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Doubts About Self-Driving Cars

By | | Transportation
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A new poll finds that nearly two out of three auto owners think self-driving cars are a dangerous idea. Slate writer Lee Gomes argues that self-driving cars may never happen. Both are wrong.

The pollsters don’t argue that self-driving cars actually are dangerous; only that “automakers will have to work to win over car shoppers who think some of the technology makes vehicles more dangerous.” But they really won’t; they just have to make the technology available to early adopters, and as those pioneers prove it to work, more people will want it.

Gomes’ argument is that Google’s self-driving car critically depends on accurate maps, and such maps are expensive and time-consuming to make. Moreover, Gomes adds, keeping the maps up to date with daily changes in routes, traffic signals, speed limits, and other factors will be nearly impossible.

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How Many Lives Will Self-Driving Cars Save?

By | | Transportation
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Self-driving car advocates often note that more than 90 percent of serious accidents result from driver error, and thus estimate that autonomous cars will reduce fatalities by 90 percent. Indeed, in 2008 a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study of crashes between July 2005 and December 2007 found that 5,096 were caused by driver error, while just 130 were caused by vehicle failure and 135 were caused by the weather.

After some adjustments, NHTSA concluded that 93 percent of accidents can be attributed to driver error. So it seems reasonable to conclude that self-driving cars will save more than 31,000 lives per year (i.e., about 93 percent of the 33,560 fatalities suffered in 2012).

Not so fast, says a group called the Casualty Actuarial Society. It took a close look at NHTSA’s 2008 study and found that “49% of accidents contain at least one limiting factor that could disable [autonomous vehicle] technology or reduce its effectiveness.” That means self-driving cars will only reduce fatalities by about half, not 90 percent. While 16,000 lives saved per year is nothing to complain about, there’s a big difference between 16,000 and 31,000.

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Policy Implications of Autonomous Vehicles

By | | Transportation
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Tomorrow, the Cato Institue will release a new paper on the policy implications of self-driving cars. Antiplanner readers can download a preview of the paper today.

In a nutshell, the paper argues that self-driving cars combined with car sharing will put public transit agencies out of business. The average cost of transit, including subsidies is $1 a passenger mile. Self-driving cars should cost far less than half of that. This means there will be no reason to continue to subsidize transit except in a few very dense areas such as New York City.

The paper also points out that most of the effects of self-driving cars can’t be predicted today, so Congress should give up on the idea of having states and metropolitan planning agencies write long-range transportation plans that we know will be wrong. Transportation agencies should solve today’s problems today and prepare for autonomous vehicles by keeping roads in good repair and following consistent sign standards.
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Cadillac vs. Mercedes

By | | Transportation
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Cadillac has announced that in 2017 it will begin selling truly “hands-free” cars that can steer themselves and control their own speeds to avoid collisions. While other manufacturers, including Acura, Infiniti, and Mercedes, most manufacturers have simply provided lane keep assist, which warns drivers when they drift out of a lane.

The new thing in Cadillac announcement is the inclusion of vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The Antiplanner thinks building such systems into cars is unnecessary because they are already inherent in many smart-phone apps, and since consumers replace smart phones more frequently than cars, they will be assured of having the latest technology at all times.
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Perhaps more significant is Daimler’s announcement that it has bought MyTaxi, a competitor of Uber. Mercedes obviously believes that car sharing and smart-phone apps will play an important role in the future of the cars it manufactures.

Planning for the Unpredictable

By | | Mission, Regional planning, Transportation
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How do you plan for the unpredictable? That’s the question facing the more than 400 metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) that have been tasked by Congress to write 20-year transportation plans for their regions. Self-driving cars will be on the market in the next ten years, are likely to become a dominant form of travel in twenty years, and most people think they will have huge but often unknowable transformative effects on our cities and urban areas. Yet not a single regional transportation plan has tried to account for, and few have even mentioned the possibility of, self-driving cars.

Instead, many of those plans propose obsolete technologies such as streetcars, light rail, and subways. These technologies made sense when they were invented a hundred or so years ago, but today they are just a waste of money. One reason why planners look to the past for solutions is that they can’t accurately foresee the future. So they pretend that, by building ancient modes of transportation, they will have the same effects on cities that they had when they were first introduced.

If the future is unpredictabie, self-driving cars make it doubly or quadruply so.

