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 during 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 handiest about $5 billion a yr on its protection packages, at the same time as the NSA, CIA, and FBI have mixed-finance it’s nearly 4 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 by myself, and around 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 incalculable. It should nicely 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% of the entire output of America 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 only hand and those on the opposite. All this is wanted is to have the desire to mandate this generation in every automobile. That is no longer an excessive amount of to invite within the hobbies of safety because we have already exercised our will to mandate seat belts and airbags for the precise identical purpose.
Here’s how it could make paintings. GPS structures are ubiquitous and reasonably priced and are established in pretty a whole lot of each new vehicle these days. They also are small: some can even in shape into a pocket. Wi-fi is even greater 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 already exists to enable airline pilots to land airplanes within the worst weather and with 0 visibility.
(Of direction, we simplest ought to write the software once: the price of growing it, although excessive, maybe unfold over actually billions of vehicles.) Combine the 3 – GPS, wireless, and the necessary software program – right into a single device, and then mandate that the sort of system be mounted in every road car. And also, you’d have the essence of an early caution machine that might predict and assist save you every street collision. Each such gadget might broadcast its GPS coordinates, through wireless, to each other such device in its place. Each different such 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, the use of lighting fixtures and/or sounds, that a collision is coming near, leaving the motive force to govern the car and keep away from the collision. Any prudent motive force will accomplish that, of the route, after having been so alerted. However, if the driving force is incapacitated, stupid, or drunk, the gadget can be designed to robotically slow the auto all the way down to keep away from the collision, taking on control from the driver. Some drivers might not find it irresistible, simply as many drivers internationally do not like seatbelts; however, if the system had been obligatory and tamper evidence, they would don’t have any choice. It’s no longer only for their very own truth, but for the good of anybody else they may wreck their lives, so there is ample legal and ethical purpose of mandating one of this component.
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 alternative? Such accidents might also be smooth to prevent if human beings were to hold GPS transmitters on their folks: transmitters informing all vehicles of their region in their vicinity. Such transmitters may be made small sufficient to carry in a pocket or even embed 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 genuinely get even less costly as time goes used. 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. Just application these coordinates into the system established in every car, and Bob’s your uncle.
Anyway – you get the point. Given the truth that vehicle accidents are listed through the World Health Organization in the top ten reasons of demise in the world, and given further that the CIA World Factbook gives the sector mortality fee as 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 extra than the whole populace of Germany – the maximum populous kingdom in Western Europe. Do we really 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?
