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How Much Will Autonomous Cars Really Help? (theconversation.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An opinion piece at The Conversation questions the common belief that autonomous vehicles will easily solve a host of problems with road-based travel, including safety and traffic. "Assuming autonomous vehicles were one meter apart and traveling at 100 kilometers per hour (an aim that has been stated as the ultimate hope) this would mean around 25,000 people per hour could be taken down a freeway lane. While impressive, this movement capacity is only half that of a train. But getting to this capacity means 100% of vehicles are under control of a guidance system, with none under independent control. As soon as one car does this, the whole system would slow down considerably, as is seen on freeways now." The writer argues that a better role for autonomous cars might be to take passengers to and from hubs for public transportation.
We keep getting told driverless cars are crash-proof and theoretically perfect drivers or as close as you can possibly get to it but I'd say that's mostly hype. There will still be accidents, including fatal ones and I would think a worse, more catastrophic breed of accident will appear once they start having cars drive in very close formation.
Safety standards will slip, there will be more of a drive to improve fuel efficiency and more risks taken. Redundant systems will eventually be scrapped to save costs and we'll be back to (or worse) than we are now. Above all the fact remains that we live in an imperfect world where sh1t doesn't always go according to plan. Moose will still jump infront of robo cars and get killed, as will children - you just can't stop a lump of metal traveling at 100kph in 0 time using software alone (and even if you could, doing so would kill the occupants)
... is getting back from the pub after I've had a skinful.
If you can develop a mass transport product that most consumers will actually be happy to use to go most anywhere, then great. If you're trying to fund a pipe dream with a blank check from the public treasury, you ought to be placed on a slow greyhound to Saskatchewan instead. The nice thing about automation is that it can be used both with mass transit and with automobiles to the benefit of both. The trouble with the people obsessed with publicly funded mass transportation is that most of them won't understand that asphalt is cheaper and is used more effectively than rails.
unless all other non autonomous vehicles are banned from using the same roads (so either outlaw motorbikes or wait a very long time to automatize them). It might be feasible to create separate lanes on highways if there is enough space, which isn't the case in many places and takes many many years to upgrade anyway. But there is no place for this in the cities, so they have to share with pedestrians and cycles.
With autonomous cars, the train actually has a chance of achieving it's 2x 1-lane capacity (noting that heavily traveled freeways are currently 2-4-lanes per direction of travel, though...) because people can take an autonomous car from their home to the train station, and then from the train station to their destination - the high cost of taxis rides isn't to support to the cost of the vehicle and its support, it's mostly supporting the cost to support the control system (a.k.a. the driver)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
FTA "Autonomous vehicles are being spruiked as the solution to peak hour congestion in terms of their economic benefits along with a lesser value of reduced road accidents. The attraction is that they will save time and human lives."
Safe, until a hacker with nefarious intent compromises the car and causes myriad of fender benders or drives it off a bridge.There should always be a manual override switch just in case something happens.
When can I 3D print one at home made from privately space-mined graphene from Mars?
Otherwise it's just for LUDDITES.
For the ostensible purpose of transporting people too and from the places they want to go, sure.
But that's not the real reason politicians push for rail-based transit.
The real reason politicians love rail transport is that there's so much greater opportunities for graft, kickbacks, patronage and campaign donations.
* Expensive trains with expensive contracts
* Expensive construction with expensive contracts
* Expensive donations and lobbying for rail stop locations
* Expensive land purchase deals for favored real estate agents and land owners
* Expensive union contracts to run and maintain the trains.
* Great "green energy" kickback subsidies from the federal government
* By benefiting (mostly) rich white people instead of (mostly) poor minorities, it helps rake in campaign contributions from the Right People
Old fashioned existing streets and bus lines offer so many fewer opportunities to get on the gravy train. And rail also offers the smug satisfaction of "being green"...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Anyone who has ever traveled on public transit knows it is full of plebes. If Autonomous cars only take people to public transit: then they're already DOA due to lack of demand. There is almost no way to fix this. Even with "First Class" sections, you still have the "time = money" aspect which is that public transit is inherently slow because of all the stops. You won't get the people driving expensive BMWs and Mercedes off the roads if it takes longer to get from point A to point B via public transit.
Autonomous cars are interesting because they offer the prospect of a personal driver without the expense of a personal driver. You can't compel passenger destinations with that switch based on some idealogical hangup about public transit. The only way to make public transit more popular is to make it faster, safer, more private, more clean, more comfortable, and inexpensive.
