“I found myself driving the Infiniti on surprisingly long highway stretches without touching the accelerator, brake pedal or steering wheel,” writes New York Times auto expert Lawrence Ulrich in his review of the Infiniti Q50. “The Q50 charts a course toward the self-driving cars of tomorrow.”
As shown in the 2010 video above, the technology to allow cars to detect lines on the pavement and steer themselves between those lines–known as lane keeping–has been available for several years. But most auto companies selling in the United States have used a weakened version of the system known as lane keep assist that alerts drivers if they inadvertently cross the stripes, but isn’t designed to do all of the steering independently.
The cause that cialis soft order cute-n-tiny.com Professional uses this method is because of its detoxification properties. Human psychology plays a major role here, and above all, it is an entirely unsafe affair as Hefner doesn’t care to use protection. viagra 50 mg When the money in the insurance finds runs low, they increase the premium rates. generic tadalafil no prescription The appeal of online pharmacy is great to know that nowadays a viagra without prescription patient does not have to restrict to the consumption of alcohol or meals. Are manufacturers being cautious because they fear liability lawsuits? Or is it, as Lawrence suggests due to “the growing gap between what cars can already do, technically, and what is sanctioned by the law”? Last year, Ford demonstrated a self-driving car–in Belgium. Volvo has announced that it will place 100 self-driving cars on the road for experimental purposes–in Sweden. Britain, meanwhile, has offered 10 million pounds to any city willing to become a testing ground for driverless cars by 2017.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission (NHTSC) has a go slow stance to autonomous vehicles. Isn’t this contrary to its mission?
Far from worrying about liability issues, manufacturers and governments should be pressing this technology into service as rapidly as possible. The Eno Transportation Center estimates that self-driving cars could save at least 21,700 lives, not to mention 724 million gallons of fuel, each year.
While we will probably see self-driving cars enter the market by the end of this decade, auto manufacturers have a tradition of introducing such new technologies first on high-end cars and then working down market over several years. Adaptive cruise control, for example, has been around for nearly two decades, but only in the last year has it been available on mid-range cars such as the Ford Fusion.
This will be considered heresy among libertarians, but it might make more sense for the NHTSC to consider rules requiring that all cars sold after, say, 2022 have self-driving capabilities. There are few other things the federal government can do that are so certain to save this many lives each year.
The Antiplanner’s desire to see robocars became mandatory after 2022 begs the question if there aren’t cheaper, quicker ways to reduce not only deaths from transportation accidents but also many other causes. It is clear The Antiplanner DOES have a threshold where he believes government intervention is justified, even if it leads to minor lifestyle changes (I’m counting “no longer actively driving the vehicle” as a “lifestyle change.” Walking another 10-15 minutes per day is in the “minor” category.)
Well, the economic/health/safety case for dramatically improved transit and walking environments in our cities appears to be much, much stronger than the case for robocars.
This LA Times article http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-la-now-live-expo-line-study-20131216-dto,0,5235945.story#axzz2ntsDyYat suggests that making the investment and ongoing maintenance of high frequency rail and bus service within 1/2 mile of the US urban population—with supporting actions such as capital investments to make walking a lot more comfortable in our current over-auto dependent cities and suburbs—would increase the average person’s walking by 8-10 minutes per day (discounting if there is any difference in transit usage rail vis a vis high quality frequent bus service/BRT).
Based on my “back of the envelope” calculations based on this article http://news.illinois.edu/news/11/0511obesity_SheldonJacobson.html, most “obese” people would lose enough weight be after five years of more activity—mostly walking—that making transit and walkability a real choice for most people would enable.
Several tens of thousands of annual premature deaths, if not a few hundred thousand, might be prevented as well once most people were walking more. Non-obese people would also benefit from improved health, though the gym industry would lose big-time (if someone thinks American society and customs don’t border on the pathetic and absurd at times, consider the spectacle of people driving to the gym…but I digress).
Given the fact that humans are bipeds and we clearly benefit from walking as our main exercise—that is, the way the human body evolved—anything to recover some of our previous walking habits can be nothing but good for both individuals and society as a whole.
Improving things is obviously The Antiplanner’s goal in his concession that government regulatory intervention in favor of robocars is justified. Of course, the benefits of walking are an undisputed fact, vs. the still very speculative benefits of robocars. If robocars led to even less walking than Americans already get, the additional obesity and lack of activity could easily INCREASE premature deaths by a lot more than the 22,000 or so claimed to be potentially saved annually by mandating robocars.
