April 9, 2008.
California Office of Traffic Safety Summit
San Francisco, CA.
May 19, 2009
University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies
Bloomington, MN
June 23, 2009
Driving Assessment 2009
Big Sky, Montana
June 26, 2009
PRI World Congress
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
June 27, 2009
Day of Architecture
Utrecht, The Netherlands
July 13, 2009
Association of Transportation Safety Information Professionals (ATSIP)
Phoenix, AZ.
August 12-14
Texas Department of Transportation “Save a Life Summit”
San Antonio, Texas
September 2, 2009
Governors Highway Safety Association Annual Meeting
Savannah, Georgia
September 11, 2009
Oregon Transportation Summit
Portland, Oregon
October 8
Honda R&D Americas
Raymond, Ohio
October 10-11
INFORMS Roundtable
San Diego, CA
October 21, 2009
California State University-San Bernardino, Leonard Transportation Center
San Bernardino, CA
November 5
Southern New England Planning Association Planning Conference
Uncasville, Connecticut
January 6
Texas Transportation Forum
Austin, TX
January 19
Yale University
(with Donald Shoup; details to come)
Monday, February 22
Yale University School of Architecture
Eero Saarinen Lecture
Friday, March 19
University of Delaware
Delaware Center for Transportation
April 5-7
University of Utah
Salt Lake City
McMurrin Lectureship
April 19
International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association (Organization Management Workshop)
Austin, Texas
Monday, April 26
Edmonton Traffic Safety Conference
Edmonton, Canada
Monday, June 7
Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals
Niagara Falls, Ontario
Wednesday, July 6
Fondo de Prevención Vial
Bogotá, Colombia
Tuesday, August 31
Royal Automobile Club
Perth, Australia
Wednesday, September 1
Australasian Road Safety Conference
Canberra, Australia
Wednesday, September 22
Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s
Traffic Incident Management Enhancement Program
Statewide Conference
Wisconsin Dells, WI
Wednesday, October 20
Rutgers University
Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation
Piscataway, NJ
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Ontario Injury Prevention Resource Centre
Injury Prevention Forum
Toronto
Monday, May 2
Idaho Public Driver Education Conference
Boise, Idaho
Tuesday, June 2, 2011
California Association of Cities
Costa Mesa, California
Sunday, August 21, 2011
American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Attitudes: Iniciativa Social de Audi
Madrid, Spain
April 16, 2012
Institute for Sensible Transport Seminar
Gardens Theatre, QUT
Brisbane, Australia
April 17, 2012
Institute for Sensible Transport Seminar
Centennial Plaza, Sydney
Sydney, Australia
April 19, 2012
Institute for Sensible Transport Seminar
Melbourne Town Hall
Melbourne, Australia
January 30, 2013
University of Minnesota City Engineers Association Meeting
Minneapolis, MN
January 31, 2013
Metropolis and Mobile Life
School of Architecture, University of Toronto
February 22, 2013
ISL Engineering
Edmonton, Canada
March 1, 2013
Australian Road Summit
Melbourne, Australia
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January 23rd, 2012 at 11:03 am
Once we collectively decide to use self-driving cars, the question then becomes why those cars should turn rubber wheels on flat blacktop.
Put the same vehicles on light-duty steel tracks, and instead of steering you just have to use remote control to configure switches ahead of you on your trip. That greatly simplifies collision avoidance systems and makes us all safer.
January 23rd, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Omri, what you describe looks like the CargoMover from Siemens except for the lack of passenger transport permission. But, getting such a permission for railways is much harder than for street transportation due to the higher safety standards. You know, railway fatalities cause headlines, street fatalities cause statistics.
But I’m afraid it’s still a long way to go until car manufacturers get a general permission to sell self-driven cars, i.e., cars without an operator to blame for accidents.
January 23rd, 2012 at 1:27 pm
If the car becomes a rolling computer, what happens when the computer crashes?
