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Bikes, Not Self Driving Cars, Are The Technological Gateway To Urban Progress
It took a whole lot of noise from activists and campaigners for bicycles to be taken seriously at last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, and for active travel to be added to the declaration on accelerating the decarbonisation of road transport.
Beyond the serious lobbying from automotive industries, there seems to be a psychological block that prevents the bicycle from being accepted as a central technology when imagining the future of cities.
If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.
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It beats me how very few people see that there's absolutely no future for most of our current technology, let alone such completely wasteful and inefficient stuff like cars, electric or thermic or whatever.
Either because we suddenly become intelligent, see it for the planet-destroying folly that it is and put an end to it (thus being able to keep a few useful things like bikes). Or because the whole system will come crashing down around us, and that rather sooner than later, given the huge cracks already showing and getting bigger by the day. Then absolutely nothing will be left.
Went for a walk Sunday through a village. It's just over 5 miles to the town centre, but the number of cars was ridiculous. 4 per house and 6 in one.
Then on Saturday went to a retail place which was massively car centric. We parked 5 minutes walk away to avoid the slow crawl of queuing traffic makiits way in and out of the retail area. Also you could only really walk shop to shop around the perimeter as there was almost no provision to walk directly.
It's going to be a big change to make anyone give up their car when people are so enslaved by them.
And we're nowhere near as bad as the US.
I have some friends there and it's genuinely impossible to get anywhere from their house without a car.
That's why I think self driving cars will be successful. They will enable our society to keep using most of our current car centric infrastructure.
The cost of replacing that infrastructure would be enormous. The cost of implementing self driving cars will likely be negative overall. Money talks.
The U.S. is truly terrible to get around unless you're in a city.
It may play out that autonomous cars take off in the U.S. but I have my doubts about their power infrastructure being able to handle lots of EVs - our own power infrastructure is going to need serious work to enable it and we don't suffer from all the brown-outs due to aging infrastructure that they do. There's also the issue of lithium supply unless alternate battery tech is developed (quite possible).
I think it's a mistake to keep current car-centric infrastructure as it doesn't work well now with current traffic levels, so unless autonomous vehicles can significantly reduce traffic levels, there will be the same traffic jams featuring autonomous vehicles.
The best bet is to try to replace as many journeys as possible with two-wheelers/two-feeters and thus reduce the overall traffic load - eBikes will likely make a bigger impact than autonomous cars will.
People are quick to avoid physical effort and money talks. So I suggest a massive subsidy of e-legs as a way of reducing our resource usage.
And more escalators / travellators to encourage more journeys by leg.
Hve you noticed that there are no cars in Star Trek* - they walk (or crawl in Jeffries tubes) have multi-dimensional lifts for long distance travel on the ship, and everything else is the transporter.
I suspect we won't evolve the transporter unless we manage to invent the nearly free energy we were promised with nuclear power - and don't mind occasionally been turned into blobs of ooze. Still, worth it to avoid the parking problems of now.
*Excluding the obligatory time travel episode.
What amuses me is that the Star Trek transporters were invented to reduce the cost of making the programmes - no need for expensive space shuttle shots.
Young Kirk in the first of the new movies started in his step father's ICE convertible.
I saw a billboard/bus-stop type advert this morning - cars / e-cars / bikes.
(Emphasizing (I think) how congestion caused by e-cars looks suspiciously similar to congestion caused by ICE cars.)
(If I remember, I'll try to get a photo at lunchtime).
I suspect cycling will continue to exist through most changes in the UK - but at a very low level. After all, it's still here despite the technological changes of the last over 100 years. Equally all the so-call "encouragement" has done little to broaden the appeal. (Possible exceptions - a minor increase in a few places like London).
On the other hand as long as you've still got some cycling and you're prepared to spend a fraction of the road budget (say 10%) then cycling can become a mainstream form of transport - apparently anywhere. Most people will simply choose the easiest form of transport whatever that is *.
I'm an optimist and there's some hope in Scotland - we've managed to get a substantial chunk of transport budget for active travel. So maybe a gradual change is possible. For the rest of the UK I suspect it would take some drastic economic or political changes for mass cycling to happen e.g. a long-lasting fuel crisis, a revolution or some party like the Greens winning. I can't see any of the current main parties doing much different.
* Exceptions: if people already have cars and it's convenient to drive, people drive. If something feels unsafe or lacks cultural prestige or taboo that may override "ease of use".
I see self driving cars as an 'enabling technology' that will allow cycling to flourish more quickly than it would in their absence.
If we could eliminate all illegal driving behaviour our roads would be infinitely more pleasant to cycle on and more people would do so.
Eliminating huge numbers of cars and their associated parking spaces would also free up enormous amounts of urban real estate for high quality segregated infrastructure.
If roads became much safer and the amount of segregated infrastructure increased significantly then fewer people would find themselves dependent on their cars and fewer people would opt to own one.
Not owning a car would become entirely normal and non car owners would be an increasingly important political bloc. Politicians would seek to court said bloc and funding and infrastructure would continue to improve accordingly creating an increasingly virtuous circle.
