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Why Cities Aren’t Ready for the Driverless Car

49 points by davidiach 10y ago

gumby 10y ago
I have to complain that the WSJ's title is completely backwards. Petroski's article is about the sensible topic that self driving cars aren't ready for the typical real-world chaos. In fact he glossed over Audi's "99% of the trip was autonomous" claim -- that 99% was on freeways which while hard, are well structured. I can't wait for self driving cars for a jillion reasons but I am dismayed when advocates claim that the infrastructure must change to support them. That's completely backwards: our tools should support us, not the other way around.
- rayiner 10y ago
  That is a losing game. Years ago, I worked on a DARPA project that would let radios opportunistically use available frequencies instead of fixed ones. Doing this with a totally uncooperative environment, relying only on the wits of the software, is really hard. Like still in development after more than a decade hard. Like Microsoft and Google gave up on solving an easier problem hard. Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard.
  - jtbigwoo 10y ago
    >> Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard. That's why I'm skeptical of self-driving cars becoming widespread in the U.S. in the next decade. Driving in an unknown environment over millions of miles of roads is going to be a huge challenge if the infrastructure doesn't change, but I can't figure out which political party is going to support the massive infrastructure project. The early adopters of this technology are probably going to be transportation companies. Democrats are going to have a hard time advocating for spending money that throws truck and taxi drivers out of work. And good luck getting Republicans to spend additional money on anything. I hope that google and/or the car companies pull it off, but I don't think that we should hold our breath waiting for the world to adjust to self-driving cars. The hardware and software will have to do 99% of the work.
saosebastiao 10y ago
My prediction (I'm well aware this is worthless, as nobody cares about random-internet-guy's predictions enough to follow up) is that there will be a handful of cities that will try their best to orient themselves around self driving cars, and like the cities before them that tried to orient themselves around cars, they will fail. Most of the fanciful predictions from self-driving car futurism are incredibly naive and fail to take into account basic facts about how cities function from a systems perspective. 1) Traffic will disappear because cars can stop faster and travel close together. At best there are a tiny minority of driving scenarios where driving closer together or stopping quicker are the system bottlenecks. Rush hour traffic is not one of them. At best, you will drive faster on highways, but that will just get you to your exit faster, where you will spend more time waiting than you used to because intracity bottlenecks haven't changed. Traffic lights will still continue to make tradeoffs between latency and throughput, and self driving cars can't take away that tradeoff. And cars will continue to drive slow enough to stop for typical city obstructions (like cyclists, pedestrians, etc.), even if they have a few milliseconds faster of a reaction time. And you're still going to have typical rush hour volumes of people coming from multiple different places converging on a single area. 2) Haven't you seen the simulation where self driving cars don't need traffic signals anymore cause they can drive right through without stopping or hitting anybody? Guess what, it's a simulation...one that conveniently ignored almost every other relevant factor about how the world works. Like pedestrians. Dogs. Joggers. Cyclists. Handicapped people. Gridlocks that happen due to bottlenecks on perpendicular streets. Street protests. Weather conditions. In fact, the only way this idea feasibly works is if you are in a remote intersection in the middle of somewhere so unimportant that it doesn't have any other obstacles or traffic types, in an area where non-driverless cars are banned. And guess what...those situations get along quite fine with traffic lights. 3) But you won't have to circle around the block endlessly to find parking! Actually, your situation isn't much better, and if you see a rise in commuting by cars it could get much worse. Your traffic lanes will be continuously blocked by people getting in and out of their cars. Think of the airport arrivals and departures loops...nobody there has a need for parking, and yet still they are a traffic nightmare because everybody is either getting in a car or getting out of a car, and you have cars blocking traffic looking for their specific passenger, and you have cars circling around the block anyway because there is nowhere to stop legally. I could go on and on. Traffic is the external manifestation of a system that is far more complex than streets with a few bad drivers clogging shit up. It is a manifestation of the interaction between cars and non-cars, economies and the humans that contribute to them, all with different goals and objectives, all trying to use a shared but very scarce resource. It isn't going away. Ever. The best you can do is find ways to move more people through it faster, and from that perspective the geometric reality of an automobile is grim. No matter how optimized for ommitting the driver it may be, a car will always take up exponential amounts of space compared to public transit systems. But that isn't a reason to not pursue them. They should still be pursued on safety grounds alone. They just won't answer your prayers for a traffic-free city.
adultSwim 10y ago
