Study: Intelligent Cars Could Boost Highway Capacity by 273%
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Human driven cars are idle 95% of the time. Many fewer self-driving cars could handle the same capacity with ride sharing services like uber.
I'm concerned that auto manufacturers would take actions to prevent this outcome, reducing the potential.
EDIT: silverstorm that's an awesome point
Self-driving cars releases the number of active vehicles from the constraint of number of operators.
The Radial tire came from within the automotive industry, so even if there were some temporary losers, there wasn't any leverage point to fight adoption.
With Google leading this charge rather than Ford, I think the best hope is for American car manufactures to strike a quasi-monopolistic partnership to gain advantage over foreign manufacturers.
(I may be somewhat incorrect about the profit piece, what with the weird relationship between car manufacturers and car dealerships.)
I'm glad Tesla is around for precisely this reason. Does it occur to anyone else that self-driving cars could be a solution to the chicken & egg problem for non-gasoline/diesel refueling/recharging stations? Cars could take the role of taxis, and computer algorithms could ensure that cars get routed to charging stations when they need charging.
Then the auto insurance business will go nearly extinct - after all, their margin is a percentage of the compensation paid. If there are no accidents, there are no payouts, and no margin ...
1. cars will last longer, which would make car manufacturers unhappy
2. cars will become more fuel efficient, which would make fuel industry unhappy
3. insurance rates will go down, which would make insurance industry unhappy
4. number of accidents would be less, cars would require lesser maintenance which would make mechanics unhappy
etc
But, more people (elderly, people with disabilities) would buy cars, so number of cars sold would go up. Also, it would open up whole lot of possibilities on the software side, construction industry etc (what if roads are designed for super efficient drivers, than humans?).
Overall, it would be awesome to watch this happen - kudos to Google for tackling this.
Living in the suburbs would be much more palatable because you could convert your "drive time" to "internet/reading time".
Auto driving cars would be not be just a disruption (i hate that word) to the auto industry, it would be an earthquake that would have many aftershocks to the economy as a whole.
Sadly some of us humans are now genetically dead ends. I'm one of those people who gets car sick unless I'm looking out the window, best in the front seat and with cool air blowing. Consequently I can't really read or Internet. (If I look at a paper map for about 60 seconds I'll be on the verge of puking.) So even if I wasn't driving I can't really use the time for anything else (can't sleep either).
Each car would travel closer to 150,000 miles per year. Monthly tune-ups and brake replacements. New tires twice a year. A modern combustion engine would need weekly oil changes and major maintenance every 6 months. It would last maybe 3 years under that workload.
Electric car batteries may last 5 to 8 years at 150,000 miles per year. And that brings up another problem with increasing our utilization - we'll effectively be using the same amount of energy to transport ourselves, but using many fewer tools (cars) to transport ourselves. There's a limit to how quickly the batteries can be recharged in each individual car.
There's no reason you can't have a stop-station quick-replace batteries, preferably automatically. You just need enough safety there to make sure the batteries don't fall out on the road.
1) Even with robots there will be unknowns which the robots will have to deal with which will still require a margin of safety. Likely that margin of safety will be lower with robots, but definitely will not approach 100% capacity. (things like tire blow-outs, deer, even sudden rain etc).
2) Road wear will still need to be considered in any cost benefit analysis. Presumably road wear is less of a factor than jamming cars on the road, but I don't know that for sure and someone should do the math on that. There is also a point where if you exceed a certain capacity percentage, anytime road work needs to be done it would dramatically impact traffic since there is less of buffer to absorb the lack of lanes.
3) As we increase capacity, we may run in to additional problems that we cannot imagine. Bridges for example could be an issue as the amount of weight would be increased dramatically, even more remote a possibility would be damage from additional vibrations etc. Those are just ideas that come to mind, but there are probably many other risks we are not considering.
Overall, I am 100% for robotic cars, robotic passenger jets, etc. I just wanted to brainstorm a few future problems that may need to be considered as we move forward. The last thing I want to see is a 5 year setback.
Then again, the engineers at google and elsewhere have probably considered all these things which just seem new to me as a casual outside observer.
If when you got in, it gave you 5 options with estimated times and prices and you could always choose it would be awesome.