Here is working link to LA Times story on travel impacts of Expo line:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-la-now-live-expo-line-study-20131216-dto,0,5235945.story#axzz2ntsDyYat
There’s a simple way to ease the minds of conservatives and libertarians who like the Antiplanner’s proposal. Pair the new mandate with the repeal of one or more costly and harmful mandates (CAFE?). The NET cost of regulation drops AND the composition improves.
At 418 words, msetty’s “comment” (sic) is longer than the Antiplanner’s article, and it’s filled with insight and informative nuggets like “the fact that humans are bipeds”.
Talk a walk msetty.
The huge value of self-driving cars will be the ability to send the car far away to park and an automatic valet service. Of course Mayor Bloomburg types will ban them because they reduce exercise.
The biggest safety value will be to allow drunk drivers to get around safely. But will anybody want to tout that? Will it be DUI in an automatic driving car?
It’s not a DUI unless you get caught. I would put my money on machines over drunk bipeds any day. Or stoned. Or tired. Or nicotined. Or testosteroned. Or texting.
Hey, Frank, sometimes is it essential to point out the obvious.
If space aliens came from where-ever they come from and looked at US cities, they’d note how roads dominate our cities and conclude that the primary inhabitants were big metal boxes on wheels who require parasitic bipeds to get inside them in order to move and survive.
The point is that walkability and public transit should be given equal weight as we’ve given to moving cars–and certainly more than dubious technofixes like robocars. And the cheapest, quickest way to do that is retrofit our cities and suburbs to be as walkable as possible, and provide transit to most points within a half mile of where people live, with the possible exception of really low density exurbs where rich people live and who have other options–like home gyms, several trips to Aspen or Tahoe every year–to ge the exercise they need.
More grist for the mill:
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679157/mapping-the-link-between-obesity-and-car-driving
Not every bit of US growth in obesity is obviously linked to excessive driving, but most goes part and parcel with ‘driving’ culture, e.g., fast food, the empty calories in cheap food, “food deserts” and so forth.
Msetty says If robocars led to even less walking than Americans already get, the additional obesity and lack of activity could easily INCREASE premature deaths by a lot more than the 22,000 or so claimed to be potentially saved annually by mandating robocars.
Except that getting more people walking will also INCREASE premature deaths. In 2010, 4,280 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes in the United States, and another 70,000 pedestrians injured. Pedestrians are 1.5 times more likely than passenger vehicle occupants to be killed in a car crash on each trip. http://www.nhtsa.gov/Pedestrians
Maybe it’s time we separated the pedestrians from traffic altogether. http://www.bing.com/search?setmkt=en-US&q=Third+Generation+Roadway+washington
There is even less reason for “PRT” and other “gadgetbahn” concepts than there are for robocars. Maybe it’s time we adapted our cities to pedestrians rather than pursue even more naive technocratic “solutions.”
And Brough’s interpretation of what the facts actually indicate is quite wrong: those relatively few places (yet) that have improved walkability also have much reduced pedestrian accident rates including deaths.
Haters who live on Napa Valley ranches gonna hate.
If space aliens came to earth, they would immediately realize that dogs rule the world. What other species makes other species follow behind them and pick up their poop?
Less seriously, the statistics about how much land is devoted to transportation can be surprising at first glance, but with some thought it is not at all surprising. How much of any system is dedicated to transportation? How much of a human body is taken up by the circulation system?
and stupid trolls gotta keep trolling…
“and stupid trolls gotta keep trolling…”
Well, you can always stop.
msetty is normally more sensible. His claim that “anything to recover some of our previous walking habits can be nothing but good for both individuals and society as a whole” is plainly wrong. His basic idea that spending a lot of money to deliver a system that gets more walking from users by virtue of being less convenient than the alternative is not sensible. Those same benefits can be unlocked for zero (fiscal) expense by passing laws that require folks to park their autos x blocks from their destination. The benefits of walking are mostly privately enjoyed, leaving little room for govt, however efficient or immune to pork barrel, to improve things. Msetty says robocars benefits are unproven, which is or will soon be a product of government and legal failure, just as FCC dithering in the 70s delayed the introduction of the mobile phone by 10 years. It is not hard to see why once fully developed robocars will cut crashes by 90+%, given Google’s exemplary record in testing so far. These robocar benefits are so large that not even govts, the law and the msettys of the world will be able to resist them and just as soon as the msettys purchase their own robocar they will be demanding everyone else do the same in the interests of safety.