A solution for India’s traffice woes

Anybody who has been stuck in the Delhi or Bombay traffic despairs that India will ever solve its traffic problems. Too many cars are coming off the assembly lines and there are simply not enough roads. Space for expansion does not exist in most urban cities. Can you imagine trying to build a road with multistoried buildings on either side or cutting down the trees to widen existing roads. Fortunately now technology has an answer: self driven cars!

Until now, self-driving cars have just been regular cars with an autopilot mode. They have steering wheels, gas pedals, brakes, and human drivers ready to take over at a moment’s notice. But now Google has come up with a a new truly self driven car.

Designed and built from the ground up, it’s a true driverless car. A tiny, bubble-shaped two-seater, it’s designed to pick people up at Point A and deposit them at Point B without any intervention on their part. Just set the destination and push the “go” button and you’re free to look out the windows, read a book, work on their laptops, or go to sleep. No driver’s license needed.

Perhaps more importantly: no ownership needed. Google envisions a future in which people simply order a self-driving car when they need one. When they arrive at their destination, they hop out and the car goes on its way, like a taxi service. From Google’s blog post announcing the prototype:

Just imagine: You can take a trip downtown at lunchtime without a 20-minute buffer to find parking. Seniors can keep their freedom even if they can’t keep their car keys. And drunk and distracted driving?

To minimize risk, the initial prototype tops out at 25 mph and sports a safety-minded design. The front end is made of a compressible foam-like material and the windshield is flexible. The sensors are more powerful than before, able to see up to two football fields ahead. And the controls are redundant, with a backup motor and brakes that can take over if anything goes wrong.

That’s all quite prudent, especially considering that California law today requires self-driving cars to have a human driver at the ready should anything go wrong. Google will need to get those laws changed in order to realize its vision for fully autonomous driving.

Just as importantly, the car’s cuddly profile seems like an effort by Google to make it as non-threatening as possible. It resembles nothing so much as a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe.

The prototype isn’t a finished product, Google emphasized. “What we’re announcing today is a prototype, designed for learning and rapid iteration, and is the first incarnation of something that could go in a lot of different directions; it’s our long-term intention that’s important here, not the specifics of this vehicle,” spokeswoman Katelin Jabbari said.

“We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously—pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn,” writes Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car project, in a blog post. “A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t—and it never gets tired or distracted.”

It also never gets impatient. That sounds obvious, but it could be a godsend for bicyclists in particular if and when self-driving cars begin to replace human drivers on America’s roads. In all cases, the car errs on the side of caution—something we human drivers could stand to do a little more often. And its decisions are rigorously data-driven. For instance, Google's car will wait for a split second when a light turns green, because research shows that red-light runners are most likely to come flying through the intersection in the first moments after the signal changes.

As far as it has come, the self-driving car technology remains very much a work in progress. Even if self-driving cars never achieve perfection, it’s looking increasingly likely that they’ll prove far safer than your average cellphone-checking, selfie-snapping, road-raging, falling-asleep-at-the-wheel human driver ever was. In fact, given that Google’s cars have now logged nearly 700,000 miles without causing a single accident, it seems that they already are.

Though Google's driverless car gets most of the hype, Carnegie Mellon University, which for several years now has been collaborating with General Motors to turn a standard-issue Cadillac SRX into a road-ready autonomous vehicle. Like Google's self-driving Prius, the Carnegie Mellon car is capable of making its own decisions to speed up, slow down, and stop at right lights. One notable difference: whereas the Google car's main, 64-laser sensor sits conspicuously atop its roof, rotating multiple times per second, the Carnegie Mellon car's sensors are embedded discreetly all around the car.

While the technology has already come a long way within a few years—Google's version has some 500,000 miles without an accident— most observers believe it will be at least 2020 before self-driving vehicles are ready for widespread commercial use. The greatest expense, for now, is the sensor system, which costs upward of $50,000. And while self-driving cars hold the promise of being far safer than those driven by humans, it will take a lot of testing to assure engineers and the public that they're fully glitch-free and can drive at the posted speed limits.

