As reported by MIT Technology Review: As driverless cars edge slowly toward commercial reality, some people
are wondering how cities might change as a result. Will traffic lights
disappear? Will parking garages become obsolete? Will carpooling become
the norm?
Singapore is keen to find out. The city-state will open one of its
neighborhoods to driverless cars in 2015, with the idea that such
vehicles could operate as a kind of jitney service, picking up
passengers and taking them to trains or other modes of public
transportation. The vehicles might be like golf carts, taking people
short distances at low speeds, similar to the driverless vehicles
demonstrated this year by Google (see “Lazy Humans Shaped Google’s New Autonomous Car”).
Lam Wee Shann, director of the futures division for Singapore’s
Ministry of Transport, said during a panel held at MIT last month that
the government wants to explore whether autonomous vehicles could reduce
congestion and remake the city into one built around walking,
bicycling, and public transit.
“Singapore welcomes industry and academia to deploy automated
vehicles for testing under real traffic conditions on public roads,” Lam
said in a follow-up e-mail interview. He declined to say whether Google
or any other companies pursuing driverless cars have contacted
Singapore yet.
At 700 square kilometers, Singapore is about three times the size of
Boston, but it has 5.5 million residents versus Boston’s 646,000.
Because it is so dense, Singapore is aggressively trying to discourage
car traffic. For example, if you want to own a car in Singapore you have
to pay a “certificate of entitlement” fee that’s roughly equal to the
price of a car. It also offers free travel on city trains before peak
periods (along with free breakfast vouchers).
Through the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, the
city has had pilot tests of driverless cars for several years, starting
with two driverless golf carts on the campus of the National University
of Singapore. This year it added a Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric car,
retrofitted to be autonomous. A driverless bus called the Navia is used
as a shuttle at Singapore’s Cleantech eco-industrial park and on campus
at Nanyang Technology University.
All of these experiments “provide first-and-last mile connectivity to main public transport nodes,” Lam said.
This fall, people in Singapore were able to try out driverless cars
for the first time. Driverless buggies were deployed in the Chinese and
Japanese gardens in the Jurong Lake District. The system featured an
online booking system and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The buggies
ran for two weekends, and carried 500 people over 400 kilometers in
total.
Cities with driverless cars could eventually eliminate mainstays like
traffic lights. Paolo Santi, a senior researcher with the
MIT/Fraunhofer ambient mobility initiative, said at the MIT event that
his lab has done simulations showing that twice as many driverless cars
could route themselves through intersections, easing congestion and
reducing the greenhouse gas emissions caused by stop-and-go driving.
Santi hopes to carry out experiments in Singapore to see how pedestrians
and bikes affect driverless cars at intersections.
Many challenges remain. On the panel at MIT, Nhai Cao, a senior
global product line manager at TomTom, a navigation vendor, noted that,
“current maps are not good enough for autonomous vehicles.” Driverless
cars, he said, need maps that are three-dimensional and accurate to
within 20 centimeters.
Lam also noted that if driverless cars are available to everyone,
that could translate into more people taking car trips. “An autonomous
vehicle could add on a lot more road trips, and we can ill afford that,”
he said.
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