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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
Ironically if all human drivers were to be off the road by tomorrow, automated operation would suddenly become far more feasible. If all the vehicles on the road were able to communicate as part of some master network it would solve so many problems. You wouldn't need traffic lights or stop signs or minimum following distances since all the traffic would be controlled by the same system. And you wouldn't have the inefficiencies caused by cars driving around looking for parking since the system would know exactly where to park or the car would simply drive away and serve other passengers when the current occupant disembarked.
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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.
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As for electric buses, this would perhaps be one of the best possible investments that metro transit could make. No only would the operating costs be much lower, but the NVH levels inflicted by the current buses would be cut by like 75%. I haven't see or heard of any ebuses here yet though. If they're testing them they're doing a great job of keeping it secret.
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I would applaud replacing diesel buses with electric. The sooner they can get them off the road, the better. Diesel fumes are not pleasant nor are they good for the health of those who have to breathe them. And of course, there are the environmental impacts.
Halifax has been studying BEBs, but I have not seen one on the road either, as yet.
As far as noise levels go, I imagine they will still have to create an artificial noise so that pedestrians and cyclists are aware of their approach. Many electric and PHEV vehicles already have this feature.
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