Study: Intelligent Cars Could Boost Highway Capacity by 273%

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/intelligent-cars-could-boost-highway-capacity-by-273#.UEZAIqv-vCA.hackernews

by eguizzo • 14 years ago

72 74 14 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

michaelpinto• 14 years ago

I think self driven cars are going to be an amazing blessing to senior citizens — this could really reinvent suburbia in a good way.

ncavig• 14 years ago

True, but not even that limited. Any individual that could benefit from not having to concern themselves with the outside environment. In addition to the senior citizens, you also have the handicapped, the makeup applicators, the cell phone users, limited eyesight drivers, the overall bad drivers, and more importantly, impaired drivers (alcohol especially).

Not just performance in terms of efficient driving and merging, but also safety and essentially taking human operator error out of the equation (for the most part)

jstalin• 14 years ago

Not to mention exciting opportunities for mass transit. Imagine jitneys or other smaller van-like transit options that have dynamic routes based on demand. No more fixed routes and inefficient buses.

sp332• 14 years ago

Any individual that could benefit from not having to concern themselves with the outside environment.

I think people will take this way too far. They'll turn on the autopilot and take a nap while blasting through a school zone or something.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Surely not as much as widespread delivery services? Of course the delivery services could use self driving cars, to make them as cheap as they were 50 years ago when almost all shops delivered.

Just because cars made suburbia possible still does not mean it is a good thing.

stcredzero2• 14 years ago

When they are mainstream and people are comfortable with the idea, it will start filtering down to use by kids. Then we'll see the reinvention of suburbia and even deeper changes in the culture and the fabric of society.

a-priori• 14 years ago

Wow, about a month ago on Reddit, I made a quick calculation where I predicted a 250% improvement in capacity.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y28g8/suspend_al...

yanowitz• 14 years ago

Is it just coincidence that this is essentially e? I know the natural log pops up in all kinds of unexpected places. Is this one of them?

mistercow2• 14 years ago

Probably a coincidence. Keep in mind that "273% more" actually means a multiplication factor of 3.73, not 2.73.

sukuriant• 14 years ago

Unless the article derped

SilasX3• 14 years ago

I'd be more concerned about the phony precision. Not 250%, not 270%, no -- 273%.

saraid216• 14 years ago

Considering this references an actual research paper, I'd wait to actually read the paper before calling the precision phony.

001sky3• 14 years ago

Isn't the historical problem 100% of feasible capacity will be used?

SilasX3• 14 years ago

Bingo. Until you can handle the problem of people moving further out to make up for the shorter commute, you're just deferring the problem, not fixing it.

lallysingh2• 14 years ago

Well, yes, but not from the way one thinks here. Governments will be fast to reduce their expenditures on growing capacity.

This'll have the effect of making roads denser, and less pleasant to drive on, and increase the sales rate of self-driving cars...

brittohalloran• 14 years ago

My first thought is minority report "pods"

paulsutter• 14 years ago

The introduction of radial tires caused a collapse of the tire industry. People didn't start driving four times as far when the useful distance of a tire increased.

Human driven cars are idle 95% of the time. Many fewer self-driving cars could handle the same capacity with ride sharing services like uber.

I'm concerned that auto manufacturers would take actions to prevent this outcome, reducing the potential.

EDIT: silverstorm that's an awesome point

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

On the other hand, self driving cars open all sorts of possibilities. Radial tires didn't increase the number of tires in use, because the number of operators didn't change and neither did the number of wheels on a car.

Self-driving cars releases the number of active vehicles from the constraint of number of operators.

dvanduzer3• 14 years ago

The point is that an industry currently operating at 5% efficiency whose profits rely on this fact will fight disruption.

The Radial tire came from within the automotive industry, so even if there were some temporary losers, there wasn't any leverage point to fight adoption.

With Google leading this charge rather than Ford, I think the best hope is for American car manufactures to strike a quasi-monopolistic partnership to gain advantage over foreign manufacturers.

