Tag Archives: driverless cars

Possible link between major music releases and driving deaths

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A recent working paper looked at the possible connection between music releases and traffic fatalities:

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A group of researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School recently issued a working paper reporting an association between the release days of the most-streamed albums and an increase in US traffic fatalities. The authors say the pattern is consistent with smartphone-enabled driver distraction, including the use of in-vehicle phone-mirroring platforms.

“Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real-world effects are difficult to study,” the researchers said in their explanation for performing the study. Fatal traffic accidents and release days for popular streaming albums, the team said, were chosen as an “exogenous event” that “may offer an opportunity to quasi-experimentally study the impact of distraction using observational data.”…

The team used data from the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which catalogs all fatal crashes on public US roadways, and compared that to data from Spotify charts, looking specifically at the top 10 albums with the most first-day streams between 2017 and 2022 (Taylor Swift and Drake each appear three times in the top 10, for those curious)…

They adjusted for fixed effects like holidays, the day of the week and week of the year, repeated the analyses to select for infotainment systems and other automobile information, and accounted for driver characteristics including age, the number of people in the car, and involvement of alcohol. The team even conducted multiple “placebo album” falsification tests, running experiments on randomly-selected dates, to be sure they weren’t overlooking something else unknown.

This sounds like an example of a “natural experiment” where researchers can see what happens to driving deaths on Fridays with major music releases and Fridays without them.

Three quick thoughts in response:

  1. I remember when major music releases were on Tuesdays, not Fridays. And when the music was not yet digital, a consumer had to go to a location to buy a physical copy. I was never in any release lines but I definitely went to stores on release day to buy CDs. (Have never done this for records or cassettes.)
  2. How many people enjoy new music in a car versus via ear buds, headphones, and speakers in other settings? A moving vehicle can make it difficult to hear music. The road is noisy. A vehicle makes noise. The car has a certain sound system. In newer vehicles, the listener is streaming music. But driving is better with entertainment. And driving with friends and music can be fun. Driving fast with friends and loud music can feel fun.
  3. What might be a public health response to this? Regulations about screens in cars – making them easier to operate, smaller, less distracting, etc.? Music release days back on Tuesdays or another weekday to avoid the possible connections to weekends? Public safety messages? Promoting the use of driverless vehicles?

Mapping and regulation needed before self-driving cars can operate in Illinois

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Two big steps need to be taken before Waymo can operate autonomous vehicles in Illinois:

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The self-driving taxi company is deploying about 10 vehicles in Chicago to start mapping the city’s streets — thus “laying the early groundwork” for future operations here — Waymo said Wednesday. 

But for now, the cars will be driven by people. State officials say legislative change is likely needed to give the green light to self-driving cars in Illinois, and Waymo’s Chicago soft launch comes as a battle over the issue is heating up in Springfield…

The mayor’s office confirmed Waymo had notified the city it would be operating here “in order to map streets formations, record geographical data, and better understand driving conditions.” The company assured the city it would not deploy autonomous vehicles in Chicago yet, the mayor’s office said….

Though several legislative attempts last year went nowhere, state lawmakers have filed at least three bills related to autonomous vehicle regulation since January…

I was aware of the need for a regulatory framework. Rules need to be established. Liability needs to be defined. Political negotiations or compromises need to take place. There are regulations from other places can provide direction but there may also be Illinois or Chicago specific concerns.

I was more surprised to hear about the mapping needs. What additional information does Waymo need compared to what is already available? What extra details will be captured? How much information can the mapping gather? How much data does the typical Waymo vehicle have access to while moving around the streets of Chicago?

There are a lot of roadways in Chicago. Driving them all would take less time than running them all. But it will still take some time. Will the mapping be done before the legislative or regulatory activity finishes? Are there multiple waves of data collection?

The article provides no possible dates of when action related to this will finish. Perhaps Chicago will have its driverless cars in a year or a few years. When that happens, it will be with massive amounts of mapping data and clear state (and local?) guidelines.