Road wear is a cost, but it scales at worst linearly with traffic. I can't imagine anyone crying because we can now build ($$$$) half as many lanes of highways but much repave ($) them twice as often.
And the bridges things is just wrong. Bridges are obviuosly designed for maximal loads, which in this case would be a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of even more weight than a packed stream of robots. And that happens routinely.
Also: I'm very amused by your assertion that the interstate highway system (probably 10% of which is under expansion at any given time in any give metro area, and the remainder of which is rapidly approaching capacity and/or experiencing routine unplanned congestion) is "done".
Understood. So I will explain a bit more in depth. But, the things I laid out are pretty basic. The dynamic responses of a vehicle under motion works something like this.
(1) Balance. The car is never level. As you accelerate, there is inertia. The drive train and the chassis do not move in unison. They are connected by "Springs". This is like an airplane: attitude. So, the forces on the car and the road are different, but related. And there is a lag.
(2) Dynamics. Accelerate, nose up + ass down. Decelerate, nose down+ass up. The road is not straight? Similar for a turn (tilt left, tilt right). Now, combine. What happens? There is a dynamic weighting applied to all 4 corners. Go into a rt turn? Weight front left. Unweight rear right. etc. So, the point is that the friction is changing in each corner as you drive. The friction must exceed the energy of the car, or you will slide like on ice, etc. But, for the reason you brake in a turn, this is not always guaranteed, etc.
(3) Topology. Now, add some complexity: The road is not flat. This changes the calculation of the weighting for each tire. A tire on a 45degree incline is not holding as much friction as on a 2 degree one. This is like standing on a sand-slope, etc. Just basic idea. Now, The traction is a function of the weighting of each tire, plus the relative position of the tire to the road surface.
(4) Environment. Also, you have to consider a few other things: Do you know the co-efficient of friction of the road surface? Clean? Dry? Wet? WIth autumn leaves? What tyres do you have? What is the friction curve with relation to the rubber type and the ambient air-temperature? Oh, and by the way where is the tread depth? Today? Yesterday? These are all things that go through the mind of a trained driver and are not un-common knowledge (think: f1, rally). Same thing with left-foot braking, not using ABS, non-abs brakes on snow/ice/dirt/ etc.
(5) Complex System. If you cannot predict any part of this, you run the risk that the inertia of the car from speed etc >friction => loss of traction, accident, crash etc. This means: If you don't know the "camber" of the turn, your math is a problem. You might know that you are turning right at x degrees, but what will the turn be in 100m? constant radius? or not? What if you change lanes in the turn? etc. Now, you can topo-map solve this at high enough resolution. Eg., something akin to a race-track, in a video game. Go to Laguna seca, and put that in a computer. Problem here, though, is scale: like 1 inch topo variances or something, but that data set for CA state? Is huge. You don't have it. How would you even get it? What is your other option? Terrain acquiring radar? That might work. There is probably something in 60ghz and up that in theory might work. But you are line of sight constrained and now how far out can you look? 10m? What is the system's reaction time? How fast are you?
(6) Road hazards. Similar problem here. If there are abrupt changes. How do you acquire them? A sinkhole. A pot-hole (might break your wheel, etc) These are things not on a map-set. A live person just drives around them. But, what about a freeway? 6 Lanes, everyone is packed in like sardines. Does the guy in lane 6 know the guy in lane 2 is going to swerve? If he doesn't swerve (an breaks his wheel) what happens? The bridge failures are an example similar. If you are driving, you just look and see: no road. But, what if you are on auto-pilot? Who tells the computer there is no road? Same thing flash flood. Even worse, is hydroplaning risk (like 1/4 inch of standing water, say). If you are not driving are you paying attention? If you don't feel the steering wheel, how do you know? Can you put that into the computer?
That being said, they are doing amazing things with traction control systems on motorcycles right now. So some of this may get figured out. But you will not see a guy with all of this tech riding no hands/no brakes, etc. This is strictly in addition to user input and continual monitoring of the controls.
