In it’s announcement, the DMV emphasized that changing technological standards had shifted expectations. “The draft regulations would expand the state’s existing autonomous vehicle testing program to keep pace with the rapid development of the technology,” Bloomberg BNA reported, citing the Department of Motor Vehicles. “The newly proposed rules would not require a human in the car, a change from the current rules.” The news was a boon for competitors in the crowded driverless space, which includes key legacy manufacturers as well as new tech entrants. “Tesla Motors Inc., Ford Motor Co., Nissan Motor Co., Honda Motor Co., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Volkswagen AG and Baidu Inc., are among the 23 manufacturers on the list of approved participants for the California testing program,” Bloomberg BNA noted. 

The list also included “self-driving startups such as Zoox, Drive.ai, AutoX and PlusAI,” Fortune reported, along with “China-funded electric vehicle startups NextEV and Faraday Future. Earlier this week, California granted a testing permit to ride services firm Uber Technologies after a legal standoff last December.”

Hailing robots

The Uber grant signaled a real sea change in life on California roads. Although autonomous cars could fan out across roads as soon as this year, the bulk of consumer experiences was expected to shift away from owned cars to pay-per-use. “Among other things, the revisions would permit ride-hailing services to pick up passengers in cars without human drivers on board,” Car and Driver observed. “For now, these rides would remain solely in the realm of testing, and companies providing them would be prohibited from charging fees for those services. Nonetheless, the prospect of ride-hailing services like Uber or Lyft picking up riders in autonomous vehicles within a matter of months is the latest sign of just how quickly the autonomous age may be approaching.”

Both tech and safety advocates have found reason to cheer the promised transformation. “Some 3,000 people die on its roads every year, and self-driving cars could eliminate the human error that causes 90 percent of crashes,” according to Wired. “They could make more people more mobile, reduce emissions (maybe), and boost the economy.” 

New frameworks

Driverless car companies were not released from key regulatory obligations at the sometimes blurry nexus of state and federal rules. “If companies test vehicles without conventional controls, they have to show the California DMV that they have approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” Bloomberg reported, citing California DMV Chief Counsel Brian Soublet. “NHTSA said in early 2016 that self-driving software systems, not just humans, can be considered drivers.”

But federal regulators, in turn, will be looking to California’s unfolding experience for cues going forward. “The DMV’s rules are going to shift a big part of the conversation to the federal level,” University of South Carolina driverless expert Bryant Walker Smith told Wired. “Federal regulators seem eager to advance autonomy (chiefly for the safety benefits), so what happens on California’s roads may well be replicated across the U.S., and even internationally,” the magazine added. 

That has meant a special burden for Sacramento, where the ins and outs of insurance and other questions must be hammered out a step at a time. “California state lawmakers are starting the long process of deciding who should be held responsible when these new vehicles crash on state roadways or are potentially hacked by criminals,” as Capital Public Radio reported. “The California State Senate Committee on Insurance heard testimony on those questions and others at the state Capitol [March 8]. The informational hearing raised more questions than it answered.”

New proposed rules unveiled this month by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles drew sharp complaints from the leading companies in the field — Google, General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen and Honda — as being far too onerous and certain to slow innovation. They are among 18 firms with licenses to test autonomous vehicles in California.

A nascent industry group — The Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, whose members include Lyft, Uber Technologies and Volvo — released a statement that the rules “could greatly delay the benefits that self-driving vehicles can bring to safety and mobility for individuals.”

Among the proposed state rules spurring concern:

• A regulation that would require a one-year delay between testing a vehicle with new technology and its use on public streets and highways.

• A regulation that would require driverless vehicles being tested to have vehicle data recorders whose information is regularly provided to the DMV, which automakers fear could lead to proprietary information leaking out.

• A regulation that allows police to demand that information from the vehicle data recorders be turned over within 24 hours without authorities having to get a subpoena or warrant.

• A requirement that all local governments give their permission before an autonomous vehicle could be used on their roads and highways.

The last requirement drew a sharp response from Ron Medford, the director of safety for Google’s self-driving car project, who wondered why bureaucrats didn’t grasp how much red tape this would create. Medford said the rule was “unworkable,” according to a Reuters report.

