Geofenced cars and ebikes
The speed of our vehicles is increasingly likely to be limited remotely, in accordance with traffic rules and local regulations.?There's a whole range of changes coming from different directions, which eventually may result in the driver having less control over the speed of their vehicle — but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
If you've ever used a shared urban micromobility service like Dott or Voi somewhere in Europe, you probably noticed how the speed of an ebike or escooter gets reduced automatically as it enters a certain area. Usually it happens in crowded, tourist-packed neighbourhoods where the risk of an accident is high. This geofencing is considered normal, and we're all used to it.
However, things get very different when similar technologies migrate towards privately owned vehicles.
In Amsterdam, the Townmaking Institute is testing a technology that'd apply geofencing to everyday electric bikes. That, of course, would require installing a special device on those bikes, which is unlikely to be done voluntarily by riders who tend to speed often.
It is, however, less hard to imagine that the city would mandate installing geofencing devices that warn the cyclist about approaching a dangerous zone, rather than turning the electric motor off right away.
Moreover, the same thing will start happening with new European cars very soon. As we first?reported almost two years ago , in just a few months all new cars sold in the EU will have to be equipped with an intelligent speed assistance (ISA) system. Regulators have opted for mandating a passive variant of it, meaning that it will indeed alert drivers who (are about to) break the speed limit but not throttle the engine.
Together, these two developments can offer a glimpse into the future of urban traffic control, powered by a wide range of technologies, from 5G to LiDAR.
As we're waiting for all of that to happen, do check out the piece by our reporter Si?n Geschwindt on the Amsterdam initiative, in which he interviewed the engineer who designed the ebike-taming system ??
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