I haven't read the TFA, but the summary is phenomenally stupid. Is 25,000 too few? Too many? I know, let's compare it to train that doesn't go from my driveway to my destination, and runs on its own schedule instead of mine.
And then change the subject again! Does this moron have any attention span?
So-called 'autonomous cars' will never catch on, not in the way that some dreamy-eyed fantasy lovers think it will.
At best they'll be a sophisticated cruise-control like feature on high-end luxury cars. There will ALWAYS be a full set of manual controls from which the driver will always be able to take back control of the vehicle immediately. Operators of motor vehicles will always be required to be fully educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured; you will never be able to put your kids in a car and just send them off to their grandmother's house; you will never be able to take a nap on the way to or from work. So get over it.
So far as the whole 'public transportation' thing goes? If it was going to catch on, it would have already. People do not like having to jam themselves into buses and trains to get places. It's inconvenient, it's smelly, in some places it's dangerous. To be fair if you live somewhere like New York City only the rich can afford to park a car so it makes more sense to take the subway many places, but you expect someone who lives miles from civilization to take a train or a bus everywhere? Nonsense. People like being able to go wherever they want to to go whenever they want to, alone if they like. Nothing is going to change that; it's been this way long before any sort of automobile existed.
You want to make automobile travel safer? I recommend driver education, training, and testing reforms, to make it tougher. Re-test drivers more often. Stiffer penalties for bad drivers, up to and including removing their driving privilege if they demonstrate over time they just aren't capable of being competent behind the wheel.
Technology can help us be safer, but too much technology will just make people lazy and less skilled. Even if there are completely 'autonomous' cars there will ALWAYS be circumstances where a human being must be in control, and what happens then? Distaster. Too many people seem to have no ability to consider 'what if', they think that since nothing bad has happened in the past, nothing bad can happen ever, so why worry about things you don't think will happen? If engineers, planners, and legislators thought that way all the time, we'd have orders of magnitude more deaths annually, that could have been avoided.
In conclusion, just get the whole idea of 'Your Mother the Car' whizzing you down the highway while you watch a movie, or eat a meal, or take a nap: it's not going to happen, ever, and for one simple immutable reason: Safety. Where human safety and lives are hanging in the balance, you cannot take half-measures and assume nothing bad will happen. Aircraft that have sophisticated autopiloting systems have redundancies against failure, and even then there still must be a qualified human pilot and co-pilot (redundancy there, too) at the full set of flight controls. It shouldn't be (and won't be) any different with automobiles. Also, I hadn't even touched on the subject of malicious actors: What will you do when your control-less autonomous car is hacked, sending you off into a concrete abutment at high speed, to be smashed horrificly to death in a firey crash? Imagine the horror when you realize you cannot do anything to save yourself! If only there was at least a brake pedal..
I suggest you all brush up on your driving skills, you're going to need them for the rest of your active life. I also suggest that if you just don't have the aptititude for driving, that you do the rest of us a favor, surrender your license, and arrange for alternative transport for yourself; that alone would make the roads much safer than any amount of so-called 'autonomous cars' ever will.
Restructuring the US road system in rural and urban areas would be too hard and have an astronomical cost. Better to construct high speed pneumatic tube for human transportation. (All praise to the Hyperloop)
While true enough autonomous cars to public transport makes a degree of sense, the author suffers from thinking most people are urbanites like them.
Unless you want the cost and upkeep of laying rail to the sticks, public transportation only works with a high enough degree of population density or in-between routes from major cities. Everyone else is left behemoth vehicles to carry supplies twice a month where public transport falls short. Not to mention you haven't solved congestion issues like the author suggests, but have merely moved them to different roads.
Nor have they considered that with sufficiently advanced autonomous vehicles, several people will probably forgo purchasing private vehicles altogether as taxi services drop in price and have the convenience of a private vehicle. That is less vehicles on the road, which helps in every measure.
For what they are really meant to do: those in power will always know where you are, and will be able to stop you from going where they don't want you to go. Are you planning to attend a protest? Too bad, the car won't take you there. And it won't take anyone there. You will have to stay home, or be driven to the most convenient police station to answer a few questions.
I do not really believe that self driving cars will significantly reduce my transportation time. But I expect them to reduce the number of traffic accident. In a traffic jam, drivers can frustrated and bump in each other. I highly doubt self driving car would do that. Also, I do not care as much being in a traffic jam if I am not the one driving the car. Finally, if the car drive itself, then I can take more long distance trips easily: push the buttons, go to sleep, wake up in a different state.
