95 percent of serious car crashes are due to human error. There is an ever increasing amount of road traffic and semi trucks with new drivers on our major highways that are greatly increasing deaths on our rural roads.
Having all vehicles with autonomous driving wouldn’t need people’s decisions, which could often be dangerous and irrational to take you from point A to point B. This will virtually eliminate traffic deaths. It will also regain an eternity of time for humans to do other work while in transit.
The tremendous technological progress now gives us the possibility to have a closer look at all the advantages we could have in our cities of the future, together with autonomous driving and the new smart infrastructure.
The automotive industry is rapidly evolving and guidelines for autonomous vehicles rely on voluntary standards which makes the need for the new smart autonomous vehicle infrastructure more necessary than ever. Authorities have to consider updates to it and work with developers to make the new wave of rural transformation successful.
Here are changes to be made so that the new smart city infrastructure will be suitable for autonomous vehicles:
Lane Marking
Poor road markings are challenging even for the already existing connected vehicles. It’s something that has to be worked on for the effective adoption of AVs. The road markings should not only be reflective but machine-readable.
Roadside Sensors
To be prepared for the driverless future, roadside sensors should be included on sidewalks, curbs and lanes. They will allow vehicles to keep track of their surroundings and foresee potentially dangerous situations.
Smart Signage
Current autonomous vehicles use image recognition for reading road signs. However, a much more reliable approach would be machine-readable signs. They will include an embedded code that could be transmitted. They’ll send messages detectable by computers.
The best cities of the future will be transformed into digital hubs and citizen will access a wide variety of the open data from the above, along side a plethora of electric autonomous vehicles from bikes, to scooters, sleds, cars and aircraft. It will radically transform city design this decade.
Most of these vehicles will not be owned, but with shared mobility we drive down the cost of transportation to practically nothing. More here on infrastructure.