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The Interstate System
Do you have experience actually navigating? Like, say long stretches accross the USA? At continental scale? The Interstate systems is what it is. Its "90%" done. There is not 1000 mile segments being built. Max is 100 miles, and even that is incredibly difficult (permits, etc). Also, those are not "capacity" related build outs, you are talking only a couple of missing geographic links. New lanes/etc are a different animal (thats maintenance, for the most-part). Put another way, US is not going to rip out 2/3 of the roads and put 3x the traffic on the smaller footprint, to get to a break-even case. Now, you want to increase by 278% more cars/hours on the system? OK fine, but it will cost you. Its basic math, no? Also, the economics of construction don't work out that you save money by only "fixing" half the lanes or whatever. Lastly, consider the purpose: more capacity? History shows, no matter how many lanes you put down, the 405 fwy will be in Jam at 4-6pm in LA. Its not just rubbernecking. It is a larger social issue: people will procrastinate. Now they are in a "hurry". Oops. [As the saying goes, sometimes there is no engineering around stupid =D.]
Other Safety cases.
The point of these cases is not that they are per-se fatal. It is that they require real-time rapid-terrain-acquisition to avoid making the problem worse. Deer is similar. I doubt a basic Lidar is going to acquire a deer in the brush that jumps out in the road. It might, with thermal imaging, make it possible to see hiding off to the side. But, the calculation would need to be predictive in a what which is pretty amazing.
We will make a lot of assumptions about what is a linear expense, linear threat etc. without really knowing what will be linear until we pack an extremely tight grouping of cars on the road.
Taking my point further:
For road work, expense may go from linear to nonlinear because of something that seems completely counterintuitive. Imagine every car now has variation in the exact placement within the lanes. Highways have marks where the majority of cars drive, but variation in drivers accounts for variation in path. If every robot executed their driving in the exact 1 foot per tire space, it is likely that 1 foot per tire space would require a greater than linear road work. This could be solved by programing an automatic variation in all cars or possibly changing how roads are built so that they require only cement in those 1 foot areas.
Now, an example of a time when engineers thought they had it right, but didn’t think of everything:
Engineering has come a long way since the Tacoma bridge incedent, but we cannot underestimate what assumptions were previously made that will be incorrect when we start driving far more vehicles on roads. In the Tacoma bridge edge case, sustained winds caused flutter (self-feeding vibration) which caused the bridge to fail.
While I do not suggest this is a likely case, the fact is, we are probably not considering everything and there will be issues we do not foresee, but we should try to eliminate as many edge cases as possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)
To your point about robots being faster: Yes, I agree they are faster, but even the fastest robot will need some space to interact. In a situation where a truck on the highway has a blowout which causes large debris to separate from the truck, the robots still need some room to slow down. In the extreme example where cars are 1 foot away from each other, an accident like that would have tremendous negative consequences that even robots would have a tough time dealing with.
We will have self-driving cars, and they will likely be much safer than human operated cars, but we are going to also have setbacks and many of them can be avoided by looking to the future and trying to solve the problems early rather than later.
If that was a large concern, then wouldn't we see a lot of bridge failures during bumper-to-bumper traffic due to accidents and/or rush hour? I would hope that bridges are designed to handle the weight of cars being packed that closely together, seeing how often it actually happens in the real world.
Then again, the future probably has all road work done by robots too so this will be less and less of an issue.
A busy highway moving smoothly at capacity is like a super-cooled fluid. As long as nothing goes wrong, it can last, but the second you introduce some delay, somewhere, you wind up with a rapidly expanding solid (ie traffic jam). Intelligent cars boost the capacity of smooth traffic more than they do the capacity of bumper to bumper slow traffic, and hence the transitions from "awesome" to "oh shit" should be much nastier than they are now.
The traffic jams of the future could make our current ones look tame.
>"As long as nothing goes wrong, it can last, but the second you introduce some delay, somewhere, you wind up with a rapidly expanding solid "
I'll check the youtube videos, thanks.
edit: duh, it's exactly the same process of crystal formation.
Smooth: Going 60 mph and leaving 2 car lengths of space, so the distance from front bumper to front bumper is 3 car lengths.
Congested: Going 30 mph and leaving 1 car length of space, so the distance from front bumper to front bumper is 2 car lengths.
