In December 2015, when the state Department of Motor Vehicles released draft regulations for the testing of driverless vehicles, California tech firms were stunned by their onerousness. Google immediately objected to a proposed requirement that drivers always had to be behind the wheel of autonomous test vehicles.

Soon after, a consortium including TechNet, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the Bay Area Council, the Wireless Association, the Consumer Technology Association, the Information Technology Industry Council and the Auto Alliance issued a statement pleading with the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown to encourage, not discourage, the nascent driverless vehicle industry.

Instead, the DMV initially decided to allow each of the state’s 480-plus incorporated cities and 58 counties to set up their own rules for such testing – potentially creating an immense maze for driverless vehicle companies.

To the relief of executives with Google, Uber, Lyft, Volvo and 40-plus other companies interested in testing their vehicles in the Golden State, the state government reconsidered its position. Beginning in April 2018, new DMV rules allowed for autonomous vehicles to be tested without a human behind the wheel. So far, only one company has met DMV’s standards and obtained a permit for such tests – Mountain View’s Waymo. But far more could qualify in coming years.

Now, there is a fresh sign of the DMV’s willingness to embrace new vehicular technology. On April 12, the agency released draft regulations allowing for testing of autonomous delivery vehicles. Heavy-duty vehicles that weigh more than 10,000 pounds are not allowed, but standard cars, trucks and vans can be tested. The DMV will only issue permits for fully autonomous testing to companies that have met the same safety standards that Waymo did. The rules are expected to be finalized by December.

Driverless deliveries may face less public anxiety

With polls showing millions of Americans are very nervous about riding in driverless vehicles, tech and marketing experts told The Verge website in January they were much more likely to gain initial acceptance for delivery purposes.

Robot deliveries with much smaller vehicles have already proven instant hits. San Francisco-based startup Starship Technologies has enjoyed huge success since January, when its 25 robots began deliveries on the 800-acre campus of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Navigating campus paths and sidewalks at 4 miles per hour, the robots deliver small coolers capable of holding up to 20 pounds of groceries. Students use an app to direct the robots where to go and are sent access codes to open the coolers. Starship collects $1.99 per order.

A March 25 Washington Post story depicted university officials as initially unsure what sort of reception the robots would get. But on the first day of deliveries, “the machines were flooded by so many dinner orders that school officials had to pull the plug, shutting off orders so that robots weren’t operating late into the night, far behind schedule,” the Post reported.

Since then, they’ve become an accepted convenience of campus life at the university.

S.F. firm’s college delivery robots only the start

In late March, Starship announced that an even bigger order of food-delivery robots, 30-plus, had been shipped to a second U.S. college – Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Unlike George Mason, NAU leaders were so confident the robots would be a hit with students that the university issued a press release quoting NAU President Rita Cheng as welcoming them to campus.

But much bolder plans are in the works. The Verge’s report in January noted that Burlingame-based startup Udelv was partnering with Walmart on an autonomous grocery-delivery service that will use the sort of vehicles that the California DMV is now crafting rules for. Home-food delivery services could be a $100 billion annual industry by 2025, the tech website reported.

The Udelv report came shortly after Cruise – GM’s autonomous vehicle company – announced it was teaming with San Francisco-based DoorDash on the same sort of food-delivery venture.

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.”

California’s utility companies have unveiled a plan to allocate $1 billion to a statewide charging station program, designed to meet the state’s rigorous emissions standards and extend the reach of electric and hybrid vehicles throughout the state. 

“Three major California utility companies are following the lead of the state’s clean transportation and emission-reduction goals by offering multiple programs to promote EV adoption by citizens and deployment by public and private agencies,” Digital Trends reported. “California Electric Transportation Coalition members Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric submitted applications to the California Public Utilities Commission for a variety of significant programs. All of the programs are aimed at moving the state closer to its zero-emissions vehicle goals.”

Keeping up with change

But environmentalist plans have not been the only driver of the state’s broad push toward more alternative energy-fueled transportation. Driverless vehicle technology, which could soon transform the business models of shipping and automotive companies, pairs naturally with zero-emissions technology. But the regulatory landscape, even in California, has not changed as swiftly as technological advances have progressed. 

