"A.I. Innovation To The Streets" (Post Five)

Autonomous vehicle fantasy has always been in the back of our heads when we think about futuristic man-made phenomena but the majority of us don’t quite understand how we’re actually going to introduce AV to public roads. Most of the general public might think that it’ll be running just like any other car on a public road, while some of us might think it will require its own lane or road in order to fully express its potentials and capabilities. The question that generally comes up when discussing AV is the liability of AVs especially when giant companies like Tesla or Uber’s self-driving vehicle obtains in some sort of collision resulting in someone getting critically injured or even death. Due to these accidents, some may think AV’s are too advanced or that we aren’t quite yet ready to release AVs on the public roads, but in fact, autonomous features have been introduced dating back to 1788 when cruise control was first invented for steam engines by James Watt as reported in a book called “The Steam Engine” by Jaime Wisniak. Although all of the cars in store as of 2021 including Tesla are termed as level 2 from levels of automation where it requires the drivers “full attention,” and though we are years off from obtaining a fully automated vehicle, the progression of AV is looking great in a sense that there have been major companies interested in AV sector than ever before, and that can have a huge influence on the progression of AVs. Now, regardless of whether you drive a car or not, you most likely have experienced what it’s like being stuck in a traffic jam where it turns 40 minutes ride into a 2-hour ride due to reasons like car accidents. While accidents are inevitable and though there have been a few AV accidents during test drives, the addition of AV and its own lane will benefit us tremendously in terms of reducing car accidents which will reduce traffic in the future.

So how will this new AV lane work and how will it reduce current traffic issues? Well, two graduate students, Baiyu Chen and Anthony Barrs, from Cal came up with a theory called “Hyperlane” that won them the AEM Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge. Basically, their theory is that there will be a lane next to highways where only AVs are allowed and that these AVs would travel at a constant speed of 120mph using 5g technology as the centralized computer control. “Sensors in the road would evaluate traffic density, weather hazards, accidents, and other changes, prompting the system to adjust vehicle speed as necessary,” as stated in a website called The Guardian titled “Berkeley duo’s plan to solve traffic jams: hyper-fast lanes for self-driving cars,” written by Benjamin Preston. With Hyperlane road being installed with sensors, this will be a huge game-changer considering the fact that AV will all move at 120mph and still being able to detect if there is an accident upcoming and change route to get to the final destination. Furthermore, it was mentioned that it would cost $139m per mile to create Hyperlane which is a lot and can throw off lots of companies. Though it would cost a lot as of right now, it would generate more in the future as people start to transition from motor vehicles to AV. California State Highway Dept has stated that “examining in the future solely focused on transportation-related strategies such as connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) would lead to significant revenue generation as a result of pricing, which would be reinvested into non-auto modes to spur the shift.” Though the idea of obtaining an environment that solely relies on AVs for means of transportation may never transpire due to different preferences, we can incorporate lanes specifically for AVs in an environment where there are youth and aging population, low-income users, and users with disabilities to fully utilize the AV innovation.

AEM Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge finalist

The strongest reason for the addition of Hyperlane is that AVs will be uniform with fewer accidents making it a faster way of getting around. Although some scholars argue that adding another additional lane will lead to more traffic and car accidents, actually, quite the opposite is true because if an accident is bound to happen in the middle of a slippery icy road where the car is swerving, a driver might respond incorrectly whereas AV will be under control, and will transition to whatever gear necessary to get out safely. 94% of accidents are the result of humans mistakes, and AVs obtain the probable to extract human errors as mentioned in the United States Department of Transportation (USDoT) website titled Automated “Vehicles for Safety.” USDoT further reported that 36,096 people had died in 2019 due to car accidents. Now if we were to multiply 36,096 (deaths) by 10 (10-year span), 360,960 would be the total deaths in a 10-year span, which can be preventable if we adopt AV and their own Hyperlane which would eradicate driver errors. This type of innovation installed in AV raises another question that is, wouldn’t more people then want to own AV and go out more which will intern cause traffic? For example, one of the more convincing arguments on the topic comes from Mustapha Harb, of the University of California at Berkeley, who argues that owning an AV will most likely inspire the owners to go out on more rides who usually wouldn’t even bother doing so with their motor vehicle, as he refers to it as taking “ghost trips.” Despite the fact that Harb is right in that the people who actually own an AV may decide to go on more rides than usual, most of the general public will use the AV share system which would reduce the number of vehicles on the road.