Fully autonomous cars seem to be a lot more difficult to achieve than previously thought, so I'd consider that increased enforcement is the way to remove the worst drivers. The alternative is to build decent separated infrastructure, but that costs money and the UK seems to be allergic to designing for cyclists' requirements, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that.
The big problem with autonomous cars is the form factor - why use a big and heavy metal cage when two wheels are clearly better for higher density transit. Of course, people would still want a car shape for travelling in numbers too big for bikes and too small for buses, but that should be a minority of journeys.
I don't think that the AI bods have really grasped that the problem is not just following road markings and looking for objects, but coping with imaginary road markings and invisible guides and conventions that have to be understood.
While computer programs can reliably follow asset of rules and don't get distracted, the rule set required is massively more complex than the AI people hope.
Add in some shortcuts, so the likes of Tesla are trying to use sensor tech that doesn't have the visual processing that humans have, where humans have glitches but generally are stunningly good at interpreting ambiguous images. As an example, try "Select Subject" AI processes in Photoshop-like programs. They take significant time when we immediately recognise the elements in the picture, but AI regularly add in extra odds and ends or misses an arm or a leg that a human would exclude or include because we can extrapolate body shapes.
We can then add in assessing reactions of pedestrians where we can recognise a pedestrian not paying attention or astray dog which requires an extra level of comprehension over simply plotting paths. This problem is exacerbated by an American view of traffic normally being isolated, physically and legally from pedestrians in many scenarios - interacting with a pedestrian environment isn't being properly considered in many of the technology trials going on with the major American smart driving teams.
I think that Tesla is trying to essentially use just cameras and AI to recognise and detect objects whereas other autonomous vehicles use LIDAR which is more expensive, but provides a 3d map of physical objects. I think it's less important for a vehicle to distinguish between a dog and a pedestrian, but far more important to recognise that there is an object that must not be driven into.
My point is that to avoid an object you have to predict its path.
Consider an object detected and how a person deals with it if it appears to be a dog.
Is the dog accompanied? If yes, is it under control? If no, is it travelling in a calm predictable way? Is it actually a dog or is it a badger,a deer, a fox? Is the animal interacting with your presence?
Dealing with an animal is a peculiar experience. Think about sheep on moorland which may lie lazily as you skim their nose or bound across from a distance.
Then consider children and how they behave. (Think of the children!).
I still think that determining the class of moving object is less important than reliably detecting it. With unpredictable movers such as dogs and children, I'd say that the AI only needs to predict their current trajectory to determine if there's any need to slow down or change course. The advantage of using AI is that it shouldn't matter that it's approaching a sheep lazily munching on the roadside - it should detect the proximity and lack of kerb and slow down appropriately to pass it and if the sheep suddenly makes a run for it, the AI would be able to detect that and react in milliseconds. It's our slow reactions that mean that we have to have such good predictive models in our heads.
I'd consider that even with decent LIDAR, the AI models will still need to have object persistence and tracking, so if it detects a small child (or large squirrel) on the pavement and then it loses sight of it as it runs behind a parked car, it'd flag it as a possible hazard and reduce speed as necessary until it spots it again or passes the last known location.
I think though that identifying an object is key to deciding whether it is feasible to predict the path on an object, so we will drive past a dog on a lead, which we probably identify by the juxtaposition of dog to owner as much as observing the lead. without a worry, but a dog that is on the loose, or, as I was suggesting, other dog sized objects, cannot be dismissed. If you don't dismiss the dog on the lead, then you end up driving to a near stop in case it randomly leaps out. The point being that wildlife and ill-behaved humans of whatever variety may not have predictable paths so need an aggressive defensive response, whereas well-behaved objects tend to be dismissed.
If you have a fast moving object like an over-excited free-running dog, you cannot really predict where they are going to move - the extreme example from my cycling experience is pheasants, which seem to cause a significant number of injuries to cyclists as they burst out at you and you haven't got time to assess that you need to ruin them over in preference to taking out other riders in the group, or the surprise that causes people to over-react and fall off. Drivers tend to drive through pheasants because they can't react at all - but what would an AI driver do when detecting an incoming pheasant?
Without cars being segregated from other road users (and I deliberately phrase it in that priority) automation has a far harder task because it needs a far greater understanding of what the object is and its current mode of behaviour to determine how it needs to be handled, and of course, this analysis needs to be near instantaneous from point of detection, or else, in a mixed environment you get AI-based behaviours performing apparently random acts where human drivers have dismissed objects. Now humans, may dismiss some objects incorrectly due to lack of detection, but I'd guess that my dog example would be one where a safety first protocol would be sticking the brakes on because a dignificant number of dog-like objects have an unpredictable behaviour so need extreme caution - like a current Tesla braking in response to ghost objects - jumping at its own shadow - leading to poor interaction with meat-based computers.
I don't think it's worthwhile to base heuristics on dogs being on leads or not. Surely any object moving along a pavement can be safely ignored until their direction changes. AI should be able to respond almost instantly, so if a dog on a lead suddenly spots a squirrel and manages to slip its lead and run into the road, the car can be hitting the brakes the moment the dog is off the pavement. Humans would believe a dog on a lead to be under control and would be unable to react in time.
