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Self-Driving Cars Superior to Light Rail in Canberra

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Canberra, Australia’s capital, is considering spending close to $1 billion building a light-rail line. But a new study by computer programmer Kent Fitch finds that shared, self-driving cars make a lot more sense.

Where light rail would lose money, a fleet of shared, self-driving cars could earn a profit. Where light rail would serve just one corridor, self-driving cars would serve the entire urban area. Where light rail would require a massive expenditure on new infrastructure, self-driving cars would use existing infrastructure. While light-rail would require people to walk to stations and wait for a railcar, more than 96 percent of self-driving car patrons would have to wait less than a minute for a car to meet them at their door.

Fitch observes that Canberra, being entirely a twentieth-century city, is simply not designed for public transit, which is why ridership on the city’s stagnant or declining. When a city is too decentralized for “medium-box” transit like buses, the solution is not to go to “big-box” transit, which only works if a lot of people want to go from point A to point B at the same time. Instead, the solution is smaller-box transit, such as shared cars.

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Hacking Self-Driven Cars

By | | Transportation
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Computer experts have figured out a way to hack a Jeep, allowing them to remotely control everything from music and windshield wipers to speed and brakes. This has led to a proposal for federal cyber-security legislation, while other people question what this means for self-driving cars.

The question of the cyber-security of automobiles is almost completely separate from self-driving cars. The self-driven cars developed by Google, Volkswagen, and other manufacturers rely on several kinds of sensors to direct their travel, including GPS, lasers, radar, infrared, and optical sensors. Of these, the only one that uses the radio spectrum is GPS, and since the cars use it only to determine a route, and not for minute-by-minute driving, I don’t think it could be vulnerable to a cyber attack.

Experts believe that hackers used Chrysler’s use of Sprint communications technologies in its cars aimed at providing auto buyers with an “in-vehicle communications system.” If so, then Sprint failed to build an adequate firewall between its communications and the car’s operating controls. Chrysler responded to the hack by recalling 1.4 million vehicles that have the Sprint system, presumably so it can somehow add such a firewall. According to Wired, the hackers that demonstrated the Sprint system’s vulnerability report that
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Say Yes to Self-Driving Cars

By | | Transportation
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A writer for Electronic Design magazine named Lou Frenzel opines “that the driverless car is not a good idea.” His argument comes down to, “I don’t know anything about it, but I can think of lots of problems that I don’t imagine anyone at Google has ever thought of.”

For example, he asks, can self-driving cars operate at night? Can they handle rain, fog, and snow? Can they find a parking space in a garage? Can they make left turns?

The fact that all of these questions have been asked and answered by Google, Volkswagen, and other companies developing self-driving cars makes Frenzel’s article pretty insipid. For example, most of these cars rely on radar, infrared, and/or laser beams, none of which care whether it is day or night. Infrared can also “penetrate smoke,rain, snow, blowing sand, and most foggy conditions,” though in heavy fog, a self-driving car would slow down, just as a human-driven car should do.

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WiFi Yes, V2V No

By | | Transportation
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A little-known conflict over the electromagnetic spectrum could shape self-driving cars for years to come. On one side is “an ecosystem of companies” that have developed vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications systems and the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission (NHTSC), which wants to mandate such systems in all cars and trucks, which together want the Federal Communications Commission to dedicate the 5.9 gigahertz spectrum to such systems. On the other side are WiFi developers and advocates who would like to open parts of that spectrum to WiFi use.

The V2V people say that such systems are essential for improved auto safety and self-driving cars and don’t want to share the spectrum with millions of WiFi users. However, General Motors and Cisco have thrown a monkey wrench into their case with an announcement that they plan to test WiFi for V2V communications.

Volvo and other companies have already shown that WiFi alone can provide adequate V2V communications for platooning cars down a highway. In such platooning, a lead vehicle does the driving and numerous following vehicles, spaced as little as five meters apart, merely mimic the lead vehicle’s speed and direction. Such platooning would obviously greatly increase highway capacities.

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The Uberization of Transit

By | | Transportation
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A few weeks ago, Uber’s Travis Kalanick predicted that it would soon replace its drivers with self-driving cars. Now, he’s putting his investors’ money where his mouth is by poaching 40 self-driving auto engineers from Carnegie-Mellon University.

“Uber offered some scientists bonuses of hundreds of thousands of dollars and a doubling of salaries to staff the company’s new tech center in Pittsburgh, according to one researcher at NREC.” Although Google has gotten most of the headlines lately, it was Carnegie-Mellon’s entry that won the $2 million DARPA urban challenge in 2007. Unfortunately, its biggest sponsor, General Motors, went bankrupt soon after that, and it probably hoped that a partnership with Uber would help. Instead, the partnership just allowed Uber to decide which of its engineers it would steal.

