Driverless cars: convenience means congestion
Study suggests self-driving vehicles will increase demand for journeys
After a decade of hype and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, you still cannot buy a self-driving car. Undeterred, tech companies and carmakers continue to pour money into the transport revolution, promising a safer future. If they are successful, there would be a lot more cars on the road.
Highlight text
Predictions for autonomous vehicles often assume travel habits will not change. Commutes will continue, but travellers will be able to work or watch TV instead of looking at the road. The best case scenarios suggest traffic will improve. Precise, machine-controlled driving will close gaps between cars, for example.
But an experiment by the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Davis suggests this would not be the case. Researchers offered 43 households a personal chauffeur as a stand in for a self-driving car. Freed from the hassle of driving, users chose to take far more trips. Travel by car rose 60 per cent on average. The chauffeur was only available for 60 hours per week. If driverless travel was possible at all hours of the day the total might have been higher.
Just as MIT found that ride-sharing increased traffic in cities, so driverless cars are likely to increase congestion by increasing journeys by car. Children not old enough to drive could take solo journeys. Older people who do not like to drive at night may use their cars more. Traffic jams and city congestion would get worse.
Highlight text
This could be solved if cars are shared. But drivers will not automatically swap their own vehicle for rides in a robo taxi. General Motors reported it was looking to launch robo taxis in 2019. But at this year’s annual US Consumer Electronics Show it focused on would-be owners, saying they would be able to buy their own self-driving cars this decade.
The most convincing rationale for self driving cars is safety. A blog by Google in 2010 noted the 1.2mn annual traffic deaths around the world and claimed self-driving cars offered a solution. Technology, it said, could cut that number by as much as half. But such statistics do not take into account the dangers created by more cars on the road.
Regulation could change the outcome by limiting car numbers. The future may also be further away than investors hope. Predictions for driverless cars hitting the road en masse have repeatedly been proved wrong. Full autonomy at scale remains a distant goal.