(I may be somewhat incorrect about the profit piece, what with the weird relationship between car manufacturers and car dealerships.)

latortuga• 14 years ago

Not to mention the possible implications for the auto insurance industry. When all cars drive themselves, am I responsible for my car getting into a collision? If not, who pays for it? If so, how can that be justified given that I didn't actually do anything to cause the collision? It's interesting to think about, for sure.

ableal• 14 years ago

The auto insurance companies will make a killing for a year or two, issuing coverage that will not be cashed in.

Then the auto insurance business will go nearly extinct - after all, their margin is a percentage of the compensation paid. If there are no accidents, there are no payouts, and no margin ...

mratzloff3• 14 years ago

Really, it's not a particularly hard problem to solve. By letting the car drive itself, courts must necessarily conclude (for reasons of practicality if nothing else) that you are taking responsibility for that decision. Any collisions that result are handled by liability insurance. As time goes on and the robot car industry proves itself in practice, insurance companies will give big discounts to owners of robot cars, which provides a market incentive to buy one.

vijayr• 14 years ago

If software drove all cars, driving cars would become much more efficient

1. cars will last longer, which would make car manufacturers unhappy

2. cars will become more fuel efficient, which would make fuel industry unhappy

3. insurance rates will go down, which would make insurance industry unhappy

4. number of accidents would be less, cars would require lesser maintenance which would make mechanics unhappy

etc

But, more people (elderly, people with disabilities) would buy cars, so number of cars sold would go up. Also, it would open up whole lot of possibilities on the software side, construction industry etc (what if roads are designed for super efficient drivers, than humans?).

Overall, it would be awesome to watch this happen - kudos to Google for tackling this.

eumenides1• 14 years ago

5. Housing prices would go down in major cities in the short term? Less demand to be in a metro area?

Living in the suburbs would be much more palatable because you could convert your "drive time" to "internet/reading time".

Auto driving cars would be not be just a disruption (i hate that word) to the auto industry, it would be an earthquake that would have many aftershocks to the economy as a whole.

stephengillie2• 14 years ago

The old rule of thumb is that most people drive their car 15,000 miles per year. If we assume that's 5% utilization, what does 50% utilization look like?

Each car would travel closer to 150,000 miles per year. Monthly tune-ups and brake replacements. New tires twice a year. A modern combustion engine would need weekly oil changes and major maintenance every 6 months. It would last maybe 3 years under that workload.

Electric car batteries may last 5 to 8 years at 150,000 miles per year. And that brings up another problem with increasing our utilization - we'll effectively be using the same amount of energy to transport ourselves, but using many fewer tools (cars) to transport ourselves. There's a limit to how quickly the batteries can be recharged in each individual car.

lallysingh2• 14 years ago

A great case for electric cars, but remember that you will have competition from technologies built in long-haul trucking. But they'll love self-driving for their own reasons.

There's no reason you can't have a stop-station quick-replace batteries, preferably automatically. You just need enough safety there to make sure the batteries don't fall out on the road.

dvanduzer3• 14 years ago

Come on guys, you're the IEEE. Lead the story with the second set of graphs, not the first set of graphs.

I'm also going to go out on a limb and guess that this study doesn't account for the inevitable malware when the majority of vehicles are communicating with each other.

EliRivers• 14 years ago

"I'm also going to go out on a limb and guess that this study doesn't account for the inevitable malware when the majority of vehicles are communicating with each other."

It's not inevitable. The simple solution to malware - just don't run any software you didn't have when you were first turned on - seems pretty solid here. Software updates handled the way airliners do it - not by letting the consumer reach out into the aether and grabbing whatever shiny malware infested dreck he can find.

dvanduzer3• 14 years ago

Aha. s/malware/bad actors/

A little late getting back to the party, but the problem I intended to highlight was the potential for DDOSing the traffic network, or someone otherwise gaming the system.

samstave• 14 years ago

I sure hope Google and Tesla are partnering to bring the tesla's next model to the market as the first fully electric and robotic self driving car.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

Tesla's goal is to create a fun-to-drive electric car. It would be opposite to their goal to create a self-driving car.

rscale• 14 years ago

I'd love to see BetterPlace work with Google on this one, because an autonomous electric car with a robotically swappable battery is a lot more interesting than an autonomous car that needs to park for a large portion of the day.