In the former road you go 2x as fast and need only 1.5x as much space, so the former road has a third as much capacity as the latter. So if cars are moving along a highway already operating at capacity into a congested area, cars are arriving at the transition faster than they are leaving. Thanks to the law of conservation of cars, excess cars must accumulate at that transition, and since they have nowhere to go, they wind up parked in a traffic jam. And as long as the road feeding it is at capacity, that traffic jam grows.
From the point of view of the driver, this is what it looks like. You're sailing along in smooth fast traffic, and then hit a sudden traffic jam with no warning. After sitting there for a long time the road starts moving again, but goes much slower.
This is common experience in Los Angeles traffic. And a significant fraction of accidents happen at that sudden transition from smooth sailing at 60 mph to a dead stop. (In fact my wife got rear-ended in that exact scenario a year and a half ago on the 405 near Los Angeles airport.)
Takeaway: don't tailgate.
When humans operate on a roadway, they don't manage cars on the roads. They manage the bubbles of space between their cars. Physics tells you that you'll need a bubble of space ahead of you for you to move your car into. Traffic jams happen because not enough "space" is "bubbling" backwards for drivers to form a bubble in which they can travel forward.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y28g8/suspend_al...
>And if all vehicles on the road are equipped with both adaptive cruise sensors and communication, capacity can be increased by a factor of 3.7
which is consistent with the headline.
Perhaps the research is good, and this is just a case of PR having unwarranted input into the labeling, but that still wouldn't justify the headline.
1)How will manual cars (and motorcycles) be managed once we have non trivial percentages of cars on the road automated? Will there be automated-only highways? Automated-only lanes? Is the beginning of the end for those of us who really enjoy driving (or motorcyles?). Or will those things just be limited to non-urban/track environments?
2)How does all this automation & closer car traveling @ high speeds work when natural events intercede. The most obvious one is weather (rain or snow), which can be a huge problem for cities as is, but it seems like having cars on the road with no "bubbles" of space to buffer great exacerbates the potential for massive accidents when there is marginal traction. Secondly, in many areas of the country, wildlife on highways is a very common occurrence (even in cities there's the occasional road debris/unexpected obstacle). I wonder how well an at-capacity automated highway could react to a sudden bit of road obstruction w/o running into a massive accident (or massive traffic jam) situation.
Of course, many/most human drivers don't handle adverse weather or unexpected obstacles very well either, so maybe these are just facts of driving, not arguments against automated cars as such. Still, I'm interested to see what attempts are being made to mitigate the effects of such variables.
About your second question, at least at high speeds the capacity of an break is more important for the distance needed to stop the car, than the reaction time. So the situation does not change much.
I think too many people are reaching to calculate the effect this will have on the price of gas, insurance, etc but we have to remember that full integration of automated cars is likely to take decades. All of the major industries will have plenty of time adjust and find a way to survive.
But automated cars could flip the efficiency numbers around. Really excited to see where this technology takes us.
That said I'm also worried that it could increase the time spent in cars since there won't be as much negative feedback from stressful/boring/unproductive driving.
Not just performance in terms of efficient driving and merging, but also safety and essentially taking human operator error out of the equation (for the most part)
I think people will take this way too far. They'll turn on the autopilot and take a nap while blasting through a school zone or something.
If the car can't handle those situations, then it's not going to be a very useful intelligent car.
The entire point of an automated car is that it can handle stuff like that for you. Eventually it'd be safer than humans, who are quite happy to blow through the school zone outside my house at 50mph.
Just because cars made suburbia possible still does not mean it is a good thing.
This'll have the effect of making roads denser, and less pleasant to drive on, and increase the sales rate of self-driving cars...
I'm also going to go out on a limb and guess that this study doesn't account for the inevitable malware when the majority of vehicles are communicating with each other.
It's not inevitable. The simple solution to malware - just don't run any software you didn't have when you were first turned on - seems pretty solid here. Software updates handled the way airliners do it - not by letting the consumer reach out into the aether and grabbing whatever shiny malware infested dreck he can find.
A little late getting back to the party, but the problem I intended to highlight was the potential for DDOSing the traffic network, or someone otherwise gaming the system.
Most of the pieces are available for a wonderful new transportation infrastructure. Here's to hoping they mature sooner rather than later.