This is the real reason I loved riding public transportation so much when I was living in France. It might not be the fastest way of moving around. But it was definitely the way that was consuming the less of my attention time. Made me arrived at work after 30 minutes of playing the nintendo DS. Much better than after 20 minutes of dealing with traffic congestion.
And check their weapons then I might travel with others.
Really everything
almost can be ordered and I have little need to drive at all.
Certainly not for pleasure. Not to vacation nope only grocerys Doctor I drive nowhere else.
And I might start taking two cars so someone can cover us on the way and we can cover them going back.
Radio conversations and all. Cover me while I pass the VW.
This is life with everyone armed, guess we just have to get armor and live with it.
Last time I bought a new car had the bullet proof film put on the windows, I will take it a step further next time.
25,000 people per hour could be taken down a freeway lane. While impressive, this movement capacity is only half that of a train
The train comparison is completely fatuous since no train can carry 25,000 and the smaller ones don't run frequently enough to sustain that level of movement. Plus, last time I checked, I can't get a train from right outside my doorstep.
Trains have some uses, but they lack the versatility of cars, and far more expensive to build and operate and they are only comparably efficient when full or nearly so.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
While theoretically a massive train of crammed in passengers can get more bodies from point A to point B than a chain of autonomous vehicles, how many of those bodies actually want to go from point A to point B. If you ramp up capacity to transportation hubs, you just have huge traffic jams at those hubs and you drive more miles since you go to hub and then somewhere else. Autonomous systems are distrubute and avoid centralized hub bottlenecks and would certainly increase versus decrease capacity unless everyone is going to the exact same place.
This suggests the most efficient use of the roadway is to get the vehicles as closely packed together as possible. Its an assumption many motorists seem to make while flow theory states otherwise.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
While impressive, this movement capacity is only half that of a train
Yes, and a freeway of autonomous cars also can't transport as much cargo in their trunks as a panmax bulk carrier - therefore, autonomous cars are bad.
That's how they can help. Nobody's saying it'll be easy, but it is possible. Fix your transportation system, or resign yourself to dying in it – if airlines had the safety record that motor vehicles do, nobody would get on one.
... Honestly, a lot of the push for a Utopian, fully-autonomous car mindset comes from three major groups:
1) People living in New York City, where basically no one has a car and many can't drive
2) People living in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley where driving is a pain because of poor freeway design and everyone's a 22-y/o new developer who thinks they can devops a technological solution to change people,
3) People still in college or a college area who've not had the opportunity to drive because of cost/benefit
Everyone not living solely in a dorm or mega-dorm-like environment should really get out and talk to more people. Everyone living in the urbanized East Coast should take a trip out West for a while. It's very, very, very different.
- A San Diego, CA resident
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Just to put that in perspective, that's almost 35 times what is currently possible (~700 cars per freeway lane at that speed), and about an order of magnitude more than even the average flow of traffic on heavily congested freeways.
Not really true. As soon as there are enough cars on the roads under autonomous control, we could pass laws requiring that all human-driven cars keep to the right. That would allow traffic to flow freely at speed in every lane Except for the one late that would be slow anyway because of people entering and exiting. So autonomous cars would still result in speeds that are dramatically better than freeways today.
Also, self-driving cars won't just impact freeway driving. City streets are an underutilized resource in most cities, for two reasons. First, drivers don't want to be bothered with having to watch for pedestrians and other vehicles cutting out in front of them. Second, traffic lights are timed to keep cars from driving too fast, because drivers aren't good at watching for pedestrians, other vehicles, etc. Given enough vehicles communicating with a central scheduler, traffic lights could become a thing of the past, and vehicles could plan their turns in such a way that most vehicles don't even have to slow down, much less stop. This will dramatically improve the average speed on city streets (even without increasing the speed limit). (Note that this will likely require normal cars to get a small, inexpensive add-on box installed that identifies the vehicle as a manual vehicle, and if that box ever stops working, the driver will have to stop at every traffic light—all-ways-red by default—until it gets fixed, but that's pretty trivial.)
Moreover, if more of these autonomous vehicles take city streets instead of hopping onto the freeway for two exits, you'll have lower contention for the entry/exit lane, which by itself will improve traffic flow on the freeways by almost as much as reducing the inter-car spacing does. And the reduced backup when getting off of the highway onto city streets (by allowing automated vehicles to not stop at the traffic lights at the top of the exit unless there are manually-operated vehicles present) will further reduce contention on the freeways.
