GPS vs. Covered Bridges: Unintended Consequences

Every time a new technology becomes popular, effects happen that nobody anticipates—not the designers, not the firms selling the product, and not the users either.  A small but significant case in point was highlighted in a recent Associated Press piece describing the increased vulnerability of historic covered bridges in the U. S. to truck and RV drivers who blindly follow their GPS instructions, only to smash into the bridge superstructure.

 

Covered bridges were themselves a technical innovation.  According to the Wikipedia article on covered bridges, wooden structural members exposed to the weather, even if painted, will last only about 20 years before they need complete replacement.  In the 19th century, the European innovation of covering a bridge with walls and a roof spread to the U. S., and many thousands of them were built, mostly between 1825 and 1875.  Because they were usually built for local pedestrian, horse, and carriage traffic, the overhead clearance was typically about ten feet or less, well below the fourteen feet (4.3 meters) that is the U. S. interstate highway standard minimum clearance. 

 

Although most of the covered bridges in the U. S. are long gone, some communities have preserved them for historic and cultural reasons, and a few dozen are still used for vehicular traffic.  One such bridge stands outside Lyndon, Vermont.  The 140-year-old Miller's Run bridge provides a shortcut around the town of Lyndon, and many GPS-enabled smartphone programs such as Waze intended for passenger cars will route drivers through the bridge.  Despite several warning signs stating the low clearance of the bridge, at least 20 drivers of box trucks, vans, and RVs have hit the bridge in the last few years.  Sometimes only minor cosmetic damage results, but on one occasion a delivery truck hit the bridge supports.  That cost the town $100,000 and put the bridge out of commission for several months.

 

When the driver can be identified, the town can collect insurance money to pay for the damage, but many drivers just keep going, sometimes leaving air-conditioning units behind that are scraped off the top of campers.

 

Bill Caswell, who is president of the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges, says this problem turns out to be a constant battle.  The only sure-fire solution is to build heavy steel height-limit barriers at each end.  But even when communities put up warning signs and flashing lights to inform drivers of the upcoming obstructions, many of them are still surprised when they hit the barriers.

 

Many of you may never have seen a covered bridge, and even fewer have tried to drive across one in a truck that's too tall for it.  But this problem is a good example of a widespread issue that philosopher and psychologist Iain McGilchrist has pointed out in his book The Master and His Emissary, and more briefly in a recent article in the journal of religion and public life First Things. 

 

McGilchrist is one of the world's leading experts in the differing functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  His thesis defies easy summary, but basically, one can think of the two hemispheres as two people with complementary personalities working together as a team to accomplish mental tasks. 

 

The right hemisphere is focused outward.  It is the one that perceives the world and admits its complexity and mystery, in the sense of being partially but not completely understandable.  The right hemisphere helps us to appreciate art, poetry, and the best in human relationships.

 

The left hemisphere, on the other hand, tends to simplify and abstract things down to only the essentials needed to get something done.  It is the brain's bureaucrat, ignoring subtleties and ambiguities, and sticking heedlessly to a task long after the wider-ranging purposes of the task are forgotten.  The left hemisphere can't see the forest for the trees, and McGilchrist's cri de coeur these days is that once more (after similar paths trod by ancient Greece and Rome), we are letting left-brain thinking take over our civilization, and are in danger of falling into ruin just as those civilizations did. 

 

When someone driving a rented moving van for the first time tries to get through Lyndon, Vermont, if he or she is following right-brain thinking, the thing to do would be to drive through the quaint old town, stop in and have a meal, maybe, and stroll around the town common, appreciating the flavor of a historic location full of time-bound associations and resonances of the past. 

 

But if the driver is dominated by left-brain patterns, Lyndon is just an obstruction on the way to wherever the goal lies, and in following that fount of efficiency, the voice on the GPS-enabled phone, the driver turns away from the town and heads straight for the Miller's Run bridge.  Perhaps the driver observes the scenery—the trees, the street signs, the warning sign saying something about a bridge—but the left brain discards all of this as meaningless and useless fluff.  The main thing is to cover so many miles in so many hours and get to the goal on the map.  In this way, dozens of drivers have plowed straight into the bridge covering, wreaking various amounts of damage and propelling themselves off an idealized digital map into the real world of recalcitrant lumber, damaged vehicles, and auto insurance claims. 

