Case in point: the 2 times I've gotten a speeding ticket were both unintentional; on one of these tickets, I even had my then 50+ year old mom look out for the speed limit sign with me. I remember being on the empty, many lane highway, car set on cruise, yet not being able to spot a speed limit sign. At one point of the search, I thought I saw a sign though I missed it as I was trying to watch where I was going ahead of me and also trying to catch the small blurred numbers on the sign at the far right.
Er, Fitt's law right? My eyes were trying to focus on 2 things ~90' apart, plus the emotional stress of trying to drive in a highway with 2 family members I wanted to ensure the safety of and all my packed stuff crowded high around them as I make the long distance drive from upstate NY to Pittsburgh.
Recently, I got another ticket for "rolling" on a stop sign. I know, it should just be ingrained in me to stop completely at a stop sign and I am at fault here, though wouldn't it be nice and helpful if there was more of an incentive around stopping at a stop sign?
Before I sound too disagreeable, I marvel in a lot of the great tricks used by the transportation system to make driving safer -- the sloped highways in LA make the steering wheel turn mostly on itself, the intricate but often very sensible reasons to exiting and entering a freeway -- i.e. the extra lane to pad the incoming traffic, to name a few.
And since it seems I cannot hope for autonomous vehicles just yet -- including the lack of a good business case: the insurance cost of a car failing may not work in the American capitalist system whereas the technology may be sustainable in more socialist and communist countries -- I suppose it would be more productive to dream about how to improve the rolling-on-a-stop-sign phenomena.
The first thought that came to mind was using a blinking red light instead of the stop signs. They personally are more effective to me because they remind me of the traffic lights where I am consistently reminded of the consequences of not stopping at a red light -- the possibility of hitting oncoming traffic from the other direction. The downside to this is we may overuse the red light signal and drivers will learn to dismiss a blinking red light as a lot do now with stop signs. Without additional studies, I cannot be certain that learned dismissal may not be an issue, though my intuition is to not overuse a very important, life saving signal.
Another method then, though negatively rewarding, is to threaten drivers with the camera flash. If drivers know that cameras are installed in all intersections, including stop signed intersections, perhaps this would motivate drivers to truly stop. There's something personally less stressful about an 'objective' computer telling me that I did something wrong than a policeman flashing his roof lights and confronting me with my mistake. I assume the traffic computers are rational and hence can admit my fault more easily than having an urge to argue with another 'subjective' human being that no sir, I did indeed 'stop' enough to know it was safe to move onward.
In any case, the transportation space always intrigues me. There are so many fun usability challenges to optimize for! This could be a full semester project which the under budget government could fund in the academia and surely come up with, in a short period of time, many great ideas.