Why I'm Not Ready for the Uninformative Headline
atonse 10y ago
> Similarly, unmanned vehicles might proceed at speed through an intersection where a stop sign has been removed by college students or knocked down the night before by an impaired human. But so would human drivers. In fact, a self-driving car may actually do better in this scenario because it would have metadata stating that the last 3,000 times a car encountered this intersection, there was a stop sign here.
- rayiner 10y ago
  And a sufficiently smart compiler could optimize Common Lisp to run as fast as c: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler The fact is that GPS navigation is a mature field (I.e. unlikely to get much better very soon), and is still very failure-prone. I just took an Uber this morning and twice the GPS got confused between the street I was going to and the on-ramp to the highway (the two roads were narrow and unusually close together). Twice, the driver followed the GPS instead of looking with his eyes at the road (the on ramp clearly looked like an on ramp). I run into these sorts of things 2-3 times a month.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  An uncontrolled intersection means yield to traffic approaching from your passenger side for intersecting roads of equal importance, or vehicles on the minor road yield to through traffic on the major road. Yield signs usually just formalize this implicit intersection control. Taking out one stop sign is usually not an imminent hazard to traffic, but taking out two from perpendicular approaches might cause a problem. Removing all of them would actually be slightly more safe than a bad configuration of signs. I expect my driverless car to be able to disobey signs when I indicate that it would be appropriate or necessary to do so. I may one day enforce this by carrying around two poles that bear "stop", "do not enter + wrong way", "no u-turn", "do not reverse + severe tire damage", and "no stopping any time" signs on them, and creating pop-up paradox traps for unwary driving AIs.
- stormbrew 10y ago
  I was just about to comment on the same section. This kind of poorly thought out assertion throws a lot of shade on the rest of the article.
mrfusion 10y ago
Guys here's my prediction on this. Cities will become completely Undriveable and possibly off limits to cars once the majority are self driving. Here's why; pedestrians will know that all cars will stop for them and people will just start crossing anytime they want and even start simply walking in the street. There might be some jaywalking enforcement attempts but ultimate they'll fail. What do you guys think?
- monocasa 10y ago
  Awesome. We'll take our cities back. It'll be what streets were like before the invention of the crime of jay-walking. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...
- 33W 10y ago
  That's an interesting point. I think you may see something similar to tourist districts today where the streets are closed to traffic outside of certain hours. People drive near the area and continue on foot. Autonomous vehicles may be even better for this, as a person could be dropped off at the closest accessible point, then the vehicle retreats to a lower-density area.
- SilasX 10y ago
  There are already places where people walk like this, and they still have cars (even if they're a bit less effective). With that said, I hope they phase out human driving (or require similarly ex(p|t)ensive insurance policies) once SDCs become robust; the joy of driving isn't enough, IMHO to build the entire infrastructure and compromise safety.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  Frankly if you're hitting people just because they aren't in a crosswalk while you're driving, you have no business driving now, let alone in the future. As the controller of the 2.5 ton metal machine, you are responsible for making sure you don't hit things or people. With the saturation of safety gear on newer cars you really have no excuse anyhow, the newer ones even slam on the brakes FOR you when they detect an obstacle.
FussyZeus 10y ago
The one thing the author doesn't seem to be taking into account is that the cities are much easier for them to change as needed. The infrastructure is more dense and (usually) more orderly designed, and access to electricity to add beacons, as well as access to all kinds of networking resources already in place for traffic work is pre-existing. Augmenting cities for self driving cars is going to be the bunny hill compared to augmenting the interstate highway system to them.
- mikeash 10y ago
  Automated interstate driving is nearly a solved problem already. My car will easily go for hours hands-off on most interstates. The only infrastructure you need is clearly marked lines, which already exist on most of them. There's no way that cities are easier to change as needed, when interstates don't need to change in the first place.
- zyxley 10y ago
  I suspect you haven't been in a big city much if you think thousands of stop-and-start intersections would be easier to automate than a far fewer number of continuous lanes and offramps that work via simple merging.
Joeri 10y ago
Did the author actually ask the makers of self-driving cars whether these are real problems? Many of the problems listed in the article seemed relatively easy to solve (compared to the difficulty of building a self-driving car).
- bzalasky 10y ago
  Henry Petroski is well known for writing about the history of civil engineering failures, so perhaps he's just extrapolating from his experience?
eric_h 10y ago
