Reptation Systems and Road Rage at Ryan Says…

A while ago I was toying with the idea of how we could use technology to do something about all the a**hole drivers on the road (hey, I live in California :)

I really like the idea of online reputation systems, as they provide a means for a community of peers to self-regulate (e.g. think of eBay’s reputation system). Could we apply a similar community-based scheme to help regulate drivers? I mean, the police do a reasonable job at catching some fraction of drivers that break the law, but there are a whole lot of crappy drivers out there doing annoying and downright dangerous things that aren’t necessarily illegal.

In an ideal world, every car would be fitted with some kind of ‘device’ such that when someone cuts you off for example, you could activate this device and it would identify the offending driver (either by a corresponding device in offender’s car, or by their license plate) and register a negative ‘vote’ for that driver. There may even be a feedback mechanism for the offending driver where his device would alert him that he has just pissed off X drivers - which could go a long way toward solving the problem (it’s not hard for me to imagine that a lot of drivers in California are simply clueless, rather than malicious).

But in addition the potential benefits of real-time feedback, there would also be a central database for aggregating driver reputations. At a basic level this would just serve as a ‘leader board’ of the worst drivers in a given area, but could conceivably be used as a data source to affect drivers’ insurance premiums (as long as the system is secure and trustworthy).

Thinking about this some more, I realized there is already a suitable ‘device’ in almost every car - the cellphone! A very simple implementation of this system would be for a driver to make a phone call or send a text message with the license plate of the offending vehicle, and perhaps even a sentence about what they did. Of course, making a phone call or sending a text message while driving could have negative consequences on the number of bad drivers… but I figure everyone in California is on the phone while in their car anyway :)

There’s even a good revenue model for such a system - premium SMS. In the heat of a ‘road rage moment’, i don’t think many people would think twice about paying 30 or 50 cents to report a bad driver. After the carrier takes their fees for delivering the message, this leaves probably a good 10-30 cents in revenues per message. Not to mention revenue from potential back-end deals to share data with insurance agencies etc.

Of course, it’s non-trivial to design a system like this that is resilient to gaming and other types of malicious attacks. There are several measures you could take - some sort of algorithm that weights votes based on the number and frequency of votes from the voter (maybe some voters are just easily annoyed). Privacy is also a very important consideration, it’s probably best to identify drivers by their license plate only. But what about when a vehicle changes ownership? You would need to interface with the DMV to ‘wipe the slate clean’ in such a case…

Anyway, I just thought I’d post my thoughts up here and maybe inspire someone to build something like this (if you do, sign me up for your beta :). I’m focused right now on too many other projects to invest any real time into it - although from my brief investigations it would be pretty low-cost to hook up a server and a cell phone and see if the thing gets traction.

Also, since initially having these thoughts I have discovered PlateWire, which seems to be doing something similar - started on the East Coast last year and seems to be expanding nationwide.