Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I have often fantasized about a new outlet for democracy: nailing bad drivers.
I was pondering this subject today as I was walking home, after I had to precipitously reverse course to avoid being hit in a crosswalk, by the driver of a Kvichak Marine truck who had eyes for other vehicular traffic, but not pedestrians. The way it would work is like this: every driver, biker, motorcyclist and pedestrian would get two things. One would be a transponder, like an RFID chip or something. The other thing would be their tag gun.
The transponder identifies each road user uniquely. The tag gun reads the transponder from up to about 500 feet away (note that this is all in the realm of fantasy, there are many practical problems, which I'll get to). When a driver/biker/ped pisses you off, you aim your tag gun at the offender, and hit the button. Ideally, it would have some interface to indicate what the offense was, but even a generic "negative brownie points" system would be useful. The first shot is the only one that counts, so you can "shoot" the offender multiple times without skewing the system.
The tag gun would upload its hits on a regular basis, possibly via cell networks, or by plugging into your computer at night.
As a road user accumulates demerits -- and there would have to be some kind of hard-won compromise on how many points per day/week/month constitutes "enough" -- the police would drop a friendly "you're being a jerk" ticket in the mail for you. The fine would have to be carefully compromised too, but I'm thinking something like $50. Get enough jerk tickets over the course of a quarter/year, and you graduate to bigger and bigger fines per ticket.
The beauty of this (highly theoretical) system is that it is, pure and simple, democracy. The threshold would be set high enough that some sociopath tagging everyone they see can't result in a ticket, but if you're really driving/riding/walking like a jerk, you'll be called on it. It will be a sufficiently anonymous system that there's no real chance of retribution. It would be a novel way of enacting the saying that "an armed society is a polite society." If your driving is offensive, you get fined, whether there are police around or not.
Of course, there are many excellent reasons this system would never work (which is why I've only dreamed about it, not ever considered doing anything with the idea): technically, RFID only works at relatively short ranges (up to a couple dozen feet, I think); the act of tagging someone, if at all obvious, could spur the tagee to acts of road rage; the ability to selectively target do-badders at any distance would be poor, so you'd end up tagging a whole cluster of road users half the time (although the threshold would solve that to some extent). There's also the problem of getting such a system enacted into law. I'm sure there are some extremely powerful lobbies which would oppose it.
It also suffers from some frustrating limitations on the tagger side. I'd want to be able, for instance, to tag people at different levels: drunk drivers get the heftiest tag, while people who fail to use their turn signals, or jay-walkers (assuming I cared about jay-walking) get a relatively weak tag. It would be an expensive system to roll out, since you'd have to set up each citizen with both transponder and tag gun. Both those items together, assuming massive economies of scale, would probably set back the government at least $100, for a total cost in the billions before you even consider the infrastructure or legislative requirements. If such a system were implemented in one locality only, it would be nearly useless except as a way to unfairly target local residents.
Such a system also offers breathtaking sociological implications. Assuming that the transponder has to be integrated into the vehicle, this would not only allow differentiation between the vehicle and the driver, but it would also enable both speedy recovery of stolen vehicles, and Dick-Cheney-wet-dream levels of movement monitoring. It also raises the issue of licensing (even in a very limited way) bicycles and pedestrians, which opens the door to another huge can of worms.
So, like so many clever ideas, although it has some neat primary effects, it wouldn't be worth the secondary effects. I still fantasize about tagging bad drivers when I encounter them, though.
Posted at 13:51 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater