Urbanism Speakeasy - Driverless cars, the most courteous drivers

A few weeks ago, one of my Institute of Transportion Engineers contacts, Andy Boenau invited me to do a podcast for his Urbanism Speakeasy website.

Andy is doing a whole series of interviews on all sorts of subjects around transportation aimed at listeners from all backgrounds, with a view to avoiding jargon and overly technical explanations - to make our fascinating transportation profession accessible to all.

Please let me know if we succeeded with my interview - I should warn you that it is 45 minutes long - so maybe download and play in a quieter time of day.  There is plenty to think about as we covered a whole range of subjects in the the autonomous vehicle space - which will affect almost every aspect of society

You will find the podcast here.

An elephant in the room?...

On Wednesday 10 April, 2013 I had the privilege of presenting at the Canadian Institute of Transportation Engineering (CITE) Annual Meeting in Calgary.

I attended some really excellent presentations on the Monday and Tuesday.  Many of the projects or designs being discussed involved expensive infrastructure and long range plans looking forward 20, 30, 40 or more years.

But in almost every presentation I had the frustrating thought: 'This project or design would have looked different if the engineers and planners had been aware of the impact of autonomous vehicles'.

This resonates very much with the Freakonomics challenge of December 2012 that had spurred me on to start my ITE blog:

"Surprisingly few people, 

even within the transportation planning world, 

are talking about this pending revolution." Freakonomics

So when it was my turn to present, I started with a slide asking "Is there an elephant in the room?" and explained that I would like to move the discussion forward so that ITE members can overcome the credibility gap and progress along this scale of being:

1. Unaware
2. Informed
3. Challenged
4. Excited
5. Active

In the rest of my presentation, which can be found here, I explained:

• how technology is developing exponentially
• how autonomous vehicles work
• the level of development of autonomous vehicles
• details of the Google Self Driving Car project in particular
• the paradigm shift that occurs once autonomous vehicles are certified safe to travel unmanned
• benefits and challenges
• when we can expect this technology to arrive - 2017-2018 according to Google
• the transformative effect it could have on transportation and society
• a possible implementation scenario
• possible public and private sector responses
• challenges to transportation professionals and our projects

During the 90 minute round-table discussion that followed the three technology themed presentations we talked about many transportation issues that arise from the deployment of autonomous vehicles.  But I was not surprised to find that the discussion frequently strayed to touch on many topics outside of transportation, as those present gained a greater understanding of the magnitude of change that autonomous vehicles will bring.

I talked about unintended consequences of not planning for autonomous vehicles, as I was not aware of any jurisdiction in North America that has currently allowed for the impacts of autonomous vehicles in any of its short, medium or long range transportation plans.

But one unintended consequence was that several conference delegates came to the mic to contribute or ask a question, and basically said 'Paul, you've scared us!' - whereas I had hoped to merely 'challenge'.

Perhaps there wasn't an elephant in the room after all.  Maybe it was an 800 lb gorilla!

A new paradigm

It is my personal belief that the impending arrival of autonomous road vehicles (driverless or self-driving cars) will transform society.

I don't think that any society is ready for this 'paradigm shift'.  Not even partially ready.  If we were we would be viewing the development of our urban centers, parking requirements, transit plans etc. in a very different way to what we are currently.

Most people simply don't realize quite how dramatic the change will be and how soon it will arrive.

Yet this technological tidal wave is bearing down upon us and we are continuing on, business as usual, whilst the time for a proactive response is fast running out.  Yes, really; time is short.  Google have indicated that their self driving car technology could be in public hands by 2017-2018.  We therefore only have maybe four years to plan for this eventuality.

This blog will seek to address some of those impacts and raise awareness of just how transformative this new paradigm might be.  The more that people are aware of how things might change, then the greater chance that they might choose to do something about it.

The focus of the blog will be the impacts of autonomous vehicles, but the background to this rapidly evolving story is the technology revolution that is happening so fast that it is almost impossible to keep up with it.  This development of technology is occurring at an exponential rate, which means that the rate of change isn't constant, but it is accelerating.

There are major trends within the technology revolution that are relatively easy to spot; the key one for this blog topic is automation of everyday tasks.  With autonomous vehicles this is essentially the creation of a robot that will do the driving for us.

The key to the automation of the driving task is not the mechanics of the vehicle itself, not even the sensors that it uses to perceive the world around it.  Those items have been in use for many decades and we already have off-the-shelf version of vehicle parts and sensors such that many undergraduate university courses have students building their own version of 'smart vehicles'.

What is key to the autonomous vehicle is the development of an artificial intelligence operating system which uses information from the sensors to determine how to safely negotiate the vehicle from its origin to the destination chosen by the operator of the vehicle.  Ultimately the operator doesn't even have to be in the vehicle, or anywhere near it.

The new paradigm will occur when these vehicles can operate unmanned. At this point the autonomous vehicle can do work by carrying people and goods and make money for its owner.  In a capitalistic society following free market principles the ability to make money by simply owning an autonomous vehicle will prove attractive to many individuals, businesses and government organizations.

As an individual reading this in a developed country there is a good chance that you already own a vehicle, or are expecting to own one in the next four years.  My advice to you is to consider the fact that Google have been discussing the possibly of retro-fitting existing vehicles and that if you plan carefully you can minimize what you spend on transportation and maximize your benefits.

Future blogs will go into more detail and identify areas many of the other areas of impacts and how we might respond.