Is warning people about police on Google Maps aiding your fellow citizens, or abetting dangerous drivers? Anna Rawhiti-Connell debates Anna Rawhiti-Connell.

For over a decade, the navigation app Waze has used a crowdsourcing feature that allows you to report incidents on your route. With your phone plugged into Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, you hit a button on your display and can report heavy traffic, lane closures, roadworks, potholes and the presence of “speed traps” (now just labelled “police”). This information is then shared with other drivers on the same route via notifications and visualisation on their own display.  “Police in 300m” will pop up, with a prompt to report whether they’re still there. If you’re doing something you shouldn’t, it acts as a heads-up to stop doing it before you get closer.

Google bought Waze in 2013, but it’s only been in the last few months that they’ve rolled this feature out to the navigation app most of us use in our cars, Google Maps.   

For some, it’s a handy feature that alerts you to what’s on the road ahead. 

To others, it could be seen as a distraction and a thwarting of the police in their job to keep our roads safe.

This is an oddly specific and trivial thing to feel morally compromised about when the world is on fire, and the police are just trying to keep the roads safe. Keep driving and let them do their thing.

Questioning whether to participate in this technology-enabled exercise is a microcosm of age-old and relevant tensions between individualism, collectivism, safety, risk-taking, authority, courtesy and compliance. And I didn’t say I was morally compromised. It’s an ethical curiosity highlighting a weird grey area in our law where technology has outpaced regulation.

Liar – sorry to nark on you, but you raised this issue with your colleagues after a feeble and frozen moment in your car on the way to work on Monday. You agonised over whether to hit the button on your CarPlay display after seeing a police car on the motorway. I’d say that’s morally compromised.

Fine. I do feel morally unsure about it. On one hand, I struggle with it precisely because I am a law-abiding citizen who believes in the merits of policing road safety. On the other, I am also a human who likes to feel like I “belong” and occasionally gets irked by what sometimes feels like revenue gathering from officious authority.

Technology also alienates us from others and enables inconsiderate and uncivil behaviour. Alerting drivers to hazards or assisting them in not getting pinged for driving one kilometre over the speed limit feels like a bending of the arc back the other way. It’s a 21st-century nod to the power of small gestures in breeding collective courtesy.

Are you serious? Did you read a lot of contemporary non-fiction about AI or anxious children over the holidays?  You’re just pissed off about that fine you got for being on your phone while driving and for the occasional speed camera ticket you’ve gotten. You shouldn’t even be touching your phone in the car anyway, so it’s fitting that you’d want to break the law in order to warn other drivers about their own law-breaking.

You’ve possibly double-narked by outing me as someone who contemplated touching something in her car in the last paragraph, and now as someone who has occasionally done illegal things in her car. So you’re clearly not against narking in general, just against cops.

NZTA has guidelines on phone use in the car, and it is only “legal” to use a phone for navigation on apps like Google Maps when the phone is either:

• “secured in a mounting fixed to the vehicle and doesn’t obstruct the driver’s view of the road. Drivers are encouraged to set their destination before driving and to rely on the GPS spoken directions rather than looking at the phone, or
• “able to be operated without touching any part of the phone (eg by Bluetooth or voice activation).”

That doesn’t really clear up the matter of touching an Apple CarPlay or Android Auto display, which admittedly is a minor point to the “narking on cops” argument. But it shows that focused driving and car behaviour is often something that can only be policed by individual conscience and judgment, which surely bumps it into a moral category. You mock this dilemma, but moral it seems to be.

It just seems like a silly thing to worry about. Why not skip thinking about it and let the police do their job? Ignore the feeling that you should be doing anything other than driving while driving, perhaps?

But it’s like its predecessor, the friendly and “pretty legal” light flash.  It satiates a desire for rebellion against egregious revenue-gathering exercises and authority. It’s an “us versus them” exercise. A small fist raised against “the man” in service of your fellow humans. It encourages an odd sense of collegiality on the road, and surely that’s good for building a sense of consideration for your fellow humans you share the road with. 

No, it encourages short-term behaviour change when longer-term punitive measures are likely to do more to change people’s behaviour. Someone might slow down for 300 metres to avoid getting fined. If they got fined, it would act as a greater deterrent. Just drive considerately and safely at all times, and you have nothing to worry about!

Hard to know who is the bigger goody-two-shoes here. Me in sharing the deep anxiety that this small thing causes me, ultimately driven by a question about what kind of person I am, or you with your punitive deterrent talk.

And yet you hesitated, so half of you agrees with me. On one side is your purported belief in old-school courtesy and covert displays of unity and rebellion and your deep-seated fear that’s all falling out of favour. And on the other side is your concern about being a distracted driver and potentially preventing the police from lightly punishing drivers who are breaking the law and endangering people’s lives. That’s why your little hand wavered the other day.

Well, my tiny hand and I will die before giving up the small wave to acknowledge someone letting me into a queue. My hand is off the steering wheel for that, too, you know.