Does that autonomous semi also make stops at Buc-ee’s?

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Drivers traveling at night between certain American cities have some new company on the roads:

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Autonomous trucks are now driving highways at night, hauling food and dairy between Dallas and Houston…

Aurora’s trucks do have a human behind the wheel, just in case. So do autonomous Kodiak trucks operating on highways from Dallas to Atlanta, Houston and Oklahoma City—some of which drive at night…

Aurora is now testing the system between Phoenix and Fort Worth. The journey takes around 16 hours and typically requires two drivers to complete, with a stop for a handover. Federal law allows long-haul truckers to drive a maximum of 11 hours in a 14-hour period, followed by a mandatory 10-hour break.

There are a lot of potential consequences of this. One I have not seen discussed is what happens to the road trip establishments and culture in the United States. Drive any highway in the United States and they tend to be lined with certain establishments: gas, food, and lodging options, plus tourist sites. Drivers count on these and communities, businesses, and employees benefit from the revenue.

If more vehicles are autonomous, do these roadside features disappear? Or do the people still riding in the vehicles – they may or may not be in trucks, would likely still be in passenger vehicles – still need or want to stop? What if being in a vehicle becomes even more about only what is inside the vehicle; a person enters at the start of the journey, does what they want in the moving room, and only exits at the end? Or perhaps the autonomous vehicle will have to stop to recharge batteries?

Driverless trucks, dark stores, and getting groceries

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How Americans get their groceries might be on the edge of a big change with the introduction of autonomous vehicles and dark stores into the mix:

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Walmart and Silicon Valley start-up Gatik said that, since August, they’ve operated two autonomous box trucks — without a safety driver — on a 7-mile loop daily for 12 hours. The Gatik trucks are loaded with online grocery orders from a Walmart fulfillment center called a “dark store.” The orders are then taken to a nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered…

Walmart, the nation’s biggest seller of grocery items, is testing the Gatik autonomous vehicles as part of its transition to a “hub and spoke” model for grocery delivery where dark stores are closer to the consumer and used to serve several retail stores. Walmart said the use of automated vehicles will also allow store associates more freedom to perform “higher level” tasks, including picking and packing online orders and customer assistance.

“The old architecture of delivery where you have a giant distribution center four or five hours away from the end consumer does not work anymore. Grocers are forced to set up these fulfilment centers close to the customer, and once you get close to the customer you have to shrink the size of your warehouse,” Narang said. “As the size shrinks there is a growing need for doing repeated trips from the fulfillment centers to the pickup points. That’s where we come in.”

The Kroger supermarket chain has tested autonomous delivery with start-up Nuro since 2018 and said it’s now completed thousands of “last mile” deliveries in the Houston, Texas area. Kroger is also using automated warehouses to launch online grocery delivery in Florida and other states where it does not have brick and mortar locations.

The driverless trucks are interesting in their own right. The United States needs a lot of trucks to move goods all over the place. They are a familiar sight on both local roads and highways. Would it matter much to the typical driver if the semi next to them had no driver?

Additionally, it would be worth hearing more about fulfillment centers/”dark stores.” Where are they located? How do they operate? How many of them are needed in a sizable metropolitan region to fulfill orders? Depending on some of these answers, this could change where warehouses are located (can they be as concentrated, such as in Will County?) How much more efficient is this system compared to now? Somewhere, a particular community could figure out how to maximize dark stores and reap the benefits.

Autonomous railroads and the importance of shipping goods by train

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An exploration of autonomous trains in the United States includes this graphic about how cargo is moved in the country:

At this point, railroad shipping is very important: roughly one-third of cargo goes via train. This only follows trucks. And I wonder how this data works when cargo goes much of the way via train but then needs to make it “the last mile” from the railyard to specific locations.

