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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.
... is getting back from the pub after I've had a skinful.
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?!
By benefiting (mostly) rich white people instead of (mostly) poor minorities, it helps rake in campaign contributions from the Right People
Your entire post was hilarious; but I especially loved this bit. You've obviously never ridden on an urban mass transit system of any kind.
#DeleteChrome
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.
Well, it eliminates whole classes of cases for accidents. All those people who drive while they are drunk, or drive too fast because they are too late, or drive too fast because they like driving fast, or drive too fast because they don't know better, or etc. There are tons of accidents caused by older people who are too senile to drive a car. This can be helped by taking away their license, but staying at home surely isn't a good therapy for old people to stay healthy.
Also, if all cars are driverless, they always know when faster cars can get before slower cars on a one lane per direction road.
This won't solve all accidents, but it will certainly improve the situation.
Precisely. We haven't figured out yet how to create 100% secure programs, and we already start using software in all places of life, including where people can get killed by malicious software. The damage hackers can cause increases with adoption of networked computers.
Where do you live that politicians like rail? My politicians love cars, and have been actively removing rail at every chance.
Something north of 90% of accidents are preventable; take a look at table 8 here: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/P...
That table shows the 'critical event' in an accident, which is what made it unavoidable. Just 1.4% of accidents are from an object or animal in the road. Likewise, only 1.2% are due to a vehicle problem, although a large percentage of those are improper maintenance, which would be solved by some autonomous vehicle business models where they are owned and maintained by a fleet company (such as Uber).
So we can prevent 90% of accidents, but you think it's not worthwhile because the other 10% still happen?
Furthermore, if the fleet model is adopted, it actually becomes more likely that safety improvements will make more financial sense; far fewer cars are needed in the fleet, so the costs are amortized over more people. But in either case, safety standards are set by the government, and we can choose to raise or lower them as we see fit, completely orthogonally from whether cars are autonomous or not.
The article is from Australia and I'm not terribly familiar with the attitude toward public transportation there, but at least in the US, apart from a few pockets in big cities, you will not pry cars from their owners without at least a generational change. Also, the author seems to have no clue just how advanced these prototype vehicles have become; they are very able to navigate among unpredictable obstacles on city streets without being slowed to a crawl. The premise is decent - that autonomous vehicles could be used to boost the use of public transit - but it's not the only thing that will happen; nor do I think it's even one of the primary effects that will result.
I believe Heinlein had a story were social misfits (people who wanted to think or drive for themselves, did drugs, didn't listen to their doctor, didn't bath on a regular basis and other social malformations) were herded onto reservations where they could keep their disgusting habits away from Right Thinking Folk.
It would probably have lots of dirt roads for you to play on...
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This won't solve all accidents, but it will certainly improve the situation.
Indeed. The naysayers seem to forget that self-driving cars already have millions of miles of testing. If they were accident-prone, the data would show that, and it does not. Driving in close formation, or "platooning" is well tested. I remember seeing test car platoons on I-5, north of San Diego, in the 1990s. TFA is mostly nonsense and conjecture. It says that a single non-autonomous car will "slow the system down considerably". I see no reason that would be true. A human driven car would just mean one car would have a normal gap, but that wouldn't slow down other cars. I have heard the opposite: That even a few autonomous cars can make a big difference in preventing congestion, since they have more information about traffic conditions ahead, and can react quicker, so they smooth out the "accordion effect" for themselves as wells as all the cars behind them.
Comparing self-driving cars to trains is idiotic. I can't take the train to the grocery store. A stream of self-driving cars may have half the bandwidth of a passing train, but not if you consider the gaps between trains, which are usually far more than the length of the train. A mile of passenger rail costs about $100M. A lane of asphalt costs about $1M per mile.
I also choose my own level of risk tolerance.
False. You're presuming to make that choice for anyone sharing the road with you.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The article suggests a new mode of driving only possible by driverless cars, but 1 meter apart is kinda ridiculous. A tire failure in any one of those cars could cause a pileup of unimaginable purportions. I'd settle for autonomous cars driving at human following distances because we know humans can do it. Even at human following distances autonomous cars can improve things because even the simplest actions on the road have huge unseen consequences from the drivers perspective. You can avoid the problem where a dumb driver can tap on his brakes for no good reason and sends ripples of break lights miles behind him/her. Sometimes I wonder how many of those drivers drive with two feet. One on the brake and one on the accelerator.