  • How long will it take before self-driving cars dominate the roads?
  • Will people who own self-driving cars change their residential locations because they won’t mind traveling twice as far to work?
  • Will employment centers move so they can take advantage of self-driving trucks and increased employee mobility?
  • Will car sharing reduce the demand for parking?
  • Will carpooling reduce VMT or will the increased number of people who can “drive” self-driving cars increase VMT?
  • Will people use their cars as “robotic assistants,” going out with zero occupants to pick up groceries, drop off laundry, or doing other tasks that don’t require lots of supervision?
  • Will self-driving cars reduce the need for more roads because they increase road capacities, or will the increase in driving offset this benefit?
  • Will self-driving cars provide the mythical “first and last miles” needed by transit riders, or will they completely replace urban transit?

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Wait Six Years to Buy Your Next Car

By | | Transportation
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You’ll be able to buy a car that can drive itself under most conditions, with an option for override by a human driver, in 2020, according to the median estimate in a survey of 217 attendees of the 2014 Automated Vehicles Symposium. By 2030, the group estimated, you’ll be able to buy a car that is so fully automated it won’t even have the option for a human driver.


A demonstrator car with two Lidar laser sensors hanging on the front bumper, five radar sensors hiding behind the fenders, and two optical sensors with 360-degree fields of view on the roof. Click image for a larger view.

Though 2020 is just six years away, there remains a lot of debate over how the industry is going to get there. Most auto manufacturers are incrementalists, adding automated features such as adaptive cruise control, self-parking, and traffic-jam assist, two or three at a time. Google and some others in Silicon Valley, however, are more interested in producing highly or even fully automated cars as soon as possible.

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Back in the Air Again

By | | Housekeeping
3 Comments

The Antiplanner is attending a conference on driverless cars near San Francisco this week. The first session, on Monday afternoon, dealt with the process of developing standards and best practices.

In 2009, when I was writing Gridlock, my main recommendation was that someone should convene a working group to write such standards. I suggested that the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials lead the process, but I should have known that a better group would be the Society of Automotive Engineers. In any case, I’m glad it is getting done.
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Today there will be a session on implications of driverless cars for regional planning. Since most regional planners seem stuck in the early twentieth century, it will be interesting to see what the presenters propose.

First Fully Self-Driving Car

By | | News commentary, Transportation
9 Comments

Yesterday, Google unveiled the world’s first fully autonomous car, “complete” with no steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedals, rear-view mirrors, or other accessories needed by primitive human-driven cars. On the outside, the car appears to be a tiny two-seater; insides, it has enormous amounts of interior and legroom.

The car is still topped by an ugly, spinning laser sensor, which joins with infrared and optical sensors to detect lane stripes, traffic signals, and all possible obstacles. Eventually, these laser sensors–which, at about $50,000 apiece, are the most expensive part of the car–will have to be miniaturized. Some have projected that, when built in large quantities, the cost of the laser sensor will come down to around $250.

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Self-Driving Car Update

By | | Transportation
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Google reports it has run its self-driving cars nearly 700,000 miles, and the cars are mastering all kinds of situations in city traffic, including dealing with bicycles and detours. For example, as detailed in this article in Atlantic Cities, Google originally programmed its cars to know where every permanent stop sign was located, but not how to deal with temporary stop signs (such as signs held by flaggers of road maintenance crews). Now, the cars know how to spot and react to such signs.


With a Google engineer watching in the background, some guy wearing a funny tie examines a Google self-driving car in Washington, DC.

These improvements have encouraged Google to set a target of having driverless cars on the market by 2017. That’s a pretty ambitious goal considering that six years ago the auto industry’s best engineers were predicting the first self-driving cars wouldn’t reach consumers until 2018.
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Your Freedom Is Someone Else’s Hell

By | | Transportation
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Yonah Freemark, a writer over at Atlantic Cities–which normally loves any transit boondoggle–somewhat sheepishly admits that light rail hasn’t lived up to all of its expectations. Despite its popularity among transit agencies seeking federal grants, light rail “neither rescued the center cities of their respective regions nor resulted in higher transit use.”

Not to worry, however; Atlantic Cities still hates automobiles, or at least individually owned automobiles. Another article by writer Robin Chase suggests that driverless cars will create a “world of hell” if people are allowed to own their own cars. Instead, driverless cars should be welcomed only if they are collectively owned and shared.

The hell that would result from individually owned driverless cars would happen because people would soon discover they could send their cars places without anyone in them. As Chase says, “If single-occupancy vehicles are the bane of our congested highways and cities right now, imagine the congestion when we pour in unfettered zero-occupancy vehicles.” Never mind the fact that driverless cars will greatly reduce congestion by tripling roadway capacities and avoid congestion by consulting on-line congestion reports.

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