However, things suddenly running into the road is an edge case and certainly human drivers will be unable to avoid collisions in those circumstances if they're moving quickly.
Given that vehicles have limitations on manouverability, we, as humans, dismiss certain hazards, and place the responsibility on evading a collision on the other objects, as it is physically impossible to avoid. Where we suspect that the other object is not going to cooperate with that, we take preemptive action. So for example, when passing a horse, we do not predict that it will continue on its path, we are told we cannot - and the results of being sat on by a scared horse make it not worth the risk - so we alter our speed and path accordingly, but we have to do that before there is any assessment of there being any obvious intersection of paths.
I guess what I am exploring is the risk factor - motorists are supposed to give cyclists 1.5m+ to mitigate the risk of unexpected manouvres, and motorists are supposed to assess the landscape as a whole for potential hazards, the farm entrance should trigger caution even though nothing is visible.
That last point reminded me of Ashley Neal complaining about the Tesla intelligent cruise control which happily maintained its speed even when there was a car waiting to emerge from a side road - humans are taught to prepare for other drivers' pontential mistakes, which is all about assessing the pitential for collision even when one is not currently a possibility based purely on the detection of objects. Ashley described it as a bad driver with quick reactions, and it seems that this is the model you are suggesting is acceptable - I'm saying that for AI to approach an acceptable standard, which is to say that it needs to avoid avoidable collisions, I don't believe that is possible without it having a good understanding of the nature of the enemy. I'll give you another example, on driving down the M40 I noted a car ahead which initially seemed to be driving predictably and cautiously, but before I was committing to pass it, for no discernable reason wandered out of its lane slightly across onto mine. I watched, couldn't see a reason and then continued past, noting that as I was about to pass the car was again moving towards the edge of its lane, I gave a "friendly toot" in warning and moved to the other extreme of my lane. I had a look at the driver and concluded that their inability to hold a lane seemed to be incompetence rather than any obvious distraction, there was no other event happening and the vehicle they were planning on passing was still a couple of seconds ahead. So for AI to avoid a collision with non-AI drivers, it needs to have a sense of caution around drivers who display a lack of ability, whereas at the moment, I get the sense that they assume all is well until it isn't, that as long as they follow the rules, everyone else will. In America, an example would be the Four Way Stop which relies on each driver noting who arrived so they advance in turn, but not everyone will abide by the rules, so AI cars can get stuck due to a cautious approach as some drivers will sniff out the hesitation.
I'm really just saying that rule-based systems cannot cope with real-world complexity, so they need more understanding of their environment, and I believe that the early adopters severely underestimated the complexity of interactions with other objects, at a time when it is clear that they are struggling even to interpret the fixed objects of lane markings and roads.
"A bad driver with quick reactions" - that nicely sums up how I think about autonomous vehicles.
These autonomous vehicles need more situational awareness! Bad driver with quick reactions reminds me of the comments about AI in chess from back in the day. Along the lines of: programs play dreadful chess - predictable and unimaginative - but humans make wild and inexplicable mistakes.
Debates on AI are amusing but I'd be out of my depth. I'll simply agree current systems are still too simple. The roads and rules are mostly simple (by design) but occasionally weird things do happen. However current drivers are also prone to awful errors and themselves frequently get overloaded by the unfamilliar *. So in some senses it's a low bar to clear.
* Since we've an increasing understading of the ways humans will go wrong I'm more for the very simple than the complex at this point. However complex attracts more money.
I think that's the nub of the problem, so many exceptions, and UK roads build in a lot of requirement for situational awareness. Things like negotiating a two way street with parked cars either side and effectively a single lane, or simply dealing with vehicles parked forcing you to cross a solid white line, or cyclists doing less than 10mph
The exceptions are endless before you get onto the likes of Abingdon where drivers think heavy traffic means no entry signs no longer apply even when facing an angry queue of drivers!
Looks like we'll have some practical experience soon. DPD launching autonomous delivery in Milton Keynes. Currently learning routes according to this.
https://www.lapostegroupe.com/en/news/dpd-uk-to-launch-autonomous-delive...
A bit sceptical myself.
Those little robots are kinda cute.
I suspect they'll have more difficulty from people going and kicking them over, than they'll get from any collisions, but then they move slow enough and are small enough that collisions are unlikely to be serious.
I'm sure they've designed / engineered in extra cuteness (maybe borrowing from Short Circuit / Wall-E?) for exactly that reason. Although that may lead to them being stolen to become pets...
Presumably we didn't go for a trained dogs / moneys on horseback solution because of cost concerns and fears they might unionise?
If there are any collisions though I would hope it would delay the introduction of autonomous vehicles, which could do a lot more damage, until they have had a couple of trouble free years but with the current government hell bent on deregulation I fear it won't.
1800 people a year killed by human driven cars, roll out hasn't been paused yet.
Reminds me of the FBI mail robot in "The Americans"
Most people want to travel in the sort of comfort that bicycles can't always provide. There's no easy way around that.
Driverless cars should increase the occupancy of the average car which should significantly decrease the number of cars needed.
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