Computer Controlled Vehicles

Independently controlled vehicles comprising our transportation system is an archaic method that has far outlived its usefulness.

What is needed instead is a 100% computer controlled transportation system. What that means is no more human controlled vehicles. For the highway portion of transportation this means that all cars and trucks will be entirely controlled by computers. This requires a central computer with individual vehicles having individual computers under ultimate control by the infrastructure computer structure.

Computer Controlled Transportation

Why computer control? Think of all the advantages:

1. No accidents.
2. No traffic jams.
3. Reduced travel time.
4. No drunken drivers.
5. Large reduction in teenage deaths.
6. No need for ownership of vehicles.
7. No parking problems.
8. No car payments.
9. No car insurance.
10. No need for garages..
11. No need for driveways.
12. No need for more traffic lanes.
13. Reduced energy consumption.
14. New jobs.
15. No head start that foreign vehicle manufacturers now have.
16. Free time to former drivers.
17. No need for a driver for children.
18. No more road rage.
19. Automatic rerouting for evacuations.
20. No more traffic cops.
21. No traffic signals and all one-way streets in the cities.
22. Caravan traffic between cities.

Some of these may not be obvious, so let's take them one at a time:

1. No accidents. OK, maybe not none, but compared to today's disaster configuration of highways, it will be nearly none. Yes hardware failures will exist as will software failures. Neither of these should cause much of a problem and certainly not accidents as hardware problems will be seen by the software and adjustments made. Software problems also should mitigated with fail safe software and redundancy. The major problem will be terrorism. Secure systems will be a necessity.

1. No traffic jams. Again, no is not exactly correct. However, traffic jams are caused by a combination of too many vehicles, knowledge by the driver of only the relative position of his vehicle in relationship to the other vehicles he can see, and the driver reaction time. With computer control all these will disappear.

First, the central computer will limit the traffic to what the lanes will hold, sort of like traffic lights on entry to freeways today. However with computer control, the number of passengers and amount of cargo handled by any one lane will greatly increase. The distance between vehicles will diminish, the lane widths will diminish, and the vehicle size will match the cargo/passenger requirements. No longer will a full-size SUV be used for one or two or three or four passengers. Instead we will have a vehicle to match the number of passengers.

One passenger will be in a "lean" one passenger vehicle. Two passengers will be in a sports car size vehicle; 3 or 4 in an economy car; and on up through pickup truck size, van size, and bus size. Citizens will rent the right size vehicle for each trip.

Weather will still be a problem, but not fog. Instead, weather that limits the friction between the vehicle and the lane will reduce the speeds and hence the lane capacity. You could call this a traffic jam, but the jam wouldn't exist, just a reduced traffic flow.

Speaking of traffic flow, we will achieve quite an improvement in high traffic areas by making all lanes one way; no cross traffic with vertical separation between NS traffic and EW traffic; turning from one to the other via ramps (resulting in no traffic slow down with the computer doing the merging); and pedestrian flow being also vertically separated.

Second, the central computer, and hence the individual vehicles, will have to know the position of all vehicles under its control with respective to an absolute position. Relative positioning, as has been proposed by others (e.g., platooning) will result in a ratchet effect leading to traffic jams.

Third, the computer reaction time will be essentially zero.

3. Numerous reasons for reduced travel time exist:

a) No traffic jams.

b) No accidents.

c) Speed controlled by computers.

d) No driver reaction time.

e) Reduced distance between vehicles.

1. No drunken drivers, after all we have no drivers at all. Now a couple of codicils do exist. First, when the computer controlled vehicles are first introduced, other vehicles would still have drivers. Hence the advantages of no accidents and no traffic jams won't be fully achieved until all vehicles are computer controlled. Second, initially back up control by drivers will be provided. Once we see that the backups are no longer needed, that will be abolished.

1. The number one cause of teenage deaths is car accidents.

1. No need for ownership of vehicles. When totally implemented, you simply rent any vehicle. Certainly one can own a vehicle, and such would be the case as computer controlled vehicles are being introduced. Packages would be available to place in owned vehicles to provide computer control. But once all vehicles are computer controlled, it would be prudent to not allow any individually owned vehicles on lanes that are only for computer vehicles.

The problem with allowing private vehicles is that means that the vehicles no longer need be the right size for the trip (unless, of course, the private owner has the selection of vehicles for each potential trip).

No such restriction would exist for non-computer lanes as, for example, off road.

1. No parking problems since parking itself is not needed. You rent a vehicle. With proper fleet size, the vehicle pulls up to your location within 5 minutes of your pickup time, drives you to your location, drops you off (as in a cab) and is available for the next passenger. Drop off zones are, of course, required. But current parking lanes turn into travel lanes.

1. No car payments, just rental payments as you use a vehicle. Certainly the rental companies would have to pay for their vehicles. Certainly vehicles will wear out and have to be replaced. Certainly improvements will be made, some of which will require new vehicles, however the anticipation is that most of these will be retrofitted. But model changes will disappear. Does this mean that we can no longer say "What is good for General Motors is good for everybody?" Yes that will no longer be true (if it still is). But each and every technical improvement has resulted in an economic upturn, as will this one.

1. No car insurance. The rental companies will carry insurance, and you won't. But their insurance (which is passed on to you in the rental fee) will be greatly reduced as accidents disappear.

1. Now everybody can use their garage for storage, or convert it to another room. Sure, a garage is a place to store a car, but since you won't have or need a car it is now simply a place for storage.

1. Well you don't have to put in more lawn, but won't your front area look better without a driveway?

1. No need for more traffic lanes, just maintenance on existing lanes. How much more density do we get out of the combination of:
   1. Vehicle size matching the load,
   2. Decreased distance between vehicles,
   3. Lane size matching vehicle size,
   4. Elimination of parking lanes,
   5. Elimination of crossing lanes,
   6. Computerized traffic control?

