Driverless cars, mandatory alcohol detectors: Can technology save Long Island from its dangerous roads?

It’s rush hour on the Southern State Parkway, and Jacob Kraniak's hands aren't touching the steering wheel and his feet aren't on the pedals.

Instead, eight cameras and an onboard computer accelerate, brake and turn his 2023 Tesla Model Y along a stretch of highway known as Blood Alley, near where an alleged drunken driver recently killed two elderly people in a five-car collision. A few minutes later, it glides through an intersection on Sunrise Highway in Copiague, where crashes killed three pedestrians over 11 months — including a 15-year-old student.

Some futurists and technology enthusiasts like Kraniak, a cybersecurity professional from Ronkonkoma who blogs about electric vehicles, believe autopilot-like features and fully driverless cars will play a major role in reducing crashes in places like Long Island. Driverless taxis are already picking up passengers in a dozen American cities, and the companies that own them claim they are safer than cars with human drivers.

Although the U.S. traffic fatality rate is still much higher than in most other wealthy countries, it has come down significantly over the past 50 years — a development experts often attribute to safety technology like three-point seat belts, air bags and other factors.

Today, besides driverless cars, new features are emerging that can detect alcohol in a car's air, or use GPS to limit a vehicle's top speed based on the zone it is in. What role could all this new tech play in reducing deaths and serious injuries?

"Cameras and the computers will never get tired. They'll never get distracted. They're never going to get drunk at the wheel," Kraniak said.

During a roughly 50-minute drive with Newsday, his car in "Full Self Driving (Supervised)" mode handled some tricky situations successfully as he kept his hands inches from the steering wheel while an internal camera monitored his eye movement, making sure he was paying attention. But the vehicle also made three mistakes that required him to intervene. In the most serious incident, it pulled out of a parking lot and nearly merged into a moving SUV on a local street. Kraniak grabbed the wheel and braked; the other driver blared their horn. Kraniak pointed out that his Tesla runs a legacy version of the software; newer versions, released a year and a half ago, run only on newer models.

More than 2,100 people died and around 16,000 were injured between 2014 and 2023 on Long Island roads. Crashes are the leading cause of accidental death among kids ages 5 to 19 here, and kill about six times more people than homicides. The latest finalized casualty data for the region, from 2024, shows improvements — but Nassau and Suffolk are still the two most dangerous counties in New York for traffic deaths and injuries per capita.

Over the past year, Newsday's Dangerous Roads series has looked at the causes of, and potential solutions to, the crisis. Its reporters have examined trends in aggressive driving and speeding, proposals to change laws around drugged driving and hit-and-run crashes, and police ticketing rates for dangerous violations. Newsday also has investigated how better road designs could protect pedestrians, cyclists and motorists.

For the final installment in the series, we turn to the role of technology, and whether that can save Long Islanders' lives.

Vehicle tech already saving lives

Vehicle safety features, such as three-point seat belts, air bags and side-impact protection, have made major strides over the years. Between 1970 and 2023, driving became about 3.5 times less deadly per mile, according to fatality data from the National Safety Council. Experts often attribute that change to safety technology as well as other factors, like stricter laws and greater enforcement around drunken driving.

In 2022, automatic emergency braking, which uses sensors to monitor the road ahead and brake automatically, became standard on all new vehicles sold in the United States. It is already helping avoid crashes and reduce their severity, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, but it typically takes decades for new vehicle features to spread through the registered vehicle fleet, because many people continue to drive older cars.

An emerging technology is what is called "passive blood-alcohol content monitoring." Unlike ignition interlock devices — which are installed after a DWI conviction in New York and require the driver to blow into a tube — these systems passively monitor for traces of alcohol in the air near the steering wheel, use scanners that detect signs of impairment in eye or head movements, or use fingertip readers that measure a driver’s blood-alcohol level. If alcohol is detected, the driver can’t start the car.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Joe Biden in 2021, calls on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to begin requiring car manufacturers to install the technology by later this year, though it is unclear if that deadline will be met. Mothers Against Drunk Driving has called it the most important piece of legislation in the organization’s 45-year history, although a large number of congressional Republicans have sought to repeal the law, calling it a "kill switch" for citizens’ cars and comparing it to elements of George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984." The American Civil Liberties Union has raised concerns about the data collection involved, but noted "with some care the benefits of such technology can be obtained without invading Americans’ privacy."

Recently, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed a pilot program in New York City requiring drivers who rack up speeding tickets to install intelligent speed assistance in their vehicles. The plan, which would use GPS monitors to prevent repeat offenders from traveling more than a few miles per hour over the speed limit in whichever zone they are in, was applauded by some traffic safety advocacy groups.

Driverless vehicles 13 times safer? Experts question claim.

The first time Kraniak used the full self-driving mode, or FSD, it was "a little unnerving to see the wheel spinning back and forth," he said. "The more I used it, the more comfortable I got with it."

Self-driving cars have long been a science-fiction trope, but enthusiasm has often exceeded actual capability.

In 1925, an inventor tested a "driverless" radio-controlled car in Manhattan, which traveled "as if a phantom hand were at the wheel," The New York Times wrote at the time. It went "down Broadway, around Columbus Circle, and south on Fifth Avenue, almost running down two trucks and a milk wagon" before crashing into a car full of photographers.

