Remote driving in UK from abroad should not be allowed, says Law Commission
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Driving also varies a lot between countries. I can't imagine having to switch between left- and right-hand driving multiple times a day, let alone remotely. Nor can I imagine switching between the relatively calm (if somewhat pedestrian hostile) style of driving in the UK, to the structured chaos of driving somewhere like India.
The UK is pedestrian hostile? In comparison to where? It's always seemed to me one of the most pro-pedestrian countries, eg there is no such thing as "jaywalking": you can cross anywhere and cars are obliged to stop once you're "established in the road" - plus they are obliged to stop at all times on zebras.
I would agree with the grandparent poster that the UK is pedestrian hostile. The sidewalks are too narrow and the roads too wide. Having double decker buses drive by (only feet away) is an unpleasant experience.
Also in the UK traffic lights 'protect' the crossing - i.e. you will never get a green light to turn across a crossing that has a 'green man'. This means here that drivers want to get closer to the pedestrians that are crossing and 'squeeze through' as soon as they can, to avoid holding up people behind during their 'turn' of the green light.
Edited to clarify that I think it is more pedestrian hostile in Finland than the UK.
Finland is a very different country than the UK - much worse weather in winter but much much sparser - but looking at the stats it seems to do a little worse on road casualties than the UK on most measures. eg 3.8 road deaths per 100k pop in Finland vs 2.9 in the UK and 5.1 road deaths per billion km in Finland vs 3.8 in the UK.
I don't think Finland's road safety is as good as the UK though it is still one of the better countries.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/introduction#ru...
Prioritising the safety of vulnerable Highway users is obviously good, but potentially forcing cars to come to a full stop on a 40 mph road seems like it’s going to cause a fair few high-speed rear end collisions.
As a pedestrian in the UK it seems like the rules around yielding mean very little in practise
But hopefully habits will change.
For the rule to work, every driver and pedestrian has to be on the same page. And this is behaviour that is ingrained in people since they began crossing roads or driving.
If the pedestrian understands the rule and the driver doesn't, then you've got an accident waiting to happen. The pedestrian could expect a driver to stop and cause an accident.
If the driver understands the rule change and the pedestrian doesn't, then you've got a confused and cautious pedestrian wondering what's going on. Not to mention that in most junctions the pedestrian can't easily see any gestures by the driver to usher them across the road. It can also cause a pedestrian to forget to look the other way.
Plus, most drivers don't even know about the rule change, even today many months after it's introduction.
So as a pedestrian, it's much easier to assume every driver is oblivious and rely on your own judgement as to when it is safe to cross. And that means letting cars turn into junctions before crossing. Which, in turn, reinforces the undesired behaviour.
This is why I think in reality nothing will change. It's just too unsafe to assume drivers know the new rules of the road when they barely understand ones that have existed for decades.
Pedestrians only had right of way if they're in the process of crossing. The new rule is that pedestrians waiting to cross have priority, which is just not practical to introduce without everyone being on the same page.
Being predictable is how you are the safest pedestrian or driver. Prior to the rule change being predictable was assuming pedestrians wait for vehicles. With the rule change, you can no longer be predictable because different people have different expections of what a pedestrian or driver will do.
Presumably the Government have done the research, and drivers should always be ready to stop safely regardless, but … I preferred the old rules.
People speed like maniacs in residential areas too. The road outside my house is 30mph, but every time I walk down it I catch a few people clearly going at least 40, probably 50mph.
In the past year two drivers purposefully drove up to my bike, matched speed, and made it clear they do not like cyclists.
One was civil, but the other wad swerving the car dangerously and shouting obceneties.
Unfortunelty I don't have a dashcam or anything to record the number plate and report the latter one.
Nono, you will pay to drive, it will be a $100 DLC to the European Truck Simulator (or whatever its called)
However, they do list one reason that matters a lot: criminal liability. What happens if the overworked, underpaid driver in a Hertz sweatshop in Hyderabad breaks traffic laws, or crashes and injures someone? Which will happen.
Virtue signal received loud and clear though.
Bullshit signal received loud and clear though.
I mean, cool, but I was rather thinking about criminal liability i.e. when negligence of the remote driver causes death of another road user.
"Can you show me your car"
"Yes, it's that one"
"OK, here's your license"
>You must complete an approved driver education course with a certified private or public driver training school using one of the following methods. Approved classes are also offered online. You must also complete each item in the method you choose.
Method 1 30 hours of classroom instruction 6 hours behind the wheel training at the certified school 40 hours of supervised driving with a parent or guardian (6 hours of the 40 hours must be at night)
Method 2 30 hours of classroom instruction at the certified school 40 hours parent-taught behind-the-wheel training. Parent/Teen Driving Guide (includes 40 hours of supervised driving with parent or guardian)
Method 3 30 hours of online instruction with a certified virtual program 6 hours behind the wheel training at a certified school 40 hours of supervised driving with a parent or guardian (6 hours of the 40 hours must be at night)
Method 4 30 hours of online instruction with a certified virtual program 40 hours of parent-taught behind-the-wheel training.
After you do the above you need to take a driving test. You need to be able to parallel park, reverse park, and do a variety of things while driving around.
Not sure where European readers could be located, but snow driving is not taught in my state. We get snow every couple years at most and it rarely sticks to roads.
CA was pretty tough, they even fail you for driving too slow.
(Not sure how accurate that is, as with all things on the internet.)
