Autonomous-Ways, or A-Ways, Part 1 – What Do We Want?

When I focused on how Autonomous Vehicles could transform transportation in 2007, I started by looking at my own transportation habits and needs. 

I rapidly realized most travel is local, so improving local transportation is the key, not bullet trains and ultra-fast long distance services (although, I’ll address those as well). My typical trip around town is on roads with speed limits of 25 mph, 35 mph, and 45 mph. Thus it takes 14 minutes to go the 6.8 miles to the Garden State Parkway, for an average of 29 mph. Traffic adds about 5 minutes, which brings the average down to 23 mph.

I spent a lot of time contemplating our roads and highways, usually while stopped at stoplights and stop signs, or stuck in slow traffic – there are 8 traffic lights and 2 stop signs on that trip to the Parkway.

Simple things like eliminating stop signs, traffic lights, and slow speed limits could almost cut my typical trip in half. I quickly realized that Autonomous Vehicles don’t need such traffic restrictions because inter-vehicle communications, using my ideas for Cloudlet Computing & Communications and traffic management would keep them from running into each other.

With this careful management Autonomous Vehicles can drive closer to each other, both front-to-back and side-to-side. This means we can get a lot more cars into the same roadway area: today cars occupy only 11% of a roadway. This will reduce congestion – which speeds up my typical trip even more.

Close coordination also means Autonomous Vehicles can safely travel faster on the same roads. Now we might do my 6.8 mile trip in 6.8 minutes, or even less. 

I call the “roads” that these Autonomous Vehicles will move on Autonomous-Ways, or A-Ways J

An unintended consequence of making transportation faster and more pleasant is that people will travel more. So any efficiency from not stopping and starting would be gobbled up by the additional travel.

That got me thinking about how to make Autonomous Vehicles much more efficient than cars. Cars are very inefficient, so that isn’t too hard. Overall transportation is about 20% energy efficient, and most of the energy from our imported oil goes out the tailpipe of our transportation system.

Autonomous Vehicles won’t have collisions. If we don’t have any collisions then we can eliminate a lot of weight from current cars: bumpers, crumple zones, super strong doors and frames, air bags, etc. This makes Autonomous Vehicles substantially lighter than cars.

Weather is another hazard, both to driving, and to the roads themselves – during freeze-thaw cycles here in the Adirondacks you can almost watch the roads disintegrate. This led me to think we need to enclose these new segregated ways.

Once we are free of weather related issues, and the vehicles are lighter, the enclosed ways can be engineered to be very flat and smooth. This means Autonomous Vehicles don’t need heavy tires and suspensions, which makes the vehicles even lighter and smaller. This greatly reduces rolling resistance 4%-8% of losses for current vehicles.

As I discussed in Optimized AutonomousVehicles, I believe we could get the Autonomous Vehicle replacement for car-like functions down to less than the weight of the contents they are carrying – more like an enclosed electric bicycle.

Of course there will be a wide variety of vehicles, from the tiny “pill-vehicles”, to Personal Mobility Vehicles, to Convoy Vehicles that carry many people and large quantities of other items, including other Autonomous Vehicles nested inside. So we aren’t really talking about a single A-Way, but a whole family of them. Here I’m focusing on carrying people over the distances they typically travel in a car, a few miles. (I’ll deal with very short distance and long distance A-Ways later.)

Once the Autonomous Vehicles are close to each other, why not actually link up, like train cars. This allows us to greatly reduce air resistance (4% for local travel, and up to 16% of highway losses for current vehicles), and air resistance losses grow as the square of speed, as we go to 100 mph, and even 400 mph, this will become even more important.

Originally I imagined the individual Autonomous Vehicles just linking together to form the Convoys. But I soon realized that to get the higher speeds we want, safely and efficiently, we needed longer, multi-passenger vehicles.

Now we have separated the vehicles into high speed Convoys and lower speed Personal Mobility Vehicles. And I noted that the Personal Mobility Vehicles could carry other items, up to the weight of the person. That led me to the concept of separating the Content Carrier from the Mobility Platform, so that you had a seat and the associated amenities when carrying a person, but could optimize the Carrier for other items, whether refrigerated, or heated, or fragile, and allowing for nesting smaller Autonomous Vehicles.

Once we link them up, that led me to the concepts of Continuous Convoys, Nesting Autonomous Vehicles and En Route Sequencing, which allows the Personal Mobility Vehicles to move within the Convoy Vehicles, and brings us to an integrated Transportation System, so you can change from one mode to another without getting up.

But to achieve those gains we have to keep Autonomous Vehicles away from us, dangerous drivers that we are. Drivers and cars caused 35,900 deaths, 2.2 million injuries, and 4.3 million collisions with “only” property damage in 2009; 1/3 of deaths involved speeding, 1/3 involve driver intoxication, and 22% of injuries involved driver distraction. Between 91% and 99% of crashes involve driver behavior issues.

And of course we have to separate those delightfully speeding Autonomous Vehicles from pedestrians, bicyclists, kids, pets, and other critters. This started me on the path of envisioning separate “ways” for the Autonomous Vehicles.

But where to put them: obvious places are on medians of current highways, or as an “Autonomous Vehicle only lane”, or supported above a current highway.

How do you get to those Autonomous Vehicle-only lanes, and how do you keep drivers from going into the lanes. I contemplated all sorts of fancy schemes.

Intersections pose major challenges – even if you have separate Autonomous Vehicle-only lanes, how do you get across the conventional roads at the intersections. Bridges block going above some highways, and the bridge supports often block the median.

Bury the Autonomous Vehicle-only lanes? Expensive and you still have the problem of bridge supports, not to mention all the utilities running alongside existing roads: utility poles for power and communications, buried water and sewer lines, buried communications lines.

What about making all the roads Autonomous Vehicle-only? Where could we walk, or bike, or move things that didn’t fit in Autonomous Vehicles, like construction vehicles and building materials.

This seemed like a dead end because we couldn’t make the transition from our current, obsolete, infrastructure to a new paradigm – I needed better ideas.

In the next Post I'll describe my vision for Autonomous-Ways.