 

Perhaps the town of Lyndon will finally decide enough is enough, and erect two sturdy steel arch barriers over the roadways approaching the bridge so that even GPS-hypnotized drivers can't cause any more damage.  But these barriers will stand as a mute and expensive testimony to the inability of modern humans to embrace the whole of their environment, instead of giving in to a tunnel-vision version of reality simplified to a creeping colored line on a map. 

 

Or maybe, just maybe, the world will heed the call of prophets such as McGilchrist and pull back from the brink of disaster that we seem to be teetering on.  If history is any guide, though, it will be hard to stop ourselves in time.  And this go-round, we may damage a lot more than a few bridges.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press article "Historic covered bridges are under threat by truck drivers relying on GPS meant for cars" by Lisa Rathke appeared on Mar. 20 at https://apnews.com/article/covered-bridges-gps-truckers-accidents-906e3379e07b20dbcdbe16e7cf5e5d6d.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on covered bridges.  Iain McGilchrist's article "Resist the Machine Apocalypse" appeared in the March 2024 issue of First Things, and can be viewed at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/03/resist-the-machine-apocalypse.

Friendly Jammers: The U. S. Military's Threat to Commercial Aviation

 

The Global Positioning System (GPS) that allows a few dollars' worth of electronics to determine your position within a few feet almost anywhere in the world has proved to be a great boon to aviation, which previously relied on an expensive and not that reliable network of ground-based technology for electronic navigation.  Newer aircraft use GPS as an essential part of their autopilot system, for example.  A report in the February 2021 issue of IEEE Spectrum shows that this happy situation is frequently being disrupted by the U. S. military in test exercises that use GPS jammers and spoofers, especially in the western United States.  Despite a formal requirement to warn pilots that such tests may be occurring, these tests have caused numerous problems to pilotes and even near-accidents over the last decade or so. 

 

In fairness to the military, GPS is their baby.  Deployed initially with a secret feature that degraded its accuracy for non-military users, it was designed primarily for combat uses, and commercial uses began as a kind of afterthought.  In 2000, this "selective availability" option ended, and now anybody, military or commercial, can get the highest accuracy possible out of the system.

 

Understandably, pilots and airframe makers have begun to rely on GPS almost exclusively for routine navigation.  The bad old days of shooting the stars with a sextant ended when various radiolocation technologies such as VOR (VHF omnidirectional range) were deployed after World War II, but in the last few years the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been decommissioning those stations in preference to GPS.  And GPS works fine, except when it doesn't.

 

Because GPS is now an essential part of military operations, the U. S. military is now coming up with ways to deprive the enemy of it.  By the time satellite-transmitted GPS signals reach the ground, they are weak enough that suitable ground-based transmitters can either simply overwhelm them with interference (jamming) or worse, imitate them to deceive any GPS receivers in the vicinity (spoofing).  By law, any such military tests have to be announced to the aviation community through Notices to Airmen (NOTAM).  But these notices tend to be very broad, blanketing multiple states for days at a time, and most notices do not result in pilots experiencing any interference.  The net effect is that when GPS jamming happens, it tends to take pilots by surprise, and you don't want to startle a pilot when he's doing his job, or even when she's doing her job.

 

One of the worst such incidents happened in May of 2020 as a commercial airliner came in for an approach to El Paso International Airport in West Texas.  It was early morning, still dark, and that airport is surrounded by high mountains that pose threats to airplanes that are not where they're supposed to be.  Suddenly the pilot lost his GPS position, and rather than attempt to land blind, he declared a missed approach, went around, and landed on a different runway guided only by air-traffic control.  In a report he wrote about the incident, he remarked dryly that the runway he used "has a high CFIT threat due to the climbing terrain in the local area."  CFIT stands for Controlled Flight Into Terrain.

 

Investigation by Spectrum reporter Mark Harris revealed that such incidents are much more common than previously believed.  In one six-month period in 2017, for example, 96 GPS disruptions occurred in commercial aviation.  This led the FAA to ask the nonprofit Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) to investigate the problem.

 

The RTCA's report recommends several things, but it's not clear that many of them have been implemented.  Better reporting of GPS failures due to military interference was one of them, and now the FAA wants pilots to report any such incident, not just if it required the intervention of air traffic control.  But many other recommendations, such as the military making more specific NOTAMs that describe exactly when and where the interference will happen, have apparently not been acted upon.

