Last month I wrote about what a colossal waste variable speed limit signs are. As I was driving to work this morning, and saw someone in the opposite lanes flashing their headlights, it occurred to me that it might not matter anyway.
It is only a matter of time before cars have internet access. They will either be sold with this option, or it will be available as an after-market add-on. It is a certainty. Once this happens, and the vast majority of cars on the road have it, inevitably there will be a whole series of distributed software applications that act to tie all the cars together. Something like instant messenger for cars, only these messages will also contain useful information for the driver beyond the normal inane conversations. Traffic information like debris in the road, or emergency vehicles approaching from the rear, could be passed from car to car, traveling in both directions on any given stretch of road, giving the driver insight into driving conditions both in front of him and behind him.
Once this is well-established, it is not hard to see that the next logical step will be notifying motorists of speed traps. The information will be much more sophisticated than simply flashing one’s headlights at oncoming traffic, however. These packets of data could include precise GPS coordinates, for instance, reconnaisance photos of the area (because no car with internet access will be without a hood-mounted or dashboard-mounted webcam), as well as brief notes describing the trap. With all of that information available to a driver, who needs radar detectors anymore? The effect will be, on a macro scale, that traffic will naturally slow around the location of a cop, and speed up again once the threat of a ticket has passed. Much the same way it works now, only infinitely more efficient. So efficient, in fact, that it is likely that no cop will ever write a speeding ticket again.
You heard it here first, folks. Tell your friends. The days of speeding tickets are numbered.
[Update: Sep 24, 2012] My prediction is closer than I thought to coming true. Wired reports that Cisco has been working on this as a “skunkworks” project for three years. Hmmm… that is shortly after I wrote this post.