Driverless Transportation | Is a Driverless Future Heaven or Hell

Burney Simpson

The move to driverless transportation is picking up speed but some are questioning whether this new technology will bring great strides in safety and efficiency or roads jammed with vehicles holding a single passenger staring at his iPad.

Bicycle riders are one transportation interest group that have had a long and contentious relationship with vehicles. American car culture has meant miles of beautiful roads often filled with cars driven by guys that want bikes to get out of their way.

That disagreement heated up as the number of bike commuters rose by nearly 50 percent nationwide from 2000 to 2011, according to the League of American Bicyclists, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. Granted the base was small, but in that time the number of bike commuters grew 300 percent in Washington, 250 percent in San Francisco, 440 percent in Portland, Ore., and 200 percent in Philadelphia, the League reports.

League members are unsure about driverless technology. In a survey last summer, 42 percent of members that responded said that technology like the Google car would make roads safer, 14 percent thought they would make roads less safe, and 43 percent said they didn’t have enough information to make a judgment on safety implications.

“There’s a concern among bike riders that we will repeat the optimization of roads for vehicles, and forget bikes, pedestrians, and other modes of transportation,” said Ken McLeod, the League’s legal specialist who presented the findings last year at the Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation (T-SET) University Transportation Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

SHARING THE ROAD

For cyclists, a driverless-vehicle America could be either Heaven or Hell, says McLeod.

It would be great if it brought a diminished car culture and with it drivers/riders who are willing to share the road. “If people aren’t driving, they won’t be as emotionally attached to their car. They won’t care so much about bike lanes and narrower lanes,” said McLeod.

Or it could be a Hell filled with more commuters in single-passenger vehicles who view cyclists as a drag on traffic, and demand that bikes be removed from the roads. That would lead to “the same old transportation designs on steroids,” said McLeod.

Bicycling has not been top of mind for many driverless engineers. But Sweden’s Volvo considered bikes as it developed its XC90 SUV with its Intellisafe system featuring Adaptive Cruise Control, a 360 degree camera, park assist, and lane control.

CITY SAFETY

The XC90 also includes Volvo’s City Safety system designed to detect, warn and auto-brake to avoid collisions with cyclists. Volvo created the bike system with two Swedish partners – sports-gear marketer POC, and communications firm Ericsson.

This Volvo video shows a biker wearing a POC helmet and carrying a smartphone with a location-tracking app installed who receives a vibration and a visual warning of any impending collision with an XC90. This communication system from Ericsson will also send the XC90 driver an alert and a cue where the cyclist is coming from.

Volvo announced the POC helmet system at the Consumer Electronics Show 2015 and noted sobering bicycling safety statistics:

serious injuries for U.K. cyclists in 2013 were 31 percent higher than in 2009;
In the U.S., 726 cyclists were killed in 2012, a 7 percent increase from 2011; cyclists injured exceeded 49,000 in 2012, up 2 percent from 2011;
The total cost of bicyclist injuries and deaths is over $4 billion per year in the U.S.

“Currently, we have problem of distracted drivers, and it’s only getting worse,” says McLeod. “(Driverless technology) may be a way to deal with the increased number of distracted drivers.”

That makes sense as safety is the primary goal of driverless vehicles. The tricky part is that more people are choosing to commute by bike just as the use of cars is changing forever.

The photo at the top of this story was taken by Sascha Kohlmann in Berlin.