 

According to Harris, the situation is only going to get worse, as GPS manipulation becomes a more important feature of war games in military reservations, and as GPS becomes increasingly relied on as the main navigational technology used by airlines. 

 

This kind of situation is very familiar in engineering ethics, and can be characterized as the passed-out canary in the coal mine.  As you may know, in the days before technology was available to detect methane that could lead to an explosion, coal miners carried along canaries, whose respiratory systems are more sensitive than those of humans.  If the canary showed signs of distress, it meant there was enough gas to be dangerous, and the miners took steps to avoid igniting the gas, such as stepping outside of that part of the mine.

 

The near-misses and other distressing but so far harmless incidents that military GPS jamming and spoofing have caused are the kind of warnings that a responsive, on-the-ball organization will seize upon for appropriate preventative action.  Nobody wants people to die because an avoidable accident wasn't avoided. 

 

It's a matter of judgment as to how much effort should be expended to avoid it, but a good measure of that effort is to monitor the frequency of near-misses to see if remedial actions are making them less frequent.  If they are, the changes are doing their job.  But according to Harris, GPS failures are only increasing.  And as the aviation industry relies more exclusively on GPS for takeoffs and landings, it is just a matter of time before something really serious happens.

 

This situation is made worse by the distributed nature of the responsibilities involved:  the U. S. military, the FAA, airline operators, airline manufacturers, and pilots.  With so much opportunity for finger-pointing, it's no surprise that not much substantive has been done.  It would be a tragedy if effective steps were taken to fix this problem only after somebody gets killed.  But sometimes it takes a tragedy to get people to do something.

 

Sources:  Mark Harris's article "Lost in Airspace" appeared on pp. 22-27 of the February 2021 issue of IEEE Spectrum.  Portions of it can be viewed at https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_february_2021/lost_in_airspace.html.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on GPS and VOR.

ICAO To Airlines: Watch Where You're Going (Every 15 Minutes)

Once in a great while, I have the satisfaction of making a prediction or calling for a certain action in this blog, and then seeing the called-for event actually come to pass.  Last month, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) issued a new set of tracking requirements for airlines in participating countries, which means just about every airline that flies in more than one country.  While a formal vote on the requirements won't happen till later in the year, the slow-moving machinery of the United Nations—of which the ICAO is a part—has finally creaked into action.  So it may not be too much to hope that the kind of situation that has kept the destiny of Malaysia Flight 370 a mystery to this day can be avoided in the future, or at least that such incidents will produce data that will make the plane easier to find.

Flight 370, which disappeared a year ago March 8, was supposed to stay within range of ground-based tracking radars.  But when it veered way off course toward the open ocean for reasons that are still unknown, the limited-range ground radars lost contact with it, and an onboard satellite-tracking system was not working, possibly because it was intentionally disabled.  The upshot was that once the flight disappeared, investigators had to use some arcane technical tricks to estimate the flight's last known location, and the resulting poor accuracy and long gaps between known locations have left searchers stuck with many thousands of square miles of ocean to cover.  The plane may never be found.

Back in January, I blogged on this tragedy and noted that the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was urging the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to adopt improved flight-location technology.  I also noted that while this move would help us to find international flights operated by US carriers, a truly international solution would have to await action by the ICAO, which has now begun to act.

As reported in a recent Associated Press article, the ICAO rules would require each airline to get location updates for all their flights every 15 minutes.  How they get the updates is up to the airlines.  Deep-pocketed operations such as Air France already have automatic satellite-location systems in place, and probably either already meet the requirements or can change their operations slightly to comply.  Less well-funded airlines can fall back on having their pilots look at their pocket GPS they mail-ordered from Walmart and use their shortwave radios to report their position.  Any way will do, says the ICAO, but you have to update your flight locations every 15 minutes.  If the rules are approved, this requirement will go into effect in 2016, which is by UN standards almost instantaneously. 

A second part of the ruling pertains to automatic flight-location technology, typically a satellite link.  By 2020, all new airplanes carrying more than 19 passengers will have to go into a minute-by-minute location transmission mode if an emergency occurs such as a steep dive or significant deviation from the flight plan.  The five-year delay from now would give airframe manufacturers and their customers time to ready the technology and the money to pay for it, respectively. 

