There is a gigantic difference between 'this technology has some useful applications' and 'this is fundamental to improving road safety'. And there is even a more gigantic difference between cost and useful how useful it is.

Again, we know how to make gigantic gains in road safety. Its not difficult, its proven technology, its cheap, it can literally be done quickly. The only question is will of politicans. That's it.

First of all, its already incredibly absurldy expensive how the US currently does traffic. There are far, far to many traffic lights and traffic lights are expensive. Far to many lanes and far to wide, incredibly expensive. That again makes traffic signaling more expensive. Now in addition to traffic lights you need cameras everywhere, often covering 8 lane stroads, and then you need comptuers to process all that data. And do so correctly under difficult conditions. Installations of these system will be hugely expensive.

You can already compare your avg traffic intersection between the Netherlands and the US. The US often only has 1 sensor while the Dutch have many more. US intersections still operate based on completely outdated signaling orders for the most part (not to mention completly unsave and unfriendly for anything but cars). So when in the US most towns can't even configure their basic signaling orders in an efficent way, but you want them to do complex video image analysis and messaging? How does that make sense?

Again, we know how to make things cheaper and much, much safer. And it doesn't need fancy technology. We don't need people with PhD in data science to implement this.

If you want to make an argument that some of this has some uses, sure, whatever. I honestly don't think anything you mentioned is really all that complelling but I guess its possible.

> The city infra can tell the vehicle (or your phone) where the closest open parking space is

This is great, if your goal as a city is maximum utilisation of parking space, but that shouldn't be the goal in the first place.

If cities actually listen to experts on how to actually manage parking correctly, finding a parking spot wouldn't be hard in the first place.

> And importantly the cities that have been pioneering this tech have been pushing it while also pushing separated bike lanes, improved transit, more distinct street vs road distinctions, etc.

That just means that the lobbies pushing this stuff have successfully done their job despite far more important things. No city in the US has even begun to fully implement modern traffic practices. Playing around with this V2X thing and investing money into it is foolish.

In the actual countries where they take safety seriously, you know where they actually successfully have reduced traffic accidents and death. In those countries you hear very little about V2X and the almost universal thing you hear from all the actually successful experts is that road infrastructure needs to be changed according to the newer standards. Most nations did gignatic damage to themselves in last 50 years and all of it needs to be undone.

I'm sure those governments have V2X somewhere, but its simply not what most actual traffic engineers in those countries talk about. This V2X stuff is something car companies and lobbiest are primarly pushing. Its mostly popular with tech people. Most actually existing organisation for traffic safity are pushing what we know actually works.

> It's essentially just a LTE or WLAN link

Most vehicles can barley even software updates at all. And most old cars simply wont be updated with everything need to fully support this stuff. And even then most people on motorcycles and bikes don't have a great way of receiving that information. And there tons of old cars who want have it, so you can not realy on this for the next decades anyway.

> This tech is something that has been in development since the 90s

And designing streets without killing unbelievable amounts of people has been in development much longer and yet still traffic accidents are going up in the US not down. So maybe focus on that instead of fancy tech from the 90s.

> Also it's not the first line of defense for pedestrians but rather one of many that can be rolled out now while also pushing other material benefits.

The problem is that once this tech is there drives will relay on it. The idea that in order to be safe to cross, a whole complex change of senors, network tech and so on has to work is crazy.

And talking about defense in depth is all fine and good, but if the actual first 4 lines of defense don't work, you are never gone stop anything.

Literally every $ spent on this by the government or cities is 1$ less for infrastructure that is proven to save lives.

I think people really don't understand the amount of destruction these issues are causing. The insane amount of people (and children) killed is one thing. But beyond that the cost of the current transportation patterns are actually insane. The amount of cost in terms of police, firefighters, the cost for delays and infrastructure damage. Not to mention the hilarious amount of cars that smash into people houses. The overhead of insurance. People times dealing with all that stuff. How much of this can V2X fix? Almost nothing is the answer.

Its actually comical how bad it is. And even worse that this is done by doing road infrastructure the most expensive possible way. So its both expensive and does a bad job, its actually crazy.

But sure lets invest in V2X when most towns can't even maintain the road in proper state or paint cross walks correctly. Great plan.