Pulling his Tesla Model S onto Highway 1 from McGill Avenue, Bruce Sharpe clicks a lever on the steering column to engage its adaptive cruise control, which takes control of managing the car’s distance from the truck ahead and watches for vehicles around it.
Click it again, and the car’s sensors and systems start to steer around a slight curve in the road following the centre of the lane. Sharpe’s hands are off the wheel, though hovering nearby in case he needs to take control.
“It does a great job with just tracking (the lane and surrounding traffic), so that you don’t have to do all of that steering yourself,” Sharpe said.
The car isn’t fully autonomous. Sharpe still has to be in control at all times and British Columbia doesn’t have a regulatory framework for fully driverless vehicles yet. But it is an example of what is possible now and a taste of the future for driverless transportation.
To optimists, that future will start arriving as soon as 2018 and it will usher in an era of increased road safety, as human-error crashes are reduced, and improved mobility for seniors and the disabled who don’t drive.
For Metro Vancouver, that could mean reducing the thousands of road crashes recorded each year by the Insurance Corp. of B.C., according to a policy paper issued by TransLink last August. In 2013, the report said, the region had 61,000 crashes.
TransLink and the City of Vancouver are among the local agencies considering the potential for autonomous transportation to alter long-term urban planning.
A Seattle-based venture capital group has proposed designating a lane of the Interstate 5 highway as a testing ground for autonomous transportation on the 240-kilometre section between Seattle and Vancouver, as a way to spur innovation in the region and ease congestion.
“This is going to happen,” said Tom Alberg, co-founder of Madrona Venture Group and co-author of the proposal. It may take five years or 10 years before it becomes widespread, he said, but “why not start planning for this now?”
The rosiest of visionaries look a couple of decades ahead to the sharing of autonomous cars that are interlinked with transit and other transportation options to solve traffic congestion in big cities.
In some respects, that future seems tantalizingly close.
Every week, it seems, advanced test projects seem to make the news, such as Uber’s launch of 100 Volvo-made driverless taxis in Pittsburgh (with human drivers, just in case), or a 190-kilometre trip by an autonomous highway truck in “You think you’ve kind of solved the problem, but to really, really solve the problem and all the different, unusual circumstances that arise, that takes a lot of time, and I think that’s going to be the way for self-driving.”(with the driver monitoring from the cab’s sleeper) conducted by the tech startup Otto.
Sharpe, however, is doubtful of the most optimistic timelines. He’s an ordinary driver, but as a Surrey-based software developer, he has some familiarity with “how easy it is to get fooled by early successes.”
Read more of the original article at Vancouver Sun
