5.39-NYT_Mag-111417

  THE TECH & DESIGN ISSUE: LIFE AFTER DRIVING

NYTM Editor, Nov 7, "IT IS A truth as visible from space, in the tendrils of our brightly lit megaroadways, as it is under a microscope, in the diesel particles that tar our lungs: America is a car country. This truth has been true for more than a hundred years now. Soon after the turn of the 20th century, the automobile became pervasive in urban centers, establishing a new, briskly perilous pace for city life; by the 1930s, as annual vehicle sales surpassed four million, urban streetcar systems had begun to go defunct, scrapped in favor of gas-burning buses; by the mid-1950s, new cars increasingly rolled off the line into a suburban way of life that the car itself had made possible. Suburbs had already swallowed a quarter of the population when, at the behest of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, Congress inaugurated the most ambitious infrastructure project in the nation’s history: a 47,000-mile Interstate highway system. Its construction would crisscross the nation and spread even more suburbia as it went, bringing a profusion of new features to the American landscape — not just countless cloverleafs and imposingly stacked overpasses but drive-ins, drive-throughs, cul-de-sacs, acres upon acres of blacktop parking.

As the car transformed the American lifestyle, so did it colonize the American imagination. Perhaps the most fascinating artifact of automotive retrofuturism dates to 1958, two years into the Interstate building boom, when Disney produced an hourlong TV program called “Magic Highway, U.S.A.” After a half-hour or so celebrating the car’s ascent, the program pivoted to envisioning its future. At a time when Eisenhower’s Interstate project — inspired, famously, by his awe at traveling Hitler’s autobahn during the Nazi overthrow — was seizing private property through eminent domain around the country, Disney imagined atomic-powered tunnel borers and imperial road-building machines as tall and wide as skyscrapers, cutting through landscapes and leaving fully constructed roadways in their wake. Dreaming further forward, the program extrapolated from the new real-world highways to envision literal high-ways of clear tubes raised far above the urban environment, magnificent air-conditioned arteries that someday would “link together all nations and help create a better understanding among the peoples of the world.”…"  Read more Hmmmm… Wow!  The whole magazine about SmartDrivingCars.  Wow!  Must reading.  Caution: The only way this utopia doesn’t turn into a disaster is if, when pertinent, we Share Rides!  It is not pertinent when the trip density is so low that there isn’t anybody around going in the same direction at about the same time. Then it is appropriate and no problem to go alone. 

However, when there are other people going our way at about the same time, then we should go together instead of adding to congestion by going alone.   When several people are waiting for an elevator going up,  they tend to all get in together and go up.  The alternative would need to be for the whole building to be made of nothing but elevator shafts (same as paving our way out of congestion).. Then each could ride alone without waiting.  Without more elevator shafts, then each could wait and incur intolerable delay by insisting on riding alone as, happens today on our streets and highways at rush hour.  A fleet of centrally managed driverless vehicles create "horizontal automated elevators" that can facilitate sufficient ride-sharing  to deliver utopian mobility to all without incurring vehicular congestion.  This enables moderately dense living environments to be very attractive.  Alain

Smart Driving Cars Podcast Episode 12

Episode 12 of the Smart Driving Cars Podcast with host Fred Fishkin and Princeton University Professor Alain Kornhauser. This edition: Tesla unveils a truck, the media focuses on the future of driving, Uber’s Express Pool, remembering the DARPA challenge, Jaguar Land Rover testing self driving vehicles in the UK and public acceptance.
How far all of this has come:  The first skit of the Yale Band at half-time of the Princeton-Yale football game last Saturday centered on the Driverless Car "Trolley Problem".  Talk about almost mainstream! Alain

