“As ever with these things, the issues are social and political rather than technological. If you were prepared to share vehicles or have them running around the place, you can do that. But the question is: how does that play out in terms of connections?
“For Milton Keynes it might be the right answer for getting people to the railway station. But I do emphasise people will still want to go to the railway station because it will the easiest way of getting to and from other places. You could argue the threat is to buses rather than rail.”
Why?
“Well, if you have shared AVs, that looks like a bus anyway. Let’s suppose where we end up is that AVs are part of the door to door journey where rail is still there. The market that gets disrupted is buses.”
The march of digital technology has already changed the railway industry. The Docklands Light Railway immediately comes to mind when considering ‘driverless systems’. However, decades before that the Victoria Line pioneered ‘automatic train operation’, albeit with a driver in the cab.
The former has been successfully reconfigured to a moving block signalling system and the latter has been upgraded, which together with faster trains has created more capacity. In the years ahead, just as autonomous technology will potentially change the road sector, it is unthinkable that there won’t be further developments for railways to seize upon.
“Say you don’t have to get the trains out of the depot,” says Joseph. “The trains come out of the depot to the nearest platform, where the drivers pick them up. In some ways the technology might enable the railways to do better. If you can make AVs, road vehicles are far more dangerous than rail vehicles at the moment. You could have safe rail vehicles that are autonomous. You can still have staff, but they are for security and other purposes. The technology helps rail, assuming you can adopt it, as much as it hurts it.”
How it might be adopted on the roads is already exercising legal minds. One of the big firms to respond to the Government’s Pathway to Driverless Cars consultation was Irwin Mitchell.
Neil Whiteley is a partner and head of the firm’s Cambridge office. He’s a leading authority on head, brain and spinal injury claims: “A lot of people seem to be running ahead of themselves at the moment. There’s a lot of excitement that we are at the dawn of a new age. I think actually, particularly in Britain because of our roads - we have densely populated areas and densely used roads - there would have to be quite a lot of work to the infrastructure to support full autonomy. If you think about the investment available in infrastructure, that has to have a question mark around it.”
The adjustment of motoring regulations will naturally also affect insurance claims and the question of fault in an accident.
Says Whiteley: “What the consultation sought to do was to create the environment where insurance products could start to be developed - where if it turned out a car was in some form of autonomous mode, and it is the automation that fails or there is a safety failure that could be a component in an accident, then the insurance cover in place on the vehicle would pay out regardless of whether there was an issue between the insurer and the creator of the technology/software. The question of ‘does the manufacturer pay?’ or ‘does the insurer have to pay?’ would be left for another day. The victim of the accident doesn’t worry about that.
“So at the moment it is very much edging forwards, and the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (which is our professional body) has put in a paper that says road users - including pedestrians and cyclists - shouldn’t get caught up in some complicated dispute between a driver’s insurer or a motor manufacturer (or indeed a software manufacturer), because they could be different about who caused the accident.”
Car technology has continued to develop since Henry Ford offered us one choice of colour. Today, we might scoff at the days when heaters and radios were offered as an exciting development. The future will likely look back in the same way at our cars, with automatic headlights and systems to keep you in the same lane on a motorway. Even in modest vehicles, drivers are beginning to enjoy some element where the car thinks for itself. But the forthcoming mix of vehicles on the road brings trouble, Whiteley forecasts.
“When autonomy really takes off we should be in a better place, because the idea is it takes drivers away from decision-making, and drivers make a lot of errors. The popular figure quoted at the moment is that 90% of road collisions ultimately come down to driver error, so you would have thought that if everyone was in autonomous vehicles and the technology supported it, we’d be in a much better place.
“Actually it won’t happen like that. There will be a long lead-in period where you have a mix of autonomous vehicles, semi-autonomous vehicles and (let’s face it) old vehicles which are not in any way embedded with that technology. That overlap period is going to have huge potential for complication.”
However, Whiteley’s biggest concerns are reserved for platooning: “That’s great in Canada or Australia, where you have long stretches of barely used roads or certainly fairly free-flowing highways where you could platoon a number of vehicles together without causing a major issue. In our response to the consultation we certainly expressed reservations about how that works in Britain.
“In Britain, roads are massively over-subscribed. For example, if you have a large convoy of lorries separated only by a couple of metres, which is the way it’s supposed to work, it doesn’t give people room to escape or manoeuvre if there is an incident in another lane. It could cause difficulties for people leaving or joining motorways if there is a blockage and people start accelerating to get around that. It is a complicated and challenging arrangement on the UK’s roads.”
In its second evidence session, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee asked questions about the societal impact of AVs and how both drivers and third parties might react to sharing roads with them.
Professor Nick Reed, technical lead on the Greenwich Automated Transport Environment, argued that examining the human response was at the heart of current trials.
“It gives us the opportunity to engage directly with people, give them an experience of automated vehicles, and then come to a conclusion about whether they would like to use/pay for transport using such vehicles.
