Over on dezeen there is a really interesting post by Dan Hill called “Self-driving cars are the answer- what is the question?”
Basically you should all read the whole thing there rather than me sum it up but here’s taste:
Here we see such companies are not actually interested in genuine change, for all their bluster about “radical disruption”. Self-driving cars are a sticking plaster over existing conditions. They actually reinforce the ‘Californian Ideology‘ that underpins today’s mobility problems: suburban sprawl, based around the possibility of lengthy car-based commutes, in turn predicated on a highly individualistic view of society. It is an entirely conservative move. Self-driving cars provide a way of changing the veneer of this system, as no-one is brave enough to suggest changing the system itself. They replace who, or what, is holding the steering wheel, but not the underlying culture that contributes to mass depression, obesity epidemics, climate change and economic crises.
And this gem:
To them, technology enables them avoid talking about changing an unsustainable lifestyle. They want to have their cake and eat it. And then get fat.
I’ve long held the view that the enthusiasm for self driving cars as any kind of answer is for the problems of our cities is wrong-headed, especially for people emotionally attached to their cars and driving. This later group seem to me to like fighter pilots advocating for more drones: you love driving; hand it over to a risk adverse computer then.
And of course if we want more city with the quality of Elliott St then technology that reduces the numbers of cars rather than sets out to maintain auto-dependency is what is required:
Anyway Hill cuts nicely to the chase on the disconnect we have around cars and their apparent delivery of ‘Freedom’ to our lives:
For all the emotional appeal that cars are associated with, most tasks do not involve an Audi TT gliding around a bend in the Dolomites, sadly, but glum, mildly desperate, slogs through dreary clogged arteries. The FT reports that “the average American spends 38 hours a year stuck in traffic. Cars spend more than 90 percent of their lives idle.”
He also has a better solution, one not as sexy and futuristic sounding as the robot car, but one much more likey to deliver real change and improvement to people’s lives this century:
The allure of cars, albeit a fantasy most of the time, is significant though. They are wonderful machines, after all. So why not reframe them as “something for the weekend”? Around freedom, excitement, identity, at your leisure.
Software-enabled sharing is far more radical than simply software-enabled driving. We have seen how bike-sharing schemes are beginning to redraw our urban fabric. We can see the growth in the community garden movements. We can see how shared space systems creates a safer, more engaged way of moving around. Self-driving cars have none of these dynamics, simply using software to reinforce what are actually pre-internet ideologies.
Nice work.
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Driverless cars will make all roads into shared spaces with pedestrians given right of way everywhere. I can’t wait.
No they won’t. The pedestrian laws will get changed. Just wait.
The argument about driverless cars freeing pedestrians to walk everywhere wasn’t about the law. It’s a social question – if a human-controlled car hits a pedestrian and faces criminal charges, the jury feel sorry for the driver and let him off, regardless of who is legally at fault. If a driverless car hits a pedestrian and a giant corporation gets sued, an (American) jury is going to award damages in the zillions, again regardless of who’s at fault.
It doesn’t matter what the law is – the companies making driverless car software are going to do their utmost to avoid killing people and sabotaging their business, and pedestrians, legally or as outlaws, will take advantage of that.
And as soon as pedestrians work out that they can walk in front of these devices, how long until drivers get annoyed with increased travel times and demand changes be made to pedestrian rules? I’m not saying it’s a legal issue or not safe, just pointing out possibilities.
Oh, I’m sure you’re right about that, and the Herald will be leading the charge to get those dirty pedestrians back on the footpath where they belong. But I’m saying that US law will have little impact, and NZ law no impact, on what the cars themselves will be programmed to do.
I’m certain the cars will operate, as designed, and miss everything. That is the only way they’ll get NHTSA compliance.
A little off topic, but a future for our RoNS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoEd8yOFfLA
That Tauranga Eastern Link road will be like that. An empty white elephant like Route K.
Nice article – there’s a bit of research in academia on this topic (I’m an (ex) Auckland PhD student studying public transport issues), though I personally don’t have the enthusiasm for self driving cars them that some of my professors do. There’s a couple of points I’d like to make:
a) This could be really useful for demand responsive public transport schemes (something I work on myself). Instead of having a set of large, traditional buses, we could have a set of self driven minivans. People are able to call one (from anywhere) via an app, and the van picks them up at their requested origin (and drops them at their requested location), serving other customers along the way. There’s many examples of such schemes worldwide, mainly in Europe (there’s a link to a Finnish one below), but there are some variants currently running in Australia.
http://thegovlab.org/choose-your-own-route-on-finlands-algorithm-driven-public-bus/
Unfortunately, the main expense of such schemes is usually labour costs. But if vehicles are self driving, we could have a larger fleet, enabling the scheme to reach the critical mass of participants needed to be successful.
b) In network routing, it’s been shown that the combination of all the choices individuals make does not give the socially optimum solution i.e. If you could control which routes people took, you could reduce the average travel time, lower emissions and reduce individual travel time for most, (likely all) users. People wouldn’t be willing to accept having to learn a new route each morning, (especially if it doesn’t seem to be the best), but may be willing to accept their car being routed along a different path (especially if they’re too busy reading a paper to realise).
