“I don’t know how many of you are familiar with teen driving statistics. They are horrible,” Urmson, who leads Google’s self-driving car program, told an audience Monday. “I’m committed, and my team is committed, to making sure he doesn’t have to get a driver’s license.”
Urmson, a former Pittsburgh resident who lives in Mountain View, Calif., was the keynote speaker at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America’s annual meeting, which runs through Wednesday at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown.
Self-driving cars that communicate with one another and with road infrastructure have the potential to seriously reduce crashes and traffic congestion, he said. Crashes kill about 33,000 people per year in the U.S., “the equivalent of a 737 [jetliner] falling out of the sky five days a week — an incredible, incredible cost.”
Meanwhile, Americans spend 6 billion minutes every day commuting. “You divide that by the average lifetime of an American citizen and you end up with 162 lifetimes wasted every day, just getting to and from work,” Urmson said.
Cars that drive themselves and communicate with other vehicles are a major focus of the convention, which has brought 2,000 transportation professionals and 125 product exhibitors to the city.
While full implementation of such a system might take many years or even decades, “bits and pieces are already in place” and are being used by drivers, said Ananth Prasad, national transportation practice leader for HNTB Corp.
Vehicles with collision-avoidance systems, cars that parallel park themselves and vehicles that warn drivers when they start to exhibit drowsiness are on the road, he said. If his Mercedes starts to drift because he’s nodding off, the steering wheel will shake him awake.
“You’re going to see a lot more technology in mainstream cars,” said Prasad, former Florida secretary of transportation. “Think about computing power. Five or six years ago, people were crazy about 5-megapixel cameras. The iPhone now has an 8-megapixel camera.”
When cars are fully automated, traffic will flow in harmony with fewer variable speeds and needless lane-changing, increasing road capacities by 300 to 500 percent, said Jim Barbaresso, HNTB’s national practice leader for intelligent transportation.
For Pittsburghers, that would mean an end to the brake-tapping that jams traffic on the approaches to tunnels and bridges.
It also would bring profound changes to the design of highways, allowing narrower lanes, narrower shoulders and elimination of guardrail and other barriers, he said. A new highway would occupy much less land, and an existing road with three 12-foot-wide lanes could be converted to four 9-foot-wide lanes.
But will people accept cars that drive themselves?
Urmson said that when Google offered a group of employees the chance to test its driverless car, several said they were excited to do so, but not everyone.
“My favorite was the guy who said ‘I’m not. This whole thing’s stupid. I have a Porsche. Cars are for driving. What are you thinking?’” he said. “He comes back three days later [and says] ‘I get it. I need this car. It turns out that I’m a terrible driver and so is everybody else.’ ”
David Cummins, a senior vice president with Xerox Corp., said most in the industry believe that technology will be added to vehicles in increments, so when the first fully autonomous vehicles roll out, “it won’t be such a radical thing.”
One of the next big steps: a car that parks itself in a garage and comes back when the owner hits a button on his smartphone, he said.
Xerox, in partnership with the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, created a 32-acre simulated city at the Ann Arbor campus for testing connected and automated vehicles and systems before they are tried in real traffic.
“I’m a believer that full autonomous vehicles will be here sooner — in the next five to 10 years. Others are saying it’s 15 to 20 years away,” Cummins said.
Google, meanwhile, has logged a million miles with its self-driving vehicles, teaching them to recognize the various obstacles and conditions they’ll face, Urmson said, including pedestrians; cyclists; other cars; buses; trucks; traffic lights; construction; and the difference between the flashing lights on a police cruiser, which cars may pass, and those on a school bus, which require a car to stop.
“Like any new technology, people have reasonable questions,” he said in an interview. “What we’ve seen is that when technology serves a good purpose and adds value to people’s lives, it gets adopted. There’s still work to do, but it’s going very well.”
©2015 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