By specifying in the 15-minute rule the desired outcome rather than the technology required to achieve it, the ICAO has done a clever thing.  Each airline can tailor its response to its own circumstances and adopt an approach that doesn't place an undue burden either on the flight crew or on the airline's budget for new equipment.  For reasons that are not clear, but may have to do with relationships between large avionics companies and the federal government, FAA rules tend to be much more prescriptive of exactly how certain goals are to be achieved technologically.  Historically, the FAA owned and operated much of the technology itself, so naturally the agency got in the habit of telling the airlines what matching equipment they needed.  But nowadays, the central-control model is pretty old-fashioned and is being superseded by distributed technologies that rely upon a combination of public, private, and open-source resources to work.  Safety-critical technologies are a breed apart, and a certain level of standardization and certification is reasonable.  But I wonder if things might move a little faster in domestic aviation technology if the FAA took a hint from the ICAO, and moved toward simply telling airlines what is to be achieved, and let the firms themselves figure out how to achieve it.

All this comes too late to help those on the ill-fated Flight 370, which is probably—but not for sure—somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.  The death of a loved one is always a tragedy, but there must be a special pain associated with not knowing anything about the person's final hours, and what mischance caused their demise.  Sooner or later, someone will probably find the wreckage, and if enough evidence can be recovered it may be possible to reconstruct what happened.  But in the meantime, I hope that the proposed new ICAO rules will make it much less likely that airlines will simply lose track of a plane while someone runs off with it, and can even prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.

Sources:  The article "Airlines move to better track their planes" by Scott Meyerowitz and David Koenig was carried by numerous newspapers, including the Deseret News on Mar. 3, 2015 at http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765669470/Airlines-move-to-better-track-planes-a-year-after-Flight-370.html.  My post "High Time for SatelliteTracking of All International Flights" appeared on Jan. 26, 2015.

High Time for Satellite Tracking of All International Flights

This coming March 8 will mark one year since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing somewhere over the Indian Ocean.  The wreckage has never been found, although communications experts used some almost accidental satellite-transponder data to estimate the last known location of the plane.  At the time, I recall thinking that if I was an airline and owned a number of high-value mobile assets known as airliners, I would want some way of knowing where each one was every minute or so, anywhere in the world.   After all, the technology for tracking the much cheaper assets called semi-trailer trucks has been around for years.  The little white domes on truck cabs report minute-by-minute locations to a data center where operators can pay a monthly fee to any one of a number of firms to keep tabs on shipments, and truck drivers too, for that matter.  But there is no international requirement for airlines to do the same.

Last week, the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) waded in with a recommendation for all passenger airliners to be equipped with improved location technology.  The board admitted it was motivated partly by Flight 370's disappearance, and called both for improvements in in-flight tracking and in "black-box" technology. 

The in-flight tracking part seems to be pretty straightforward technologically.  It would operate more or less the same way as the truck-tracking system.  Every minute or so, a GPS receiver on the plane would send its location to a satellite in view, and the satellite would relay that information to a data center, where it would be logged and made available in the event of an incident of interest.  The only slightly tricky part would be identifying which satellite to use.  But there are already geostationary satellites in orbit such as Inmarsat which provide virtually world-wide coverage, and the missing bits of Earth near the poles could be made up for by linking to numerous low-earth-orbit satellites in polar orbits. 

The technology is not nearly so much a hurdle as the cost and the peculiar structure of international aviation regulations.  The NTSB's recommendations went to the U. S. Federal Aviation Administration, and if the FAA adopts them they will be obligatory for all U. S. airlines—but nobody else.  Because the U. S. operates only a fraction of international flights over large bodies of water where the technology would be most useful, the idea will not succeed without international cooperation, and that means the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO.

The ICAO is a United Nations body in charge of international standards for, well, civil aviation, as you might expect.  As such, its rulings have no force of law in individual countries unless the countries' own aviation regulations require that its carriers follow ICAO rules as well, which most do.  It was a 2008 ICAO ruling, for example, that required all air traffic controllers and flight crew members involved in international flights to be proficient in English.  I'm rather surprised that it took until 2008, but after all, everything takes a while at the UN.

