Archive for June 9th, 2010

My latest Slate column is up, and it considers the emerging legal questions about liability in cases of crashes in which faulty GPS information is implicated.

And yet what happens when the world that is depicted is different from, or has not yet caught up to, the external world, and something goes awry? Where does the fault lie? Drivers, one might argue, should never rely entirely on a map—what family vacation hasn’t had its moments of (nonlitigable) high drama, with parents squabbling over a desert shortcut promised by Rand McNally that was washed out in the spring runoff? But there is a difference between glancing at a map for initial guidance (and then relying on signs or the road itself for information) and the new way of navigating, which is to receive authoritative real-time spoken and visual instructions—at a level of granularity measured in meters or feet—as one actually drives.

The New York Times notes:

India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006 and has continued to pull steadily ahead, despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries.

It goes on to cite a few reasons:

A lethal brew of poor road planning, inadequate law enforcement, a surge in trucks and cars, and a flood of untrained drivers have made India the world’s road death capital. As the country’s fast-growing economy and huge population raise its importance on the world stage, the rising toll is a reminder that the government still struggles to keep its more than a billion people safe.

In China, by contrast, which has undergone an auto boom of its own, official figures for road deaths have been falling for much of the past decade, to 73,500 in 2008, as new highways segregate cars from pedestrians, tractors and other slow-moving traffic, and the government cracks down on drunken driving and other violations.

As R.J. Smeed first noted, having fewer cars is by no means an indicator that one will have fewer traffic fatalities (and an important distinction in the developing world is that traffic fatality categories are topped by pedestrian deaths). But one thing that goes unmentioned in the piece is research, cited in Traffic, by Elizabeth Kopits and Maureen Cropper, that links a nation’s rate of traffic fatalities to its GDP. When GDP climbed from $1200 to $4400 in the countries studied, the fatality rate dropped by a factor of three.

According to the CIA Factbook, the 2009 estimated GDP of China was $6600, while in India it was $3100. Just by this measure alone, the discrepancy between the two countries could be predicted, if not fully explained (for there would be many other factors at play here, like culture, governmental structure, etc.). It’s not hard to imagine why higher GDP would lead to fewer deaths (in this regard it’s not properly correct to call traffic deaths, as is often done, a “disease of affluence”); as development levels increase, there’s not only more money for engineering, enforcement, etc., but also a reduced likelihood of corruption (roads are built to standards, police less willing to take bribes), accompanied by a greater societal emphasis in safety in all kinds of areas of life. But the real question is how India can close the huge fatality gap with China even if it can’t immediately narrow the GDP gap.

A Spanish company, Badennova, has developed what it calls an “intelligent speed bump,” which only acts as a speed bump if you’re going faster than the posted speed:

When vehicles traveling at the appropriate speed pass over the top, the intelligent speed bump provides no resistance and, as a consequence, does not cause any damage. For cars moving at excessive speed, however, the speed bump hardens and therefore provides the same resistance as any standard speed bump.

As a consequence, the non-Newtonian material allows the speed bump to change from a soft to a solid state according to the vehicle’s speed.