GETTING UP TO SPEED

DRIVERLESS CARS MIGHT BE THE KEY TO SOLVING TRAFFIC WOES

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If you haven't taken a ride in a driverless car yet, odds are you will soon. Waymo operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. It has expansion plans for New York City, Denver, Seattle, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Dallas. Uber is investing $300 million in Lucid's robotaxi program with plans for 20,000 driverless cars on the road in the next six years. Amazon's Zoox is giving rides in Las Vegas and is on its way to San Francisco. The number of automated vehicles on the road is set to skyrocket in the next few years. What effect, we wonder, will that have on traffic patterns?

Stops & Starts

Human drivers have a tendency to create “phantom congestion,” where one person steps on the brakes, then a line of trailing cars also slows down. This pattern repeats, often because someone is following the car ahead too closely.

Automated cars, on the other hand, keep an even distance between themselves and the car in front of them.

“Driving is very intuitive. If there's a gap in front of you, you accelerate. If someone brakes, you slow down. But it turns out that this very normal reaction can lead to stop-and-go traffic and energy inefficiency,” said Alexandre Bayen, associate provost and engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “That's precisely what AI technology is able to fix — it can direct the vehicle to things that are not intuitive to humans, but are overall more efficient.”