I actually had a long discussion about this with an Uber driver the other day. Given that this article predates that discussion, I would imagine he was sourcing a lot of his arguments from this article. My position in this discussion is that yes, infrastructure improvements are necessary, but they'll be relatively straight forward in the US, as basically every city in the US was designed to support automobile traffic. Self driving cars are going to have a much tougher row to hoe in Europe and Asia, where city infrastructure predates the automobile by centuries/millenia
- csydas 10y ago
  >My position in this discussion is that yes, infrastructure improvements are necessary, but they'll be relatively straight forward in the US, as basically every city in the US was designed to support automobile traffic. This is not to say that it's impossible, but US cities barely manage to get the infrastructure upgrades and maintenance they need now - Google et. al. have a lot of money, but I'm not confident they can play bureaucracy well enough to get some of the infrastructure improvements necessary for either large fleets of SDC's. I admit, the idea of replacing all the individually owned cars on the road with a fleet of summonable automobiles is very appealing; it just seems like there are a lot of intermediary steps that are less about technology and money than they are about politics and personal interests.
tpowell 10y ago
I'm more optimistic that the NTSA will rise to meet the challenge because there is so much benefit and momentum (thank you Elon Musk) to making them work. My favorite article on the subject[1] extrapolates how much impact autonomous vehicle technology will have. I'd actually be pretty surprised if it hadn't come across the desks of the GM executives involved in the half a billion dollar Lyft investment[2]. The Obama administration seems to be making a real effort to lay the groundwork for the necessary infrastructure and regulatory resources[3]. Also, if you haven't read/watched this, don't pass go: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv... [1] http://zackkanter.com/2015/01/23/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-will-destroy-10-million-jobs-by-2025/ http://zackkanter.com/2015/01/23/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-w... [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-04/gm-invests-500-million-in-lyft-to-bolster-alliance-against-uber http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-04/gm-invests... [3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/01/14/nhtsa-detroit-auto-show-autonomous-vehicles/78792868/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/01/14/nhtsa-de...
danans 10y ago
>And in cities where it is customary for human drivers to anticipate the red light turning to green by inching into the intersection prematurely, will the driverless automobile allow for the custom? I can't believe they are describing this as a custom rather than a dangerous behavior born of impatience. I grew up in a place where people did this and it only took one close call with a clearly drunk driver flying through a red across the intersection in front of me to make me stop for good. Why would anyone design a self driving vehicle to emulate this behavior?
pif 10y ago
I've wondered several times, how could a human on the road interact with an autonomous car? For example, if a lane is currently closed and alternate traffic is in place on the other lane, how can a traffic cop instruct the car to stop there for a while and then proceed to cross a double white line and move in the usually-wrong direction? Or, how can you explain a car that a bridge is blocked and it has to take the next one?
wccrawford 10y ago
Articles like this feel like they were ripped from another century. "Why cities aren't ready for the horseless carriage." ... Sure, they may not be. But that doesn't mean that change will stop, or that they have to be ready overnight. It means that we'll have to deal with these things eventually, and I'm betting it's sooner rather than later.
intrasight 10y ago
I just don't think that we as a society are ready for the driverless car. We are not ready to give up the freedom and the semi-anonymous nature of driving. I know you'll that with ubiquitous cameras that we are already being tracked, but that is different from the continuous, high-fidelity tracking that will be in place on these cars. I trust neither the private companies nor the government to keep this data secure. I expect that within my driving lifetime that I'll be forced to choose between lower insurance (for driverless cars) and driving myself. That makes me sad. And consider, if you will, how this can become the modern version of "Red Barchetta" if you did choose to keep driving yourself.
- fluxquanta 10y ago
  I'm absolutely with you. The weather's finally warming up, so I spent most of this past weekend doing maintenance on my motorcycle for the riding season. In a couple of decades will riding a motorcycle on public roads even be an option anymore? Will all motorcycle riding be relegated to isolated tracks, to which we'll have to ferry our motorcycles on autonomous transport? I'd rather not ride at all at that point, and that makes me sad as well.
- tim333 10y ago
  You can have self driving cars where you can turn the system on and off like you can on the Tesla S. That would work for me. I can't see them banning human driving in a hurry.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    Not "banning" but you will pay higher insurance. Then we'll have a society where only the wealthy can drive their own cars for pleasure.
malandrew 10y ago
The author naively assumes that driverless cars are going to be replacements of human drivers in most ways. This is an extremely ignorant view that lacks a lot of imagination. Everyone actually working on driverless cars has been thinking of all these potential gotchas for years and have been designing and engineering with these gotchas in mind.

