Will Driverless Cars Lead to Street Wars?

“Street Wars 2035” cries The Guardian; “Can cyclists and driverless cars ever co-exist?” The article predicts that streets will be designated “autonomous-vehicle only routes” where cars will whiz by, centimeters apart, allowing no room for pedestrian or bicycle crossings. Apparently, the writer never heard of stop lights or rights of way.

“The forces of driverless motordom try to push pedestrians and cyclists off the road” shrieks Treehugger, citing the Guardian article. All this hysteria is derived solely from one quote by Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn in January, 2016. Speaking to CNBC, Ghosn said, “One of the biggest problems is people with bicycles. The car is confused by them because from time-to-time they behave like pedestrians and from time-to-time they behave like cars.”

I’m not sure why Ghosn is even considered an expert, as Renault is hardly the forefront of driverless car technology. However, Renault’s partner, Nissan, has promised to have several models of self-driving cars by 2020. While Ghosn was technically CEO of Nissan when he made the statement (Renault owns 43 percent of Nissan and Nissan owns 15 percent of Renault), I suspect his statement was just an unguarded remark and not meant to the first shot of a war on bicycles.

There are a lot of problems that driverless car researchers have to solve, but none are insurmountable. A mere five months after Ghosn made his statement, Waymo–which was still called Google at the time–claimed to have solved the bicycle problem. This was completely ignored in the Guardian article posted four days ago.
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The great thing about machine technology is that, when one car learns how to solve a problem, all the other cars on the road can learn it as well. I suspect manufacturers will have some vehicles on the road learning all the time, while the remaining vehicles will benefit from what they learn through secure internet connections when they park at night.

Judging from the anti-automobile statements in the Guardian article (“It’s about people, not cars”; “It should be more about the livability of urban life and the benefits of active lifestyles”; etc.), it is clear that this is just a backlash against improvements in personal mobility. Some people can’t get over the fact that the problems they blame on the automobile–safety, energy, pollution–are all solvable without getting rid of the automobile. Rather than embrace a new technology that can help solve those problems, they would sabotage it so that the problems remain.

I think it is quite likely that major freeways will eventually be designated driverless-only roads, but these aren’t roads that pedestrians and cyclists try to cross anyway. City streets will always be open to bicycles and pedestrians, just as they are today, and those pedestrians and cyclists will be safer for having driverless cars on them rather than human-driven vehicles.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

One Response to Will Driverless Cars Lead to Street Wars?

  1. CapitalistRoader says:

    From the Graunid article: “There’s a lot of interest and people tend to get distracted by this shiny new toy,” she [Sadik-Khan, who is chair of the National Association of City Transportation Officials] says. “Let’s make sure that is the focus – creating the city that we want to have – and not looking at the technology as the be all and end all. ”

    It doesn’t seem to occur to her that cities may well become less populated as people are freed from spending an hour or two a day concentrating on piloting an automobile and opt for farther flung residences.

    Also, a ctrl-F on the “fatalities” and “injuries” result in zero hits. It seems to me that the likelihood of reducing the number of both by a factor of ten would appeal to a statist rag like the the Graunid, which leads me to believe that the “experts” quoted are simply latter-day Luddites, attempting to hang on to their taxpayer-funded jobs like grim death.

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