Driverless Cars

At first, driverless cars might not seems like the sort of new technology that would be interesting to civil engineers.  They're designed and built by the sorts of computers and robotics engineers that work for companies like Google, and it's a whole different kind of engineering than the kind that builds bridges and helps design cities.  But driverless cars have a lot of potential to help civil engineers plan future cities that are more sustainable, so keeping up with the development of this technology and the ways that it can change cities is still a good idea.

The short TED talk in this video shows a lot of great footage of what driverless cars can do.  The hard part about driving safely is that there are so many different things going on around the car at all times, and in many cases people get involved in accidents because they reacted  badly in a fast situation or weren't paying attention to everything.  But driverless cars don't make these kinds of mistakes, and since about 95% of traffic deaths are from accidents where human error is the cause, driverless cars give us a way to eliminate almost all traffic deaths by taking human error out of the equation.  The video shows how the cars use radar to sense everything going on around them at all times including other cars, pedestrians, animals, and anything else that could be blocking the road.  The computers in charge of the car can see things around them better than a human could, and can also process all this information faster than a human could to react instantly and avoid accidents in ways that would be impossible for people to do.  This means that driverless cars could safely drive at speeds up to double what humans can, and can pack together tighter on highways at high speed because of the fast reactions.  In major cities they wouldn't be able to go nearly as fast because of all of the intersections and pedestrians, but they could be hooked up to a network that would automatically direct cars through different routes to the same place to help avoid traffic jams and congestion on city roads, and this could seriously help reduce the carbon impact of traffic in the cities of the world.

One of the first real world tests of driverless cars in a city environment is going on in England soon, but the cars won't be the kind of personal cars that most people think of.  They'll be testing out driverless shuttles to get groups of people around areas of the city faster than they could by walking, and this shows one area where civil engineers can take advantage of driverless cars in city planning.  One of the big challenges in city planning is making a walkable city where the people living there need to drive for as few reasons as possible, and these driverless shuttles are one new way of public transportation that is easy to introduce into old and established cities to help make this a reality.  In the real future, if every car is driverless, then cities won't even need things like traffic lights or stop signs anymore because all of these parts of traffic engineering will be handled directly by the computer network in charge of the driverless cars in a much more efficient way than a human could plan out.

But driverless cars have a major flaw that could make it hard for them to completely replace regular cars, even though so far their safety record on the road is pretty much perfect.  This is the fact that they are controlled by computers, and so they can be hacked and manipulated by bad people who would want to cause damage and harm.  Engineers need to keep flaws like this in mind when they plan out cities, because if a city is 100% relying on driverless cars to move people around and this system gets hacked and goes down or out of control, then the whole city comes to a stop and is basically controlled by the hacker.  It's not the job of engineers really to worry about coming up with new security methods for the network, but it is the job of engineers to have a plan in place for the city in case the system goes down so business and life can keep going.