% Working Title: Road Worthy % Johana Bearden
My car has a computer and a wireless data client and access point which lets it communicate with other cars on the highway, as long as they also have clients and access points obeying the same protocol. And these days almost every car has it. The protocol is called Road Worthy(TM) and its purpose is to improve highway safety and reduce fatalities, property damage and crime. It does a pretty good job, sort of, at the expense of everyone's privacy. It was still considered, by and large, a "good thing"(tm) by the majority of consumers. Which is nothing short of a PR miracle, to be honest. One thing perhpas that it had going for it, was the fact that the protocol itself was not owned or patented by one of the "evil four" (the four largest technology, media, information and entertainment companies to emerge from the end of the third decade. The name "evil four" was meant to be perjorative, however the E4 as they became popularly known, with the help of the four company's savy PR and marketting teams, maintained an iron grip on the markets. They never tried to distance themselves from the evil moniker but instead relied on a confused consumer base to accept their hegemony in a misguided attempt to be hip, edgy, or woke. Like as if their enthusiastic endorsement of the name evil made them somehow ironically self-aware and less evil. But at the same time everyone knew they were evil.
all that is way off topic of the Road Worthy protocol, because it didn't belong to them.
What RoadWorthy does is obtain traffic consensus among vehicles travelling, at any given time, along contiguous sections of controlled access highway. It acheieved this through the following procedure. Any given car, mine for example, upon entering the highway would announce to every other car within range (if any) it's unique id, its make and model, direction of travel and potential destination. Not every car knew exactly where it was going. Mine for example rarely had specific notice since I knew most of my routes by memory and didn't need to rely on it's onboard nav system. However even my car could guess. See it would store a history of all my trips for as long as I had owned the car, and based on time of day, the occupants in the car. Day of the week, season etc. It would typically guess where I was going. It didn't necessarily matter, for the purpose of Road Worthy, whether it was always correct. Because all the other cars were operating off of probability models and could calculate contingencies based on eachother haveing more than one potential destinations.
Any two or more cars in communication with eachother was called a Autonomous Automotive Comutation Council, or just "coucil" for short. A car could be a member of more than one council at a time, if for example it was within range of two other cars that were not in range of eachother. However for all practical purposes, any separate councils would merge into one council, with each intermediary vehicle acting as a relay. If the relay fell out of range of one council or another, each severed council would continue on in its smaller incarnation but would postulate the positions of the other council based on last known information and update the potential locations of its constituent cars.
Once established, each coucil had an agenda which it would rigourously follow and repeat indefinitely, reconvening instantaneously if any member of council (a car) made or detected changes to its itinerary or projected career. The first item on the agenda was speed. The council's job was to agree upon a common highway speed such that, if all members agreed, the cars in the council would never or at least rarely need to pass eachother or change lanes. So for example, if it was a two lane, divided highway, the council would agree upon an average speed for the slow lane and the fast lane. The council would account for the fact that its members (which were all cars) all had drivers with their own personal agendas, needs, urgent obligations and the like. So they could accomodate for example, an ambulance needing to go much faster than all other cars; or an elderly driver with axiety about driving even a percentage point over the speed limit.
That said, the council would also work subtly to influence it's drivers to compy with its decisions. The cars were not necessarily self-driving. However they where surprisingly effective at managing their own drivers. They had a panoply of incentives to work with. For one thing, they would remind their drivers that compliance would be rewarded with lower insurance premiums. The onboard car computer could let its driver know in real time whether their driving habits were being rewarded financially or penalized. At the end of a particularly compliant trip, a driver might even be awarded a special token or title, such at "Road Worth Commended Driver" which carried its own status and could also be cashed in for material gain.
The Council also helped eachother deal with emergent phenomenon. For example, if a car detected a large animal moving near the highway, it would alert its driver as soon as possible and warn them to slow down and pay attention. It would also pass on its observations to the Council. It wouldn't always be able to itentify an animal or other hazard, so it would always ask its driver, what is that?