Most of the pieces are available for a wonderful new transportation infrastructure. Here's to hoping they mature sooner rather than later.

praptak• 14 years ago

This is not necessarily good news. Among other thing this means the capacity for pollution also rises, although hopefully not by the same factor - maybe automated cars can be more energy efficient than human drivers.

dwiel• 14 years ago

There is a large amount of pollution cause by the manufacturing of cars, which can have a net benefit. Another benefit is that you could use very efficient cars for the trips that they are suited for like going shopping for groceries by yourself, and inefficient ones like picking up a new refrigerator.

That said I'm also worried that it could increase the time spent in cars since there won't be as much negative feedback from stressful/boring/unproductive driving.

btilly2• 14 years ago

I'm curious what happens when you have highways filled to capacity, and then more cars are added.

A busy highway moving smoothly at capacity is like a super-cooled fluid. As long as nothing goes wrong, it can last, but the second you introduce some delay, somewhere, you wind up with a rapidly expanding solid (ie traffic jam). Intelligent cars boost the capacity of smooth traffic more than they do the capacity of bumper to bumper slow traffic, and hence the transitions from "awesome" to "oh shit" should be much nastier than they are now.

The traffic jams of the future could make our current ones look tame.

paulovsk3• 14 years ago

please, could you elaborate on this? I loved the metaphor.

>"As long as nothing goes wrong, it can last, but the second you introduce some delay, somewhere, you wind up with a rapidly expanding solid "

stupandaus• 14 years ago

Supercooled water for example could stay in liquid form if it was in a vessel with no imperfections. All it takes is one imperfection or seed to be thrown in, and the entire mixture will suddenly turn to ice, even though the temperature has not changed. Plenty of videos on Youtube showing it happening.

btilly2• 14 years ago

The capacity of the road as being the number of cars passing by per second. Which is the number of lines times the rate at which cars are traveling, divided by the distance between cars in a lane. Now compare:

Smooth: Going 60 mph and leaving 2 car lengths of space, so the distance from front bumper to front bumper is 3 car lengths.

Congested: Going 30 mph and leaving 1 car length of space, so the distance from front bumper to front bumper is 2 car lengths.

In the former road you go 2x as fast and need only 1.5x as much space, so the former road has a third as much capacity as the latter. So if cars are moving along a highway already operating at capacity into a congested area, cars are arriving at the transition faster than they are leaving. Thanks to the law of conservation of cars, excess cars must accumulate at that transition, and since they have nowhere to go, they wind up parked in a traffic jam. And as long as the road feeding it is at capacity, that traffic jam grows.

From the point of view of the driver, this is what it looks like. You're sailing along in smooth fast traffic, and then hit a sudden traffic jam with no warning. After sitting there for a long time the road starts moving again, but goes much slower.

This is common experience in Los Angeles traffic. And a significant fraction of accidents happen at that sudden transition from smooth sailing at 60 mph to a dead stop. (In fact my wife got rear-ended in that exact scenario a year and a half ago on the 405 near Los Angeles airport.)

tgrass• 14 years ago

Traffic waves. http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html

Takeaway: don't tailgate.

stephengillie2• 14 years ago

As a highway fills with cars moving the same speed, it begins to resemble a 4-lane-wide moving bus, or a huge conveyor belt. More than half of the surface of the roadway is covered with large steel boxes moving independently at the same speed, just a few feet of space between each one.

When humans operate on a roadway, they don't manage cars on the roads. They manage the bubbles of space between their cars. Physics tells you that you'll need a bubble of space ahead of you for you to move your car into. Traffic jams happen because not enough "space" is "bubbling" backwards for drivers to form a bubble in which they can travel forward.

elchief• 14 years ago

With the right software, they will be able to drive like a school of fish, at very high speeds.

wtvanhest4• 14 years ago

3 points should be considered:

1) Even with robots there will be unknowns which the robots will have to deal with which will still require a margin of safety. Likely that margin of safety will be lower with robots, but definitely will not approach 100% capacity. (things like tire blow-outs, deer, even sudden rain etc).

2) Road wear will still need to be considered in any cost benefit analysis. Presumably road wear is less of a factor than jamming cars on the road, but I don't know that for sure and someone should do the math on that. There is also a point where if you exceed a certain capacity percentage, anytime road work needs to be done it would dramatically impact traffic since there is less of buffer to absorb the lack of lanes.

