[wpietri]

I have often imagined a dashcam that does license plate recognition and lets you know when shitty drivers are nearby. And of course, it would have voice response so you could give nearby cars compliments and public grumbles. Presumably you'd also want it to be geosensitive and real time, so that it could say, "Hey, there's a lunatic coming up behind you."

Seems like it would be easy to put together a dash stand, some OpenCV magic, and a little glue logic to get a prototype together.

[msie]

No no no! Hopefully you guys are joking. This is another case of geeks thinking technology and public shaming will cure us all of bad human behaviour. Cynically I think you'll get funding.

[rwallace]

Actually that's a bloody brilliant idea. In an ideal world, morality or enlightened self-interest would convince everyone to behave well. The real world falls far short of that ideal, but social pressure is often a powerful tool for filling in the gaps. You'd think "you might die" would deter drunk drivers, but it didn't. "Everyone will think you're an asshole" was more effective. Let's extend that to other forms of misbehaviour on the road. The point here isn't the technology. It's using the technology to save lives.

[wpietri]

Our current version of this in the US is a system where there are a much smaller number of observers (cops). Too many bad observations and you face license suspensions.

In practice, the small number of observers means that there are plenty of bad drivers who have long periods of bad behavior with no negative feedback. Basically all I'm suggesting here is increasing frequency of observation while reducing the size of the penalty from "large ticket" to "mild shame".

It's also approximately equivalent to what happens in a small community. There if you are a bad driver, word will get around and eventually get back to you. That doesn't seem like a terrible dynamic to me.

[hueving]

It worked with Uber rating drivers and riders. Care to elaborate on why this wouldn't work?

[bmelton]

A big, obvious concern would be having a system that alerted you to drivers previously seen exhibiting bad behavior, and the social justice network taking that as an opportunity to avenge the bad behavior and inadvertently causing danger to themselves, their "adversaries" or other drivers on the road.

On top of that, everybody drives poorly at some point, and for some reason. A roommate of mine wrecked his car once like, one block from our house. I couldn't stop laughing at him long enough for him to explain that while he was driving, a spider was crawling out of his ear, and it justifiably freaked him out enough to hit a telephone pole.

If I was a random passerby that didn't get to stick around for the explanation, I would have flagged him as a clear danger to other motorists, which would have been undeserved. To boot, I think he reacted as well as he could have, and probably better than most, given the circumstance.

[wpietri]

Isn't this roughly equivalent to the concern that sometimes people give unfairly bad reviews on Yelp? Sure, it happens, but it seems like the solution isn't less data, but more. If you have 100 or 1000 data points on every driver, then it seems like it would be pretty easy to extract the people who are actually problematic versus just normal drivers.

[bmelton]

It is very possibly an over-concern.

[detaro]

Wasn't there a "report my driving for everybody" or something along those lines on HN in the past few days?