Further, the assumption that trains carry more passengers is not necessarily correct, as it likely discounts periods in which the trains are not full, periods when the trains don't have enough capacity to meet demand, signal light malfunctions, suicidally depressed people jumping out onto the tracks in front of the trains, and all the other joys that plague train travel. Unlike autonomous cars, which can quickly divert to alternate routes to avoid accidents that block the road, when there's only one passenger track pair and somebody jumps out in front of the train, all trains on that route either single-track past the accident scene or worse, stop outright for hours, and there's no way for trains to route around an accident except by transferring everyone to a slow, cumbersome bus bridge. Throughput falls through the floor. This is a huge disadvantage.
A
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
In densly populated areas mass transit is the right technology to transport people and goods. In future we will augment that with other short and mid range transport technologies, like bikes, e-bikes, low speed autonomous cabs etc.
The math in the summary is based on a lot of hidden assumptions.
Length of vehicle, passengers/vehicle, number of lanes, etc.
One independent vehicle need not destroy the efficiency of the entire system. It just means that there wouldn't be a 1 meter gap around that vehicle. so you lose maybe 16 passengers of capacity for each independent vehicle.
But here are some reasonable questions:
Why keep a 1 meter gap? Why not have cars link bumpers?
What if car sizes were cut to 1 meter wide x 2 meters long and engines were separate components? So a family could own 2 engines and 4 pods. When one person "drives" to work, they connect one pod to one engine and go. When the family goes on a trip, you connect two engines and four pods. Then, a 5 meter wide road could have 3 lanes of traffic, all connected nose to tail. You could fit 150 pods in 100 meters. If 5 out of 12 pods were engine pods, you could transport 87 people in 100 meters of "road." You can achieve comfortable train-like densities without train-like rigidity in routing. Plus, you lower the profile to less than 1500 cm, vastly improving the aerodynamics. Try that on a train. If you convince people to "carpool" with two pods per engine, densities approach 100 people per 100 m of road.
To accommodate non-autonomous vehicles, you build a parallel 5 m wide road (single lane). Initially, this will cause traditional vehicles to suffer extreme congestion, encouraging a switch to autonomous vehicles. Later, when non-autonomous densities are greatly decreased, there would be some incentive to
have that single lane all to yourself.
So, with a whole different set of assumptions, rerun all you math.
I think the around-town driverless car is a decade or more away from infancy.
But, if you try to do any sort of cross country driving, on the interstate system, you see immediately that driverless cars will be a boon. The inefficiency and stupidity that goes on on the interstate is breathtaking. There are too many obstacles and scenarios to make it reality in less time than that. Even now, in car(2015) GPS still makes major errors. One recently sent me down an incorrect road that made me understand how it is possible for people to be misdirected and wind up incorrectly driving down an runway.
People today don't seem to be able to use their cruise control, instead surging ahead and fading back dozens of times over in a 50 mile stretch. Speeds varying from 50 to 90MPH.
Inappropriate lane departures are ridiculous as they all text furiously while driving ~80MPH.
People won't use the passing lane correctly, preferring to be in the passing lane and hang mindlessly on the rear quarter of the car in the slow lane, blocking all other traffic.
It's clear to see that automated cars "training" - with adaptive cruise control and automatic steering and breaking - on these long lengths of near perfectly straight roadways could be a huge benefit. They would significantly increase the efficiency of these roads allowing traffic to flow uninterrupted at uniform high speeds. This type of automatic driverless motoring could be a reality in under 5 years. The issue or delay will be "legacy" cars and manual drivers.
automated cars"" will come, simply to save the billions of dollars allowing corporations to payoff all the truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers,...
Lets just hope that common wage thing in finland? works out...
I'd like to be able to set my automated car to still follow at 3 seconds behind the nearest vehicle. m*v(sqd)!
You can speculate all you like about "a worse, more catastrophic breed of accidents", on average the amount of damage and loss of life and limb can only be expected to decrease sharply.
But yes, there will probably be accidents. It would be a bloody miracle if there weren't any. Actuator malfunctions, programming errors, hardware glitches, unanticipated situations. What have you. The uncomfortable truth is that you, as a passenger in an autonomous car, will be powerless to do much about it, if and when it happens.
I can sympathise: that doesn't feel good. But that's no reason not to adopt autonomous cars. We'll just have to deal with the remaining failures, absorb the loss, and improve the driver systems. It's better than having human drivers.
"movement capacity is only half that of a train"
Call me when the train can take the next left. Until then, trains can kind of go screw themselves for everything by dense urban people movement, in areas where you don't have to buy up insanely expensive real estate to lay down new tracks. This is not a socialist utopia, as in Sim City, where you can tear down a stadium because Skywatch One is reporting heavy traffic, in order to improve traffic flow.