3) As we increase capacity, we may run in to additional problems that we cannot imagine. Bridges for example could be an issue as the amount of weight would be increased dramatically, even more remote a possibility would be damage from additional vibrations etc. Those are just ideas that come to mind, but there are probably many other risks we are not considering.

Overall, I am 100% for robotic cars, robotic passenger jets, etc. I just wanted to brainstorm a few future problems that may need to be considered as we move forward. The last thing I want to see is a 5 year setback.

Then again, the engineers at google and elsewhere have probably considered all these things which just seem new to me as a casual outside observer.

maxerickson2• 14 years ago

If automatic car implies networked car, routes that are under construction could easily be converted into toll roads (presuming there is a toll that will offset the congestion). I guess lots of people wouldn't like it, but lots of people already don't like traffic jams.

wtvanhest4• 14 years ago

Can you imagine how crazy that concept could become? I wonder how elasticity of demand for toll roads would change if a computer was driving your car.

If when you got in, it gave you 5 options with estimated times and prices and you could always choose it would be awesome.

ajross2• 14 years ago

I think your broad point is correct; no system can be perfect. But most of your criticisms have straightforward rebuttals. Robots, being robots, are going to be inherently safer at the stuff you mention (tire failure, sudden obstacles, weather) simply because those things are "dangerous" precisely because they are unforseen and require the driver to take action quickly. Robots are faster.

Road wear is a cost, but it scales at worst linearly with traffic. I can't imagine anyone crying because we can now build ($$$$) half as many lanes of highways but much repave ($) them twice as often.

And the bridges things is just wrong. Bridges are obviuosly designed for maximal loads, which in this case would be a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of even more weight than a packed stream of robots. And that happens routinely.

001sky3• 14 years ago

We don't want to mis-underestimate the complexity driving a car. The dynamics of obstacle avoidance, for example. Have you ever been hit by a deer?. Had a blowout (not a flat) on an SUV, say in a decreasing radius, off camber turn? Can you solve for some of these considerations? certainly. But you would need extra-ordinary technology. The dataset for camber-level 3D GPS maps, for example = large. What about a sinkhole or collapse of roadway al-la Embarcadero freeway? Or the Collapse of the Bay Bridge? What about hydro-planing after a rainstorm in CA? Lastly, ABS can be dangerous on snow, dirt and other imperfect road surfaces. How do you feather the brakes? Just some edge cases. On the cost side, the interstate system is ~complete. So, you wont be saving money by avoiding future construction, in proportion. You will just be speeding up the depreciation of the existing capital infrastructure. So, again, that's not a clear cut case there.

wtvanhest4• 14 years ago

By broad point was not really clear, but could simply be stated as:

We will make a lot of assumptions about what is a linear expense, linear threat etc. without really knowing what will be linear until we pack an extremely tight grouping of cars on the road.

Taking my point further:

For road work, expense may go from linear to nonlinear because of something that seems completely counterintuitive. Imagine every car now has variation in the exact placement within the lanes. Highways have marks where the majority of cars drive, but variation in drivers accounts for variation in path. If every robot executed their driving in the exact 1 foot per tire space, it is likely that 1 foot per tire space would require a greater than linear road work. This could be solved by programing an automatic variation in all cars or possibly changing how roads are built so that they require only cement in those 1 foot areas.

Now, an example of a time when engineers thought they had it right, but didn’t think of everything:

Engineering has come a long way since the Tacoma bridge incedent, but we cannot underestimate what assumptions were previously made that will be incorrect when we start driving far more vehicles on roads. In the Tacoma bridge edge case, sustained winds caused flutter (self-feeding vibration) which caused the bridge to fail.

While I do not suggest this is a likely case, the fact is, we are probably not considering everything and there will be issues we do not foresee, but we should try to eliminate as many edge cases as possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940)

To your point about robots being faster: Yes, I agree they are faster, but even the fastest robot will need some space to interact. In a situation where a truck on the highway has a blowout which causes large debris to separate from the truck, the robots still need some room to slow down. In the extreme example where cars are 1 foot away from each other, an accident like that would have tremendous negative consequences that even robots would have a tough time dealing with.

