Who's Watching You?

You’re out for a Sunday ride with your friends, cruising out of town to enjoy your favorite twisties.

On the way back, you jump onto the freeway, where you pass under a metal canopy holding a row of sensors. The sensors download data from a GPS unit installed as standard equipment on your bike.

A couple of days later, a traffic ticket arrives at your home. The notation on it indicates that somewhere out there on those back roads, you exceeded the speed limit briefly. You can mail in your fine, or you can go to court and try to prove that you didn’t do what your own bike says you did.

• • •
You stop at a gas station to fill up, and a display on the pump indicates that it’s identified your motorcycle. The pump reads your bike’s onboard computer and then adjusts the price of the gas based on your road-usage patterns.

• • •
You pull a stack of letters out of the mailbox and notice an envelope from your insurance company. Inside is a bill that includes a hefty surcharge.

Why? The helpful note underneath explains that the insurance company has determined you’re spending much of your time on congested roads where the chances of being in an accident are higher. As a result, your insurance rate just went up.

• • •
Far-fetched? Hardly. The technology to do all that—and a lot more—already exists.

More significant, transportation officials and insurance companies are already testing ways to use this emerging technology in ways that have the potential to completely change the experience of riding your motorcycle.

If you live in even a moderate-sized city, chances are you’ve already seen some of this new technology at work in the form of stoplight cameras designed to catch drivers who run red lights.

But that’s just the start. Join us for a look at the type of tattletale tech that could increasingly allow others to look over your shoulder every time you go for a ride.

Data Recorders
Chances are, the only time you think of data recorders is when you hear about a plane crash in which investigators are trying to recover the aircraft’s “black box.”

But the fact is that more than two-thirds of the cars sold in the U.S. today also come with black boxes, technically called event data recorders (EDRs). They’ve been on many American cars since 2004, and in some stretching back to 1990. In all, experts estimate that EDRs have been installed on about 40 million cars.

The EDR works like an airplane’s flight data recorder, monitoring a wide range of information about the vehicle—speed, engine rpm, throttle or brake usage, even whether the occupants are wearing their seat belts. As a result, it offers a snapshot of what was going on with the vehicle when it crashed, and in the seconds leading up to that crash.

Originally, car manufacturers used EDRs to improve the performance of safety systems like airbags. But the information contained in those automotive black boxes is increasingly being revealed in court to help determine who was at fault in a crash. You may claim you were obeying the speed limit when you skidded on wet pavement and ran off the road, but your car may tell a different story.

Data recorder evidence has been introduced in accident cases in 19 states. One high-profile case that focused attention on EDRs was the 2003 crash in which South Dakota Congressman Bill Janklow ran a stop sign in his Cadillac and collided with a motorcycle ridden by Randy Scott, killing the rider. Traffic investigators extracted data from the Cadillac’s black box showing that Janklow was speeding as he blew by the stop sign and into the path of Scott’s bike.

The increasing number of automotive black boxes has sparked concerns on the part of people who say they represent an invasion of privacy. In response, the federal Department of Transportation has ordered the manufacturers of vehicles with EDRs to include that information in the owners manual, beginning in 2011.

What about EDRs in motorcycles? No one has indicated they are specifically installing such a device, but the computers that run modern engine-management systems track much of the same information, and it’s likely that some include storage of at least a few seconds of data to more precisely adjust things like spark timing and fuel mixture.

GPS, etc.
If knowing exactly how fast a vehicle is going before a crash can be considered an invasion of privacy, how about knowing exactly where that vehicle is, all the time?

That, too, is entirely possible with today’s technology.

Many car drivers and motorcyclists already use GPS units to keep them from getting lost on the road. But officials in California and Oregon have considered requiring them on vehicles to track how many miles they travel and whether they go out of state as an alternate way to assess highway taxes.

Oregon in particular is looking at GPS tracking to compute gasoline taxes. The onboard GPS would record where a vehicle goes and how many miles it’s driven. Then the tax would be determined at the gas pump.

The British government is considering a similar fuel tax, and a government feasibility study there has suggested that it would cost more than $1,200 per vehicle to implement the system, including the cost of the GPS units in vehicles and the infrastructure to collect the tax.

But the capabilities of GPS units go well beyond reporting where a vehicle is. Among other things, they also collect data on its speed, which has obvious implications.

A few years ago, a rental-car company in Connecticut decided to take advantage of that capability by installing GPS devices in its cars and assessing a $150 penalty on drivers if the device showed they had been speeding. The practice only ended when the state attorney general said that the company couldn’t impose the penalty.

But that hasn’t stopped other companies from setting prices based on driving data from their customers. Currently, for instance, Progressive’s TripSense program, a voluntary pricing plan available to drivers in Michigan, Minnesota and Oregon, monitors when they use their cars and how fast they’re going. The company then computes insurance discounts for those who do most of their driving during low-risk hours of the day and spend less then one-tenth of 1 percent of their driving time over 75 mph.

