Quote:
Originally Posted by OldDartmouthMark
The concept is great in theory, but sounds a little too utopian to actually function as such.
Sure, you can remove human drivers, and assuming all systems continually work as they should, every vehicle could travel efficiently in harmony with one another with no need for traffic rules or controls.
But... that is a world where there are no humans or other animals in the mix. In the real world, you will have pedestrians wanting to cross the street, you will have children playing that might run out into the street, there will be domestic and wild animals that aren't aware of the amazing technology making all these vehicles work in harmony with one another.
And of course... cyclists, who are human controlled vehicles. Perhaps with the precision of self-driving vehicles, you can narrow the lanes and provide cyclists with separate roadways, but they still will have to cross paths at some point, and thus the self-driving system will still have to deal with unpredictable human 'drivers'.
Or, perhaps the cycling coalitions will insist that they share the roadways with the self driving vehicles, such as in the situation in Ottawa mentioned in this thread, where cyclists are encouraged to ride down the middle of the lane with motorized vehicles following. Nothing would cripple the efficiency of a self-driving vehicle system as much as that, but at least it would be safer for cyclists (as long as the sensors on every vehicle were functioning properly and calibrated correctly such that the vehicle "sees" the smaller cyclist in front of them).
How about motorcycles? Will motorcycles also be self-driving? If not, will people no longer be able to ride motorcycles on the road? That would not go over well... if you think that bicyclists are outspoken, you haven't heard anything till you deal with the motorcycle crowd - those guys (and gals) are very defensive of their right to ride...
Then you still have to deal with human nature. A friend brought up an interesting point in this past week - once self-driving cars are on the road, they will have to be tuned to avoid collisions at all costs, which means if a pedestrian steps out in front of a vehicle, it will be programmed to avoid hitting that pedestrian. Once people learn that, crosswalks probably won't be used as much, since people will start to understand that they can cross anywhere they want and the vehicles will stop for them. What will that do to the utopian traffic flow? Not to mention how the computer will be programmed for events where the car will have to choose whether to hit a pedestrian or injure its passengers by hitting something else - sounds like a legal nightmare to me. It's currently easy, you just blame the human driver for whatever happens, but once large corporations are involved it will be much more complicated.
Yep, lots of stuff to work out before we have a functional autonomous vehicle system working in our society. IMHO.
|
I think there are things to work out but not as many as naysayers make it seem. When it comes to new things, people tend to set higher standards of perfection in order to be considered feasible, when reality they just have to reach the point of being measurably better than the status quo in the net aggregate. That means there can still be problems and drawbacks that we accept if we accept problems of equal or greater magnitude currently. For example, children and animals running out into the road unexpectedly are problems faced by human drivers already and probably not handled any better. And cyclists not feeling safe and wanting infrastructure to separate them from traffic is already an issue. As a cyclist myself, having all the cars behave in a predictable, neutral manner (not excessively polite or aggressive), not pass you only to turn right and cut you off, or not be paying attention and not see you sounds like an improvement. Yes there would be times when the automated cars wouldn't see you but they would be less prone to distraction, emotion, or fatigue than drivers currently.
I do agree that there are legislative issues that need to catch up but that's the case with all new technologies. On one hand corporations might resist liability more than human drivers, but there would also be more reliable camera and sensor data on board making determining the cause of accidents easier. And i don't see a reason why there couldn't simply be no-fault insurance covering everything. There are some jurisdictions that are already "no fault" as is. And pedestrians would soon learn that automated cars are just "better" drivers rather than infallible, so as soon as someone was killed taking careless risks or prosecuted with the help of the onboard cameras, precedence would be set.
Threaded Mode