Sandy James: This piece has just come out from Ryerson on the issue of autonomous vehicles. I took one look at this and wondered what people in fifty years will say when they look back on this type of video-will they think the same as we do now looking at those early videos of the benefits of the 1950’s highway construction across the USA?
What is notable is that walking and accessibility really do not get prime points here, and the interfacing between this new technology and peds/bikers gets no shrift.
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pricetags: Given how easy it will be for pedestrians and cyclists to frustrate the flow of AVs, knowing that the vehicles will always stop and accede the right-of-way, will there be pressure to prohibit any other users than cars on the roads except in designated places like crosswalks (on the light) and separated cycletracks?
Or will AVs accelerate the de-carring of dense downtowns? As they simply won’t work anywhere where a person as much as looks like they might step onto the street, much less where there are large numbers of these unpredictable beings (including militant pedestrians actively punking them?). They will thrive in the already hermetic environment of the freeway, but likely fail anywhere near people.
I have a hunch that people will not accept anything like the current crash, death, and injury rates from bot-cars, not least as they are being sold on the basis of 100% safety. I think the best model for understanding their cultural acceptance is how we currently treat airline standards. Everytime a airplane has a problem let alone a crash there is a huge reaction; enquiries, groundings, front page news. Already we are seeing this with the few small incidents that have occurred with AVs.
In short people largely accept human error on the roads; but won’t accept machine killing.
The techno-fantasists are drinking their own Koolaid. Yes these videos are exactly like the highway boosting ones of the 50s; just as one sided.
As people learn how autonomous vehicles behave, common courtesy will take over. Just as when people in cars merge together in an orderly fashion, as opposed to a chaotic, every man for himself system.
AV comes in stages.
The full no human involved AV is at least twenty likely far more years off.
Most vehicles today do not even allow stage 1 ( feet off ). Stage 2 ( hands off ) might arrive within 5 years on controlled highways, say Hwy 1, but in cities not by 2025 or 2030. Stage 3 ( eyes off ) i.e. barking a command or typing in a destination while sitting in the back seat or snoozing in front seat will be 15-20 years, likely more. A full stage 4 ( brains off or no human ) will likely be 20 or 25 more years. We can’t even agree on Uber standards today. What makes us think that AVs which are far more complex to integrate into human systems and all sorts of anomalies is easy and fast .. And soon ?
Technology always is far ahead of law and customs. I’ve been told in the 1980’s that speech recognition would absolve us of typing. Look where Siri or most map or PC input speech recognition is today for anything moderately complex and you get the idea that AVs might not be here by 2040 or likely later, if at all in all circumstances. Yes in stages and yes on controlled roads first but likely not for quite some time as envisioned here by guys in their 20’s or 30’s !
It occurred to me while reading an article about the use of “on demand” autonomous vehicles, which trumpeted the elimination of parking needs, that use of autonomous vehicles may increase the number of single purpose shopping trips that people make.
If I go shopping, I combine trips and load my groceries or other purchases into the car after each stop where they are stored until I get home. If you are jumping between cars (akin to using taxis for each leg), you’d have to lug your purchases around to each subsequent store.
It also made me wonder about cumulative mileage and whether calling a fresh car for each leg of a trip would rack up more mileage than if one car were used and parked between legs (i.e. it would depend on where the fresh car is coming from and whether my destinations are “remote” – which is one reason that Car-to-Go limits its operating area).
I suppose that wouldn’t be much of an issue for electric cars, but energy is energy, and wear & tear is still wear & tear.
Guest wrote: “If you are jumping between cars (akin to using taxis for each leg), you’d have to lug your purchases around to each subsequent store.”
Great observation! It’s these kinds of things that make predicting the impact of AVs so difficult.
It’s also a reason that taxi drivers don’t like long one-way trips.
Had an interesting conversation last week with a friend of mine in Munich who is a senior manager at BMW.
We discussed the future of e-cars and AV. He also concurred that due to legal, regulatory and social complexities a full AV is a long way off. He stated that the AV progress will come in 4 stages:
Stage 1 – Feet off
Stage 2 – Hands off
Stage 3 – Eyes off
Stage 4 – Brain off
To wit, we rented a Volvo S80 for a few days driving around Bavaria and when set to say 160 km/h on the Autobahn it would follow the car in front of you at a certain distance up to 160 km/h then stay there until a traffic jam or a slower vehicle pulled in front and slowed down and then accelerated again. A good example of stage 1. The rest of the four stages are far more complex and will follow on time, decades likely, in incremental stages.
Silicon Valley is just about the worst place to invent the future city. Because it isn’t one.
Where zoning limits houses to a single storey; where the sidewalks that exist are sunbaked deserts; where the only way to get around is by car; where public space is lacking; where there are no streets in Jacobs’ sense, only freeways and roads resembling country lanes; where the goal of travel is to move from gated private space to Utopian private space (e.g. the Google campus, with its fleets of free-to-use bikes for internal trips only): there, autonomous cars look like the solution.
I can easily imagine automated cars navigating Mountain View. The chaos and unpredictability of Vancouver is another matter. I think Mr Price’s question is right on the money: when cars succeed there and fail elsewhere, the engineers will think it is the city at fault, not the imaginary islands where the cars were invented.