Anyway, just wanted to say it’s a great blog – I’m normally much more of a lurker than a commenter, so thanks 🙂
Yes, any discussion about self-driving cars and public transport needs to consider this kind of demand responsive public transport schemes.
I know you’re not fond of transit lanes on this blog, but a wide array of T4 lanes throughout Auckland City when self-drive cars become available could encourage shared taxis/small-scale public transport use to become widespread. You get 4 road users taking up the space of one vehicle (or 9 in a minivan), more widespread support for transit lanes, and some highways could even have two lanes if there was enough demand, which means buses and shared transit all form part of a large congestion-free network.
If the cars are electric then potentially you have a low-carbon network too!
We’re very keen on Transit lanes on this blog.
Self-driving cars = cheaper cabs (no drivers’ wages) = fewer private cars = less traffic.
The traffic from private cars will cause fewer traffic jams because computers are better able to adjust to congested settings.
Less speeding.
Fewer pedestrian fatalities.
Less driver stress.
Less central area given over to parking (car can drop off owner then shuttle to carpark in a low-use area).
We’ll see; am looking forward to being able stop all traffic simply by walking out onto the street…. ‘computer says no’ nice shift in the balance of power again, and will be rather frustrating for the occupants of the cars.
So I predict that it will work well in car only environments, ie motorways, everywhere else; meh.
And even then but even then every car will have to be a new one, when has that ever been the case?
Google’s Uber, in California, requires every car to be a 2006 model or later and they’re doing great. Given time, new cars come on the road – they always have. Self-drive cars have operated roads with human drivers for 100000+ miles with no computer errors leading to an incident, so I don’t know why every car would need to be new just to get a decent self-drive public transit fleet on the road?
I’m sure that ‘balance of power’ will be managed so that these cars can work on the street, even with pedestrians. A self-drive car might stop for you if you step out in front of it, but that doesn’t stop the driver blasting you with a horn if you stood in the way. I actually see human drivers taking as much flack as anything else in any accidents from this kind of thing. If a pedestrian steps out, and a self-drive car is forced to hit on the breaks so that the human driving the car behind it fails to react in time and slams into it – and the car records video evidence of the whole thing, will people continue to blame the car?
The answer to the problem of too many cars is not another kind of car. Read the linked article above.
I have already, but I took another look at it. It asks “why not really reduce the number of cars required in the first place, via mass, distributed car-sharing schemes”? This is the kind of thing I’m talking about, and it seems almost inevitable to me that distributed car-sharing schemes will become part of commuting for a lot of people in the future.
Oh I agree with that, but whether the cars are driverless or not is irrelevant to that outcome.
Maybe I’m overestimating the impact, but I wouldn’t say irrelevant. If the cars are driverless, none of the commuters need to own a car themselves, they don’t need to pay for the labour costs for a driver, and with a third party running the service, people might consider it safer than hitching a ride with a driver in their own car.
Self driving cars unlock the capacity of existing roads and best described by the below KPMG paper.
http://www.kpmg.com/us/en/issuesandinsights/articlespublications/pages/self-driving-cars-nextrevolution.aspx
“An essential implication for an autonomous vehicle infrastructure is that, because efficiency will improve so dramatically, traffic capacity will increase exponentially without building additional lanes or roadways. Research indicates that platooning of vehicles could increase highway lane capacity by up to 500 percent. It may even be possible to convert existing vehicle infrastructure to bicycle or pedestrian uses. Autonomous transportation infrastructure could bring an end to the congested streets and extra-wide highways of large urban areas. It could also bring the end to battles over the need for (and cost of) high-speed trains. Self-driving vehicles with the ability to “platoon”—perhaps in special express lanes—might provide a more flexible and less costly alternative.”
I still find this to be an over idealised fantasy. Technophilia at its most crazed. It clearly requires all vehicles to be commonly equipped so when will this happen then? With an increasingly ageing fleet of old bangers in NZ no time soon. Or do you envisage NZTA buying everyone a brand new hi tech car so they can platoon everywhere? Oh joy. Of course shortly there will be no money available for any kind of new investments by NZTA as its future budgets are all being prespent on dodgy PPPs to build empty RoNS.
Also just how far away from an image of freedom can you get than KMPG’s described above? That’s a driving nightmare.
The questions are easy: How do we eliminate the needless deaths of 200 people a year? How do we eliminate the maiming of thousands more? How do we eliminate the financial and social burdens of these injuries? How do we eliminate the risks of drunk drivers and red light running? How do we drastically reduce the costs of PT and taxi’s? I think driverless buses and taxis will deliver the biggest impact rather than private driverless vehicles.
Or, you can just get a lot of people riding bicycles like in the Netherlands. They have fantastic road safety stats, especially for cyclists.