Uber ‘Express POOL’ offers the cheapest fare if you’ll walk a little

J. Constantine, Nov 10, "Uber’s found a way to shave another 25 percent or so off the price of a ride. Uber Express POOL asks you to walk up to a few blocks to your pickup and destination before and after the ride in exchange for the cheapest fare out of all of Uber’s options.  The feature dynamically generates “smart spots” that are easy to drive to and close to the origin or destination of several people seeking an Express POOL. You hail, it tells you where to walk, you go there, join other passengers, take your ride, get dropped somewhere easily accessible near your destination and you get in-app walking directions to your final address. By picking up and dropping off multiple groups of people at once, Uber avoids diverting from a city’s main streets, and passes on some of the savings. …"  Read more  Hmmmm…. This is fantastic.  This is what my class and I have been studying for several years…assessing the ride-sharing opportunities of this kind of service.  Coupled with using multi-modal (NJ Transit Rail) options, when appropriate, this type of service has the potential in New Jersey for taking half of the cars off the road throughout the day (meaning energy, pollution, GHG are all cut in half) and more than 2 out of 3 in peakHour/peakDirection on congested roads; thus, basically eliminating road congestion in NJ.  Ridership on NJ Transit Rail is increased by 5x.  This year’s class is assessing this opportunity throughout the US and its implication on individual rail transit systems, including Amtrak.  Stay tuned.  Alain 

Waymo’s fully self-driving vehicles are here

Waymo team, Nov. 17,  "Two years ago, we completed the world’s first fully self-driving trip on public roads, …and so far only documented or so-claimed Fully Self-driving (aka Driverless) ride ….when Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, traveled from a park to a doctor’s office without anyone in the driver’s seat.

Waymo’s fully self-driving vehicles — our safest, most advanced vehicles on the road today — are test-driving on public roads, without anyone in the driver’s seat. To date, Waymo vehicles have been operating on public roads with a test driver at the wheel. Now, in an area of the Phoenix metro region, a subset of our fleet will operate in fully autonomous mode, with Waymo as the sole driver. Over time, we’ll cover a region that’s larger than the size of Greater London, and we’ll add more vehicles as we grow…." Read more  Hmmmm…. Unfortunately Waymo fails to say "there is a ‘Waymo’ attendant in the back seat" so this is NOT ‘Fully Self-driving/Driverless’ and they aren’t yet offering ‘SteveMahan-like’ rides. Why is Waymo so shamelessly exaggerating what they are actually doing???? Shame on them!!  Alain

The PayPal Mafia of Self-Driving Cars Has Been at It a Decade

D. Hull, Oct 30, "A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups. A decade later, the competitors are struggling to perfect the technology….An initial competition, the Darpa Grand Challenge of 2004, asked robotic cars to travel roughly 140 miles across the Mojave Desert. Carnegie Mellon’s entrant, a Hummer named “Sandstorm,” managed to travel the farthest—a whopping seven miles. At a follow-up event, in 2005, Stanford University came in first place, and Carnegie Mellon’s contenders placed second and third. Each university team included dozens of students and professors, as well as corporate sponsors…"  Read more  Hmmmm…. Yup!  After about 12 years I think that most of us are still ‘all in’ trying to make all of this happen.  I used to say that the launching and operating of GPS satellites delivered the highest DoD Societal Benefit Ratio = SocietalBenefit / DoD $$$ Spent.  But no… DoD spent so little money on the DARPA Challenges; probably less than $10M and certainly nowhere near $100M, and those Challenges truly changed everything.  They created the pivot from a hopeless flawed Automated Highway Concept that required dedicated infrastructure (roads) in order to operate even a single automated vehicle to the realization that we might be able to put sufficient intelligence in a single car and have it share the enormous existing infrastructure "as is; where is".  Moreover, using someone else’s infrastructure is much more valuable than using someone else’s money!  Infrastructure is always VERY expensive and requires up-front money.That’s how DARPA took us from DoA to unstoppable!  Alain

Self-Driving Trucks May Be Closer Than They Appear

C. Doucherty, Nov 13 "Trucks will someday drive themselves out of warehouses and cruise down freeways without the aid of humans… maybe… or even a driver’s cab … don’t hold your breath.  not soon!…— about that there seems little disagreement. The question is how soon that day gets here.. 