In many countries, including the United States, the speed limit is a rather nebulous thing. It's posted, but on many roads hardly anybody obeys it. Almost every driver speeds regularly, and anybody going at or below the limit on a clear road outside the right lane is typically an obstruction to traffic—they will find themselves being tailgated or passed at high speed on the left and right. Half of Germany's Autobahns have no specific speed limit, but they have a better safety record. For a brief time. In France they take a different approach. The Autoroute limit is 130 kph (81 mph), and almost nobody exceeds it; in fact the vast majority go under it. Reportedly, this is because the police are serious about it and will ticket you for any excess. In the United States, it's not that way. A ticket for going 1 mph over the limit is an extremely rare thing. It usually signals a cop with another agenda or a special day of zero-tolerance enforcement. In fact, many drivers feel safe from tickets up to about 9 mph over the limit. Tickets happen there, but the major penalties require going faster, and most police like to go after that one weaving, racing guy who thinks the limit does not apply to him.

So how does a self-driving car enter this world of few hard-and-fast rules? There are two common schools of thought:

As with its ancestor, the cruise control, the operator of a self driving car can set the car to operate at any speed within its general limits, regardless of the road speed limit. The moral and safety decisions rest with this person. Or the vehicle could be programmed to not break the speed limit, nor allow its operator to do so. It must be aware of all limits and obey them. People generally don't want their technology to disobey them or enforce the law.

Speeding is just one of the code violations almost everybody does. There are many other examples. One that Google reported early on was handling a four-way stop. They found that if they were not a little aggressive in asserting their turn at the stop, others would quickly grab the slot, and the car would sit waiting for a long time. So they programmed the car to try to go on its turn even if somebody else was also trying to steal the slot, though it will eventually yield in a true game of chicken. Fortunately, there is always somebody who will be polite and yield when it was not their turn. They also programmed the car to do things like nudge a little into the oncoming lane (when safe) to get around things like double-parked trucks.

Once self driven cars can be certified safe, they may well be able to drive even faster than humans can safely drive. In the self driven car or robocar world, where your solo car can drop you off to join an ad-hoc carpool and pick you up on the way back, and where a short-range robotaxi can pick you up from where your ad-hoc carpool members part ways, real carpooling becomes far less inconvenient. Given an added incentive like a 100-mph dedicated lane for the bulk of the trip would be quite attractive and save energy to boot.

Ever since the 1930s, self-driving cars have been just 20 years away. Many of those earlier visions, however, depended on changes to physical infrastructure that never came about, such as special roads embedded with magnets. But many of the modern concepts for such vehicles are intended to work with existing technologies. These supercomputers-on-wheels use a variety of onboard sensors— and, in some cases, stored maps or communications from other vehicles—to assist or even replace human drivers under specific conditions. And they have the potential to adapt to changes in existing infrastructure rather than requiring it to alter for them. Infrastructure, however, is more than just roads, pavements, signs, and signals. In a broad sense, it also includes the laws that govern motor vehicles: driver licensing requirements, rules of the road, and principles of product liability, to name but a few. One major question remains, though. Will tomorrow's cars and trucks have to adapt to today's legal infrastructure, or will that infrastructure adapt to them?

Also technical questions that remain still to be solved means it will be a while before your children are delivered to school by taxis automatically dispatched and driven by computers, or your latest online purchases arrive in a driverless delivery truck. That also means we have time to figure out some of the truly futuristic legal questions: How do you ticket a robot? Who should pay? And can it play (or drive) by different rules of the road? Finally, what happens when things go wrong—or at least not as right as they might? Given that the vast majority of crashes are caused at least in part by human error, self-driving vehicles have huge potential to save lives.

Google hopes to build about 100 of the prototype cars in the next two years and run a pilot program in California to test them on volunteers. Ultimately, said project director Chris Urmson in a statement, “If the technology develops as we hope, we’ll work with partners to bring this technology into the world safely.”

Google needs to hurry up with its project and perhaps someone in India will buy the patent and start manufacturing these cars soon. One can always hope!