...the whole point of me owning a car is so I can avoid public transportation in the first place. I don't want to have to sit beside some random person and have the trip take much longer because it's stopping every 5 minutes to let people on and off. A better solution is to raise the speed limits in areas where it's safe to do so. 100 Kph speed limits are very unreasonable in places where there is good visibility and no harsh turns like highways and freeways, and people are already driving much faster than the posted limits.
I'm not in any of those groups. I just don't enjoy driving for the most part. I have better things to do with my time than devoting cycles to watching for hazards, which is essentially how I feel about driving.
For what it's worth, I live in the suburbs around Montreal, QC, Canada.
There are moments when driving approaches enjoyable - quiet, gently curving roads on the highway in between cities as an example - but I am perfectly ok with giving up those rare moments if it means I can liberate my commute time to sleep or read.
Everyone not living solely in a dorm or mega-dorm-like environment should really get out and talk to more people. Everyone living in the urbanized East Coast should take a trip out West for a while. It's very, very, very different.
- A San Diego, CA resident
Yes - NYC is better. Boston too. As is London, Tokyo, and Paris. I've lived on both coasts and it is FAR better to be able to take a bus/train/subway to work than to spend 20-30 minutes in a car to get there. People who drive an hour each way? They're nuts, essentially underpaying themselves 25% (nominally 8 hours pay, 10+ hours consumed for work).
A viable mass transit system has to get most people approximately where they want to be, roughly when they want to be. I don't care if there is a mile walk on either end or a fifteen minute wait - that's close enough. A good transit system cuts down that wait time and or the walking distance and doesn't stop in the early evening making people worry about catching the last bus. Automated buses will solve that. In ten years with support, or twenty without it.
The authors misunderstand the point of autonomous cars.
They won't be here for efficiency, safety or speed.
They will free up the time for the driver.
Instead of keeping my hands on the wheel, I can work, shave or have sex.
THIS will be the benefit.
It also means that the decision to drive or not to drive will be much cheaper. Today, a 30 minute drive will take 30 minutes off from my life. Tomorrow, it won't. I can still do what I want while being driven - which means that I will "drive" much more. The ones who can allow to own / rent robot cars will suddenly start moving around a lot more. This will create more traffic, maybe exponentially so. The green, eco-friendly vision of reduced traffic via autonomous vehicles is all wrong.
It will also affect urban planning in ways that nobody can yet comprehend nor predict.
The following is just one of the arguments that sounds good to college kids and bureaucrats, but not to anybody with a functional brain and a real life:
"...this would mean around 25,000 people per hour could be taken down a freeway lane. While impressive, this movement capacity is only half that of a train...."
Here's the problem: As long as people have to walk 3 miles from their point of origin to their departure train station, and then walk 5 miles from their arrival train station to their destination, the car wins every time, and the "analysis" does not take this massive waste of time nor the effect it has on people's decisions into account. Only a person whose time is worth nothing, or a person who has no intention of riding the train but wants to order everyone else to do it can afford to overlook this. For anybody who values his life, mass transit is evil unless it goes door-to-door... let's face it: time is a slice of your life and it cannot ever be replaced.
As an engineering matter, I love trains. They are extremely efficient at moving tons of mass, which is why the US has probably the world's most-efficient freight rail system. People however are an entirely different matter. A train trip as an act of recreation, like sailing or riding a camel is fine, but for day-to-day use it's an act of oppression. The only places where trains do not steal your life are places where people live in skyscrapers atop train/subway stations and work in other skyscrapers atop train/subway stations and even there they are money-losers that need continual taxpayer subsidies. It's amazing that anybody (usually governments) can make one of the planet's most efficient transport modes it into a money loser (Google: Amtrak for a shining example)
Now, if we could team-up Elon Musk's super-fast and efficient Hyperloop with autonomous mini e-taxis at each end, the extreme efficiency of the Hyperloop MIGHT more than offset the inefficiency of the autonomous taxis while eliminating all the walking...
There are drawbacks of increased speed even if accidents can be cut to zero, such as increased gas usage. This can be solved by moving to electric vehicles, possibly running off power rails on the highways etc.
However, in urban areas speed is major factor for noise generation.
I personally live next to a major road where vehicles go past at 70+ km/h and the noise is very bothersome. It hovers around 60-65 dBA, peaks at at 75 when someone with a case of lead foot powers by. The majority of the noise is simply from the tires moving on the road surface and wind drag. You usually don't hear the engine unless it is a motorbike.