“The overall goal is to facilitate the addition of tens of thousands of plug-in vehicle chargers at homes and businesses across the state, while further spurring the adoption of electric vehicles, particularly as a replacement to gas- or diesel-powered delivery trucks or buses,” Autoblog noted. “As it is, California accounts for almost 12,000 of the approximately 40,000 publicly accessible plug-in charging outlets in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.”

Bigger batteries

In pushing for an all-in approach to rechargeable technology, California’s utilities sharpened a two-prong approach to the opportunities and challenges facing the state on alternative energy. While the widespread use of charging stations could help swiftly drive Californians toward the economic lead in new transportation infrastructure, utilities officials have also focused in recent years on trying to achieve a breakthrough in the stubborn problem of scaling up battery storage to meet state needs.

State engineers, the New York Times recently reported, “brought three energy-storage sites close to completion to begin serving the Southern California electric grid within the next month. They are made up of thousands of oversize versions of the lithium-ion batteries now widely used in smartphones, laptop computers and other digital devices.”

“One of the installations, at a San Diego Gas & Electric operations center surrounded by industrial parks in Escondido, Calif., 30 miles north of San Diego, will be the largest of its kind in the world, developers say. It represents the most crucial test yet of an energy-storage technology that many experts see as fundamental to a clean-energy future. Here, about 130 miles southeast of Aliso Canyon, the site of the immense gas leak in 2015 — the global-warming equivalent of operating about 1.7 million cars over the course of a year — 19,000 battery modules the size of a kitchen drawer are being wired together in racks. They will operate out of two dozen beige, 640-square-foot trailers.”

What’s more, the paper noted, former longtime state energy policy czar Susan Kennedy has been “keeping a close eye on the Southern California battery efforts,” although the energy storage startup she now runs did not participate in the Aliso Canyon project. 

Shifting sales

Beyond environmental or technological justifications for its new charging station plans, California’s utilities have simple self-interest in play as well. “The utility industry is looking to electric car-charging as one of the few areas of growth as the increased use of rooftop solar panels and energy-efficient appliances weakens power sales,” Automotive News observed. “Last month, regulators approved a scaled-down version of PG&E’s plan to invest in charging stations.”

Rules on driverless cars tick off industry

Good morning and Happy Halloween. Today’s newsletter is totally free of news about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Instead, we begin with innovation and regulation — nothing more California than that. 

Hopes that California would emerge as the global center for what eventually could be a multitrillion-dollar industry — self-driving vehicles — have taken a step back.

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.”

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Bad news for Republicans: “More than 2.5 million Californians already have voted by mail, and Republican returns statewide are down about 1.4 percent from 2012, according to Political Data Inc., the voter data firm used by both Republicans and Democrats in California. Democrats, meanwhile, were exceeding their 2012 turnout at this point by two-tenths of a percent,” reports Politico.

• More bad news for Republicans: “Perhaps the starkest view of the party’s problems comes from a poll last week by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. In short, the Republican brand has become radioactive. Of the state’s likely voters, 72 percent have an unfavorable opinion of the GOP. That’s eight points higher than two years ago, 14 points worse than four years ago and a massive 21 points above the party’s unfavorable rating six years ago. And then there’s this: 50 percent of registered Republicans have an unfavorable opinion of their party.” The Los Angeles Times has more.

• Non-Republican news: “Businesses in California were given state tax breaks worth about $2.67 billion over the past two decades, with more than half the money going to two sectors of the economy – those trading in war and circus.” The Orange County Register has more. 

• If voters legalize recreational pot, how will that work with federal laws? The Los Angeles Times answers that question. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December. 

Gov. Brown:

• In San Francisco at a breakfast benefit of the Willie L. Brown, Jr. Institute on Politics and Public Service.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @barbsolish

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.’

The latest battle in California’s ongoing legislative and regulatory war over ridesharing services has shifted to new ground, as livery supporters rallied to pass a new bill concentrating decision-making in state hands. Although car companies based in San Francisco would be spared thanks to a wrinkle in pre-existing municipal rules, a small consolation to startups in the space, the new scheme has attracted broader opposition.

