FUTURE PROOF
Autonomous cars will likely mean traffic getting worse before it gets better, reckons Paul Horrell
Many things bug me about the prospect of autonomous cars
I bring those concerns to researchers and developers who calmly reassure me they’ll eventually solve most of them But there’s one issue that no engineer will address Or at least none that I’ve met They just laugh it off
Here’s the theoretical example I give them On my pushbike in London if I need to cross the traffic I know it’d be insane to swerve in front of moving vehicles But what if in the future I saw an autonomous car? Clearly I could pedal across in front of it trusting it to slam on its brakes to avoid me Now extend the problem’s scope I could do the same if I were driving knowing I could happily barge in front of a robocar because it’d be programmed to proceed with saintly defensiveness Pedestrians too would treat autonomous cars in the same way no more waiting patiently for the green man Prankster kids would dawdle in the middle of the road Which means all the cars behind the autonomous vehicle would grind to a halt too Traffic chaos ahoy
Now here comes an autonomous driving researcher addressing the issue And he’s indicating that yes simulations predict that traffic flow will likely get worse when traffic is a mixture of autonomous and normal cars This is Nils Berkemeyer a
“SIMULATIONS PREDICT WITH AUTONOMOUS CARS, TRAFFIC FLOW WILL LIKELY GET WORSE”
director of selfdriving AI company Autobrains into which BMW and various system suppliers have invested Berkemeyer is bound to be a robocar cheerleader yet he admits the problem
However he reckons it’s not as simple as the modellers and grumpy TopGear columnists predict For a start Berkemeyer says that if autonomous cars prove safer and if they don’t prove safer they’d surely be banned pretty darned sharpish then we’ll see fewer accidents and fewer of the snarlups that result
He also reckons that traffic will flow better because autonomous vehicles drive more smoothly This means they have a dampening effect on what’s behind them One well known property of a traffic stream is that one driver accelerating and braking sets up a standing wave that brings things to a halt some way behind them Robocars would reduce that
He also says that the robocars won’t be mixing it entirely with “dumb” cars aka ones driven by intelligent humans but with others that have at least Level assistance systems so there will be sensors on every car and they can cooperate
I get his point about the lowered accident rate but others don’t cut much ice at least except on motorways where I don’t live and I hope you don’t either Where humans live the local traffic is jammy and it’s mixing with people on bikes and on their feet Cyclists don’t have Level assistance Pedestrians dodging across roads mean the vehicles have to stop so flow becomes lumpy
This autonomous vehicle maven concludes that “mixed traffic will not be quite as big a challenge as today’s simulations would have us believe” But still a challenge then For which read more gridlock getting worse before it gets better
TG’s eco-conscious megabrain, Paul Horrell, is one of the world’s most respected and experienced car writers. Has attended every significant car launch since the Model T