49 points by davidiach 10y ago

gumby 10y ago

I have to complain that the WSJ's title is completely backwards. Petroski's article is about the sensible topic that self driving cars aren't ready for the typical real-world chaos. In fact he glossed over Audi's "99% of the trip was autonomous" claim -- that 99% was on freeways which while hard, are well structured. I can't wait for self driving cars for a jillion reasons but I am dismayed when advocates claim that the infrastructure must change to support them. That's completely backwards: our tools should support us, not the other way around.

rayiner 10y ago
That is a losing game. Years ago, I worked on a DARPA project that would let radios opportunistically use available frequencies instead of fixed ones. Doing this with a totally uncooperative environment, relying only on the wits of the software, is really hard. Like still in development after more than a decade hard. Like Microsoft and Google gave up on solving an easier problem hard. Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard.
- jtbigwoo 10y ago
  >> Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard. That's why I'm skeptical of self-driving cars becoming widespread in the U.S. in the next decade. Driving in an unknown environment over millions of miles of roads is going to be a huge challenge if the infrastructure doesn't change, but I can't figure out which political party is going to support the massive infrastructure project. The early adopters of this technology are probably going to be transportation companies. Democrats are going to have a hard time advocating for spending money that throws truck and taxi drivers out of work. And good luck getting Republicans to spend additional money on anything. I hope that google and/or the car companies pull it off, but I don't think that we should hold our breath waiting for the world to adjust to self-driving cars. The hardware and software will have to do 99% of the work.

saosebastiao 10y ago

My prediction (I'm well aware this is worthless, as nobody cares about random-internet-guy's predictions enough to follow up) is that there will be a handful of cities that will try their best to orient themselves around self driving cars, and like the cities before them that tried to orient themselves around cars, they will fail. Most of the fanciful predictions from self-driving car futurism are incredibly naive and fail to take into account basic facts about how cities function from a systems perspective. 1) Traffic will disappear because cars can stop faster and travel close together. At best there are a tiny minority of driving scenarios where driving closer together or stopping quicker are the system bottlenecks. Rush hour traffic is not one of them. At best, you will drive faster on highways, but that will just get you to your exit faster, where you will spend more time waiting than you used to because intracity bottlenecks haven't changed. Traffic lights will still continue to make tradeoffs between latency and throughput, and self driving cars can't take away that tradeoff. And cars will continue to drive slow enough to stop for typical city obstructions (like cyclists, pedestrians, etc.), even if they have a few milliseconds faster of a reaction time. And you're still going to have typical rush hour volumes of people coming from multiple different places converging on a single area. 2) Haven't you seen the simulation where self driving cars don't need traffic signals anymore cause they can drive right through without stopping or hitting anybody? Guess what, it's a simulation...one that conveniently ignored almost every other relevant factor about how the world works. Like pedestrians. Dogs. Joggers. Cyclists. Handicapped people. Gridlocks that happen due to bottlenecks on perpendicular streets. Street protests. Weather conditions. In fact, the only way this idea feasibly works is if you are in a remote intersection in the middle of somewhere so unimportant that it doesn't have any other obstacles or traffic types, in an area where non-driverless cars are banned. And guess what...those situations get along quite fine with traffic lights. 3) But you won't have to circle around the block endlessly to find parking! Actually, your situation isn't much better, and if you see a rise in commuting by cars it could get much worse. Your traffic lanes will be continuously blocked by people getting in and out of their cars. Think of the airport arrivals and departures loops...nobody there has a need for parking, and yet still they are a traffic nightmare because everybody is either getting in a car or getting out of a car, and you have cars blocking traffic looking for their specific passenger, and you have cars circling around the block anyway because there is nowhere to stop legally. I could go on and on. Traffic is the external manifestation of a system that is far more complex than streets with a few bad drivers clogging shit up. It is a manifestation of the interaction between cars and non-cars, economies and the humans that contribute to them, all with different goals and objectives, all trying to use a shared but very scarce resource. It isn't going away. Ever. The best you can do is find ways to move more people through it faster, and from that perspective the geometric reality of an automobile is grim. No matter how optimized for ommitting the driver it may be, a car will always take up exponential amounts of space compared to public transit systems. But that isn't a reason to not pursue them. They should still be pursued on safety grounds alone. They just won't answer your prayers for a traffic-free city.