And while the answers vary — technologists, not surprisingly, are more bullish than truckers — billions of dollars and a growing parade of companies, from tiny start-ups to the country’s biggest trucking operations, are betting it will be here sooner than most people think.

This year, companies and investors are on pace to put just over $1 billion into self-driving and other trucking technologies, 10 times the level of three years ago, according to CB Insights, which tracks the venture capital industry…."  Read more Hmmmm…  Continues to surprise me that the NY Times continues to focus on the fluff and not the substance of this technology and its benefit to truckers and trucking.  The main benefit of this technology is that it can keep trucks from crashing and running off the road.  Even before a trucker can benefit from taking her hands off the wheel she can benefit by having the technology keep her safe and remove much of the stress and anxiety of her workplace.  The reduced liability exposure and the appeased workforce deliver the RoI basis for the investment in Safe-driving Trucks.  

Driverless is a whole different ball game.  It requires substantially better technology because it has to work all of the time AND not incur a noticeable degradation from Safe-driving.  It is unlikely that the cost of such technology is going to deliver an attractive RoI any time soon.  Alain

Meet the Tesla Semitruck, Elon Musk’s Most Electrifying Gamble Yet

A. Davis, Nov. 17, "Elon Musk has always dreamed big, and tonight he showed off his biggest reverie yet: the fully electric Tesla Semi. Powered by a massive battery and capable of hauling 80,000 pounds, it can ramble 500 miles between charges. It’ll even drive itself—on the highway, at least.   And Musk promises production will start in 2019…." Read more  Hmmmm…. Hopefully this is more than Elon just trying to change the subject from the fact that he produced 222 Model 3 in Q3 and needs to get to 5,000/week (60,000/Q, or 300x) by Q2_2018.  Such a truck would be fantastic for the Environment, the Logistics industry AND truck drivers.  There is no intention for Driverless (why include even one screen or even a cab if the intent was to make it Driverless.  Same as Jaguar/LandRover (below) that have steering wheels in their cars.  They have no intent, nor does their 100 year old business model tolerate anything but enhancing the bond between the buyer and HIS (and it has been all about HIS) own personal, private, all mine and only mine auto (manual)…mobile.  If it really becomes an auto (mated) …mobile, the business model collapses.  Alain

The Open-Source Driving Simulator That Trains Autonomous Vehicles

MIT Tech Review, Nov 17, "Self-driving cars are set to revolutionize transport systems the world over. If the hype is to be believed, entirely autonomous vehicles are about to hit the open road.
The truth is more complex. The most advanced self-driving technologies work only in an extremely limited set of environments and weather conditions. And while most new cars will have some form of driver assistance in the coming years, autonomous cars that drive in all conditions without human oversight are still many years away. …We’ll never get to "all", even ‘most’ is many many years away.  We it peak horse in the 1920s.  We have yet to hit peak conventional car.

…In each of these circumstances, a self-driving car must make good decisions, even though the likelihood of coming across them is small. And that raises an important question: how can carmakers train and test their vehicles when these events are so rare?…Read more  Hmmmm…. Agreed.  This is the way to do it.  Is this better than "Grand Theft Auto V"?  Alain

Assessing the Effects of Automated Vehicles (AVs) on Freeway Operations

Fehr & Peers, Nov 2017, "Many assume that one of the benefits of AVs will be increased vehicular capacity and reduced delay on freeways. Fehr & Peers conducted our own research to test that hypothesis using traffic simulation models of varying conditions of congestion levels and AV fleet mix…."  Read more  Hmmmm…. The issue covered in the simulation requires only intelligent cruise control which is available now if only DoTs had signs along the freeways encouraging drivers who have cruise control to use what they have.  That would cost them nothing to ease congestion and save energy.