Racing against regulation

Assembly Bill 650, introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low, D-Campbell, “would centralize control of the taxi industry by transferring regulatory jurisdiction from every city in California (except San Francisco, which operates on a medallion system) to Sacramento, the state capital,” The Verge recently reported. “So instead of L.A.’s taxi commission overseeing that city’s taxi business, California’s Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the electric grid and hot air balloons, among other commercial carriers, would now have that authority. Supporters say this will help the traditional taxi industry better compete with upstarts like Uber and Lyft.”

Automotive companies innovating around autonomous vehicle technology, however, have cried foul, with Uber, Ford and others pulling together a nationwide lobbying group dedicated to ensuring that bills like AB650 don’t sprout up around the country. “[S]witching the regulatory authority for taxis from localities to the state government could spell trouble once self-driving cars and taxis hit the road, since they rely heavily on local infrastructure information, such as detailed maps that include lanes and traffic levels, as well as real-time information on road construction and closures,” Business Insider noted. “Further, the state government may be less responsive than some local governments, and it’s not equipped to respond to technological developments in the market.”

Going driverless

San Francisco-based Uber, for its part, has forged ahead — scrambled, according to critics — with its plans to get autonomous vehicles on the roads as quickly as possible. With some jurisdictions already prohibiting the driverless autos out of safety concerns, the company could face a race against local and state lawmakers. But its hopes to outpace them were put on display as Uber revealed plans to deploy test cars in Pittsburgh, a city whose lack of regulation around the activity made for an appealing target.

“Current law, in its silence, is permitting it by not prohibiting it,” Pennsylvania transportation department policy director Roger Cohen told the Modesto Bee. “Pittsburgh might be the exact environment that innovators love to leap into — a legal void that can be defined by technologists, not bureaucrats,” the Bee noted. “The question is how fast, and under what conditions, should the testing of a life-changing technology occur. While many companies, including Google and General Motors, are conducting trials of automatic vehicles on public roads, Uber is the first to bring everyday commuters along for the ride.”

Although the automated cars have shown trouble handling physical features like bridges and more conceptual ones like the gestures made by human drivers, Uber has ensured that its Pittsburgh vehicles will be equipped with two individuals who can take the wheel if necessary. 

A shaky balance

In an ironic demonstration of how sharply the two sides in the California conflict differ, the taxi industry itself has complained that AB650 doesn’t do enough to protect them from ridesharing companies, also known by the term “transportation network companies,” or TNCs, as the California Public Utilities Commission officially dubbed them in 2013. In a Los Angeles Daily News op-ed, William Rouse, president of the Taxicab Paratransit Association of California, objected that AB650 “is a much more limited bill” now that it’s heading to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for a signature.

But much of what changed was driven by direct political pressure that threatened to effectively sink the bill. After the city of Los Angeles “voted to oppose the measure unless it was also exempted,” Low “changed the legislation to accommodate some of the largest objections,” as the Los Angeles Times reported. 

“The crash may be the first case of one of its autonomous cars hitting another vehicle and the fault of the self-driving car,” Reuters reported. “The Mountain View, California-based Internet search leader said it made changes to its software after the crash to avoid future incidents.”

The collision resulted from a confluence of atypical but not unusual circumstances on a roadway in Mountain View. Because of a sandbagged manhole, the car had to make a wider right turn at an intersection than it had originally planned to do. In the flow of traffic, the bus approached from behind. “We can imagine the bus driver assumed we were going to stay put. Unfortunately, all these assumptions led us to the same spot in the lane at the same time. This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day,” Google concluded in its monthly report for February.

“This is a classic example of the negotiation that’s a normal part of driving — we’re all trying to predict each other’s movements,” the report suggested. “In this case, we clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn’t moved there wouldn’t have been a collision. That said, our test driver believed the bus was going to slow or stop to allow us to merge into the traffic, and that there would be sufficient space to do that.”

Market moves

Despite the reassuring tone of the summary, Google-watchers noted that an important threshold had been crossed. “Google has prided itself on the fact that its self-driving car fleet has never been responsible for any of its crashes — they’ve always been caused by another (decidedly more human) force,” The Verge observed. But business analysts have not been too hard on the company; “in fairness, unless every single car on the road is autonomous, Google is right: there is some degree of negotiation involved, and false assumptions in those negotiations are where the crashes can happen,” The Verge added.