adultSwim 10y ago

Why I'm Not Ready for the Uninformative Headline

atonse 10y ago

> Similarly, unmanned vehicles might proceed at speed through an intersection where a stop sign has been removed by college students or knocked down the night before by an impaired human. But so would human drivers. In fact, a self-driving car may actually do better in this scenario because it would have metadata stating that the last 3,000 times a car encountered this intersection, there was a stop sign here.

rayiner 10y ago
And a sufficiently smart compiler could optimize Common Lisp to run as fast as c: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler The fact is that GPS navigation is a mature field (I.e. unlikely to get much better very soon), and is still very failure-prone. I just took an Uber this morning and twice the GPS got confused between the street I was going to and the on-ramp to the highway (the two roads were narrow and unusually close together). Twice, the driver followed the GPS instead of looking with his eyes at the road (the on ramp clearly looked like an on ramp). I run into these sorts of things 2-3 times a month.
logfromblammo 10y ago
An uncontrolled intersection means yield to traffic approaching from your passenger side for intersecting roads of equal importance, or vehicles on the minor road yield to through traffic on the major road. Yield signs usually just formalize this implicit intersection control. Taking out one stop sign is usually not an imminent hazard to traffic, but taking out two from perpendicular approaches might cause a problem. Removing all of them would actually be slightly more safe than a bad configuration of signs. I expect my driverless car to be able to disobey signs when I indicate that it would be appropriate or necessary to do so. I may one day enforce this by carrying around two poles that bear "stop", "do not enter + wrong way", "no u-turn", "do not reverse + severe tire damage", and "no stopping any time" signs on them, and creating pop-up paradox traps for unwary driving AIs.
stormbrew 10y ago
I was just about to comment on the same section. This kind of poorly thought out assertion throws a lot of shade on the rest of the article.

mrfusion 10y ago

Guys here's my prediction on this. Cities will become completely Undriveable and possibly off limits to cars once the majority are self driving. Here's why; pedestrians will know that all cars will stop for them and people will just start crossing anytime they want and even start simply walking in the street. There might be some jaywalking enforcement attempts but ultimate they'll fail. What do you guys think?

monocasa 10y ago
Awesome. We'll take our cities back. It'll be what streets were like before the invention of the crime of jay-walking. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/1837/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...
33W 10y ago
That's an interesting point. I think you may see something similar to tourist districts today where the streets are closed to traffic outside of certain hours. People drive near the area and continue on foot. Autonomous vehicles may be even better for this, as a person could be dropped off at the closest accessible point, then the vehicle retreats to a lower-density area.
SilasX 10y ago
There are already places where people walk like this, and they still have cars (even if they're a bit less effective). With that said, I hope they phase out human driving (or require similarly ex(p|t)ensive insurance policies) once SDCs become robust; the joy of driving isn't enough, IMHO to build the entire infrastructure and compromise safety.
FussyZeus 10y ago
Frankly if you're hitting people just because they aren't in a crosswalk while you're driving, you have no business driving now, let alone in the future. As the controller of the 2.5 ton metal machine, you are responsible for making sure you don't hit things or people. With the saturation of safety gear on newer cars you really have no excuse anyhow, the newer ones even slam on the brakes FOR you when they detect an obstacle.

FussyZeus 10y ago

The one thing the author doesn't seem to be taking into account is that the cities are much easier for them to change as needed. The infrastructure is more dense and (usually) more orderly designed, and access to electricity to add beacons, as well as access to all kinds of networking resources already in place for traffic work is pre-existing. Augmenting cities for self driving cars is going to be the bunny hill compared to augmenting the interstate highway system to them.

mikeash 10y ago
Automated interstate driving is nearly a solved problem already. My car will easily go for hours hands-off on most interstates. The only infrastructure you need is clearly marked lines, which already exist on most of them. There's no way that cities are easier to change as needed, when interstates don't need to change in the first place.
zyxley 10y ago
I suspect you haven't been in a big city much if you think thousands of stop-and-start intersections would be easier to automate than a far fewer number of continuous lanes and offramps that work via simple merging.

