Modern cars are pretty high-tech with features like lane departure warning, automatic braking for obstacles, blind spot warning, etc. Now the Ministry of Transport wants to technologically upgrade the country's infrastructure as well.
The country has just announced plans to roll out so-called “vehicle-to-everything” technology nationwide in an effort to make roads safer.
Vehicle-to-everything technology, known as V2X, will enable cars, trucks and even bikes and scooters to communicate with each other and warn of potential collisions.
They can also “give priority to emergency vehicles,” says Sarah Kaufman, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University. “For example, lights could stay green or turn green as an ambulance approaches, allowing the ambulance to pass more quickly.”
V2X can also warn vehicles if the road ahead is icy, for example.
“This technology has been around for years, but there's always been this chicken-and-egg debate of, 'Should we put it on the vehicle or should we put it on the infrastructure?'” Federal Highway Administration Administrator Shailen Bhatt said. “This gives everyone some certainty about what's going to happen.”
According to the Ministry of Transport's roadmap, by 2031, V2X will be installed in 50 percent of the national highway system and 40 percent of the country's intersections.
When it comes to vehicles, “I think we're going to start seeing it in vehicles sooner, and I think you know the plan is projected to be in passenger cars by the 2028 model year,” said Laura Chase, president and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Association.
A slow rollout might not be a bad idea, according to Cliff Brown, deputy director of technology policy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
That's because it will generate a huge amount of data about how we all move through the world, which raises serious privacy concerns, Brown said.
“You know, there are only so many of these Honda Civics of this grade that can be on certain roads at certain times of the day,” he said.
Even anonymized data can be filtered and hacked, making it a potential gold mine for advertisers, police and criminals. “Once that data is out there, people are going to find ways to exploit it,” Brown said.
Brown and others are calling for guardrails to be put in place around the use of this data, including how long it should be stored, who can access it, and why.
There's a lot going on in the world, and Marketplace is here for you.
Marketplace helps you analyze world events and bring you fact-based, easy-to-understand information about how they affect you. We rely on your financial support to keep doing this.
Your donation today will help power the independent journalism you rely on: For as little as $5 a month, you can help sustain Marketplace and continue covering the stories that matter to you.