Other companies in the automated car business have been pushing hard to compete. Apple recently (and quietly) acquired the old Pepsi bottling plant in Sunnyvale, a 96,000-square-foot acquisition that quickly sparked speculation around its expanded electric vehicle program, the Silicon Valley Business Journal noted.

Fantasies and fears

Civic leaders, at least in California, have also tilted in favor of a future full of automated cars. In a crowded metropolis — especially one with lots of roads and little public transit — robocars could make a potentially massive difference in emissions and congestion. At a recent appearance with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and others for the Times-hosted California Conversation series, Google’s robocar chief had played up the vehicles’ intelligent safety measures. “Chris Urmson, head of Google’s self driving car project, offered a presentation showing how its autonomous cars learned to avoid even the most anomalous hazards — such as a duck in the road being chased by a person in a wheelchair,” the Times recalled. “Urmson said 94 percent of accidents are caused by human error and argued that self-driving cars would save lives.”

Consumers, by contrast, have shown signs of being more skittish. According to a new AAA survey reported by CNN, “75 percent of drivers say they wouldn’t feel safe in such a vehicle,” even though “60 percent drivers would like to get some kind of self-driving feature, such as automatic braking or self-parking, the next time they buy a new car.” The legal issues surrounding insurance liability in automated crashes have also raised questions. USA Today columnist John Shinal wondered who would be held liable “if a hypothetical-and-conscientious Uber driver of the future overrides the control” of a robocar “to avoid an old lady walking her dog — but instead hits and kills an Amazon grocery deliveryman[.]”

Photo credit: telematicswire.net

Slowly but surely, driverless — or “self-driving” — cars will make their way onto California streets.

Despite a string of setbacks, and a wave of pervasive fear that automated cars could be hacked, Golden State regulators have determined to move ahead with first-in-the-nation guidelines setting the rules of the road for the ultimate gadgets.

“The state of California hopes to release the world’s first safety regulations for the public use of self-driving cars by the end of the year, officials from the Department of Motor Vehicles said Wednesday,” according to the Sacramento Business Journal. “This is the first timeline officials have offered for the release of safety regulations to govern consumer use of self-driving cars since the agency missed a statutory deadline in January. In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation giving the DMV until the beginning of this year to issue a draft.”

A race against industry

State officials have broadly agreed on the wisdom of moving to catch up with the automotive future. But liability issues have led to disagreements between the public and private sector over what internal information driverless automakers ought to be compelled to share. “Regulators don’t want to be blamed for unnecessarily stalling the arrival of robo-chauffeurs that can see farther, react faster and don’t text, speed or fall asleep,” CBS News noted. “They’ve implored Google and traditional automakers also developing the technology to share safety data, but companies in competition don’t willingly reveal trade secrets.”

The delays threatened to stymie the industry race to field robocars, which has attracted heavy investment and fierce competition among not only the world’s leading automakers but among the tech companies pushing into the transportation market as well. “Back in May of 2014 it sure seemed that DMV experts were working hard to meet the Legislature’s December 31, 2014 deadline,” IEEE Spectrum observed. “They held public hearings, consulted with industry leaders, such as Google, Daimler and General Motors, and even issued some licenses for experimental cars made by those companies and by academics. But such cars can be tested only if a qualified driver sits behind the wheel. California has licensed 98 such test vehicles from 10 companies; 73 of the cars belong to Google.”

Handling technology

Google, however, found itself at the center of the latest driverless controversy. When a Mountain View police officer pulled over a Google Autonomous Vehicle, he discovered there was no driver to ticket. But the issue went beyond that small irony. The driving infraction was a significant one — motoring too slowly. “There was no one at the wheel, but there was a Google operator sitting shotgun who explained to the officer how Google regulates the speed at which its autonomous cars drive,” CBS News reported. “According to California law, a self-driving car can only be operated on roads with speed limits that are at or under 35 mph, and Google caps its cars’ speed at 25 mph.”

The company responded by making the reassuring point that it didn’t want to frighten people by pegging its vehicles at higher speeds. But the episode reinforced concerns that the biggest problem with driverless cars was how human drivers might struggle to adapt to their presence on roads. Drivers, analysts have suggested, are accustomed to using human cues in order to make the constant judgment calls required behind the wheel.