Joeri 10y ago

Did the author actually ask the makers of self-driving cars whether these are real problems? Many of the problems listed in the article seemed relatively easy to solve (compared to the difficulty of building a self-driving car).

bzalasky 10y ago
Henry Petroski is well known for writing about the history of civil engineering failures, so perhaps he's just extrapolating from his experience?

eric_h 10y ago

I actually had a long discussion about this with an Uber driver the other day. Given that this article predates that discussion, I would imagine he was sourcing a lot of his arguments from this article. My position in this discussion is that yes, infrastructure improvements are necessary, but they'll be relatively straight forward in the US, as basically every city in the US was designed to support automobile traffic. Self driving cars are going to have a much tougher row to hoe in Europe and Asia, where city infrastructure predates the automobile by centuries/millenia

csydas 10y ago
>My position in this discussion is that yes, infrastructure improvements are necessary, but they'll be relatively straight forward in the US, as basically every city in the US was designed to support automobile traffic. This is not to say that it's impossible, but US cities barely manage to get the infrastructure upgrades and maintenance they need now - Google et. al. have a lot of money, but I'm not confident they can play bureaucracy well enough to get some of the infrastructure improvements necessary for either large fleets of SDC's. I admit, the idea of replacing all the individually owned cars on the road with a fleet of summonable automobiles is very appealing; it just seems like there are a lot of intermediary steps that are less about technology and money than they are about politics and personal interests.

tpowell 10y ago

I'm more optimistic that the NTSA will rise to meet the challenge because there is so much benefit and momentum (thank you Elon Musk) to making them work. My favorite article on the subject[1] extrapolates how much impact autonomous vehicle technology will have. I'd actually be pretty surprised if it hadn't come across the desks of the GM executives involved in the half a billion dollar Lyft investment[2]. The Obama administration seems to be making a real effort to lay the groundwork for the necessary infrastructure and regulatory resources[3]. Also, if you haven't read/watched this, don't pass go: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv... [1] http://zackkanter.com/2015/01/23/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-will-destroy-10-million-jobs-by-2025/ http://zackkanter.com/2015/01/23/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-w... [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-04/gm-invests-500-million-in-lyft-to-bolster-alliance-against-uber http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-04/gm-invests... [3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/01/14/nhtsa-detroit-auto-show-autonomous-vehicles/78792868/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/01/14/nhtsa-de...

danans 10y ago

>And in cities where it is customary for human drivers to anticipate the red light turning to green by inching into the intersection prematurely, will the driverless automobile allow for the custom? I can't believe they are describing this as a custom rather than a dangerous behavior born of impatience. I grew up in a place where people did this and it only took one close call with a clearly drunk driver flying through a red across the intersection in front of me to make me stop for good. Why would anyone design a self driving vehicle to emulate this behavior?

pif 10y ago

I've wondered several times, how could a human on the road interact with an autonomous car? For example, if a lane is currently closed and alternate traffic is in place on the other lane, how can a traffic cop instruct the car to stop there for a while and then proceed to cross a double white line and move in the usually-wrong direction? Or, how can you explain a car that a bridge is blocked and it has to take the next one?

wccrawford 10y ago

Articles like this feel like they were ripped from another century. "Why cities aren't ready for the horseless carriage." ... Sure, they may not be. But that doesn't mean that change will stop, or that they have to be ready overnight. It means that we'll have to deal with these things eventually, and I'm betting it's sooner rather than later.

intrasight 10y ago

I just don't think that we as a society are ready for the driverless car. We are not ready to give up the freedom and the semi-anonymous nature of driving. I know you'll that with ubiquitous cameras that we are already being tracked, but that is different from the continuous, high-fidelity tracking that will be in place on these cars. I trust neither the private companies nor the government to keep this data secure. I expect that within my driving lifetime that I'll be forced to choose between lower insurance (for driverless cars) and driving myself. That makes me sad. And consider, if you will, how this can become the modern version of "Red Barchetta" if you did choose to keep driving yourself.

fluxquanta 10y ago
I'm absolutely with you. The weather's finally warming up, so I spent most of this past weekend doing maintenance on my motorcycle for the riding season. In a couple of decades will riding a motorcycle on public roads even be an option anymore? Will all motorcycle riding be relegated to isolated tracks, to which we'll have to ferry our motorcycles on autonomous transport? I'd rather not ride at all at that point, and that makes me sad as well.
tim333 10y ago
You can have self driving cars where you can turn the system on and off like you can on the Tesla S. That would work for me. I can't see them banning human driving in a hurry.
- intrasight 10y ago
  Not "banning" but you will pay higher insurance. Then we'll have a society where only the wealthy can drive their own cars for pleasure.

malandrew 10y ago

The author naively assumes that driverless cars are going to be replacements of human drivers in most ways. This is an extremely ignorant view that lacks a lot of imagination. Everyone actually working on driverless cars has been thinking of all these potential gotchas for years and have been designing and engineering with these gotchas in mind.