Q&A: How driverless cars can improve congestion
A chat with Professor Raj Rajkumar, the George Westinghouse Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and co-Director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab
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We'll be starting around 1 p.m., but I'd like to hear from readers first. Would you be willing to give up the steering wheel and have Google take control of your commute?
Benefits: theoretically faster commutes because driverless cars can stay closer together in smaller lines.
Drawbacks: passing control to a computer and trusting Google Maps to get you to your destination.
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Today's expert, Professor Raj Rajkumar, had this to say in today's article ("Google gets behind the wheel"):
Right now, drivers’ manuals recommend maintaining a distance of about 30 metres from the car in front when driving at highway speeds. And while most drivers do not stay that far away, he said that cars run by computers could cut the distance to an average of less than 10 metres.
“You’d be using more of the infrastructure that exists today without having to build new roads,” he said. -
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So perhaps the solution is to give complete control to the computers?
Professor Rajkumar said this in today's article:
“When we fly, the autopilot is in control for much of the flight,” he said. “We already trust our lives to computers in these safety-critical situations.” -
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After experiencing a few accidents (never causing any) and near accidents I'm keenly aware of how one wrong decision by myself or any of the drivers coming the other way can result in my immediate death, dismemberment, or death of my family. I despise driving. I despise the congestion, the pollution, the death toll, the danger to me as a pedestrian or cyclist. Computer driven cars offer at least a partial solution to congestion and parking problems (your car can take itself home or to a more distant lot) and definitely offers higher safety. Liability issues are the big blocker, as far as I know.
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Interesting point Curtiss. Perhaps that's why most drivers would prefer to drive the cars themselves, despite the potential benefits, as this graph shows: "Canada's choice of transportation"
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Question - would they be rolled out individually for those who choose to use them? or would this be something that had to be uniformly introduced by all major car companies? Could a non-computer controlled car still be allowed on the road with say 75% computer controlled cars?
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So how are we going to resolve the liability issues? Should we be billing drivers who cause accidents for the economic cost of their decisions as a way of discouraging human-directed driving? If you trigger an accident on the 401 at 7am should you be billed several million dollars for the clean-up, delay to other road users, emergency vehicles?
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This topic is part of our Time to Lead series on congestion, a major problem facing large cities across Canada and the world. Read more about it here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/
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How are we going to standardize signalling? Tail light and headlight mounted LED signals can put out a lot of information about speed, intent, etc that can be used by other cars to help traffic flow. Road-mounted lights can put out human-invisible optical data about location, weather, congestion ahead. Is there a standards body who can unify the approach to this data?
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There are definitely more solutions to congestion than the driverless car. This article outlines some of them including some more extreme suggestions: "Cities get creative with solutions for traffic congestion woes"
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Here's a thought: Driverless cars could be much smaller. Since cars today have to protect the driver against catastrophic accidents, they need to be much bigger than they need to be. A much safer driving infrastructure would preclude the need for such large vehicles.
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We'll be starting the chat at 1 p.m. Please send your questions and I'll add them to our list for our experts. In the meantime, have a look at our Time to Lead page for more articles, infographics and links on the subject: Time to Lead
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How could the system allow for emergency vehicles? Typically, the human eye must see or hear one from a distance to know to pull over in good time. A radar wouldn't really see the vehicle early enough to plan a safe move to the side, or even know that it should be doing that.
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Here's an interesting excerpt from today's article on driverless cars:
The Google project is led by Stanford University robotics pioneer Sebastian Thrun, who theorized during a speech at the TED conference this year that the world’s congestion problems could be solved by taking human drivers out of the equation.
“Do you realize we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn’t rely on human precision, and staying in the lane, but on robotic precision, and thereby drive a little bit closer together, in a little bit tighter lanes, and do away with all traffic jams,” he said. -
That article was written by The Globe's urban affairs reporter Siri Agrell, who will join us at 1 p.m. for the chat. You can read it here: "Google gets behind the wheel"
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Interesting point Jacob. Actually, in Singapore, vehicle owners need a Certificate of Entitlement, which can start at $48,000 in local currency for a small-size automobile. It's one way they're limiting the number of cars on the road. (Read that article here: "Cities get creative with solutions for traffic congestion woes")
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As with any new technology early adopters will pay a hefty premium (see hybrid and electric vehicles). How difficult would it be to convince governments to fund this as an infrastructure project? I don't need to have the vehicle in my driveway; I just need to book one and have it meet me at the curb.
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We'll be starting in a little less than 15 minutes. If you haven't already, check out the articles above to learn more about the driverless car. It's part of our "Time to Lead" series on congestion, seen here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/
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