The question is whether and when the ICAO might follow the NTSB's lead if the NTSB prevails with the FAA to make international-flight GPS tracking mandatory.  Enough alphabet soup for you?  The whole process—from tragic accident to technical recommendations to changes in laws and regulations—is typical of how safety technology develops in coordination with regulations requiring its use.  And the regulatory part is particularly tricky when it involves spending money.  The requirement that pilots speak English can be met by changing hiring practices, but GPS tracking will involve both up-front and ongoing expenses for new hardware—which itself needs to be standardized somehow—and rental fees to the commercial firms that operate the satellite transponders used to convey the location data.  Fortunately, we are not talking about large bandwidths here—the equivalent of a single cellphone text message every minute or so would be sufficient.  But coordinating all this will take some doing, and coordination of any kind at the level of the ICAO is a challenging and slow-moving process at best.  If they took till only seven years ago to agree on a common language for radio communications from international flights, the ICAO isn't going to churn out new GPS-location rules overnight, you can be sure. 

The other part of the NTSB recommendations concerns the nature of the onboard flight data recorders.  Now that video cameras and recording equipment are so inexpensive, the NTSB says we should have cockpit video as well as audio recorders, and that controls for the entire system should be inaccessible from the cockpit.  (There is some suspicion that the radar-transponder system of Flight 370, which works only within range of ground-based tracking radars, was intentionally disabled by the pilot.)  Also, the NTSB floated the idea (so to speak) that the flight recorders should be housed in buoyant housings and ejected upon impact so that they can remain on the surface, where their radio signals could be more easily received than the limited-range and limited-time sonar emissions that the units currently send out underwater. 

All these are good ideas, and if the FAA adopts them they will make an already safe U. S. air-travel system even safer, or at least increase the likelihood of finding any flights that go down in deep water.  And the information from such accidents is always valuable in preventing the next one, whether it was caused by mechanical failure, human error, or evil intent.

Nevertheless, I am not going to be holding my breath until the ICAO follows suit.  You would think that the international carriers themselves would have adopted something similar to the truck-tracking systems years ago, but there may be a mentality in place that makes such a system seem unnecessary because of the vanishingly small number of incidents in which it would turn out to be useful.  But once GPS tracking for international flights is in place, I bet folks find other uses for it, for things like fuel-economy efforts and even weather tracking.  But first, the ICAO has to get in gear, so stay tuned.

Sources:  The article "NTSB:  Planes Should Have Technologies So They Can Be Found" by Joan Lowy of the Associate Press was carried by numerous outlets, including ABC News on Jan. 22 at http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/ntsb-planes-technologies-found-28409934.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Inmarsat, and the ICAO.

Addendum Feb. 1:  Edwin Doetzal wrote me on Jan. 31 as follows:

"Your analysis of MH370 contained a couple issues:
Airliners do often have SATCOM tracking 'like trucks'.  On MH370, this system was turned off along with the radio transponder.
ADS-B is the new satellite based air traffic control system that will replace the radio based air traffic control system and is already being implemented through efforts by NAVCanada and ICAO.
What is currently in discussion are new systems such as AFIRS that would stream amounts of data automatically or by trigger in an emergency as well as explosive jettisoned FDR/CVR units.  Knowing where an aircraft was is of course not enough without the detailed DAQ information that might explain why the emergency happened and what action was taken by the flight crew.  A truck's limited DAQ can be retrieved from the ditch.  Please be assured that an airliner is a much more sophisticated system than a truck.
It was somewhat troubling to see such an article on an 'engineering ethics' blog.  With respect, it would seem that you are speaking outside your professional scope.  A retraction would appear appropriate.
Regards,

Edwin Doetzel

Lay Person"

It was careless of me to imply that airliners had no such tracking systems, and I apologize
for leaving that impression.  In the space I had, I meant to concentrate not so much on the technology as on the international coordination that would be needed to implement it uniformly so that flights such as MH370 would not slip through the cracks.  My thanks to Mr. Doetzel for the correction.  

A Tech Fix for Texting While Driving

By now, almost everybody with a cellphone and a car knows that it's a bad idea to text while you're driving.  But people still do it, and some of those people die in text-related car crashes and take innocent victims with them.  What if technology existed that simply prevented people from texting from a moving car at all?  Wouldn't that solve the problem?

Scott Tibbetts thought so.  Tibbets and his company Katasi were profiled in a recent New York Times article for developing a promising technology that would simply block texting from any phone that was in a moving car.  While there are several technological solutions to this problem that are already on the market, they all have various problems. 

