Smarte Rhoades

This is where I see technology going in my America.

In the not too distant future, I expect every motor vehicle to come equipped with an event recorder which will process and record analog events such as acceleration, velocity and direction, and digital events such as brake pedal action, airbag deployment, and turn signaling.

Now imagine it's the year 2022, and a group of seven vehicles so equipped are traveling southbound on Franklin Blvd., and for a wayward shovel in the #1 lane they are forced to come to a sudden stop. The last car crashes into the sixth (a 1974 Pinto) whose gas tank explodes, killing two and maiming one for life. Today, in 2010, we'd more or less find fault with the last car for failing to keep sufficient following distance and that would be the end of it.

In my future America, lawyers representing driver #7 will subpoena to download the event records from all vehicles in this platoon and will hire an expert to examine the braking trajectories of all the vehicles:

And wouldn't you know it. The first car stopped before hitting the errant shovel, yes, but the fourth car, it was determined, was overly slow to react, and therefore consumed a larger portion of the shared resource of braking distance allocated among all the cars. This left the cars farther back progressively less time and space in which to stop to the point where the last car, even though it reacted faster than #4, could not stop in time. #4, arguably, bore a considerable responsibility for the fatalities in #6.

Driver of #4 is jailed without bail, arraigned on manslaughter and assault with a deadly weapon charges, convicted and sentenced. Driver #7 is acquitted because his reaction time was faster than #4.

This conviction, as it turns out, was just what was needed to sway the public towards passage of the landmark Smarte Rhoades legislation in 2023, where human controls are legislatively removed from most driving functions. The public memories of the spectacular failure of the smart grid to lower electric power costs had grown dim, and Smarte Rhoades, it was said, would learn from the past mistakes and revolutionize the way we travel. An excerpt from the executive summary of this landmark bill reads:

...with human proclivities towards error removed, Smarte Rhoades will take a pragmatic, integrated approach towards a better transportation future. Smarte Rhoades will leverage existing technologies to a greater extent while driving a higher level of integration to realize the synergies across enterprise integration. The future of transport is NOW. The future is TODAY.