TripSense gets its information from a device that plugs into the dataport for the car’s engine computer. It isn’t a GPS, but it uses the vehicle’s speed data with its own internal clock to determine when the car is being driven. It also collects information about acceleration and braking, but according to Progressive, “That is not used to calculate the discount. Progressive collects this data to better understand if it is predictive of future accidents.”

It should be noted, however, that Progressive warns customers their TripSense data would be released if it was subpoenaed by a court.

A company in England is trying a similar type of insurance pricing there.

Meanwhile, millions of drivers already have full GPS units in their cars—even if they don’t know it.

For instance, the OnStar system in GM cars combines a cellphone with a GPS device, all of which can be turned on by the driver or triggered automatically in a crash.

OnStar says it doesn’t continuously track its customers. It only locates a car when the system senses it’s been in a crash, when the airbag is deployed or when the OnStar equipment gets data updates. Of course, the company also notes that it will locate a car when ordered to by a court.

Don’t own an OnStar-equipped vehicle? You’re still carrying around a GPS locator every time you bring your cellphone with you on a trip.

Since 2005, nearly all cellphones have been equipped with GPS technology, required by law so that police can locate you when you call 911 in an emergency. Again, those phones are not currently set up to track your position continuously, but if the technology exists, there’s the potential for someone to use it.


The Big-Brother Scenario
So let’s say you’re a lawmaker interested in using all this technology to the fullest. What could you do to control the behavior of drivers and riders?

Plenty.

At the simplest level, you could do what one lawmaker in Texas proposed recently. He suggested inserting radio frequency identification (RFID) chips into vehicle registration tags. The chips would contain information about the licensing and insurance status of the vehicle.

That Texas proposal would have given police the authority to use RFID readers—like the units that are part of the EZ-Pass systems on many toll roads—to check vehicles on the road. And if you passed one of these checkpoints in an uninsured vehicle, a $250 ticket would arrive in the mail.

That plan died in the Texas Legislature, but it’s an example of the sort of thing public officials are considering. And that just scratches the surface.

Imagine mandatory EDRs connected to GPS units. They could store every detail of your route and your speed until you pass a bank of sensors connected to a centralized traffic-control computer, which would read the accumulated data.

The computer could compare your route and speed information to speed limits on the roads you used and find out that you’d gone a little too fast at some point. Potentially, it could also pinpoint an illegal U-turn you’d made when no one was watching. Either way, you’d get a ticket from the local police, or an automatic surcharge from your insurance company—or both.

But why just ticket people who violate traffic laws? Why not prevent them from breaking it to begin with?

That, too, is under consideration.

Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and other European Union countries are researching Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) systems that would warn riders and drivers when they exceed the speed limit, and could even slow a vehicle automatically.

British officials just completed a five-year study of the system, and press reports indicate that members of Parliament are taking a hard look at the research with an eye on putting it into practice.

The British system uses GPS technology and a base map to track how fast a vehicle is going and the speed limit on the road it’s traveling.

A demonstration of the system on a motorcycle showed that when the bike nudged over the speed limit, the rider got two beeps as a warning. When the bike exceeded the limit by 5 mph, the seat started to vibrate.

And if the rider didn’t heed that second warning, then the ISA system took over, slowing the bike down to the speed limit.


The Bottom Line
OK, let’s separate out the reality from the tin-foil hat speculation.

Clearly, even though the technology is available, we’re not on the verge of having every moment of our riding controlled anytime soon. But smaller steps are definitely possible.

For instance, the British House of Commons Transport Committee recently issued a report suggesting that a much simpler technology—top-speed limiters—be required on new bikes.

“Motorcycle accident rates are far too high. They have been for 10 years. It is time to consider radical action to tackle this problem,” the report said.

Several years ago, the European Commission went down a similar path when it proposed a 100-horsepower limit on motorcycles. But that measure wasn’t adopted in part because officials couldn’t prove that the restriction would actually reduce motorcycling fatalities.

Now, it looks as though European lawmakers will be having that debate all over again. And it could lead to discussions of more sophisticated forms of vehicle control.

Those discussions could have a direct impact on American motorcyclists, says Edward Moreland, AMA vice president for government relations. He notes that the U.S. is part of a group called the United Nations World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations, which is designed to open up the world market by letting manufacturers build one vehicle that can be sold anywhere. And that, warns Moreland, means regulations adopted in Europe could affect riders in America.

“We need to make sure that vehicle standards imposed in the U.S. are appropriate for U.S. riders and riding,” Moreland says. “The traffic environment in Europe is very different from the U.S., and what works there doesn’t necessarily work here.”

© 2007, American Motorcyclist Association
June 2007 Index