Arizona in Focus is a podcast from Cronkite News, the news division of Arizona PBS. This season we are focusing on science and technology stories that explore everything from driverless cars to innovating a vaccine during the pandemic.
PHOENIX – The roadways of metro Phoenix may not look much different 10 years from now, but how we travel them might.
We may have more vehicles without drivers behind the wheel, according to Andrew Maynard, an associate dean at Arizona State University’s College of Global Futures. Artificial intelligence packed with centuries’ worth of driving knowledge – which takes human error out of the equation – will control vehicles on Arizona roads.
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That future isn’t far away, said Maynard, adding that it wouldn’t surprise him if in a decade “we see fairly ubiquitous use of self-driving vehicles, certainly for deliveries, certainly for transportation of goods.”
And he imagines in that time frame, more people will use driverless taxis, such as those developed by Waymo, which began in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. This fall, Waymo introduced a fully driverless ride-hailing service to the east side of metro Phoenix.
The service was made available to members of Waymo One, the company’s premium membership, on Oct. 8, and it’s now available to anyone in Chandler, southeast Tempe, and southwest Mesa through Waymo’s app.
Julianne McGoldrick with Waymo said the company has logged more than 20 million miles on public roads to perfect its driverless technology. This includes 6.1 million miles of automated driving with a trained driver in Arizona in 2019 and 65,000 miles of driving with no driver in the vehicle according to the company’s blog.
Waymo’s autonomous driving software represents more than 500 years of driving for the average licensed U.S. driver, according to the company, which began its early rider program in metro Phoenix in 2017 using a hybrid Chrysler Pacifica.
Kevin Biesty, deputy director for policy at the Arizona Department of Transportation, said the service helps solve the long-standing issue of driver safety.
Biesty said transportation departments across the country have grappled with how to improve driver safety, but “the one key component is the driver.”
“Ever since the advent of the automobile, government has been trying to figure out what’s the secret sauce to have drivers operate safely behind the wheel,” he said.
After years of only somewhat effective incentives and penalties, autonomous vehicles may bring “significant safety factors that society will benefit from,” Biesty said.
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 32,000 people die in vehicle accidents each year, and many of those deaths are caused by human error.
Biesty said human drivers are like millions of individual operating systems similar to what controls autonomous cars. He imagines a day when those millions of systems are down to five.
“And if there was a problem, you can actually go in and tweak the system to address that problem, which is not available today,” Biesty said.
Chandler Mayor Kevin Hartke said Waymo’s ride-hailing service is an innovative approach to transportation.
“It makes a lot more sense to look for additional technologies rather than thinking we need to rip up roads and put light rail or to add an expensive bus line,” he said.
Waymo has been mapping Chandler’s streets for about four years now, he said.
“I think they crossed their t’s and dotted their i’s in terms of safety to be on our streets,” said Hartke, who said he has ridden in these cars when there was a driver onboard, just in case.
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2020.
Substituting human error with computer error is no solution. I share the road with Waymo’s everyday, and in spite of their “500 years” of experience, I still see them make erratic maneuvers for things humans can easily manage.
Breaking for cars approaching feeder street intersections, tailgating, jackrabbit starts, breaking for shadows.
We also have not begun to account for what happens when multiple versions (brands) of AV’s are operating in the same spaces at the same time.
I actually LIKE driving…a lot. I have not been a passanger in a car (aside from a few taxi rides) in years…just the driver. I have no interest in being driven around, whether by human or computer.
They can have my car when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
And as to the above comment, what will be the acceptable casualty rate? You know accidents will happen, and when we are not personally in control, we put up with many fewer accidents (thing car vs. airplane crashes).
Nope, I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.
Driverless cars are truly pernicious in so many ways, no matter how much smoke zombie technology worshipers blow up our asses.
The very first assertion in this article is utterly ludicrous–“artificial intelligence” is created and enabled and programmed by humans, therefore it will NEVER “take human error out of the equation”. For media to publish such abject nonsense at face value with no counterpoint is really irresponsible, and part of the problem.
The question is not a matter of a perpetually imperfect system vs. a perfect one. The question is a matter of comparing two perpetually imperfect systems, but even that revision obscures the real solutions that we really need.
Would you prefer the system where cars continue to rule our societies, along with fossil fuels, deadly air pollution, destroyed neighborhoods, corrosive individualism, billions and billions of dollars wasted on roads that we don’t really need, and now mass unemployment of professional drivers, and all the other problems that the rule of automobiles creates? Then, sure, put your lives (and your responsibility) in the hands of technology, even more than they already are.
The Chandler mayor talks about mass transit as if it’s a bad thing, even though it is by far the most cost-efficient and pollution-efficient way of moving people around. Quick reminder–moving PEOPLE around is the point, not moving CARS around. Too many tech zombies and cement heads have successfully conflated the two and obscured this reality (not to mention common sense) with regard to the underlying point of all this. This benefits no one but the companies who stand to profit so handsomely from reduced labor costs while creating yet another system that runs on the tyranny of their for-profit technology.
The Church of Technology is the number one religion in our land, and this is just the latest manifestation of that frightening truth. Sadly, like all religions, it’s basically just an exercise in the mass psychosis of believing in things for which there is no rational justification to believe. Technology is a doomsday cult that will eventually turn us into feeble-minded automatons who are only capable of doing what technology dictates.