Adding a complicating factor, at least one company has used a simple conceptual loophole to press ahead with self-driving technology, putting it to use in cars built for human drivers. “Tesla’s autopilot technology is still far from fully autonomous driving, but it’s moving in that direction with actual cars on the road,” CNET reported. “Today, Tesla Model S drivers can take their hands off the steering wheel while on the highway — though they’re not supposed to — and can also let the car parallel park itself.”

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.

Dramatizing the developments, one firm’s team of engineers and scientists recently kicked off a historic road trip in San Francisco, as the Bay Area’s ABC 7 reported:

“Engineers and cutting edge scientists from Delphi Automotive decked out a fleet of Audi SUVs with cameras, lasers, and radar all to teach the nearly $53,000 luxury car to drive itself … on a history-making cross-country trip from San Francisco to New York. It’ll cover 3,500 miles in about 10 days.”

Although Delphi has focused on achieving automated travel by applying technology to cars made elsewhere, Google and Tesla have reached an advanced stage in automated cars constructed with their own software and hardware.

The firms have concentrated on two basic types of transportation. Some work has centered around “self-driving” technology, wherein the person behind the wheel would not have to operate the car in order for it to drive. Other efforts have pursued “driverless” technology. More radical than self-driving, driverless technology would free travelers from having to occupy a driver’s position at all.

Self-driving, but not driverless

Tesla chief Elon Musk raised eyebrows with an announcement that went beyond driverless cars. Musk revealed that, this summer, “a software update — not a repair performed by a mechanic — would give Tesla’s Model S sedans the ability to start driving themselves, at least part of the time, in a hands-free mode that the company refers to as autopilot,” the New York Times reported.

Translation: Motorists would be able to experience “driverless” personal transportation in cars they already own or have access to.

Yet Musk’s remarks weren’t the first to put skeptics on notice that the future was coming whether they were ready or not. Google itself beat him to the punch earlier this year. According to the Times:

“Chris Urmson, director of self-driving cars at Google, raised eyebrows at a January event in Detroit when he said Google did not believe there was currently a ‘regulatory block’ that would prohibit self-driving cars, provided the vehicles themselves met crash-test and other safety standards.”

“A spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration responded at the time that ‘any autonomous vehicle would need to meet applicable federal motor vehicle safety standards’ and that the agency ‘will have the appropriate policies and regulations in place to ensure the safety of these types of vehicles.'”

Making drivers obsolete

In comments calculated to make headlines, Musk recently opined that, eventually, humans would be prohibited from driving by law for safety’s sake.

Some activists have maintained the opposite view. In a letter to the California DMV, Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog wrote:

“To express our concern that Google and others with a vested interest in developing ‘autonomous vehicle technology,’ also known as driverless cars, are pushing the Department of Motor Vehicles into promulgating rules regulating the public use of these vehicles on California’s highways that are inadequate to protect our safety. Safety issues are paramount, of course, but there are other substantial questions about privacy, data security and insurance that are also raised by driverless cars.”

Legislation

Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 1298. It formally legalized autonomous cars and required the DMV to “adopt regulations as soon as practicable,” no later than January of this year, “and to hold public hearings on the adoption of any regulation applicable to the operation of an autonomous vehicle without the presence of a driver inside the vehicle.”

But the DMV missed that deadline because of safety concerns. The Los Angeles Times editorial board tallied the public’s many fears associated with the loss of human control over cars:

“DMV has to grapple with more difficult questions. Should autonomous cars be allowed on the road with no one in them capable of taking the wheel — empty, perhaps, or with passengers in the back seat drinking or watching a movie? Should the vehicles be required to have steering wheels and pedals, or will a ‘stop’ button suffice? In theory, driverless cars could significantly reduce the number of collisions, as 90 percent of accidents are caused by human error. (The Google car won’t text and drive, for example.) What happens, however, if the car malfunctions or causes an accident? Would the carmaker be liable? Would the passenger be liable, even if he or she didn’t operate the vehicle?”

Evidently well aware of such concerns, Google recently obtained a patent for its driverless car that could see external airbags deployed to protect pedestrians from any unforeseen difficulties.