Autonomous Vehicle traffic jam

To go in-depth about how autonomous vehicles can reduce traffic, we must first understand how the system that we are on right now with non-AV functions. We live in a society where it’s almost impossible to arrive on time for work if you drive there due to traffic and so most of us prefer to either take public transportations such as Bart or even carpool to get to work on time. And because I use to take Bart to the university every morning, I’d see people parking their cars either on the streets (where it’s legal) or in the parking lot of Bart stations, and then hop on the Bart to get to their location. Now, what does the AV system have to do with this? Well, the addition of an AV system will ensure that the occupancy per vehicle increases and decrease the number of motors on the road which will improve the traffic flow. In addition, when we drive, we are subjected to leave a certain amount of gap between cars for safety purpose, whereas if we have the majority of AVs on a freeway/highway, AVs will be able to communicate with each other to occupy less space, not to mention the AVs will follow rules and so highway patrols/polices wouldn’t be necessary. AVs will also have the feature where it can be controlled by a command on your phone. For example, a journal called “Autonomous Cars: Research Results, Issues, and Future Challenges” written by Rasheed Hussain and Sherali Zeadally, stated that this progress has already been made by Tesla’s “summon,” where the owner of the Tesla can instruct the vehicle to go to a specific parking spot by itself. With cars like Tesla being able to communicate autonomously in a more efficient manner, it will bring great benefits when driving to work early in the morning.

So then how will installing an AV system reduce car accidents and be beneficial to our economic growth? As stated earlier, the majority of accidents are related to road traffic accidents that can be preventable if we adopt the AV system. If we endorse the AV system, it will reduce deaths, and if we reduce deaths, there’ll be more people in the workforce which will intern boost up our economy. There’s a website, The World Bank Group, which funds and educates developing countries who mentions that anything that reduces car accidents will result in huge economic growth. They reported that “deaths and injuries from road traffic crashes affect medium- and long-term growth prospects by removing prime age adults from the workforce, and reducing productivity due to the burden of injuries.” As further mentioned, if we reduce car accidents deaths, and injuries even by halves, it can generate over 22% Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita (per person) is enough to give a boost to the economic loss we had due to COVID. In addition, a staff writer from Government Technology, Skip Descant, wrote in his article called “Autonomous Vehicles to Have Huge Impact on Economy, Tech Sector,” that the prediction of sum generated (saved) by AV will be close to $800 billion annually from “reduced crashes, fuel efficiency and better access to transportation.” Reducing car accidents alone will lead to the gain of revenue of hundreds of billions of dollars annually. With that said, autonomous vehicles can not only be beneficial for the general public to get around places but they can also generate revenues for our economy on a different level.

In conclusion, the discovery and the possibility of having Hyperlane for AV can be beneficial to us in the long term from getting a place to place quickly and also reducing car accidents. Having an AV was once an idea but we have excelled so much the past decade that companies like Amazon and Google have already come out with their versions of AV. Now that the idea of AV is more realistic than ever, we now need to think in ways in which AV can not only get us from place to place quickly but can also reduce the accident rate level. The creations of AVs “Hyperlane” has a great potential to reduce accidents. Once AVs are released and commercially available to the public, in order to have “Hyperlanes” installed on our highways, we must speak of it more and spread more information about it because although we have huge companies like Uber, Apple, Tesla, Amazon, etc… coming out with their own AVs, it would cost roughly $139m per mile to create Hyperlane which is a lot and can throw off lots of companies. So, spreading more information about this and getting more people to talk about it will attract interest from big companies because a large number of people will adopt this new innovation into their ways of traveling which will intern help to gain revenues for these big companies. If AVs continue to progress exponentially as it is right now, who knows, maybe we can expect Hyperlane sooner than later.