Front Brake Lights Could Drastically Diminish Road Accident Rates

Since there's been an increase in the number of people parking head-out in my area (which poses a real danger to pedestrians and bicyclists), I've been wishing that there was some sort of signal on the front of motor vehicles that indicates that it is running and beginning to move, like backup lights do for moving backwards.

If the vehicle is made in the last ~10 years... daytime running lights do that, do they not?

Green is also the only color, to my knowledge, that isn't commonly restricted for accessory lighting. The laws governing strobes and sirens are written broadly enough that they cover any light that you could possibly make blink, even if you don't do o.

In most US states blue is for police and red is for fire. Some states let other vehicles, like tow trucks, use blue. Sometimes they'll use blue and red for police - but blue is always restricted to my knowledge.

Yellow/Orange/Amber is for "caution". Some states restrict that and some don't, but it has an understood meaning.

Purple signifies a hearse or funeral procession.

I learned about these laws in the early 2000s, when I was in my late teens and early twenties and wanting to drive a customize minitruck. It turned out that in my state, all colors of strobes and accessory underlighting were restricted... except green.

What's worse is that the law specifically includes a provision where possession is considered to be sufficient evidence of use. Technically it's illegal to buy a battery-powered toy with an LED strobe in it, if you drive home with it within reach of the driver.

I find it odd that you'd say that.

Everywhere I've ever lived or driven, the vast majority of people use them consistently - at least when appropriate. The most common place I see people not using them is when changing lanes, and then usually only if there's a vehicle in their target lane close enough that it would matter.

Do bad drivers exist? Obviously.

Actually, now that I really think about it, there are two places I've driven where I can recall seeing people merging and turning frequently without signaling: New York and Los Angeles.

In those cases, my guess is that it's partly cultural but predominantly driven by task saturation. When you're operating a vehicle at 80 MPH surrounded by other cars in rush hour traffic on a six-lane highway, sometimes you have to focus on staying alive.

Aviation has a saying that describes this: "Aviate, navigate, communicate". Basically, your first priority is to ensure the immediate safety of your vehicle. After that, you focus on identifying a clear path that doesn't conflict with the path of other vehicles. Only after those things are done do you worry about telling others what's going on. In the air that's the radio; in a car that's your turn signals and horn.

Here's the Wikipedia article talking about this in the context of aviation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airmanship#Principles

If task saturation is actually what's happening here, then I would expect to see turn signal usage decrease as traffic density and speed increase. I bet, given the access to data like live traffic cameras that we have today and the current generation of multimodal generative AI models, I could whip up at least a first pass at measuring this without much time investment.

Great. Now I have yet another project :P

... and that's what I actually took away from this article.

It's not that front brake lights are necessarily a great idea, but that safety is improved with the communication of states and state changes are entirely automated.

Imagine a future car that knows that you're about to change lanes because you just checked your mirror, glanced over your shoulder, and repositioned your hands on the wheel -- so it turns on the turn signal the moment you begin to move the vehicle toward the other lane. Maybe it even has multiple states - what we have today for "I'm definitely turning/merging", and a dimmer or less saturated pulsing light for "the car thinks the driver is probably about to turn".

That could get too complex to be practical quickly. AI/FSD systems have a lot more "input bandwidth", though, so maybe make those partial/inferred indicators IR so humans don't see them but it communicates to FSD systems.

Actually, scratch that. In addition to signals that don't require manual activation, add a 360º IR emitter on top of the vehicle that constantly streams real-time telemetry. FSD could then integrate the actual, specific state of the vehicles around them into its sensor suite.

If it's bidirectional, you could even have a situation where two FSD systems meeting on a narrow road could silently and nearly instantly negotiate a plan to pass one another with minimal disruption.