Today, other parts of the country have rolled ahead of New York in deploying autonomous vehicles. Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, and uses a combination of radar, laser sensors and cameras on its driverless cars, began offering rides in Phoenix in 2020 and has since spread to cities in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. Amazon’s Zoox is active on the Las Vegas Strip and Tesla’s Robotaxi — which the company says uses a more advanced version of FSD — is offering supervised as well as unsupervised rides in Austin and other cities.

New York does not yet allow fully autonomous vehicles, although semiautonomous systems like FSD are permitted and Waymo has done some supervised testing in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Hochul recently floated allowing pilot programs outside of New York City, but the proposal was not in the governor’s final budget this year.

Anthony Perez, Waymo’s regional policy manager, told Newsday that launching on Long Island would be fairly easy from a technical perspective, since the company already operates in cities like Orlando, Florida, and Phoenix, which also rely heavily on highway travel.

Driverless cars have sparked concerns about the loss of transportation-sector jobs, but also discussion of potential benefits, like better mobility for elderly people and disabled users in rural areas.

Perez said Waymo's technology is already 13 times safer than an average human driver. That’s based on what the company calls "serious injury or worse" crashes during its roughly 170 million miles of "rider-only" travel, through December, which it compares with human drivers in the same cities where it operates.

At a conference on autonomous vehicles in April at Hunter College in Manhattan, several researchers expressed skepticism of safety claims made by Waymo and Tesla, pushing back against recent positive media coverage.

Tesla claims its FSD mode is seven times safer than the average human.

Teslas have logged over 9 billion miles using FSD (Supervised) mode, and the company has reported about seven times fewer major collisions than the U.S. average — evidence, it says, that it is safer than humans. But skeptics point out this doesn’t count all the times humans disengaged the system and prevented crashes from happening, and its Robotaxis have reportedly performed worse than humans in Austin, Texas, thus far.

Waymo's safety data is generally considered the most robust, but David Zipper, a transportation researcher, has written that by combining fatalities with serious injuries, Waymo hides the fact that its involvement in fatal crashes is at least comparable to that of human drivers. Waymos have been involved in two fatal crashes, although media reports indicate it was not directly responsible for either.

David Harkey, president of the Virginia-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which has been studying roadway risks for over 60 years, said Waymo's safety relative to humans is "a question still to be answered. Even though Waymo has a lot of miles under their belt, it's nowhere near the magnitude of the human-driven miles on our roadways."

Most experts seem to agree that autonomous vehicles will eventually be safer than human drivers, but any safety gains could be offset by people traveling more, said Sam Schwartz, a former New York City traffic commissioner who recently sponsored a transportation research center at Hunter.

Perez said Waymos could provide "first and last mile" access to public transit, but Schwartz pointed out that if it is more convenient, more people could skip the Long Island Rail Road and instead hop into driverless cars for their entire commutes. And if commuting is easier, people could choose to live farther from their jobs.

That type of thing has happened before. Over the past 50 years, safety gains were significantly offset by Americans driving nearly twice as far today as they did in 1970, per capita. Put another way, if the average distance each American drove had stayed at the 1970 level while population grew as it did and per-mile fatality risk improved as it did, a Newsday analysis of NSC data suggests more than 750,000 additional lives could have been saved over that period.

Would better tech have saved this LI teen?

Back on Sunrise Highway, Kraniak’s Tesla steers itself through the intersection with 35th Street in Copiague, where large commercial buildings sit back from the street. The speed limit is 55 mph, but the six wide lanes make it feel comfortable to go faster, and the highway intersects 35th Street at an angle, making it difficult to see cross traffic.

It was here that Amir Porterfield, 15, was struck and killed one night as he walked home from Walter G. O'Connell Copiague High School, just a stone’s throw away.

"You never expect your kid to go outside and never come home," his mother, Iesha Kyles, told Newsday last year when he was profiled for the first story in the Dangerous Roads series. "You just think about it after — like, what could you have done?"

Porterfield didn’t wait for the crosswalk signal, but he was more than halfway to the center median when two cars hit him in succession, according to the police report. No criminal charges were filed, but a state Department of Motor Vehicles administrative judge suspended the first driver’s license, finding she should have been able to avoid the teenager.

After the crash, Kyles questioned whether she could have done more to teach her son about safely crossing the street, or if his school could have extended the hours for crossing guards, or — given that Porterfield was the third pedestrian killed at the intersection over 11 months — better road design could have helped.

Copiague PTA vice president Mary Sotomayor told Newsday that she asked the state DOT, which manages Sunrise, to study the area and build an elevated walkway over the highway, given the number of students who traverse it daily.

The department has not made any changes since Amir's death, although it undertook some pedestrian safety measures, such as no-turn-on-red restrictions, several years earlier, according to spokesman Stephen Canzoneri and DOT records.

Canzoneri did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Sotomayor's proposal for further study and an elevated walkway.

The first car that hit Porterfield was a 1999 Subaru.

But what if it had been a driverless car? Waymo says it has about 92% fewer injury-causing crashes with pedestrians than human drivers do.

Alternatively, what if the car had been human-driven but with automatic emergency braking? AEB-equipped vehicles in 2022 had a roughly 30% lower risk for pedestrian injury crashes, and the technology is constantly improving, though it is less effective at night and at high speeds.

But even if there is a future where new technologies are widespread and routinely help reduce crashes on roads like Sunrise Highway, no one argues they are a panacea.

"You have to use the 'three E's' — enforcement, education and engineering," said Perez, the Waymo representative. "And I think that we are a subset of that engineering side of that trifecta."

Harkey, of the insurance highway safety group, said: "We cannot rely on vehicle technology alone to get us out of the crisis that we are in."