to the nearest safe
parking area and stopped until the condition changes to buckled or not under the influence.
If a driver is distracted, autonomous controls become active and connect to surrounding vehicles to avoid collisions. And all vehicles are equipped with V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) technology that slows them to 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour) in all official school zones, and slows them when they approach roadway curves on public roadways where their speed would lead to run-off-the-road crashes.
In just these four actions, existing technology applied to new cars could substantially reduce 90 percent of fatalities for several reasons. Seat belt use is nearly 90 percent in the United States, and for the 10 percent who do not use seat belts, they are over-represented in fatalities (nearly 50 percent of annual fatalities involve persons not using seat belts). Twenty-five to 30 percent of fatalities involve alcohol-impaired drivers (which is down following 0.08 per se laws), and another 10-plus percent involve drug-impaired driving (which is increasing). Furthermore, rural run-off-the-road fatalities are overrepresented in the total number of fatalities. And finally, more than a quarter of the fatalities involve speeding; only one-third do not involve drivers under the influence.
Think of the late 1960s when nascent seatbelt, airbag, anti-lock brake technology began. Now, jump forward to today where nearly the entire driving fleet has this technology. Think of late 1970s and the U.S. dependency on foreign oil and with the government corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. Today, we are energy independent. We can get to Vision Zero. We will have Jetsons-like vehicles by 2062, but by then we could have reduced much of the toll of our highway system using advanced transportation technologies today.
Do we need a coronavirus-like focus to get there? One thing is for sure, we cannot achieve this without superior communication technology. Taking away 5.9 Ghz communication from transportation safety is like throwing in the towel on Vision Zero, setting back emergent technology from the task at hand. We can do this now—today—and Shape Your Community for safer transportation.
This is from the President's Message in the April issue of ITE Journal.