Unreal Expectations about Road Safety
On July 16, 2018 a blog post announced the deployment of yet another “tool” that would reportedly make it easier for cities to integrate automated vehicles into their already crowded and complex roadway networks. The new tool essentially is a centralized online database for all cities and public agencies to upload mapping and traffic control data to. Sounds like a good idea, and it sounds like something that most cities and agencies have historically had a very tough time with.
Reading deeper into the article announcing this new tool, however, I see a very disturbing trend in how automated vehicles are framed. This is a trend I’ve seen growing for a few months now, and it really needs to be confronted.
The article starts by talking about how the current way cities track and maintain the condition of necessary traffic control devices is failing:
“We let lane lines fade and stop signs fall down. We fail to mark speed limits and flag pop-up construction sites. For the most part, humans can handle this lack of clarity. For robots, it can be baffling.”
While I completely agree with the first sentence, it is the second one that gets me. “Humans can handle this lack of clarity.” Really? On a daily basis, I witness many human drivers “handling” roads and various traffic control devices by simply not adhering to the basic rules of the road. When a construction zone illegally closes down a bike lane and sidewalk, and the local city does nothing to enforce standing rules over temporary roadway closures, I see people wandering out into the streets, simply in an effort to get where they want to go; and into streets that are very dangerous for pedestrians. More than this example, I see on a daily basis vehicles illegally crossing into oncoming lanes of traffic to pass “slow” vehicles, or vehicles parking or driving in bicycle lanes. This is in Los Angeles, and I’ve seen the same driver behavior all over the US. Simply put, human drivers have clearly shown that they cannot handle the rules of the road as they stand, without some kind of improvement in driver education and/or behavioral modification.
The article goes on to tout the benefits of this new database, saying that the database
“lets cities pull together all the rules they expect human drivers to follow, and translate them into a computer-friendly format that any self-driving developer can fold into its software.”
That’s where it hit me. Our cities, and more importantly, the people we elect and hire to oversee the safe operation and movement of people and vehicles over city streets and sidewalks, “expect” human drivers to follow the rules of the road. As a parent of two toddlers, I had a welcome revelation a few years ago regarding my expectations, and I can tell you that my life has become a lot more manageable by expecting my toddlers to not always follow the rules as my wife and I have presented them. By having realistic expectations about how our kids might act, we are better able to keep them in-line, following the rules we (and society) have established, and most of all, keep them safe. I write this, because reading the above sentence in the article made me realize that cities and the people we elect and hire to oversee road safety could do well by developing more realistic expectations of human behavior and actions.
A more realistic expectation would be that human drivers will not always adhere to the rules of the road, and in fact, it is more likely that rules will be broken rather than followed. Continuing this line of thought, and applying some simple statistics, a more realistic expectation would be that in places of high levels of human activity (walking, biking, riding, driving), the probability of people breaking the rules of the road would increase. This is evident in Los Angeles, and is evident any time I visit other cities and towns in the US. Overlay this with an omnipresent shortening of attention spans and increasing aggressive/anxious behavior of people across the country, and you get a toxic formula for people breaking the rules of the road out of both habit and frustration.
In another article, a representative of an automated vehicle company seemed to share a more realistic expectation:
“‘Safety should be foundational to everything you do in this area,’ said Mark Rosekind, a former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and National Transportation Safety Board official who now heads up safety and innovation at the secretive autonomous vehicle startup Zoox. ‘But understand that on that path, crashes will continue to happen.’ How do you go about telling the public this sort of truth, that zero road fatalities is, for the time being, a fantasy?”
The statement above is accurate, in my opinion. The mixing of automated vehicles with all modes and forms of human-operated transportation is a recipe for continued collisions and likely deaths. Why? Because people have a habit of doing the unexpected, and if you expect everyone to follow the rules of the road all the time, you are going to face a lot of unexpected situations on a nearly minute-by-minute basis.
I was listening to the Deputy Chief Innovation Officer and technology advisor for the City of Los Angeles, speak at an event on July 17th. At the event, the Deputy CIO said,“when I pull up to a red traffic signal, I expect all the drivers around me to follow all the rules.” Really, I thought; have you ever driven in Los Angeles? I thought this because the next statements the Deputy CIO made were about all the safety benefits of automated vehicles.
This is the line we keep hearing: that automated vehicles will reduce up to 90% of roadway collisions and fatalities, making our roads safer for everyone. I’m writing all this to say that these are unrealistic expectations. I’d like to see us, and particularly those people working in and around transportation safety, get real. Rather than continue to promote unrealistic expectations about how humans will behave, and unrealistic expectations about how automated vehicles can make our roads safer, get real and focus on technologies and approaches that are proven to make roads safer.
Things like automated enforcement.
In New York City they get it, and I hope they can expand their program and deployment. Read more about how I believe the expansion of automated enforcement would be a far better focus for cities and public agencies here.
