In its bid to reduce surging traffic deaths in the US, the Department of Transportation is pitching a wireless communication system that would allow vehicles to transmit speed, location and other basic information with each other and with road infrastructure, like traffic lights. The agency hopes to equip three-quarters of the country’s intersections with the so-called “vehicle-to-everything” technology, or V2X for short.

V2X has been around for decades, and proponents say it can make streets safer. But the technology has yet to be widely adopted, and some safety experts are skeptical that it’s a panacea. As Fola Akinnibi and I report, its path to national deployment in the US is unclear. Today on CityLab: The Moonshot Plan to Eliminate Deaths on America’s Roads