What if your car wouldn't let you break the law?

Or writing Asimov's laws of urbanism

California State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a bill to physically limit how fast motorists can drive on public roads.

The bill would oblige car manufacturers to include speed governors in new vehicles. These devices would prevent motorists from driving faster than 10 mph over posted speed limits and are intended to combat traffic deaths due to speeding.¹

Scott Weiner, world’s tallest urbanist (Nancy Pelosi for scale)

Measures like this aren’t totally new. The European Union is enacting a similar policy in July.² NYC has also installed governors on city vehicles as part of a pilot program.

So would stopping folks from speeding actually reduce fatalities?

Yes…eventually.

There’s a clear through line from driving speed → fatalities. There’s also a relationship between relative speed and probability of an accident; i.e. we’re more likely to crash when we’re going faster than everyone around us.

Policy like this would need time to have impact, though. It would take several years if not decades for existing vehicles without governors to age out of use. Drivers who want the option to break the law might purposefully stick to legacy vehicles as well.

So, making it impossible to speed would make roadways safer, but the proposed law would take a while to have any effect.

Great, so everyone loves it?

Nope, not at all.

This type of policy sets off some extremely American political reactions. Apparently even among some of the urbanist set.

There’s something deeply seeded in the American psyche that chafes at surrendering agency. That includes agency to break a law, even one that we agree with.³ The idea that government could physically prevent us from taking some action is anathema, nowhere more so than in car culture.

There are some specific complaints in the thread, but they’re mostly non-issues.

→ Emergencies? Emergency vehicles would be exempt.

→ Natural disasters? Traffic — not being able to 2x posted speed limits — is the binding constraint on running away from wildfires (ask me how I know).

→ Government data collection bad? This stopped being a reasonable objection the moment we ate the apple⁴, left the garden, and bought our first smartphone.

On top of popular sentiment, the car lobby will probably push back. Additional components almost certainly means additional cost and that’s what corporations keep lobbyists around for.

All that said, even if this bill does pass, I have questions about implementation.

Database Administration

Installing governors into new vehicles seems straightforward to me. What’s less clear is how you create a complete and up to date database of all speed limits for every road in the state.

Speed limits in California are determined at the state, county and municipal level depending on the road in question. Maybe I should give folks more credit, but that sounds like a painful group project for a place with over 50 counties and 400 plus incorporated cities (many of who still share data by emailing csv files).

If anyone knows of a preexisting database (and who’s in charge of maintaining it), let me know in the comments. I’d be fascinated to know if this is something California already does.

Asimov’s Laws of Urbanism

Whether or not this specific bill passes, we’re still looking at a world where software governs the behavior of everything moving around our cities.

I’ve explored this in the context of drones, but this will eventually apply to everything. Ground based vehicles delivering goods or transporting people, drones dropping off packages, and eVTOLs ferrying passengers will all be “aware” of where they are and what behaviors they’re permitted to take, given their location.

The technology we use to move people and goods around cities is becoming more automated. As that happens, we're going to instantiate regulation in code to prevent irresponsible or malicious use. That’s a paradigm shift from rules that depend on detection and punishment as deterrence.

For better or worse, we won’t get to that future overnight. But as we deploy autonomous tech, writing regulations into code will become standard practice. And as regulation via code becomes normal, putting those constraints on any machines we still operate via steering wheel and pedal might start to feel normal as well.

1. Speeding is involved in about 1/3 of all traffic fatalities in the United States

2. The EU’s regulation gives car manufacturers the choice between a governor that actively limits speed or one that simply alerts the driver whenever they’re exceeding posted limits.

3. Going out on a limb and assuming @the_transit_guy is on board with speed limits

4. Or pomegranate or tomato