In 2010 the Netherlands had 640 road deaths, a number that is consistently dropping (http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/04/netherlands-traffic-deaths-down-again.html)
In 2010, NZ had 375 (http://www.transport.govt.nz/research/roadtoll/annualroadtollhistoricalinformation/)
So per capita (Netherlands 18m; NZ 4.2m) we are much worse.
A good cycle network would be a much cheaper solution than reconfiguring our entire vehicle fleet plus the roading network. Why not put in place a system that is tried and tested in another country and not something that sounds like it is out of a scifi movie?
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Defensive Driving:
==============
While a operator can control her / his own actions behind the wheel, it is almost impossible to control the actions of
other staff. However, drivers should be trained in defensive driving methods to avoid a crash inspite of the driving
faults of others.
Some skills used in driving defensively involve:
1. Scanning
couple of. Communicating
3. Fretting hand signals
4Flashers
5. Always keeping a margin with safety
6. Adjustment
Scanning
What the simple truth is is important to get defensive driving:
Good drivers aim to see 10 secs to 15 seconds ahead to the roadway (about a person city block).By way of looking ahead,
you can avoid last minute moves just like sudden stops and also quick lane variations.
About any 10 seconds take a look at the mirrors to check out if any motor vehicle is following very closely.
If changing lanes, backing up, slowing down and also driving down long hill, it is critical to check to get traffic from
behind the motor car and in a person’s blind spots.While checking a mirrors, do not bring your eyes heli-copter flight road for above an instant. The vehicle while in front of you could prevent suddenly.Continually leave yourself a strong “out. ”
Although mirrors are useful, you should remember they never show the 100 % picture. Mirrors leave blind spots in the
field of eye sight. Blind spots could be the areas near a left and perfect rear corners of your vehicle that you may not see using a
mirrors from a driver’s perspective. Hence, before you generate any lane variations or turns, quickly turn top of your head and
look over your shoulder to check out what is while in the blind spot. Additional blind spots is often created by glaring lights, dirty
windshields, vehicles parked too closely in an intersection, bushes plus buildings. In all these cases, slowly ease car
forward until you will notice clearly. Avoid driving around other drivers’ shade spots where its more difficult to see you.
Connecting
Communicating means letting others find out what you plan to undertake early enough to protect yourself from a crash. Anytime you intend to
slow all the way down, stop, turn, change lanes or pull away from the subdue, you should point your intention. Be in the habit with signaling
your movements even when you are unable to see others on the streets. Before you point, you must first notice that your
movement is often made safely.
Fretting hand Signals
Hand signals are listed from the driver’s home window, using the kept arm and fretting hand:
1.To point a left move, hold the left arm and hand instantly out and point the earliest finger.
2.To signal the right turn, hold the left arm straight out as well as forearm and hand straight up, palm facing send.
3.To point stopping and delaying, point the left arm and hand all the way down, palm facing backside.
Flashers
Flashing lumination signals for changes are legal substitutes for hand information, but there are when they are hard to check out. In
late afternoon and early morning, the lenses could reflect sunlight, defining it as difficult to tell regardless of if the signals are sporting.
At night your flashing light signal is noticeably easier to see than the hand signal. Use the species of signal you believe that will communicate
most effective. A good rule is by using both hand information and flashing light signals while in the daytime, especially while in the late afternoon
or early morning when the sunrays is bright and reduced in the sky. The flashing light signal is enough at night.
Signal not less than the last 100 paws before turning and also stopping. If the quickness limit is 45 mph if not more, signal at least the very last
200 feet in advance of turning. The faster you will be driving, the farther ahead make sure you signal.
Keeping your Margin of Wellbeing
Allow a margin of safety all over you by staying clear of other vehicles. Be certain there is more than enough room ahead plus
behind to go away or stop easily. Use the “two secondly rule” to determine when you are far enough behind an auto to react if perhaps it
stops all of the sudden.
The Two-Second Procedure: The two-second rule says that you allow two seconds regarding the time the motor vehicle
ahead of you passes the point and plenty of time your vehicle reaches precisely the same point.
Drive in the steady speed, and signal well earlier whenever you are delaying or stopping so that you can warn other staff
from following very closely. If a further vehicle follows you actually too closely, move to another lane and signal for any driver to
go away you. Stay involved with the lane plus leave space for both sides within your car. Allow ample room between car,
parked motors and oncoming page views.
Adjusting
In situations when you need to deal with two or extra unavoidable dangers together, adjust by giving the best
room to the very best or most possible danger. Suppose there are actually approaching cars to the left and youngsters on a bicycle to the
right. The child is likely to make intense move, so attributes needed child more home. This may mean moving nearer to the
oncoming motors. If the potential risks are equally risky, such as onset cars and left cars, you should stop as well as
the oncoming motors to pass easily before proceeding.
If every operater always obeyed the policies, and always
behaved inside of a sensible way, driving is simpler and
healthier. Unfortunately, this ideal situation would not exist.
Instead most people frequently encounter staff who behave
unexpectedly or recklessly, and various highway users, just like
pedestrians and cyclists, who ignore the policies that apply so that you can
them.Thanks.
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