So how much might autonomous railroads help? Here is some suggestive data:

A European Union-funded study published in 2020 found that moving to newer systems for managing trains could increase the capacity of existing rail networks by up to 44%. An internal study by Wabtec indicates in the U.S. the increase could be even higher, up to 50%. An increase of that magnitude in the ton-miles carried by America’s rail network would be the equivalent of moving approximately one million fully loaded Boeing 747-10 passenger jet planes from coast to coast every year.

Combine this with autonomous trucks (which, according to this piece, may take longer than moving to autonomous trains) and drones and perhaps more future goods could be moved even more quickly.

A country of roving electric car fleets

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Andrew Yang is not the first to propose this though he may be the first presidential contender to do so: replace car ownership with fleets of autonomous vehicles.

He told MSNBC host Ali Velshi that “we might not own our own cars” by 2050 to wean the United States economy off of fossil fuels, describing private car ownership as “really inefficient and bad for the environment.” Privately owned cars would be replaced by a “constant roving fleet of electric cars.”…

“What we’re really selling is not the car, it’s mobility,” he said. “So if you have mobility that’s then tied into a much more, if you had like, for example, this constant roving fleet of electric cars that you would just order up, then you could diminish the impact of ground transportation on our environment very, very quickly.”

Americans like driving and have integrated vehicles into all sorts of daily activities. This would not just be about replacing the ability of a car owner to get into their vehicle whenever they want and drive around; this could change how houses are designed (garages could be placed elsewhere or eliminated), the fast food business, big box stores, rush hour (perhaps there would not or should not be enough vehicles in the fleet to meet the needs of current rush hour), road trips, and more.

It is interesting to consider how willing people would be to do this. Is this really just about mobility? Interest in driving may be lagging for younger Americans but do they want to give up cars altogether (or privately owned autonomous vehicles that could be more like rooms) in favor of vehicles that are shared with others? Would such changes require denser housing or could it enable more sprawl? If given choices about what changes to make regarding climate change, would people favor other options rather than giving up cars?

American laws privileging driving, zoning, and differential effects

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A law professor summarizes how American law reinforces driving in multiple ways:

A key player in the story of automobile supremacy is single-family-only zoning, a shadow segregation regime that is now justifiably on the defensive for outlawing duplexes and apartments in huge swaths of the country. Through these and other land-use restrictions—laws that separate residential and commercial areas or require needlessly large yards—zoning rules scatter Americans across distances and highway-like roads that are impractical or dangerous to traverse on foot. The resulting densities are also too low to sustain high-frequency public transit…

As a matter of law, the operating-speed method is exceptional. It enables those who violate the law—speeding motorists—to rewrite it: Speed limits ratchet higher until no more than 15 percent of motorists violate them. The perverse incentives are obvious. Imagine a rule saying that, once 15 percent of Americans acquired an illegal type of machine gun, that weapon would automatically become legal. Other legislation amplifies the harm from this method. In California, for example, cities are sometimes obligated by law to raise speed limits against their will, and local governments are barred from lowering them even for safety reasons. This occurs against a backdrop of radical under-enforcement of the speed limit nationally, and the widespread banning of proven but unpopular lifesaving technologies such as automated speed cameras.

Just as telling as what activities the law regulates is whose interests it seeks to protect. Dozens of our peer nations require carmakers to mitigate harm to pedestrians caused by their products. U.S. design regulations, however, require only measures that enhance the safety of car occupants. Just as SUVs are becoming taller, heavier, and more prevalent—and pedestrian fatalities are surging—U.S. regulators have not required carmakers to embrace those more comprehensive design standards. Instead, they’ve launched campaigns baselessly blaming pedestrians for their own deaths…

In a similar spirit, criminal law has carved out a lesser category uniquely for vehicular manslaughter. Deep down, all of us who drive are afraid of accidentally killing someone and going to jail; this lesser charge was originally envisioned to persuade juries to convict reckless drivers. Yet this accommodation reflects a pattern. Even when a motorist kills someone and is found to have been violating the law while doing so (for example, by running a red light), criminal charges are rarely brought and judges go light. So often do police officers in New York fail to enforce road-safety rules—and illegally park their own vehicles on sidewalks and bike facilities—that specific Twitter accounts are dedicated to each type of misbehavior. Given New York’s lax enforcement record, the Freakonomics podcast described running over pedestrians there as “the perfect crime.”