A few friends from remote countryside had relatively easy driving tests, but the easiest-sounding test was my friend from Mumbai (he'd always refer to it as "Bombay" and I never figured out if that was his preference or if he was trying to accommodate us). He said his driving test boiled down to driving round a block and not hitting anything or doing something particularly stupid.
To be honest I'd struggle to do that in most Indian cities, and I've got 25 years experience of not hitting anything in the UK.
I'm actually going through this now in the UK and I feel like the way they do it could be much better. The randomness of driving on real roads makes luck an important factor to passing.
The average driver needs 45 hours worth of lessons. Add to that the cost of a provisional license, the theory test, and the driving test and it’s around £1,300.
Even in Spain it was about 22 quid per 45 minutes and then 150 euros for the test. And here in Sweden it's double that across the board :/
As with most learning processes which finish with an exam, the need to undergo a general learning process to get to the stage where it's likely that you will actually pass is more important than the exact equivalence of the tests.
> and you can rebook another test asap if you're confident the only things you were failed on were hesitancy or overcorrection in response to chance events.
Yeah? How can I do that when tests are all booked pretty much everywhere for the next 4 months? If I fail I am likely waiting another 4 months before I can get another test.
The fact is that test centres have wildly different pass rates (some as high as 80% vs. some as low as 38%). That kind of variance shows that the testing is not fair.
I think the point is that depending on circumstances you can spend either 45 minutes driving down a more or less empty road or 45 minutes in rush hour traffic and it's basically impossible to judge someone equally in those two cases. I know people here in Sweden who after failing their test a couple of times in city traffic, schedule their next driving test at a test centre in a small rural village and pass easily. These people can then return home and start legally driving in the same city traffic they couldn't pass their drivers test in.
There isn't an expectation that new drivers will never be flummoxed by encountering weird behaviour from other drivers or an oddly laid out junction
Exactly! And that is why it is important that we make sure everybody gets tested on that before we give them a license.
But you're highly unlikely to find a UK test centre where the routes consist of more or less empty roads (UK population is not distributed like Sweden's)
> Exactly! And that is why it is important that we make sure everybody gets tested on that before we give them a license.
The test isn't to ensure that they consistently handle weird behaviour from other drivers or oddly laid out junctions flawlessly (experienced drivers don't either). If we expected that, nobody would ever drive at all, at least not without thousands of hours in a simulator. It's to ensure their approaches to junctions are at sensible speeds and they pay attention to what's going on and use mirrors and signals. You can do that in high traffic or low traffic, and it's by no means certain that the low traffic conditions would more favourable to you anyway
European driving licenses are expensive because they require more practice. You pay for the practice hours. The tests themselves are much cheaper.
It doesn't. UK road fatalities are very low compared to mainland Europe and it doesn't matter much whether your divisor for that stat is number of vehicles or number of miles driven. It's arguable how much of that is down to the driving test and how much down to other factors like rules, rule following behavior, etc etc - but I think at least some of it is.
eg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmCSRg5p7-E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bki-SfbzkKQ
It's not a great leap from there to remote car delivery, etc.
The main point here is that there is eight years prior art in real world conditions dealing with 1,000 km + remote driving | oversight with dropped connections and extreme heat, winds, lightning, dust storms, unexpected blockages in roads, etc.
That's a foundation that can be built on and extended.
For example, self-driving cars are already "safer" than human drivers in ideal conditions, but what about when conditions change rapidly. Can a self-driving car detect when the situation is 100% ideal and it's 100% certain there is nothing going wrong, and differentiate from being less than 100% sure that everything is optimal?
Can a human at a dispatch center be brought in to potentially assist when this happens? And can this make the trip overall safer?
For example, a self-driving car driving along an empty highway in daylight on a dry day is very unlikely to encounter any issues, but an animal may still jump out in front of the car. If that happens, it should be able to brake on its own, but a human at a dispatch center might be brought in as copilot also, to ensure things go smoothly.
Maybe it's not an animal, but a shadow crossing the road from a stray cloud overhead. The AI might not be able to determine 100% whether it's safe to proceed. A human can make this determination and continue the trip (or slam on the brakes)
This would still be massively cheaper even if you pay the driver whatever you'd pay them locally for driving in person, simply because of less downtime, e.g. while a truck is being loaded.
Let's say 100% of the time there is an accident, the self-driving system is able to determine with at least 1 second of notice that human intervention could make the upcoming segment of the trip safer, and such flagged sections constitute less than 0.1% of the time the vehicle would otherwise be in operation.
Let's also say a highly trained team of 10 people, monitoring that fleet of 1000 vehicles, selected for fast reaction, and with adequate training could theoretically prevent 99% of at-fault incidents, bringing it down to a range of 0.001*A to 0.1*A.
I don't know if this would actually play out, but if the above assumptions were found to be accurate, then it'd be hard to make an argument for having human drivers in the vehicle when this system at scale could reduce at-fault accidents to <10% of the current rate
Think Mechanical Turk meets Lambda for improving self-driving car safety
I'm not sure I'd trust a human more than a machine in this circumstance. Just being dropped in with a split-second to make a decision? It's not like you can get 30 seconds of replay to get your bearings etc, otherwise by time the human is ready, the problem's already over.
There's a lot of "state" that a driver should already have built up for this. Traffic, road conditions, who's behind me, etc. Just being thrown into a situation that's rapidly devolving sounds like a nightmare.
You could potentially end up in a situation where a remote driver in Estonia needs a driving license and insurance in both Estonia and the UK to fully cover themselves.