Cars are pretty high-tech these days, with lane departure warnings, automatic braking for obstacles and blind spot alerts. Now, the Department of Transportation wants the nation’s infrastructure to get a tech upgrade as well.
It just released a national deployment plan for what’s called “vehicle-to-everything” technology in the hopes of improving road safety.
Vehicle-to-everything technology, known as V2X, lets cars and trucks — eventually even bikes and scooters — talk to each other, warning when there’s a risk of collision.
Also, “it can prioritize emergency vehicles,” said Sarah Kaufman, the director of NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation. “For example, a traffic light can stay green or turn green for an approaching ambulance to ensure that the ambulance can get through more quickly.”
V2X can also alert vehicles when, say, the road ahead is icy.
“This technology has been around for quite a number of years, but there’s always been this chicken-or-egg argument as to, ‘Should it be on the vehicle, should it be out in the infrastructure?’” said Shailen Bhatt, administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. “This gives everybody certainty around what is going to happen.”
Under the Department of Transportation’s roadmap, V2X would be deployed along 50% of the National Highway System and at 40% of the country’s intersections by 2031.
As for vehicles, “I think you’re going to see that deployment in fleets earlier. And then I think you know in the plan, it is estimating that we could see it in passenger vehicles by the 2028 model year,” said Laura Chace, president and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America.
And a slow rollout may not be a bad idea, according to Cliff Braun, associate director of technology policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Because this will generate a lot of data about how we all move through the world, which Braun said raises some real privacy concerns.
“You know, there’s only so many Honda Civics of this trim that drive down a certain road at a certain time of day,” he said.
Even anonymized data can be filtered or hacked, potentially providing a gold mine for advertisers, police or criminals. “Once that data is out there, people will find ways to use it,” said Braun.
Braun and others are pushing for guardrails on the use of all of this data in regards to how long it’s retained, who can access it and why.
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