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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.
Actually, this (loosely) has been what I see as the most beneficial use of the technology - giving mobility back to people who can't / shouldn't drive.
My mom still drives, and has her faculties. But, at 78, it's not a given that will continue for too many more years. I dread when we'll have to say "mom, you can't drive anymore... we're worried you're going to hurt someone or yourself". An autonomous car would go a long way in helping her maintain some independence, when she reaches that point.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.