Those of us who have owned computers and cars know that systems fail. A system failure in an computer hurtling down the road at 70+mph can be catastrophic. Murphy’s law says that such a failure is inevitable, but I see no discussion of planning for such a contingency.
January 23rd, 2012 at 3:02 pm
@Obbie Z: What happens when someone hurtling down the road at 70+mph has a heart attack? I’m not trying to be sarcastic. I think a large part of the discussion is exactly that: Which is more dependable? A computer or a human?
January 23rd, 2012 at 3:36 pm
“We are driving close to 70 mph with no human involvement….”
Even the machines have lead feet!
January 23rd, 2012 at 5:44 pm
I enjoyed Traffic, but when I was reading it, at the end of almost every section my thought was, “and all this gets majorly changed when the robocars come.” Glad to see you finally got to see the car at Google (I wanted to say hi but missed you that day) and perhaps at some point you will have to do a revised version of the book.
While sometimes I suspect the big effects don’t come until the more distant future when the majority of cars are robocars, but there have been more research I’ve seen suggesting that even a modest number of the cars, making the right nudges, could begin helping even sooner. While people could command their cars (at least in a free world) to do the irrational things that drivers do today, there just isn’t the same motive to do so — in fact the rider may not even be looking up or care, since they are getting work done and are in less of a hurry, preferring a comfortable ride with few distractions to a slightly faster one.
January 24th, 2012 at 10:00 am
I’ve been looking at Brad’s website as well and I’m a little more bullish about the speed of transition to driverless technology. Historically, large infrastructures (and the ICE based transportation infrastructure may be the largest in history) change very slowly once established. Once the begin to change significantly, however, most users are forced (or incentivized) to move with the rest of the herd. In this particular case the growing costs of the existing system, potential efficiency of its (driverless) alternative and, most importantly, emerging pathways that lead from one to the other, suggest that a transition may be coming our way.
My bet is it begins in earnest 10 years from now and takes about 15 years after that to be fairly complete (though far from mature). Damn, I wish I had $10,000 to put on it. Thanks again for the great article!
January 25th, 2012 at 2:15 pm
I really liked this article. I’m torn between technology and people. I love ‘em both. It’s frightening to think of a system failure without a real person being there to step in and manually take over in an emergency. I also read this article today that discusses vehicle technology issues: http://www.roadawareness.org/news/is-technology-going-too-far/.
January 27th, 2012 at 1:56 am
I think that there would be like an auto pilot override so that if the computer crashes you can disengage autopilot and steer it to saftey.But I think the biggest problem would be if you had a mixture of robot drivers and human drivers I think that the humans are more likely to make more errors than the robots.
January 28th, 2012 at 11:11 am
Odd how these visions of the future always have cars traveling along sparsely populated highways. In the here and now, and in the foreseeable future, there are no sparsely populated highways, the real problem is capacity. Given that we have massive congestion due to lack of capacity, the private car is a very real waste of space. We need smarter solutions, we know that car is a failed transport system, so we need to go back and look at things we know work rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. We need to look again at mass transit systems and cycling as a far more effective means of getting about our crowded transport networks. We know it works!
January 30th, 2012 at 8:10 am
I don’t think a computer can drive better than a human, they just drive as humans should, but won’t.
No emotion. No intermediate destination injections (I’ve GOT to get in front of that truck before my exit/make it through that stale green light, ad infinitum).
Still, the main issue seems likely to remain operator error. Fools with unlimited imagination still seem to be fastest growing segment of the population.
April 13th, 2012 at 7:18 am
We can say that new concepts are coming day-by-day and most of them are for the benefit of human beings. But total control should not be shifted directly to the computer. Manual override should be there and let’s hope best for everyone.
December 4th, 2012 at 2:40 pm
I’m very curious about how driverless cars could affect carsharing. Right now, options for passenger car travel are having your own car (and paying for and its parking 24/7) calling/hailing a cab (and paying for both car and driver), or joining a carshare and trekking over to the closest available car (paying with your own extra travel time). If a driverless car could come pick you up and take you to your destination, then disappear, would it be a better substitute for car ownership?