This is a small city and the road is a between a normal road and a highway, not that much traffic but very annoying. I have lived in larger cities, and despite more traffic around the clock it is less bothersome because the speed and hence noise is much lower. I actually have to wear headphones or ear plugs quite a lot because of it.
Current regulations in Sweden states that noise levels must not exceed 55 dBA at the outer wall of residential areas.
> Instead of keeping my hands on the wheel, I can work, shave or have sex.
No you cannot. You are still legally required to keep yourself at avail, alert and ready to take over the controls, should automatics fails or something unprogrammable happen (kid, deer jumps in, truck looses one tire in front of you, the odd Cessna making an emergeny landing on the highway, a tornado cone crossing the area or a bunch of mexican highwaymen blocking the lane with AK-47s, etc.)
If your autonomous car crashes and crushes a kid while you were anal-izing a harlot in the backseat, you will get to enjoy anal-sex for many years in the prison, on the receiving end of the licorice stick.
The other thing that self driving vehicles will do is allow us to timeshift some of the traffic to when freeways aren't busy. E.g. freight can be moved to 10pm - 5am in urban areas, since we won't need to worry about the driver's exhaustion level. Fright would also be more efficient as driverless trucks don't need to take rest stops, and can be lighter because they don't require human amenities.
Also, if I had a driverless car, and a comfy seat, I'd not mind sleeping while my car drives me somewhere overnight and I could wake up wherever I needed to be in the morning.
I expect we'll see the first innovations in the transport industry.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
They'll help me reclaim the hours I spend every day in traffic. Safety and speed will be nice, but those won't be significant until most of the cars on the road are autonomous. Until then, I'll be more than happy with the extra time to sleep, read, write, watch TV, play games, and so on.
of the cars blows a tire, hits a deer or piece of trash that fell off a pickup, or has some other problem. Then you get a 50 car pileup, even with all of the cars operating under control of a single system. Traveling that close assumes that the cars all have similar braking characteristics, tires, engines, and suspension in good condition, etc. Look at cars going down the road today. Every 3rd or 4th car spews smoke, is rusty, and probably has other problems due to little to no maintenance.
The cars will need a grading system based on design, performance, and maintenance history before being allowed to join such a "train".
And how many one lane freeways are there? Typical three lane freeways have more capacity at much lower cost.
I'm usuallly an early adopter of technology, and I can see how this will work well in the future. But for now, I would only want it for long boring stretches of highway. Or maybe as a second backup to my driving. I do worry about falling asleep behind the wheel, and while I haven't I know I have been too tired to be safe a few times. This would help in those situations to maintain the lane and speed.
Relying on a normal human as backup for the computer is a complete non-starter. Read up on what happened when google started letting employees use the Beta cars instead of the pro drivers. Even though they were informed they may need to take over, and even though they knew this was an experimental car the employees took names, whipped out laptops, etc. They were in no shape to takeover.
Normal mouth breathers will be even worse.
Now consider a car owner who has not driven a mile in the last couple years plinking away on his laptop when suddenly the car beeps and he is supposed to take over. He will be disoriented for a while under ideal circumstances, but odds are something really weird happened for HAL to throw in the towel. Is a Cessna landing? Emergency vehicle? Bug splat on the Lidar? Low tire pressure outside the underwriters criteria? The driver has been setup for failure, which cannot be acceptable.
HAL has to be 100% or merely augmenting like adaptive cruise control. A 99% solution is a nightmare scenario (unless you are a lawyer).
Jobs, you'll be putting alot of public employees out of work if driverless cars became a thing.
When I can travel as the *sole* occupant of my car cheaper than I can buy a train ticket for the same distance trains are a non-starter. Start putting passengers in my car, and the economics of the train goes from just stupid to completely insane.
Why would I ever pay several times more to travel by train than I would using my own car? Sure, the time can be more productive on a train, but not enough to make paying many more times the cost of just spending the time driving.
Let's not even start talking about adding the cost of local (i.e. travel to and from the train station from my points of origin and destination, taxi, car rental, bus even) transportation to that already too-high train cost.
True. In a bad traffic jam, how would frustrated people who have nothing to do at all but look out the windows react? Let's hoe we don't find out, because 88% of those people have guns.
Most people look at the fairly obvious cost savings that autonomous cars will provide but miss the less obvious ones.
