Automobile Accidents Are Easy to Prevent Using Modern Technology
Egads! And Gadzooks! Compare that with loss of life through terrorist assaults and school shootings, etc., all of which combined, since the year 1857, have no longer, inside the USA, handed 5,000. To put that angle, within the same one hundred fifty-12 months duration, over 3,200,000 human beings were killed through vehicles inside the US on my own. That’s over 600 times as many as killed with the aid of terrorists. It’s a mind-bogglingly disproportionate ratio. (Worse nonetheless, the US Department of Transportation spends about $5 billion a year on its protection packages; at the same time as the NSA, CIA, and FBI have mixed-finance, it’s nearly four times as large.)
And that is just the deaths resulting from road crashes. Injuries are way more normal. There are around 6 million street accidents each year in the US, and about 3 million human beings are injured via them. The financial cost of all of these, within the form of the value of treating them and paintings-hours lost, is priceless. It should be half a thousand billion dollars each year given that the GDP of the USA is best $14 trillion or thereabouts, that comes to three. Five percent of America’s entire output is just taking place on the drain, year after year.
The Good News
Fortunately, it does not have to be this manner. We already own the generation to almost do away with automobile injuries involving different vehicles and considerably reduce accidents concerning automobiles on the one hand and those on the other. All this is wanted is to have the desire to mandate this generation in every car. That is no longer an excessive amount to invite within the safety hobbies. We have already exercised our will to require seat belts and airbags for an identical purpose.
Here’s how it could make paintings. GPS structures are ubiquitous and reasonably priced and are established in alot of new vehicles these days. They are also small: some can even be shaped into a pocket. Wi-fi is even more ubiquitous and less expensive: it is built into every PC, pill, and mobile telephone offered today. And each GPS and wireless are becoming inexpensive with the aid of the year. To lead them to work to keep away from accidents, all this is wanted is a software program to consider an item’s mass, velocity, and direction of travel, so one can expect precisely wherein it will likely be some seconds (or microseconds) later if it keeps going the manner it is going. Such software is easy to write down: it enables airline pilots to land airplanes in the worst weather without 0 visibility.
(Of course, we should write the software once: although excessive, the growing price may unfold over billions of vehicles.) Combine the 3 – GPS, wireless, and the necessary software program – right into a single device, and then mandate that the system be mounted in every road car. Also, you’d have the essence of an early caution machine that might predict and assist in saving you every street collision. Each such gadget might broadcast its GPS coordinates, through wireless, to each other such devices in its place. Each different machine might use its integrated software program to determine whether or not a collision is drawing close.
Such structures should initially alert the driving force, using lighting fixtures and sounds, that a collision is coming near, leaving the motive force to govern the car and keep away from the crash. Any prudent motive force will accomplish that of the route after being so alerted. However, suppose the driving force is incapacitated, stupid, or drunk. In that case, the gadget can be designed to robotically slow the auto down to avoid a collision, taking on control from the driver. Some drivers might not find it irresistible, as many drivers internationally do not like seatbelts; however, if the system had been obligatory and tampered with, they would not have any choice. It’s no longer only for their truth but for anybody else’s good. They may wreck their lives, so there is ample legal and ethical purpose in mandating one of these components.
The cost per automobile might be minuscule. Even if every such machine had been to cost 1000 dollars – and that’s pushing it, for the reason that GPS systems fee most effective multiple hundred greenbacks each – considering that only 17 million or so automobiles are offered inside the US every 12 months, it’d mean an annual US expenditure of only $17 billion, which, in comparison with the $240 billion that street injuries price the American economic system each yr, is next to nothing. In truth, even if it had been mandated that such a system be retrofitted to every unmarried vehicle - and considering that there are approximately 250 million avenue automobiles in America today (that consists of cars, vehicles, and bikes of the route) – it would best be a one-time price that charges just a tad extra than visitors injuries cost the US financial system each yr.
But, you can ask, what about injuries between motors on the one hand and people on the other? Such accidents might also be prevented if human beings held GPS transmitters on their folks, informing all vehicles of their region in their vicinity. Such transmitters may be made small and sufficient to carry in a pocket or even embedded in a wristwatch, and due to the fact they would only amount to a wireless-ready GPS, they would be extremely cheap. As a count of truth, private GPS locators offered these days – approximately the size of a cookie – fee much less than multiple hundred greenbacks and could get even less costly as time goes on. Any car ready with the device proposed here would be capable of forgetting humans sporting such wi-fi-enabled GPS transmitters and avoiding hitting them.
As for accidents involving motors and different desk-bound gadgets like lamp posts, those are even less complicated to save you because the exact GPS coordinates of every lamp post within the international are easily available from such things as Google Earth. Add these coordinates to the system established in every car, and Bob’s your uncle.
Anyway – you get the point. Given the truth that the World Health Organization lists vehicle accidents in the top ten reasons of demise in the world, and given further that the CIA World Factbook provides the sector with a mortality fee of 8.37 individuals in step with 1,000, it comes to almost 1.23 million people being killed global-huge through motor automobiles each yr. In an unmarried lifetime (of the Biblical three-score-and-ten years), that would be more than the whole populace of Germany – the most populous kingdom in Western Europe. Do we want all those deaths in our moral sense? If no longer, then don’t you believe you studied we should agitate for installing the gadget endorsed above, asap?
