Pollution Free Cities: Time to Outlaw Cars with Drivers?

Monday, October 1, 2012

Time to Outlaw Cars with Drivers?

Look, no hands (The Economist, Sep. 1, 2012)

Also discussed here: Kiss your bus goodbye(Bern Grush, Traffic Technology International, Aug/Sep 2012)

And here: This week in self-driving cars (Grush Hour, Aug. 2, 2012)

And here: Robot Taxis(Pollution Free Cities, Feb. 2, 2011)

Today we review an article in the Economist which looks at the progress and potential of driverless cars which remove the human element responsible for 90% of traffic accidents and, among other things, much of the congestion and resulting air pollution that afflicts any cities today. Earlier we had looked at one person robot taxis being developed at MIT. Google’s Street View program has been using driverless cars operationally for some time in various cities in the USA and Canada with zero accidents. The benefits both economic and environmental , not to speak of the design of cities with a higher quality of life so outweigh the costs of developing a production model that one day the law may even outlaw manually driven cars!

Key Quotes:

“On current trends it [deaths from traffic accidents worldwide]will exceed 150,000 people a month by 2020, according to the World Health Organisation, as cars become more widespread in developing countries, increasing the number of vehicles on the world’s roads from around 1 billion in 2010 to 2 billion”

“Around 90% of accidents are caused by human error”

Benefits of driverless cars:

”could co-ordinate their routes and travel in close formation,
increasing the capacity of road networks, reducing congestion and saving fuel.
able to drop someone off and then go and park themselves.
usher in an era of widespread car-sharing, with vehicles dispatched on demand to people who need them, rather than spending most of the day sitting idle by the side of the road.
do away with the stress of driving”

“Traffic lights and road signs would no longer be needed.”

“it would allow cities to get bigger, by reducing the time and stress associated with commuting. On the other, it could allow cities to become denser, by reducing the amount of space that needs to be dedicated to roads and parking. Alternatively, space allocated to roads in city centres could be used for bike lanes or parks.”

“shared driverless cars would spend more time on the road and less time parked, meaning that we would need many fewer cars for the same volume of VMT”

“if self-driving cars really are safer than cars driven by humans, the law could work in their favour, too. Some cities might ban manual driving, to save lives and ease congestion.”