For instance in many cities there is little competition among grocery stores because a few early movers grabbed up crap land where they could then afford to put up a huge store with a massive parking lot. Then the city either grew to surround their store, or the value in that section of the city went way up. Thus the barrier to entry is impossibly high. The only grocery store competition that I see in the cities that I have lived in happens at the edge of town where there is crap land still available. But with autonomous cars the advantage of having a massive parkinglot plummets so we will end up with far greater grocery competition. This may also be coupled with autonomous grocery delivery which will also drive up the levels of competition.
Then there will be the massive reduction in the amount of wasted safety crap that we haul around and pay for in a modern driven car. Thus, on roads with 100% autonomous cars we can opt for basically the minimum amount of car that keeps us off the road and keeps the weather out. Not only will this be a minimal car but due to the fact that it drives itself and does not need to "handle" well, it means that far less engineering will need to go into the manufacture of a personal vehicle. This then opens up the field of making cars to all kinds of interesting and new competitors.
Then there is the cost of all the traffic violations going away. Over the years this can either add up directly by incurring them or as a driver with no moving violations and few parking tickets I can say that I have spent way too much effort avoiding these. I have no idea how much I can value the knowledge that some predatory taxman(ticket issuing authority) isn't waiting to jump out and rape my wallet; but peace of mind must be worth something.
Then there are the wasted hours trying to find parking, the predatory costs of parking in many cities, the predatory pricing of most cab companies, the predatory pricing of car rentals, the predatory pricing of auto-body shops. All of those pretty much vanish or become wildly more competitive. For instance if I do own my own car and I want to let it go park itself then I don't really care where it parks. So if the convenient parking garage wants $20 an hour, it can be worth it for my car to drive anything up to $9.99 away for free parking or some variation thereof to find a combination of parking that saves me money. Or if my car is less than $20 per hour to run then I could just let it drive around on its own.
Then there isn't just the car sharing that everyone talks about but within a family car sharing. This sort of car sharing would not only be for the typical family of 2.5 kids but could easily be among larger family or friend groupings. I see no reason that many (not all though) of my family would be welcome to my car. Especially if some kind of service would then effectively bill them for their share. This would be most excellent when one or more people in a family group have a speciality vehicle such as a picktup truck. I could see a nice app where you select your "reserved" hours and then let other family members largely have at it. Again, ideally this would end up being like some kind of bill splitting app where they would get automatically dinged a usage fee. I don't want to share my personally owned car with strangers, but family and friends would be OK. Some people argue that the personal car will go away. I strongly disagree for commuters as the peak loading would then leave the "shared" cars as non-performing assets. Some car pooling and whatnot will somewhat eat up commuting but I don't want to be with a bunch of people every morning. I want some "me" time so even if I commuted I would still own a tiny little pod car.
So those are only a few of the strange cost savings that the average person would have as there are many hidden costs to owning a car. I suspect that as the situation e
Driverless cars aren't about traveling at high speeds, packed together like sardines. Commercial aircraft fly themselves these days, but traffic controllers still keep them 3 miles apart. Such close formations of driverless cars would still result in massive pileups when one of the cars malfunctions and crashes.
The point of driverless cars is to let me do something else while I'm traveling. I won't care so much about my one-hour commute if I can read the news or get started on my work day while I'm on the way. I'll also be less stressed. An then there is long-distance car trips, which will be far more pleasant when it is no longer necessary to watch the road.
When driverless cars are a reality, I'm in!
25,000 people. Not 25,000 cars. They seem to be assuming 5 people per car, so that's 7 times current capacity.
I don't know where they get their 50,000 people per hour on heavy rail though.
I can't drive because of my eyesight,
my wife can't drive because she gas epilepsy
we live in small town USA where public transport is virtually non existant
Fortunately its only 20 mins walk to work, and 15 mins to the clinic/hospital
but its over 5 miles to Walmart and other big box stores, and the post office (that used to be downtown but they closed that)
A self driving car would help us a lot
Instead of keeping my hands on the wheel, I can work, shave or have sex.
This is Slashdot.
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TFA appears to be some kind of FUD. No one has any doubt that Autonomous Vehicles will do better than people. With thirty thousand dead every year in the US it is arguable that trained chimps could do better than people.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Autonomous cars will be 24/7 and on-demand
They'll scale a lot faster & use existing infra.
Trains will never be either.
Now buses--autonomous buses will change the game.
" also choose my own level of risk tolerance." No asshole, among a fleet of autonomous car, you chose the risk other people shall endure for your privilege. So the occasional death and handicap for life is also the price we have to pay for your freedom ? Sure. Ok. But from now onward 1) fine should be multiplied by 100, with penal consequence if you are unable to pay. Speed ? 20000 dollar. 2) you shall have a much greater insurance premium than us, since you are intentionally taking risk. Let us say 10 to 50 time what you pay now. 3) you will have to pass your driving license every year on your cost, to prove you can drive among autonomous car.