So, why don’t DoTs encourage the use of Cruise Control??  Are the real capacity benefits so nebulous that they aren’t a priority for State DoTs???  Else, they’d have signs along the freeways encouraging drivers to use what they already have.  No???  Alain

Monetary and Prospective Benefit Assessment Method for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

P. Feig, et al , Nov 2017 "This paper discusses a new method for benefit effectiveness evaluation in detail and investigates the most relevant property damage accidents for Germany: parking and maneuvering. Simulation results for an ADAS with fully-automated intervening functions and the hitherto-unknown collision speed distribution for parking and maneuvering accidents based on a naturalistic driving study (SHRP2) are analyzed. The proposal described here is focused on lower collision speed accidents, as property damage accidents are 40 times more frequent in Germany than those resulting in bodily injury. Due to the high claim frequency and expectancy of property damage accidents, various ADAS offer a potential to mitigate or avoid accidents. These benefits need to be evaluated as a prospective, representative and monetary effectiveness method. Thus, a bottom-up approach will be pursued in order to encourage the ADAS installation rate by highlighting its monetary benefit… By contrast, a prospective and representative analysis offers the advantage that an ADAS can be optimized during the product development process, in terms of its hardware and software. Furthermore, this allows customers, insurance companies and manufacturers to be aware of the monetary benefit prior to market start…." Read more  Hmmmm…. Very nice prospective framework for assessing the benefits, especially to insurance underwriters,  and quantifying the benefit elasticities of Safe-driving (aka ADAS) sub-systems.  Alain

  National enforcement guidelines for automated vehicles

978-0-6480157-3-4, Nov. 2017 "..These national enforcement guidelines provide guidance about how the requirement of proper control in Australian Road Rule 297 should apply to vehicles with automated functions. The guidelines also confirm that the human driver is responsible for compliance with road traffic laws when a vehicle has conditional automation engaged at a point in time…. " Read more  Hmmmm…. This is a very important and substantive contribution on this very challenging topic.  It also  encompasses:   Should the laws be different for SmartDrivingCars? 

Today, on the same stretch of road, we may have different speed limits for trucks than we have for cars.  Maybe we should have, and enforce differently, speed limits for conventionally driven cars and automatically driven cars.  Conventional speed limit might be, say, 65 mph but is enforced at the behavioral "9+" limit of 74 mph.  SmartDrivingCar speed limit could then be 74 mph and enforced at 74 mph.  This make enforcement uniform (74) and alleviates us from writing "behavioral" algorithms that game the conventional system.  Alain

  Clarifying control of automated vehicles:  Policy paper

ISBN 978-06480157-2-7, Nov 2017, "This policy paper supports the national enforcement guidelines for automated vehicles. This paper explains the assumptions and objectives of the guidelines, who has responsibility for compliance with road traffic laws and the indicators of proper control for vehicles operating at different levels of automation…."  Read more  Hmmmm…. This is an important supporting paper.  Alain

Assuring the safety of automated vehicles policy paper

ISBN 978-0-6480157-4-1, Nov 2017, "This policy paper sets out the high-level design of a safety assurance system for automated vehicles in Australia based on mandatory self-certification until the development of international standards for automated driving systems. This paper identifies key steps to implement the safety assurance system by 2020, including legislative and registration changes and the development of administrative functions…."  Read more  Hmmmm…. This is another important supporting paper.  Alain

  Jaguar Land Rover tests first driverless vehicle on public roads

C. Pitas, Nov 17, "Britain’s biggest automaker, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), has tested its first driverless car on public roads, it said on Friday, as carmakers race against each other and tech firms to tap into new technologies…..The testing is taking place in the central English city of Coventry, the historic heart of the British car industry, where JLR is headquartered. Trials will continue into next year…."  Read more   Hmmmm…. Now most everyone is doing it … Self-driving (basically what Tesla & Cadillac are now selling to individuals as a comfort & convenience (the new Corinthian Leather) item , with maybe a few more features) but NOT Driverless, which would be sold to Fleet operators to deliver societal value out of this technology rather than just more Corinthian Leather.  (Please don’t tell me about Safety.  The Safety is delivered even better if you don’t provide most of the Self-driving ‘Corinthian’ features.)  Alain

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