Meanwhile, Denver graduate student August Ruhnka has suggested that public bus systems be “uberized.” It was a unfortunate choice of terms as he didn’t mean allowing people to call buses to their homes using a smart-phone app. Instead, he proposed to let private companies operate Denver buses (he didn’t seem to be aware that they already operate half of them) and, more significantly, to let those private companies change routes in order to better serve riders. “Private-route contracts establish a sustainable procedure to constantly test the market to achieve the lowest cost,” he wrote.

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Peak Automobile?

By | | Transportation
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Ever since some alarmist came up with the economically nonsensical term peak oil, we’ve been inundated with peak this, that, and the other thing. There’s peak helium. How about peak phosphorus?

More recently, the term has been twisted from a supply issue to a demand issue, such as peak smart phone. And now, peak car. Yet, reading about peak car, the Antiplanner can’t help but feeling that this is neither a supply nor a demand issue but more wishful thinking on the part of city officials who are doing their best to create auto-hostile environments.

Millennials don’t drive? It turns out that’s not true, just as it isn’t true that Millennials avoid the suburbs.

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Self-Driving Cars Coming Sooner Than You Think

By | | Transportation
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Auto manufacturers revealed plans for cars with self-driving capabilities at the New York Auto Show last week. These include cars that will be on the market within a year or two.

Volvo, for example, plans to introduce a car this Spring that can “take over both the steering and throttle to follow the car in front of it at speeds up to about 35 miles per hour.” Audi plans to offer cars with a similar feature (up to 40 mph) as soon as January, 2016. The manufacturers use some variation of the term “traffic jam assist” to describe this feature. While the drive won’t actually be steering the car, for liability reasons the cars will require that the drivers keep their hands on the steering wheel or at least put them there every 10 seconds or so.

Late next year Cadillac will offer its top-of-the-line CT6 model with a “super cruise” feature that will combine self-steering and adaptive cruise control at highways speeds: “hands-off-the-wheel, feet-off-the-pedals highway driving.” Cadillac publicity has at least implied that drivers will be able to take their hands off the steering wheel for extended periods without having to touch the wheel every 15 seconds or so like other brands. GM had announced this feature last year, but gave more particulars at the New York show.

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Self-Driving from San Francisco to New York

By | | Transportation
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A self-driving car traveling from San Francisco to New York is about half-way through its journey, having reached Ft. Worth, Texas yesterday. The car is an Audi, but its self-driving electronics have been designed by Delphi, an auto supply company. Like Continental and Bosch, Delphi has been developing its own self-driving hardware and software.


This raw AP video gives an idea of Delphi’s plans.

They left Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay, on March 22 and took the long way around, first going south to Los Angeles where they could test the software in heavy traffic. The goal is to arrive in time for the New York Auto Show, which begins a week from today.

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Will Apple Join the Self-Driving Car Race?

By | | Transportation
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Apple is planning to put an electric car on the market by 2020. No, Apple is planning to build a self-driving car. No, it’s not. It would be stupid to do so.

Rumors about Apple, which has the highest market capitalization of any company in the world, are an industry in itself, so the rumor world was thrilled to learn that Apple had leased a modest Dodge Caravan and was driving it around Silicon Valley festooned with cameras, Lidar, and other devices.

Meanwhile, Apple has hired hundreds of auto engineers away from Tesla, General Motors, Ford, and other companies with the goal of putting as many as 1,000 of them to work on the so-called Apple Car. (Ironically, less than a month after being fined more than $100 million for agreeing not to poach employees from Google, Adobe, and Intel, Apple is being sued by battery maker A123 for allegedly poaching its experts.)

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Transit Idiocy

By | | Transportation
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Self-driving cars could “make congestion dramatically worse,” warns a headline in the Atlantic‘s CityLab. Simulations show that, if just 25 percent of cars on the road are self-driving, the article says, there will be a lot more delays at intersections.

It’s not surprising that the transit crowd would want to try to discredit the idea of self-driving cars, but this is a particularly pathetic attempt. The CityLab article is based on a study that assumed that, for the sake of passenger comfort, self-driving cars would be programmed to accelerate and decelerate no faster than a light-rail or intercity train. Such slow acceleration, the study found, would increase the time it would take cars to get through stop lights.

The study was seemingly done by people who haven’t ever seen a self-driving car in real life, or maybe any car. There’s an obvious difference between cars and trains: people stand up and walk around in trains, so acceleration and deceleration has to be slow. So far, no one has designed a self-driving tall enough to stand in, so there’s no need to cripple the cars that way.

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