Ford filed a patent last month for a smartphone app that would allow cars operating in self-driving mode to communicate with pedestrians via their phones. We’ve seen this idea before, despite being pretty terrible, and it’s the latest salvo in the war against pedestrians, bicyclists and anyone too poor or hippie to be in a car.
The app described in U.S. Patent 11396271 would alert “vulnerable road users” (a.k.a. anyone not riding in a car) to the presence of an autonomous vehicle. The AV would communicate its intentions to the person via an “augmented reality” overlay on their smartphone, all the while gathering information via machine learning to power “an impact event prediction indicative of a future impact between the AV and the mobile device.”
The first problem should be obvious: If you’re staring at your phone while walking, especially while attempting to cross the street, you’re not being a safe pedestrian. Keeping your eyes peeled and following the rules of the road is generally recommended if you want your tender human body to survive in traffic — or at the very least, so you’re less likely to be blamed for your own traffic death. This is even more true for people who may be riding a bike, skateboarding, pushing a baby stroller or doing anything more complex than putting one foot in front the other.
The other problem is that, as it’s described in the patent, this app only communicates in one direction. The human user has no ability to indicate their intention to the AV. The responsibility of knowing the intentions of the AV is solely in the human’s fragile hands. Instead of stopping whenever it senses proximity to a mobile device, this app merely communicates the AV’s next moves and hopes you know how to respond.
As a driver, do you really want pedestrians steadfastly watching their phone screens as they wander near the road? What about the privacy concerns of the AV’s passengers, who would have mobile phone cameras pointed at their vehicles in every busy intersection. Going by the description in the patent paperwork, that would be the case whether the car was in AV mode or not, because how would a “vulnerable road user” know a car is in self-driving mode without checking the augmented reality? The privacy questions unfold further from there: Where will the data from your vehicle pinging all those smartphones be stored? By whom? For how long? And how could that data be used?
Ford certainly isn’t the only entity putting the safety of pedestrians solely on their “vulnerable road user” shoulders. Two years ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declared October “National Pedestrian Safety Month” and celebrated by telling pedestrians, basically, to stop getting hit by cars. The Federal Highway Administration got in on the scheme, allowing similar technologies to be pitched as a way of preventing pesky human beings from getting in front of increasingly huge, tall, heavy vehicles.
At least the FHA app from 2020 was a federally developed “solution” that would have covered every automaker in the U.S. market. There’s no indication how Ford’s app would work with vehicles from other brands, or whether that would even be an option. Would VRUs (which, again, is any human not in a car) need a different app to see whether the Chevy, Dodge, Toyota or Honda in front of them is about to make an autonomous turn across a busy crosswalk?
When asked by Jalopnik about the patent, Ford sent this statement:
Ford is a leading automotive innovator and submits patents on new inventions as a normal course of business. Patent filings don’t necessarily indicate confirmed production plans.
Which is fair! This is just a patent application and it very well may never see the light of day. But the idea behind the patent indicates how our society still views roads as the sole domain of cars, never to be encroached by pedestrians or cyclists. That dangerous attitude is being coded into the next generation of AVs. The hope, as I understood it, was that autonomous vehicles would make roads safer for everyone, including non-drivers. But as technology struggles past Level 2 autonomy, the same problems persist, just with a new twist.
And the roads are more dangerous than ever, especially for those so-called vulnerable road users. U.S. traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high last year. While crashes between cars increased by more than 11 per cent, pedestrian deaths from cars rose 13 per cent. Two factors seem to be driving this rise in deaths: drivers behaving recklessly after roads cleared out during COVID lockdowns, and the sheer, ever-increasing size of today’s vehicles. Some lawmakers want large SUVs and trucks to come with ratings for pedestrian safety. Indeed, NHTSA has known since 2008 that American vehicles should be crash-tested for pedestrian impacts, but the feds have yet to give any indication that such testing will go forward.