Could India's crowded roads help us create better cars?
“In 60 seconds you have to consider 70 options,” says my rickshaw driver Raju, leaning over his shoulder as we weave through traffic. We’re navigating the infamous congested streets of Bangalore, and he’s explaining the rules of the road. Having lived in India for two-and-a-half years, I get what he means. Not an inch of the road is wasted – if there’s a gap, a scooter will fill it. Vehicles travel bumper to bumper. Overtaking is attempted as frequently as possible. Indicators and wing mirrors are optional extras. Most drivers seem to rely on the incessant honking of nearby vehicles – almost a form of echolocation.
But there is method to the madness. Drivers deftly navigate around manoeuvres that would lead to accidents in the UK, and offenders rarely elicit more than a mutter. They’ve adapted to predictable unpredictability. “We expect anything; only then do we make predictions. We are always expecting that the car in front could go left, right, brake suddenly,” Raju says. "Something always happens."
This driving philosophy has complex cultural and historical roots, but it's also a product of rapid growth in both urban populations and vehicle ownership – which government figures show nearly quadrupled between 2000 and 2013. This growth is outstripping the ability to build new infrastructure, leaving citizens to adapt.
India is far from alone – rapid urban overcrowding and car ownership put countries like China, Brazil and the Philippines all in a similar boat.
But for many tech companies and researchers, India’s chaotic roads make it the perfect testing ground. They might help us solve some of the big problems that come with living in crowded cities… ones that are only going to keep getting more crowded.
Overcrowding in Earth’s cities is a complex, nuanced problem with no magic bullet solution – it requires a comprehensive game plan that addresses everything from infrastructure to energy to income inequality. But as far as those cities’ roads are concerned, technologists all over the world are pursuing one grand idea in particular – one idea that doesn’t even involve humans.
Self-driving cars bring the promise to keep traffic flowing and to help us optimise our journeys. The argument is that smart robot cars could communicate with each other, better sense obstacles and generally create a more organised flow of traffic. But much of this technology is being developed for the orderly streets of the West. Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick has said India would be the last place to get driverless cars after experiencing Delhi traffic. That hasn’t deterred design firm Tata Elxsi, which is building a self-driving system that could be retrofitted to any car, and have started testing prototypes on a test track near their Bangalore headquarters.
Road testing is far away though and they’re under no illusions about the challenges. “Driving behaviour is a lot more erratic here,” says Nitin Pai, head of marketing and strategy. “Rules are not rules, they're more guidelines.” And that’s exactly why thinking about Indian roads in particular could help us come up with the best ideas.
Self-driving cars rely heavily on machine learning – that’s when AI uses mountains of data to train itself to do things like recognise vehicles and predict their trajectories over time. So far, such cars have been tested across the globe in places like San Francisco and Pittsburgh in the US, and in smaller cities in countries like Japan and China. But most research has been done in the West, where driver behaviour could be argued to be more predictable and roads are reliable with clear signs.
Indian roads throw up plenty of obstacles that don’t appear on German roads, which means that an AI trained on German data won’t be able to recognise all the objects a self- driving car will encounter on India’s roads. For example, “any dataset you take from a European or American university won't feature a typical autorickshaw,” he says. “If there aren’t autos in my dataset my self-driving car will never recognise one because my AI system has not been trained to recognise autos.” It’s not just rickshaws; in India scooters and motorbikes are far more prevalent and cars also compete with a menagerie of unconventional road users.
“People suddenly come into the road, so do cattle, monkeys, elephants,” laughs Raju the rickshaw driver. “They are also part of our traffic so we are always looking out for them.”