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      08-27-2019, 05:35 AM   #22
Efthreeoh
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesNoBrakes View Post
That doesn't quite make sense. Congress would tell the DOT to prepare and make rules, they'd call in their experts and engineers, get advisory boards with other experts, and draft rules. Congress usually doesn't make these kind of rules or draft plans except in rare cases and usually when they do, they have to "fix" them for the exact reason you explain, because they aren't experts. They only set the more general policy/rules. The "how to do it" falls on the agencies.

Secondly, you are the only one saying it's going to solve congestion. Obviously it's not, you need more capacity or to have more passengers if you are going to solve congestion. That's a different issue. Safety is the autonomous driving issue. Again, most lawmakers and and agencies are concerned with deaths and injuries. Concerns about congestion usually far pretty far below this. How does congestion lead to phone use? If you are taking stop-and-go traffic, well that probably limits deaths/injuries just by the nature of slow speeds, but that's a heck of a stretch. Does congestion lead to eating food in the car too? Dealing with kids? Talking on the phone? The idea that you aren't going to have any congestion, no stop-n-go, no stop-signs or lights seems pretty far fetched given city density and lack of public transportation. Is that really where the most bang for the buck is? You can only make highways so wide and there will still be choke points and merges that you can't make better. Just look at some of the mega-on-ramp-overpass complexes in Texas. My god, it's just getting out of control in some of those places, almost better to start from scratch.

I disagree that the only way to save lives or have less injuries is to slow speeds. Keeping cars from careening off the road is another way. Keeping cars from hitting other cars, like on-coming traffic, is yet another, keeping them from slamming into a stationary car at 70mph is yet another, and so on. These rely on the autonomous technology. Lowering deaths by lowering speeds to have less injuries and damage in crashes is not the entire principle of this, as you claim. Autonomous cars can be zipping along at 70mph and still be safer, because they won't drift off, hit an on-coming car, run over a motorcycle, etc.
Congress has to set the goals and funding levels; that is what legislation does. The agencies then try to achieve those goals within the time frame and budget the legislation states.

I drive on Route 66 outside of Washington DC. Between Manassass, VA and Centerville, VA 66 backs up to a crawl most days. I see a lot of drivers on their phones more when the traffic slows than when it is at the 60 MPH posted speed limit. Then the distracted phone use exacerbates the traffic congestion because drivers are not fully paying attention to the traffic flow, which means they don't speed up when they should, or they stay 8 car lengths behind the vehicle in front of them because they are finishing a text. In your vision, AV would solve this problem of distracted driving thus reducing congestion. But as you stated, and I wrote earlier in this thread, congestion is a result of cross traffic at intersections, where the road capacity is overwhelmed and can't store enough vehicles waiting at intersections, so the traffic backs up on other primary roads.

The only way AV can solve that situation is to control movement of each car and keep two cars out of the same spot on the road at the same time. I do not think the car-to-car AV systems now and even in the future can prevent all collisions in that scenario. Software and computers are not near perfect (despite what engineers will tell you - I work with plenty of them ), and at the speeds involved, redundant backup systems are probably not fast enough to recover in case of a vehicle equipment, hardware or software failure. The short distance of vehicle separation at high speed has been one of the touted attributes of a Level 5 automated traffic system, suggested as reducing congestion because more cars can be safely packed into a given roadway space (at higher speed), as it is considered computers are better drivers than humans. So, it not me making those assertations, it's the AV industry.

Again, when cars back up onto major roads from secondary roads because throughput at intersections are the cause, speeds resultantly slow on the primary roads whether a human or computer is driving. Timing at intersections will take route planning by a local master transportation control system and over-the-air comms to each vehicle. All those systems are in use today in the air traffic control industry and none are infallible. The speed, traffic density, and two-dimensional space make the automated separation cars way harder than airplanes.

I'm not saying the engineering challenges can't be overcome, but I am saying the cost to truly make a safe driving environment via autonomous vehicles is going to be incredibly expensive. My opinion is the side effects may not be liked by today's public (but maybe tech-wheenie, government controlled future citizens may think differently). When the Government controls the flow of traffic, which it eventually will have to, when the system gets overwhelmed, and it will, in order to maintain levels of safety (stated as the main goal of the DOT, NTSB, and NHTSA), the Government will curtail access to the system, which means it will prevent citizens from travelling when and where then want to, and slow the rate of traffic. Today's public will not tolerate such a system.

And you mentioned motorcycles...I'd love to know how they fit into the system. And this all gets migrated to level 5 while humans still get to drive their old-fashion oil burners... "First, kill all the lawyers"...
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Last edited by Efthreeoh; 08-27-2019 at 05:41 AM..
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