Some text-blocking apps work by using the phone's GPS to figure out if the phone is moving faster than walking speed.  If it is, the software concludes that you're driving, and blocks texts.  This one turns out to be a battery hog, because the GPS system has to run all the time.  It also might present problems for train and bus passengers.  Another system uses the car's speed sensor and links it to the phone with a Bluetooth wireless connection.  But it costs over a hundred bucks, and there aren't that many people who are both concerned enough about texting while driving to buy it, and also willing to shell out that much money for something they could do for free with a little more willpower, perhaps. 

Mr. Tibbetts' solution is cleverer than these.  It involves connecting a wireless box to the car's OBD-II port—the on-board diagnostics socket that the auto technicians use to figure out what the "service engine" light means.  When the car's moving fast enough to be dangerous, the wireless box sends that information to the cellphone network, which then asks the phone—once—where it is.  Then, if the network is using the software developed by Mr. Tibbetts' firm Katasi, the software uses the location data to figure out things like who is driving the car.  You don't want a whole family's text service blocked just because Mom is driving to the grocery store, for instance.  That way, the GPS battery-drain problem is minimized, and the computational heavy lifting is done in the cloud, so to speak, rather than by the phone.

Mr. Tibbetts, an aerospace engineer and entrepreneur, has persuaded both an insurance company and a cellphone provider (Sprint) to cooperate in test trials, which have worked fine.  But it appears that the largest player, Sprint, has gotten cold feet lately, and has stalled further tests.  In the Times interview, Wayne Ward, vice-president for business and product development at Sprint, expressed concerns about product liability.  Currently, if a driver texts while driving and gets in a wreck, it's the driver's fault.  Mr. Ward asks what might happen if Sprint sells the Katasi system that claims to prevent such accidents, and then some glitch happens and somebody sneaks through a text and crashes anyway?  Why, Sprint could be sued!

Pardon me, but it appears that there's more going on here than meets the eye.  Any time a small independent company comes up to a big firm and offers the big guy new technology, the not-invented-here problem can raise its ugly head.  Short of buying the small upstart outright (which happens a lot, by the way), if the big firm adapts the small company's technology, they will be on the hook for royalty payments or other forms of obligation that big companies don't want to be tied down to.  And there's also the simple pride factor expressed by the phrase "not invented here"—if we didn't think of it first, it can't be that good. 

Besides, it's not clear who would make enough money to offset the expenses of the added hardware and software—and lawyers' fees, if Mr. Ward's fears turned out to be correct.  The existing GPS-based solutions for text blocking in cars aren't exactly selling like hotcakes, even after all but five states have adopted no-texting-while-driving laws of one form or another. 

One could imagine a legal solution:  make something like the Katasi text-blocking system mandatory by government fiat.  Nobody has seriously put forward that idea yet.  But it might happen.  There was a time when ordinary window glass was used in automobiles, with the result that otherwise minor wrecks turned deadly when razor-sharp knives of glass flew around and sliced—well, enough said.  But when the technology of laminating glass with a plastic inner layer was developed around 1920 to keep the shattered pieces together, auto companies adopted it, partly motivated by fear of lawsuits.  Eventually, most countries made it a legal requirement for all glass in automobiles to be laminated or safety glass, but it looks like the firms were ahead of the government in that case.

Safety glass is a different kind of thing than automatic text-blocking.  An auto company could start using safety glass and just raise the car's price incrementally, and hardly any customers would notice the change.  But as soon as you stop a person from doing something that they're used to doing, like texting while driving, you create a sharp negative impression.  And that's something that cellphone providers are reluctant to do as long as there are competitors ready to take business away.

My hat is off to Mr. Tibbetts, who put five years and millions of dollars into developing a clever technological fix for a significant problem.  But as many engineers turned entrepreneurs have learned, building the better mousetrap­—or text trap—is only part of the problem.  Convincing people to buy it and use it is often harder than coming up with the invention itself.  If everybody used something like the Katasi system on their cellphones, we would all be safer, no question about that.  We would also lose a little freedom of judgment which we can now exercise, which is whether to text while driving.  Perhaps some telecomm industry leaders will get together and agree to adopt Katasi, or something like it, but such inter-company cooperation for a non-financial thing like safety is a rarity.  It could happen, though.  I bet Mr. Tibbetts, for one, hopes that it will. 

Sources:  The New York Times article "Trying to Hit the Brake on Texting While Driving" by Matt Richtel, appeared in the online edition on Sept. 13, 2014 at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/business/trying-to-hit-the-brake-on-texting-while-driving.html.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on on-board diagnostics, windshields, and safety glass.