Several related thoughts after reading the plentiful examples:

  1. The first example provided involved single-family home zoning. Cars and homes are intimately linked in the United States and particularly in the suburbs.
  2. I would be interested to see more discussion of how the legal structures arose alongside the rise of driving in the United States. Was it a back and forth? Did the quick acceptance of driving push the legal system in certain directions or did early legal changes give driving a boost?
  3. The approach of this article reminds me a bit of The Color of Law with the emphasis on the legal system. And the overall argument seems to be that such laws force Americans into driving. But, are there precedent-setting legal cases that could reverse this? Does the legal preference for driving rise to the level of discrimination? A case could be made since driving is expensive and owning a reliable car and driving is related to class which in the United States is also tied to race. Homeownership helps build wealth for certain groups that own but could driving also do the same? Or consider spatial mismatch where jobs and economic opportunities might be hard to access without a significant drive via car.
  4. How might this change with driverless cars and autonomous vehicles? The current system seems to privilege drivers but what if there are not drivers but rather processors, companies, and vehicle owners?

When more technology leads to more traffic

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Americans tend to assume technology will solve social problems but what if its use in vehicles leads to more traffic?

As Greater Boston creates more jobs and attracts more residents, car commutes have slowed to an excruciating pace. But while economists love congestion pricing — i.e., making people pay for the street space they use and the damage their cars inflict on the environment — it rankles Americans who’ve been raised to view driving alone as a human right. And in cities around the country, the advent of fully driverless cars, which could be many years away, has become an excuse for not building high-capacity transit networks. Autonomous vehicles, The New York Times reported this summer, became a major talking point in anti-transit campaigns in Indianapolis, Detroit, and Nashville.

Meanwhile, big names in the tech industry are portraying public transit as obsolete or worse. “It’s a pain in the ass. That’s why everyone doesn’t like it,” Tesla’s Elon Musk told a crowd last year, per an account in Wired. “And there’s, like, a bunch of random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer. OK, great. And that’s why people like individualized transport that goes where you want when you want.”…

What autonomous vehicles won’t do is make traffic jams disappear. Someday, a driverless car could drop you off at work at 9 a.m. But what if, instead of parking itself in a private garage — which would cost money — it just circles the block until it picks you up at 5 p.m., because we refuse to charge motorists for the use of most streets?…

That’s all the more reason why Greater Boston can’t sit around waiting to see whether and how driverless cars will evolve. We’ll never squeeze enough cars into crowded spaces to get people where they need to go. In the end, no artificial-intelligence algorithm can change the laws of physics. Plan accordingly.

Adding more vehicles to the road leads to more traffic, even if it is easier to obtain those vehicles or the vehicles can drive themselves.

While this article calls for a long-term look at whether cities like Boston should prioritize mass transit or vehicles (and then act accordingly through means like congestion pricing or spending more money on mass transit), this is part of a bigger conversation: what if Americans will do whatever possible to keep up their ability to drive/ride in cars from their single-family homes to where they want to go? Even putting more money in mass transit can only do so much if density does not increase. And in a city like Boston that is already pretty dense, that could lead to some tough conversations about more affordable housing closer to jobs rather than relying on transportation to even out differences in where people live.

More on self-driving rooms and homes

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Parts of your home or even your home itself could soon be on wheels and drive around without your help:

Honda recently announced the IeMobi Concept. It is an autonomous mobile living room that attaches and detaches from your home. When parked, the vehicle becomes a 50-square-foot living or workspace. Mercedes-Benz Vans rolled out an all-electric digitally-connected van with fully integrated cargo space and drone delivery capability, and Volvo just unveiled its 360c concept vehicle that serves as either a living room or mobile office. In other cases, some folks are simply retrofitting existing vehicles. One couple in Oxford England successfully converted a Mercedes Sprinter van into a micro-home that includes 153 square feet of living space, a complete kitchen, a sink, a fridge, a four-person dining area, and hidden storage spaces.

