Technology Musings: Technology used to drain our pockets
I read with great interest about a study in the USA that found that road accident deaths on highways went down over the last 10 years after the increasing of speed limits on highways.
Read about it on the Wall Street Journal: Safe at Any Speed
Here in Victoria, Australia there has been a very questionable campaign featuring the slogan “Wipe of 5 and save lives”. They are referring to urban driving and asking drivers doing 65kmh slow down to the speed limit of 60kmh.
I’ve always thought this a stupid campaign because if you extrapolate the logic that wiping 5kmh off your speed will save lives, then we should be doing 55kmh… no 50kmh… no 45kmh.. and so on.
It struck me recently that there is a rather more insidious reason for this campaign. Hand-in-hand with this advertising has been a tightening of the enforcement of fining people for speeding doing any amount over the speed limit. In the past there was a 3kmh error allowed, but with revenue collectors (aka speed cameras), even those 2kmh over the limit are being fined.
Recently though, this took another turn, with the neighboring state, New South Wales, running a similar campaign to reduce your speed by 5kmh, but their’s was in relation to highway driving.
It is a great concern when technology is used against us like this. Firstly to detect minor and often accidental speeding infringements; and secondly to generate statistics and advertising to support a biased view.
To paraphrase Maxwell Smart: If only they used their computers for niceness instead of evil.
Good luck getting the politicians to pay any attention to studies such as this. As you said, money has a lot to do with it. And common sense seems to have taken a stroll out the door in the past twenty years. When the people in charge have the ability to regulate, and the tools to enforce the regulation in an automatic, ‘efficient’ way, humanity slowly goes out the door.