Perhaps the only state action that was greeted warmly was regulatory language that suggested the DMV would be willing to accept testing of vehicles without steering wheels more quickly than expected.

Sharp contrast between state, federal approach

The state’s framework is based in many ways on ideas outlined in a federal proposal unveiled in September. That proposal generally won praise from autonomous automakers and from such tech websites as Ars Technica for heeding industry recommendations — especially in how to categorize levels of autonomy in vehicles being developed. Instead of using outdated language crafted by federal officials, the U.S. Department of Transportation adopted what are known as the SAE standards, which classify vehicles from 0 (totally human controlled) to 5 (totally automated).

But the reason the federal proposal won cheers while the California DMV’s plan won jeers is that the federal proposal amounts to a collection of guidelines, not hard rules. The Obama administration also underlined how important it considered autonomous vehicles to be in our future economy by having Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council, join Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx at the news conference unveiling the rules. This was reflected in the headline on The New York Times coverage of the event: “Self-Driving Cars Gain Powerful Ally: The Government.”

The California state government sought to offer reassurance that its rules were drafts open to revision and that it wanted and welcomed input from the 18 companies testing autonomous vehicles in the state.

But the assurance didn’t come from Gov. Jerry Brown or one of his top aides. It came from Brian Soublet, deputy director of the California DMV, who said, “The goal is making sure that we can get this life-saving technology out on the streets.’

Now an effort is being launched to see whether “Big Data” might be able to reduce California’s often-awful urban gridlock. Fortune magazine has the details:

Los Angeles’ snarled, rage-inducing roads have been infamous for decades. And now, thanks to a tech industry-fueled population explosion, San Francisco is right behind L.A. in the title race for Worst Traffic in America.

 

AT&T, UC Berkeley and California’s state transportation authority are testing a new way to get a grip on the situation — by collecting and analyzing drivers’ cellphone location data. The study leads insist that users’ privacy is protected, and the information could revolutionize how we plan and manage highways and transit.

 

“The idea of using cellular data for mobility is not very new,” admits Alexei Pozdnukhov, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Smart Cities program. “What is new … is that our approach is much more detailed modeling. We can simulate very detailed scenarios, and answer questions.”

L.A. and Bay Area the initial focus

Traffic can be horrible in other parts of the state — San Diego and Sacramento freeways are often brutally clogged in the morning and evening rush hours, and the 75-mile section of the Interstate 15 corridor from Lake Elsinore to Hesperia is a common target of Sigalerts during daylight hours because of heavy commercial traffic. But the initial focus will be on the biggest population centers:

The new California projects — Connected Corridors in Los Angeles, and SmartBay in San Francisco — are something like Google Maps on steroids. They compile region-wide cell data into big portraits, not just of where traffic is most congested, but of overall daily patterns.

 

“[It shows] where people … work, where they go for shopping, where they go for leisure, and how they choose to get there,” says Pozdnukhov. Dr. Compin says that’s “the holy grail” of transit planning.

 

The data will help planners develop detailed responses to congestion events — Compin says there are a stunning 5,000 to 6,000 events per year on the I-210 corridor, making up about 50 percent of traffic delays. By working closely with local authorities and public transit providers, Caltrans hopes to make better decisions about how to re-route traffic onto parallel corridors and local roads, and communicate changes to commuters more smoothly. The San Francisco pilot is centered on Interstate 80, and among other things, says Pozdnukhov, hopes to determine the potential impact of increased development on the Treasure Island neighborhood the highway passes through.

Research can be basis of driverless-car grid

The effort depicted by the Fortune article could end up being as tantamount to a crucial first step toward establishing a grid for driverless cars. Such a grid could steer traffic in certain directions based on algorithms anticipating optimal vehicle flow. The theory is this could be done in a way that would dramatically reduce gridlock.

Studies also emphasize how an orderly computer-run traffic grid of autonomous cars could sharply reduce pollution, especially if the cars were hybrids or otherwise didn’t have internal combustion engines.