Utopia

Transportation

Automated driving

This has bugged me for a long time, but especially when I worked in Sugar House and Golden: automated driving. This hasn’t been employed anywhere, though the technology to implement it exists now, today.

There are dozens of ideas of how to employ this, and I don’t know which is the best. But the best idea would allow not for just navigation on highways, but city and residential streets as well. It would also have to be extendable and upgradeable, so that as better ideas come along, it can be augmented.

Of course this would require custom cars (which would perhaps use Rotapower engines), or cars retrofitted with automation equipment. This would be a significant investment, but would be required to travel by car within Utopia. The cars should also be designed such that they can be navigated by humans for travel outside the city. Therefore, perhaps residential streets shouldn’t be automated, so that young drivers have a place to learn to drive.

All cars have to be able to use the system, or else it won’t work at all. The car’s computers can brake and maneuver better than any human, plus they’ll be communicating with other cars around them so they know what everyone else will be doing. A human won’t. Ideally, all the cars would also communicate with a central system that could help augment traffic flow on a city-wide basis. For example, it’d know that Park Avenue is pretty congested, so it’d direct a car to take Frontage Road instead. As far as I know, most automated systems today do not employ a central system, though they should.

Since drivers won’t need to see where they’re going most of the time, windowing opaquing technology could be employed (not required, just possible). The occupants could specify which windows should go opaque, how opaque they should become (that is, they could just become tinted) or could specify they all become opaque. The car would inform the occupants when it’s arrived at their destination.

How it works

I see it working like this: you get in your car and state where you want to go. If you’re at home, since the automation doesn’t work on residential streets, the car tells you where to go, but you can get to any “automation point” (autopoint) however you please. As soon as you reach an autopoint, the car takes over and starts taking you to your destination. It knows what the fastest route is considering traffic conditions. It displays an ETA on the dash and you, the “driver” can sit back and do whatever you please: read, eat, play a computer game (PC built into the car?), make a phone call, do some work or climb in the back seat and take a nap (a good time to use the window opaquers). It transparently takes the fastest route, unless, of course, you tell it to take the scenic route. If headed downtown, it automatically finds the best parking spot (closest to your location), making all the U-turns and maneuvering required to park. Upon arriving, it alerts the occupants.

If you are leaving from a business or downtown somewhere, the system will take over from the start. You just state where you want to go, and it starts driving (even backing out of a parking spot). Parking garages will be rigged with the systems that will allow the car to find your optimal parking space (e.g. closest to the elevator or closest to the street).

Since the cars are rigged to be driven by humans as well, if the central system goes down for some reason (this will never be unplanned, it will always be announced well in advance, it will have triple redundancy to prevent unplanned downage), people will still be able to travel by car, albeit far less efficiently. The car’s autonomous automation will still work, but optimal routing will be unavailable.

The system, of course, will be aware of current road conditions, so snow, rain, ice and such will no longer be sources of accidents (except on residential streets where the system doesn’t exist). The highways connecting Utopia to the rest of the world will also be rigged for the system. Drivers will only have to take over upon arriving at the next city. The highways will have to be parceled into auto/non-auto lanes, but it’s better than nothing.

This is a primary goal of mine. After the world sees how easy travel is in Utopia, they will quickly adopt it too. Travel by car to California will no longer be an excruciating exercise in extreme boredom. You and your family can just have fun on your way to your vacation destination.

Other Systems

In Utopia, city busses, with all the pollution and crime they produce, wouldn’t be a problem. Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), UniModal or a similar system would also be employed, from the ground up. Implementation of these mass transit solutions have failed mainly because retrofitting the systems into existing cities has been opposed (the cities simply weren’t built with them in mind). Not a problem for Utopia, where the cities are designed for them. Perhaps several of these proposed systems could be built, and after extensive use (over the course of several years), the best and most efficient could be chosen and could replace the less effective ones. The problem with most of these systems is that no one has even tried to build them!

Flying vehicles also intrigue me. Some have been developed (such as the Moller Skycar a.k.a. the M400 Skycar), but none have a shot at ever being developed on a reasonable scale because it freaks out the FAA that private citizens would be flying cars all over creation. So I’d like to look into allowing these, even on just a limited scale, to help boost adoption. The way these work is not under human control, but by automation via computer (Moller already thought of this).