Go ahead continue with your privilege, but be prepared to pay a HEFTY sum for that privilege. Because we the others, can't waitz for the driver on the road to not be human assholes anymore.
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What does 1m distance between cars matter? It's the throughput that matters, that is, how long it takes a car to travel a distance. That changes little whether the distance between cars is 1m or 100m. Cars will naturally keep a larger distance than 1m, because that would allow navigating (in particular, cars getting in from a side road).
Anyway, the measure (how many people in vehicles can stand on a piece of road) is pointless, and since the article is based on it, the article is pointless.
Exactly this, the cars will only be able to slow down as quickly as the car in the car-train with the slowest brakes, if the slowest car can't slow down fast enough to avoid the accident then it hits all of the cars in front of it*.
If the accident involves a car forcefully being stopped at quicker than the braking speed of the cars in the car train then a lot of autonomous cars (30+ or even 90+ for more lanes) will end up in a pile-up*.... Instead of 1 to 2 cars if they are leaving a 2-second gap.
*if the vehicles are leaving a 1m gap
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Two points: one significant and one sorta silly.
Once autonomous cars are safer than human drivers, then no insurance company will sell auto insurance to an individual. Why would they? Any collision between an autonomous car and one driven by a meat monkey will always be judged the fault of the human driver. The companies operating the autonomous vehicles will have far too much at stake to permit any other result ... and their lawyers will be better.
Autonomous cars will be God's gift to suicide bombers because He wants them to live and bomb another day. No way autonomous cars will be allowed anywhere near important places like a courthouse or crowded places like a train station. You will have to walk the last kilometer or use your hoverboard.
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The auto industry itself could very well lose as you point out. Service and repair is a huge money maker for them. They could be behind the FUD. But then why tout public transport? They have lobbied against it for years. Bit of a mystery as to who gains from this particular narrative.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Ripping out public transport systems in the US in the 50s in favour of automobiles was a big mistake. The way to solve the problem of automobile accidents is to get rid of the wretched things, not to make them into one man buses. What a ludicrous state of affairs.
The public transportation proponents are attempting to solve the wrong problem.
We are not all going to and from work all the time. Often, we're living in DC and we're packing the kids into the car and the luggage and maybe a set of tools into the trunk and going to Grandma's in South Carolina to visit and fix up a few things around her house over the weekend.
Now describe to me how a train is going to help with the 3 suitcases and the portable air compressor and paint gun with 5 quarts of satin white? Gonna lug that onto a train? No, you're not, you're going to be sitting in traffic with everyone else, especially on Sunday night when I-95 thru the Fredericksburg, Va. area comes to a near-halt with all the traffic (those people aren't going to work or coming from it, either) and the Harry W. Nice bridge on US 301 between Virginia and Maryland over the Potomac is backed up 5 miles with the very same sort of traffic for points north.
That's the problem to solve. Not everyone is moving around to go to work. Some are working on Grandma's house, others have 300 lbs of scuba gear / tanks / etc. or maybe a ski-doo or maybe all of the above. We need to stop the knee-jerk to "public transportation" because it just doesn't work all the places that cars and trucks work. Build some more roads, damnit, and yeah, lets robotize the cars. We want to go to sleep in the back seat and truck bed, so when we get to Grandma's, we're ready to attack the painting, or ready to hit the beach with the ski-doo...
The main area where self driving cars will prove useful is when I get where I'm going the car can then go and find it's own damned parking spot!
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If the car is driving, I'll have situational awareness only some of the time, even if I'm not doing something else. Humans don't do that well. If I have to maintain situational awareness all the time, I have to be driving. I'd be fine with some software assistance, but if the car is going to be driving autonomously it can't rely on me to do anything useful without at least a second's warning.
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Autonomous vehicles will do a great job... If your goal is to limit the overpopulation!
If you think they will be safer than people, then you are being superstitious. And I speak as an Engineer working with automated equipment.
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Off the top of my head:
Since the cars are already communicating with each other, they can space themselves at a distance appropriate to the capabilities of each car, or less optimally at the distance appropriate for the worst car. Each car should already be tracking its current capabilities, else it's not safe to begin with.
We're not expecting immediate perfection, just vast improvement. Perfection can be approached asymptotically.
It's going to be interesting watching the changes in my next 50 years, having been astounded by the changes in my first (almost) 50.
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