We should be able to work up a model to tell us the result. My own anticipation is a minimum increase in density of 5:1. Even if it is only 3:1, that means the current lane structure will handle 3 times the density. So only a very large change in population in any metropolitan area will necessitate new lanes.

13. Reduced energy consumption. The size of the vehicle will match the need for each individual trip. That will reduce the consumption. The lack of traffic jams will reduce the consumption. With reduced distance between cars we will have a train-like travel which also will reduce consumption.

1. Many new jobs. Not only will we have a new fleet of vehicles, from single passenger up to multi-passenger, cargo vehicles, all with no driver interfaces; but also a new infrastructure is required. That infrastructure will have central, interconnected computers; a terrorist proof, robust communications system; a navigation system with accurate absolute vehicle location (GPS is not accurate enough); and a fail-safe, redundant software for all.

1. American car manufacturers are currently way behind many foreign car manufacturers as we have been concentrating on SUV's and pickups. We will be starting this new generation of vehicles on level ground with all others.

1. Once we get used to the fact that back seat drivers aren't needed we could spend all that driving time reading, taking out our laptops, or just relaxing.

1. You might need a chaperon, but you won't be needed to drive your children anywhere.

1. Of course, people do exist that live on rage but they will have to find a different victim. I wonder what the removal of road rage will do for those that live in Los Angeles?

1. With computer control all lanes could be converted to outgoing, evacuation lanes. Plus, if the traffic volume is too high even with all lanes in use, our wait time would be at home rather than on the highway.

1. Not only no traffic cops, but also no traffic courts. I wouldn't think that the result would be a massive reduction of police officers (some reduction would occur), however a shift to more emphasis to other crimes would take place

1. Just think of it: with all one way streets and computer control we would have no traffic lights and no stop signs. Once we build the crossing of EW and NS streets to vertical separations all these crossings would be mergings under computer control.

1. When inter-city traffic is high, caravans would result with additions and deletions from the caravans as vehicles enter the roadways at their departure points and exit at their destinations.

What are the disadvantages? I can only think of one. Some people won't like that their own vehicle is not allowed on computer lanes, and eventually on all lanes with infrastructure. Plenty of country roads won't have infrastructure and off-road driving will still exist. However people will still complain about the lack of freedom of driving. Guess they will all have to let it out with NASCAR. Also one of the rites of passage to adulthood, getting to drive a car, will disappear. I don't think the youth of today will understand that.

We do need to determine the costs of the infrastructure and the costs of computer controlled vehicles. The vehicle cost will depend on whether the computer control is being added to a present day vehicle, the vehicle has a backup human control feature, or it only has computer control.

The costs will be reasonable, I do believe. But the real problem is how do we get from here to there? All the benefits will be achieved when lanes go to all computer controlled. So the introduction should be a lane or an entire road at a time. I would suggest starting with HOV lanes; they would be the easiest to make all computer control. However, until sufficient quantities of computer vehicles are available, the introduction will be more piecemeal and won't achieve all the advantages. At first we will only have retrofits for human vehicles. These may be units one picks up at the entry points of highways (for intercity travel) or they may be units that are part of a retrofit vehicle. In any event the process will be evolutionary and only yield partial benefits until entire lanes and roads become computer controlled only.

Now that we have a picture of where we are going, we need to concentrate our activities towards that goal. Vehicle locations systems of today simply don't have the accuracies required in the future. A navigation system is needed to provide absolute accuracies in centimeters, not in meters. Plus a communication system is required from the central system to each and every vehicle.

This navigation and communication system has not yet been determined. However the general structure must be something along these lines:

An antenna structure must be built that has a clear line of sight to all vehicles. Cell phone antennas are subject to drop outs and that won't be allowed. Reception of signals from each vehicle will be picked up by at least three antennas at all times and the time difference in arrivals of coded signals from a vehicle will provide the two dimensional placement accuracies required for absolute vehicle location.

The parameters of this system will depend on a number of factors that have yet to be quantified. Nevertheless, the system will consist of a line of antennas alongside travel lanes. When the number of lanes increases enough, two lines of antennas may be required, one on each side of a multiple lane highway. The maximum spacing between the antennas will be such to assure that three antennas will be able to see all vehicles in their coverage area at all times. With redundancy more will be required.

But where are the hardware and software for the infrastructure? Where is the navigation and control that provides real-time data for individual vehicles for city wide control and intercity travel? Where is the communication system for the navigation and control system in the infrastructure to the individual vehicles? That structure needs to be secure, continual, and robust.

Conclusion

The advantages of a computer controlled highway system are so encompassing that we must assure that all our future transportation efforts are designed with that future system is mind. Those efforts which are not directly attuned towards that controlled objective should be curtailed.

We need an infrastructure that includes the hardware and software not only for the centralized computer frames but also the navigation and control plus the secure, robust communications.

That future will be one where all vehicles in controlled highways, roads, and lanes of roads must be computer controlled, with no drivers allowed. Although, initially, some public roads (or some lanes of public roads) will have a mix of drivers and computer control, we must seek to have all public roads only allow computer control as soon as possible.

Such roads will all be one way with cross streets vertically separated with ramps for turning from EW to NS lanes. No stop signs or traffic lights will be required in this system and merging traffic (quite naturally) will be central computer controlled. Naturally, any pedestrian traffic will also be vertically separated.

We know how to do all of this today. We have the computer capacity. The software is not yet written, but the concepts have all been designed, at least at the top level. The navigation and communications system has also not been designed. But once we have determined the required parameters to include redundancy, security, navigation accuracy, update rate, and error detection and correction (I know this list is far from complete), the structure of that system will follow.

We need computer control.