We will have self-driving cars, and they will likely be much safer than human operated cars, but we are going to also have setbacks and many of them can be avoided by looking to the future and trying to solve the problems early rather than later.

nuclear_eclipse2• 14 years ago

> Bridges for example could be an issue as the amount of weight would be increased dramatically

If that was a large concern, then wouldn't we see a lot of bridge failures during bumper-to-bumper traffic due to accidents and/or rush hour? I would hope that bridges are designed to handle the weight of cars being packed that closely together, seeing how often it actually happens in the real world.

russell• 14 years ago

2) Do the work at night, esp. paving. In CA this is routinely done, even for roads of moderate capacity.

wtvanhest4• 14 years ago

You have to pay workers more at night which will increase costs in areas that currently use day workers. That is just what I can think of offhand. Likely there are no fullproof solutions to this problem, but rather OK solutions that will work in some cases and not in others.

Then again, the future probably has all road work done by robots too so this will be less and less of an issue.

bencpeters• 14 years ago

I've always had a few questions about the move toward fully automated cars (and I don't mean to raise these as luddite objections, I'm just curious how it will play out, and what steps are being taken to address this)

1)How will manual cars (and motorcycles) be managed once we have non trivial percentages of cars on the road automated? Will there be automated-only highways? Automated-only lanes? Is the beginning of the end for those of us who really enjoy driving (or motorcyles?). Or will those things just be limited to non-urban/track environments?

2)How does all this automation & closer car traveling @ high speeds work when natural events intercede. The most obvious one is weather (rain or snow), which can be a huge problem for cities as is, but it seems like having cars on the road with no "bubbles" of space to buffer great exacerbates the potential for massive accidents when there is marginal traction. Secondly, in many areas of the country, wildlife on highways is a very common occurrence (even in cities there's the occasional road debris/unexpected obstacle). I wonder how well an at-capacity automated highway could react to a sudden bit of road obstruction w/o running into a massive accident (or massive traffic jam) situation.

Of course, many/most human drivers don't handle adverse weather or unexpected obstacles very well either, so maybe these are just facts of driving, not arguments against automated cars as such. Still, I'm interested to see what attempts are being made to mitigate the effects of such variables.

maxerickson2• 14 years ago

I think there are a lot of situations where automatic cars would leave more space than humans, who seem to be prone to (unnecessary) tailgating.

error542• 14 years ago

Let's not forget traffic jams caused by rubbernecking.

yk• 14 years ago

The first automated car needs to handle human drivers well. Therefore all later cars will just inherit the ability to share a road with humans ( and very likely there will be laws which mandate this until all cars are automated).

About your second question, at least at high speeds the capacity of an break is more important for the distance needed to stop the car, than the reaction time. So the situation does not change much.

error542• 14 years ago

You bring up some very valid points. There will always be drivers on the road (assuming the government doesn't make it illegal) long after automated cars are fully integrated into society. Hell, I bet it will take at least 10-15 years before all the states legalize self driving cars which of course would be mandatory for any sort of highway travel.

I think too many people are reaching to calculate the effect this will have on the price of gas, insurance, etc but we have to remember that full integration of automated cars is likely to take decades. All of the major industries will have plenty of time adjust and find a way to survive.

TechNewb• 14 years ago

Intelligent societies could build infrastructures and communities that don't need cars.

moskie• 14 years ago

This type of information has made me rethink my overly-negative opinion of how the United States has chosen to spend its transportation infrastructure efforts. I've always been under the impression that car-centric designs are grossly inefficient, and used primarily due to culture and profit of the automobile and oil industries, while putting actually transportation efficiency on the back burner.

But automated cars could flip the efficiency numbers around. Really excited to see where this technology takes us.

tonylemesmer• 14 years ago

Am I missing something here? Already our motorways / highways are not being used at this higher capacity but when something bad happens there is no redundancy. Everything grinds to a halt. What's the desire to make this worse? Also does it not put even more pressure on the roads leading to the highway? - increasing congestion to the point where having higher usage of highways is pointless.

Study: Intelligent Cars Could Boost Highway Capacity by 273%

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