Driverless cars will change us
The Department of Transport is very worried about self-driving cars. Their new report finds that the new technology could make traffic 85 per cent worse and exacerbate the current congestion situation — where motorists spent an average of 80 hours last year.
Looking at the small print, however, the Department reckons this spirit-crushing rise in driverless car congestion isn’t going to happen until 2047. Assuming a ‘fast uptake’ of the technology by which autonomous vehicles make up half the car fleet by then.
And maybe the Department is simply softening us up for a whopping ‘congestion charge’ (a.k.a. a tax on vehicle use). After all, with the switch to electric-only vehicles promised by 2030, they’re not exactly going to raise much from petrol duty!
But I’m still not convinced. Because this report, like so many others that emanate from Whitehall, ignores the fact that the public adapts to changing circumstances.
For example, I regularly drive from Southern England to Scotland. It takes most of a day, it’s very tiring, and traffic hold-ups on the motorways are a big frustration. So when I get my driverless car, am I going to do the same journey but take nine hours’ worth of reading matter with me?
No, I’m going to get into my jim-jams, set off long after the pubs have closed, and wake up in Scotland after an overnight journey that takes two-thirds of the time. Driverless vehicles will allow people to spread their journeys into less busy times.
And another point. Just about every time I drive 400 miles to from and to Scotland, I see at least one accident or near miss, many of the former holding up traffic, and sometimes adding half an hour to my journey. Driverless cars will be safer. They don’t nod off and veer into the next lane. They don’t overtake dangerously. They know how to keep control of the vehicle if they hit some broken glass and a tyre goes.
And they can be more efficient too. They know what the most fuel-efficient speed is in any set of conditions. And unless you are in a rush, you can benefit from all that saved electricity cost. These are positive improvements, congestion or no congestion.
In town, driverless cars will really free up urban road space. Right now, it’s hard to navigate through many of our towns and cities, particularly the older ones with narrower streets, because of all the cars parked outside people’s houses restricting the flow. Sometimes people are parked on both sides such that two vehicles can’t pass each other and you have to slalom from one side to the other.
The thing with a driverless car is that you don’t have to leave it outside your house. You can tell it to park somewhere else. Or go make money for you on some new driverless car ride-hailing app. So the car drops you off, you turn in, the car goes off to the car park on the edge of town, then when you get up in the morning it comes along to pick you up again. And it gets to you very easily because there aren’t streets full of parked cars to impede it.
The mandarins at the Department of Transport should remember, too, that any car brainy enough to navigate its way round Hyde Park Corner and up Piccadilly without running into anything or anyone else is probably brainy enough to figure out the quickest route to wherever you are going.
We will end up with, arguably, fewer cars on the road — but ones that are used more intensively. One car can serve the needs of scores of people at different times of the day (and night). Autonomous vehicles can even pick up your groceries, and your neighbours’, and drop them off one after the other, without you needing to get in the car to go to Sainsbury’s.
My prediction, then, is that autonomous vehicles will lead to less congestion, not more. By spreading journey times, ungumming streets, navigating the quickest routes and by being shared by multiple users. I’m just hoping that medical science, too, will advance enough that I will still be around to tell the Department of Transport that they were wrong.