Warning: Sarcasm ahead.
Goodyear has apparently just invented a wheel that would allow a regular-looking car to fly. They are helping us baby boomers realize a dream from the pages of Popular Mechanics from the 1950s. An Intel guy says, quite seriously, flying cars will be here in five years. Uber agrees. Just think, instead of miserably slogging through stop-and-go traffic in jammed freeway lanes, we will be able to miserably slog through stop-and-go traffic in jammed air lanes. Such is progress. I am OK with the idea, just so long as I am no higher than two feet in elevation and I can literally drag my foot when I need to stop suddenly. I am reminded that the required spacing between smaller jet planes when approaching an airport under VFR conditions is 3 nautical miles, a slightly higher spacing than the 1/45 mile for a freeway lane at capacity. Oh, and the fuel economy of a helicopter with the same payload as a Prius is only 6 times worse.
I am disappointed to see no major cities in the US yet connected by maglev trains. Maglev promised exceptionally high-speed operations, maybe competitive to airlines. Oops, all real implementations of maglev to date have performance characteristics similar to good conventional rail. Perhaps 300 mph technology is not all that well suited to ½ mile station spacings. Maybe we haven’t been ambitious enough. California might be persuaded to consider maglev for revitalizing their high-speed rail project. Then if we were to connect it to a system from San Diego to El Paso, it could do double duty as a wall, eliminating a lot of expensive grade crossings with long bridge spans! This could be the political compromise we have all been waiting for. A PPP would make it even more attractive. We should ask Elon Musk for his list of Tesla investors; they will invest in anything with enough tech appeal.
Speaking of Tesla, since maglev is now a proven concept, we need to go the next step and start building Elon Musk’s hyperloop train everywhere. Could this be the solution to our transportation woes? 155 mph operation with an autonomous vehicle? I’m sold! Unfortunately, Musk’s concept is not a good candidate for my proposed San Diego to El Paso line. Too many spots for grade crossings.
Last week, a journal sent me a paper to review, and that paper assumed these obvious benefits of autonomous vehicles before plunging into some heavy network theory:
- Autonomous vehicles will greatly increase the capacity of traffic lanes;
- Autonomous vehicles will greatly reduce a driver’s subjective value of time;
- Autonomous vehicles will greatly improve fuel efficiency; and
- Autonomous vehicles will not do anything for passenger safety, or at least not enough to merit any mention by these authors.
Of course, none of this was backed up by analyses or empirical studies. I am thinking these assumptions must have been drawn from conventional wisdom. Great! Let’s base all our academic research on conventional wisdom. It’s lots easier than actually doing background research. I opted out of writing a review.
It would be far better for these concepts if we were to ignore principles of traffic flow, driver behavior, traveler behavior, political constraints, safety, and community impacts. I propose a $10 million research project devoted entirely to finding ways to suspend these inconveniences. If you are from FTA or FHWA, please write the check directly to me, personally. I will deliver the final report soon after we build our border rail project. However, I do not propose to suspend the laws of physics. One must have some degree of integrity!
It was just announced that Uber will not be charged with a crime for the March 18, 2018 crash of a self-driving car that killed a pedestrian. It seems Arizona has no laws to prevent unsafe operation of autonomous vehicles. There was an undisclosed settlement between Uber and the victim’s family, and litigation is continuing between the family and the City of Tempe. However, this litigation does not involve the self-driving aspects of the car; rather the suit boringly relates to alleged roadway design flaws. We are starving for case law on autonomous vehicles. It is clear to me that we need completely unregulated environments, such as was brilliantly created by Arizona, for operating these vehicles so we can build up case law as quickly as possible. To further speed deployment, we should lobby Congress to give big subsidies to self-driving car owners, just as it does now for electric vehicles. This will insure us a huge self-driving fleet well before we have the laws and infrastructure to accommodate it. We will be grateful for all those wrongful death lawsuits, so we can upgrade our benefit-cost studies.
As my mother would say, “Goodness gracious”, we are fortunate to be at the cutting edge of so many interesting technologies.
Alan Horowitz, Chapel Hill, March 12, 2019
Notes:
Honestly, my mother never said goodness anything in her life. Had she been asked, she would likely have said, “what a big load of crap!”.
I grew up in Arizona. I know first-hand how brilliant the state government can be.
Greetings Alan,
Evidently, many people are hoping that vehicle automation will increase roadway capacity. For example, in a recent freeway corridor study, a respected consulting firm confidently informed a state DOT and the public that in 2040 when the fleet reaches 85% connected-automated vehicles (CAVs), capacity will rise to 3,030 passenger cars per hour per lane. This 26% capacity increase, they asserted, will be like getting a fourth lane without building anything.
The logic for this leap of faith suggests that Smeed’s Law is alive and well: if automation reduces perception-reaction time (thus producing a safety benefit), why not give much of that benefit by reducing the headway from 0.9 seconds (in the non-automated condition) to 0.5 seconds (in the CAV platooning condition)?
Such thinking is complete nonsense, of course. Americans will not give away a technological safety advantage by driving more densely. Such a thing would require regulation. Maybe it could happen in Canada, or France, or Sweden, but not in the US. Instead, I’m pretty sure that Americans will throw away any safety advantages of CAVs by driving FASTER. I can see the freeway of the future: left lane CAVs only, speed limit 120 mph (never mind that pesky 50 mph lane speed differential).
I thought I was being obvious, but probably not. I am not giving an alternative prediction of the future of transportation technology. Rather, I am speaking against transportation plans and research that are based on exceptionally flimsy evidence. We are developing a horde mentality by accepting speculation as fact. The ethics of our profession are being compromised. This is not harmless. Bad planning and research can lead to bad decision making, as we have seen in the past.