I can’t wait for self-driving cars. I would like to spend a long retirement never having to drive. Don’t get me wrong, I love driving. I love hitting the right gear and working the clutch perfectly at the apex of a tightening uphill curve. That’s the thrill we live for.
But that’s when I choose to drive, not when I have to drive. I HATE driving to work. It is stupid and inefficient, a grind surrounded by people who believe ten seconds of their life is worth exacerbating the problem for everyone. There are enough of those that they, too, are delayed. The thing is, it is absolutely possible for our roads to handle that traffic without slowdowns. You just have to get rid of the drivers.
Cars moving on the freeway and on city streets would be massively more efficient if they simply cooperated. This is more than the simple “zipper” concept that seems to be beyond the understanding of half our population. Way more.
If all the cars talk to each other, they all hit the brakes together when there’s a problem. Cars in the fast lane could literally hook together, bumper to bumper, a train with good aerodynamics that can shed and add cars without ever slowing down.
On city streets, the story is similar. If cars work together, traffic is fundamentally changed. Traffic signals are obsolete. Those four-lane-each-way urban arteries can become two lanes each way, and the recovered space given to bicycles, pedestrians, and sidewalk cafés.
This is not where the car tech bros are taking us. They are spending massive resources to try to train cars to be autonomous vehicles. It is easy to believe that those cars would suck less than human drivers — at least they won’t be looking at their phones — but right there is a way to fundamentally change how cars work. The current thought is to make cars that make better decisions. That’s all right, but limiting those decisions to individual cars misses the whole point.
Cars should not have to make decisions based only on their own sensors. Any attempt to make robot cars work that way is blind to the opportunity. Cars can share data! Cars can be guided by a central control that can optimize traffic flow!
As far as I know, ALL robot cars are built simply to be better autonomous drivers. Autonomy is antithetical to the goal.
In a well-designed system, every car would simply be following instructions. They would have sensors that could put on the brakes if there was a pedestrian in the road, and when those brakes were hit the whole city would know about it and adjust.
Car hive-mind seems obvious, but no one is building it (as far as I know). Why not?
Alphabet, Tesla, the rest of them, sell cars, not infrastructure. But what we need is infrastructure before we start setting the cars loose. We need those guys to find a way for cars to talk to each other. Or better yet for there to be a central system that guides all the cars.
There’s no money in that for the car guys. Making the next transportation system is not in the interest of the billionaires. But it’s the right answer.
