Driverless by Hod Lipson & Melba Kurman

Author:Hod Lipson & Melba Kurman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2016-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Updating transportation policy

Since the doomed Demo 97 a few decades ago, the U.S. Department of Transportation and its organizational offspring, the NHTSA, and the FHA have been content with taking a largely passive approach toward driverless cars, sitting back to see where industry and individual states take them. Once upon a time, a cautious approach—given the absence of critical enabling information and communication technologies—was a sensible decision on the part of federal officials. As driverless-car technology continues to advance at a breakneck pace, however, there’s no excuse for the agency’s continuing focus on incremental initiatives such as V2X research pilots.

There are some positive indications, however, that the situation may be improving. In December 2015, Congress passed a long-awaited bill to improve the infrastructure of the federal highway system and transit systems called the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. The FAST Act provides roughly $300 billion for roads and transit systems for over five years. The act establishes grant money for advanced transportation management technologies and requires the GAO to submit a regular report to Congress on the status of autonomous transportation technology policy.

In 2016, U.S. transportation secretary Anthony Foxx announced that over the next ten years, the federal government will invest nearly $4 billion to accelerate the development and adoption of transformational, automotive technology through pilot projects.16 (At the time of this writing, it wasn’t clear exactly what these pilot projects would focus on; we hope not just V2X). Taking a more proactive approach than in the past, the USDOT said it will aim to provide guidance to industry on establishing definitions for safe operation of autonomous vehicles. The agency has also stated it will work with states to craft model policy guidance on the testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles.

If we could worm our way into the upper echelons of the federal government, here’s what we would do to accelerate the development of driverless-car technology. First, we would create an agency devoted to the topic of fully autonomous driving. Let’s call this new agency the Federal Autonomous Vehicles Agency, or AVA, similar to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that governs air traffic. The AVA would be responsible for setting aggressive and visionary strategy to make driverless cars a reality across all fifty states.

The FAA rigorously defines standards for redundancy and self-testing for aircraft; driverless cars need the same level of oversight. Federal transportation officials need to take a leadership role on defining key questions such as at what point is a driverless car “safe enough.” For example, is a self-driving car that averages one collision in 500,000 miles sufficiently safe to be allowed on public roads? (That’s a higher bar than we demand of taxi drivers.) Once defined, safety standards will need to be enforced.

One aspect of discussions of safety that’s difficult for many people to deal with is the uncomfortable fact that the introduction of driverless cars involves risk, uncertainty, and probably even some accidents. The problem is that the alternative solution, human drivers, has already proven itself to be even worse.

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