For those who are either unwilling or unable to own a home, self-driving van houses could become a convenient and affordable solution.  Soon, our mobile driverless vehicles may allow us to work from our cars and have our laundry and a hot meal delivered at the same time. In Los Angeles alone, it is estimated that 15,000 people are already living in their cars and in most countries it is perfectly legal to live in your vehicle.

Three quick thoughts:

  1. The possibilities for adding a new and mobile room onto the homes of Americans might prove to be irresistible. Now I can add a room in which I can just drive away? Or, I can throw all sorts of things in there and then drive it out of view!
  2. The micro-home idea will find a market, particularly since the vehicles seem less cumbersome than the typical tiny home. At the same time, I imagine some wealthier communities will work to keep these sorts of vehicles out of the community. It may be an affordable option but if residents have concerns about apartment dwellers, wouldn’t they certainly have concerns about people who live out of their vehicles?
  3. These changes might only add to sprawl as it would enable residents to be more mobile. This could feed into the allure of driving and mobility. Of course, if some people give up large suburban homes for more mobile homes, perhaps the effects of sprawl might be reduced. Yet, I suspect that a good number of owners of mobile rooms and homes are purchasing them as a luxury item in addition to a home.

Jane Jacobs, self-driving cars, and smartphone walking lanes

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Fining distracted pedestrians who are paying attention to their smartphones is one option for communities. Here is another: a Chinese shopping center in Xi’an has a clearly marked lane for smartphone-using walkers.

Colorfully painted paths outside the Bairui Plaza shopping mall have been designated for walkers who cannot be bothered to look up from their devices…

Instead, messages painted along the lane cajole walkers to look up and pay attention.

“Please don’t look down for the rest of your life,” one message reads. “Path for the special use of the heads-down tribe,” another says…

Xi’an is not the first city to experiment with special areas for mobile phone use. In 2014, a street in the southwestern city of Chongqing was divided into two sections. On one side, phone use was prohibited, and on the other walkers were allowed to use their phones “at your own risk.”

The German city of Augsburg in 2016 embedded traffic lights on the surface of the street to prevent texting pedestrians from walking into traffic.

This will be a difficult issue to tackle for many communities. Here are two more additional ideas that may (or may not) help address these concerns:

  1. In reading multiple stories about distracted pedestrians on sidewalks, I am reminded of Jane Jacobs’ thoughts on lively sidewalk life. She argued that a lively street scene full of mixed uses will promote a thriving social scene. Could it be that sidewalks need to be more lively to keep the attention of pedestrians? If someone is walking down a bland block or through a shopping mall that does not really look any different than other shopping malls, it can be easier to pull out a smartphone. Of course, users might be so familiar with the walking area or their thoughts are elsewhere such that no level of liveliness would keep them from their smartphone.
  2. Perhaps some of the technology already being rolled out in cars and destined for significant use in driverless cars that helps cars sense other objects and respond accordingly could be implemented in cell phones. Imagine using your smartphone while walking and all of the sudden a radar screen pops up that indicates you are about to run into something. Or, perhaps it could have lights on different edges that could provide indications that objects are on that side. This is where Google Glass could be very useful: a display of nearby objects could always be within a user’s vision. Maybe technology will soon advance to a point where we have “bubbles” around us displaying information and nearby pedestrians or other objects could trigger some sort of alarm.

Separate walking lanes as well as punishments may not be enough. Given our reliance on technology to solve problems, I would not be surprised if new technology ends up as a substantial part of the solution proposed for problems posed by earlier technology. At the same time, this may be less about technology and more about the changing nature of public life.