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.
it will cause a disastrous accident.
Unlikely. It will almost certainly be less severe than if humans were driving. Humans typically take 1 second to 3.5 seconds to realize something is wrong, and transfer their foot from the accelerator to the brake. During that time, a car going 70mph will travel 100 feet or more ... before it even starts to brake. A self-driving car can begin braking in 10 milliseconds. With humans, the cars will begin braking in sequence, one after another. This can result in a chain reaction pileup, with the most severe accidents happening far back in the pack. SDCs will all brake simultaneously, with those further back having plenty of time to stop.
Believe it or not, the engineers designing these things have actually thought about these issues, and done extensive testing. If 1 meter spacing wasn't safe, they wouldn't be doing it.
I suspect that partially interactive and/or assistive technologies will be deployed first.
This has ALREADY HAPPENED. Tesla Autopilot is available to consumers, and does 80% of what you would expect a self-driving car to do.
Here is a video of some idiot who climbed in the backseat while his Tesla was driving on a busy freeway.
They tend to drive slowly ... They don't handle heavy traffic well/p>
My wife has a Tesla with Autopilot. It does 70mph. The documentation specifically says that it does better in heavy traffic. She commutes during rush hour on Hwy 101, and Autopilot doesn't seem to have any problem with that.
the most frequent cause of sudden speed changes I see is people driving too slowly as they try to merge onto the freeway. That causes people already on the freeway to have to slow down or change lanes to avoid them, which increases the risk of an accident.
It is even worse if you are joining the freeway immediately behind that person because you are the one that the truck behind will crash into.
And TFA comparing car and train capacity is silly because it excludes time spent stopping to load/unload passengers. The whole reason people drive cars instead of take public transportation is because (1) they're sick of waiting for the bus/train to show up, and (2) they're sick of the trip taking 2x-3x longer than if they drive because the bus/train has to stop at a bunch of places they're not interested in going.
That is obviously an American view; I understand trains there are rather slow, and if people are that slow getting on and off them it is probably because they are not used to them enough. I try to make workaday journeys by train in the UK because I am sick of sitting in my car in traffic jams taking 2x-3x longer than the train. The last time I drove from Bristol to a suburb in London (130 miles) four years ago it took so long and was so frustrating that I vowed never to drive that journey ever again. I stick to using my car for recreational journeys and local shopping trips nowadays, UK road traffic has become so bad.
A London Underground railway line, in its 12ft diameter tunnel, even with its stops, can shift more people per hour than a three-lane highway, both at max capacity.
most of them won't understand that asphalt is cheaper and is used more effectively than rails.
It is not cheaper, it is just funded in a different way. Rails have to be funded by the railway company. In the UK at least roads are funded by public money and it is lost in the noise of it. Effectively private motorists subsidise things like buses and trucks, massively. I pay the equivalent of about $1 per 5 miles in my car tax, and more in the fuel tax.
What is expensive about rail is the insane set of rules and regulations about safety and finance - which, unlike on the road, are strictly observed. To spend $x on a railway project (like lengthening a platform to enable longer trains to use it) you will need to spend $5x on a safety case and $5x on a financial case. I have seen it at close hand.
One minor incident anywhere in those 40 miles and every car in the entire line must slow or stop
Cars spaced 1 meter apart rather than 30 meters apart, may have less cushioning, but the capacity of the road will be 5 times higher. It is silly to say that self-driving cars are bad because if N human driven cars cause congestion, then 5*N SDCs will cause congestion. For the same number of cars on the road, SDCs will cause far less congestion than HDCs.
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).
Looks like you are arguing from a bias. First, your demand that there should be zero accidents is an idiotic one. Statistics and tests have already proven that there are less number of accidents with automated cars.
Secondly, your pulled-out-of-your-ass argument about dropping safety standards seems to never happened to say flights, or industrial machinery. You put people's lives at risk, your product doesn't sells and you get sued too. Hell of a dis-incentive.
All the argument about being unable to stop a lump of metal travelling at 100kph in 0 time is the most moronic thing I have heard. Do you have some special telekinetic powers to be able to do this, if you had manual control?
The key thing you are missing is that the software is not getting distracted while texting, is not going to be drunken driving and is not going to get into a drag race with others on the road. Its 100% focus is on avoiding collisions while getting you where you want to go.