Ian Reagan, a safety researcher at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, recently drove a vehicle with Intelligent Speed Assistance 35 miles, from his home in Annapolis, Maryland, to his office in Arlington, Virginia. That commute runs smack through Washington, D.C.
“If I’m lucky, it takes 45 minutes, but it can often take an hour and a half”, Reagan says. “The drive through Maryland is mostly expressway driving with a 65-mph limit and moderate traffic. It’s the part that’s inside the Capital Beltway — the 64-mile loop around the District of Columbia and its inner suburbs — where things get hairy.”
ISA systems have been around for several decades. Using GPS devices with speed limit maps, onboard sensors or cameras that “read” signs or both, they can identify the speed limit in the vehicle’s location and detect when the driver exceeds it, but they vary in their response. Unlike the unit Reagan used, which worked by restricting the engine’s output, some systems only provide an audible or visual warning or make the accelerator harder to press. As of July 1, new vehicles sold in Europe are required to have ISA that at least provides a warning.
Even without a legal requirement, ISA systems are starting to appear as options on new vehicles in the U.S. Reagan said, “When it kicked in, I could still press the accelerator, but the vehicle’s speed wouldn’t increase. It also allowed me some choice about when that happened — when I matched the speed limit, when I was 5 mph over or when I was 10 mph over. I tested the device in all three settings on the expressway segments of my commute and used the speed limit threshold on surface roads.”
Reagan added, “Driving with the flow of traffic, I had ample opportunity to experience the system kicking in and keeping me from accelerating. To my surprise, it even happened inside the beltway, on both expressways and city streets, and I found that my impressions about the system depended on the roadway environment in a more complex way than I anticipated.”
For one thing, Reagan said he was surprised how useful it was on urban streets. “Our Arlington office is in a densely populated area of high-rise office buildings, condominiums, shops and restaurants. The speed limit is generally 25 mph. I wouldn’t have predicted this going in, but the ISA system kicked in to restrict my speed repeatedly in this neighborhood, where I think of myself as driving slowly and carefully because of all the pedestrians and bicyclists. Mostly, it happened when I was accelerating away from an intersection after I had been stopped at a red light.”
Reagan continued, “I often hear drivers saying they’re sometimes surprised to discover they’re speeding due to the smooth, quiet ride of today’s vehicles. These anecdotes are typically about highway driving, but the same masking factor could contribute to speeding on lower-speed roads. In this setting, I felt the ISA system wasn’t stifling a desire to drive above the limit but preventing me from doing so by accident.”
The ISA device not only helped Reagan drive safely, but it also helped him avoid the expense and hassle of a ticket.
It’s likely only a matter of when, not if, ISA will be required on all new vehicles in the U.S. Reagan’s experience gives us some confidence that we will embrace it.
This post was originally published on here
