Thursday, September 22, 2016

Traffic Expert: Honolulu Ideal for Driverless Vehicles

I, the traffic engineer, should be more careful with these driverless cars... if they become all knowing, autonomous and self-managing, they will need no drivers. And cities will need no traffic engineers ;)
Panos Prevedouros, chairman of the University of Hawaii's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, agrees that Honolulu is ideal for driver-less cars.
"Not only because of congestion but because we're really not an interstate state. Our speeds everywhere are modest to low. That makes the risk quite lower than Montana," he said.
...
The federal government believes automated vehicles will make roads safer and reduce gridlock.
But Prevedouros said self-driving cars could initially slow down traffic.
"In the future they can be aggressive. In other words, they can be tailgating each other to save a lot of space. But in the early stages this is not going to happen," he said.