Apeless Carriage - A Hitchhiker's guide to Driverless Vehicles

The LAV - Lightweight Automated Vehicle The potential that autonomous vehicles (AVs) represent for disruptive and beneficial change calls for increased study and evaluation. Because of the speed at which relevant technologies are developing the time has come to look beyond short term impacts on safety, travel time reduction, accessibility and parking. History suggests that the present focus of debates over driverless vehicles-- liability, security, and popular acceptance -- are likely to be transitory. The significance of a mature autonomous transportation system will take longer to develop, but will have a profound impact on our social, economic, and built environments. This study examines the potential for driverless vehicles to address travel demand generated by activities not usually associated with single-occupancy vehicles. The focus is on the potential for small, lightweight, automated vehicles (LAV’s) to perform transportation duties that are presently accomplished ...

Huch wood would a woodchuck chuck?  -or-   What is the real potential of a driverless system? Lets start the devil we know. The present "system" is fairly well studied and, for all its diversity, exhibits fairly consistant behaviors across all its forms.  Different roads, weather conditions, and vehicles notwithstanding there is a common factor-- the driver. Drivers can be counted on to take a roadway of almost any design and reduce its capacity.   Give the driver a potholed, too narrow, and winding roadway and there will be more horns than progress. Create a broad, well lit multi-lane freeway and every commuter in the region will converge on it and create a parking lot.  The driver, not the road, creates a fairly firm bottom line. The average capacity for a lane of traffic at highway speeds is about 1,200 vehicles per hour. Above this number and slowdowns and stoppages become inevitable.  At lower speeds the...

Transportation systems often appear immovable. Their infrastructure is massive, their networks complex, and their daily operation embedded in layers of regulation, labor, and habit. Change seems to come slowly, if at all. Yet history suggests that even the most entrenched systems can be fundamentally transformed— sometimes not by dramatic invention, but by the introduction of a relatively simple idea in the right context. The shift from break- bulk shipping to containerization is one such case. For generations, maritime freight was handled by human labor, one piece at a time. Crates, barrels, pallets, and sacks were hoisted aboard ships and arranged carefully by crews below deck. At each port of call, the process reversed. It was slow, labor- intensive, and expensive, but it worked. And because it worked, entire institutions— port authorities, labor unions, insurance systems, and international regulatory bodies— grew around it. This was the “ normal” state of global trade for much of t...