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the city's council voted unanimously to create a program to "develop autonomous vehicles as public transportation."
The council's vision is for self-driving vehicles to provide "on-demand, point-to-point transportation," with citizens "requesting a ride using their smartphone." The shuttles wouldn't replace public transportation, but augment it [...]
Phase one of the city council's program includes reaching out to companies like Tesla and Google to explore "potential partnerships."
— theverge.com
Beverly Hills isn't the only city considering adding on-demand driverless vehicles to its transportation offerings – but given its small size, affluence, and well-maintained road infrastructure, it could be a prime zone for testing municipal adoption of autonomous vehicles.As an on-demand public... View full entry
Everything from sidewalks and curbs to streets, building designs, urban layouts, and living patterns will change as computers take the wheel.
“We’re looking at the broader urban effects—and urban opportunities—of this technology,” says Illinois Tech architect Marshall Brown, one of the team members in the Chicago school’s Driverless Cities Project. “It’s in the news a lot, but nobody’s been discussing what it will actually do to cities.”
— wired.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:The "Impossible" Car – Faraday Future's lead designer, Richard Kim, on One-to-One #17World's first fully autonomous taxi service will arrive in Singapore later this yearGoogle's self-driving car hits bus and causes its first crash View full entry
[nuTonomy's] Level 4 autonomous vehicle "is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip;" all you have to do is provide a destination and (possibly) open and shut the doors.
Google's autonomous cars, in contrast, are currently at Level 3, with limited self-driving automation [...]
[nuTonomy] is building into [its] decision-making engine the ability for cars to actually violate the rules of the road when it's necessary to do so
— spectrum.ieee.org
More from the autonomous vehicle beat:The "Impossible" Car – Faraday Future's lead designer, Richard Kim, on One-to-One #17"In LiDAR We Trust" – Poking the subconscious of autonomous vehicles with special guest Geoff Manaugh, on Archinect Sessions #43This startup hopes to bring autonomous... View full entry
We swear, no BIG or Trump on this episode. We discuss the donation of Lautner's breathtaking Sheats-Goldstein house, complete with jungle, nightclub and infinity tennis court, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to become the museum's first acquired piece of architecture (along with a sizable... View full entry
U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law [...]
"NHTSA will interpret 'driver' in the context of Google's described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants" [...]
Google told NHTSA that the real danger is having auto safety features that could tempt humans to try to take control.
— reuters.com
The technological and legal impediments to making self-driving cars a reality on U.S. roads seem to be falling away – and as the regulatory market opens for business, so may more competition, with Google and California (which legalized self-driving cars in 2012) leading the way.More on the... View full entry
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the government would remove hurdles to developing autonomous vehicles and set further guidelines for them within six months. [...]
The government’s new support includes a request in President Obama’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year for $4 billion, to be spent over 10 years, to finance research projects and infrastructure improvements tied to driverless cars.
— nytimes.com
This is the first time the federal government has actively engaged in the regulation and implementation of driverless vehicles. State governments had previously been putting forth their own standards – see this handy wiki from Gabriel Weiner and Bryant Walker Smith at Stanford University... View full entry
between population gains and the popularity of fully self-driving mobility services, we’ll see the total number of vehicle miles grow by 1 trillion. (Half of the 1 trillion it attributes to population growth.) For perspective, U.S. residents drove 3.1 trillion miles in 2014.
KPMG expects this growth to come from trips taken by the very young and very old, who can be immobile only due to their inability to drive. By having access to a self-driving shuttle, a world of opportunity would open up.
— washingtonpost.com
We discuss the implications of autonomous vehicles in the built environment with Geoff Manaugh on our latest podcast episode, "In LiDAR We Trust".For more on self-driving vehicles:Tokyo's 2020 Olympics won't have Zaha, but it's looking like there will be "Robot Taxi"Milton Keynes invests in... View full entry
Long-time Archinector and BLDGBLOG-runner Geoff Manaugh joins us on the podcast this week to discuss his piece on "The Dream Life of Driverless Cars" for the New York Times Magazine. Referencing work like that of London-based design studio, ScanLAB Projects, who use LiDAR (light + radar)... View full entry
The sensory limitations of these vehicles must be accounted for, Nourbakhsh explained, especially in an urban world filled with complex architectural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites. This means that cities may have to be redesigned, or may simply mutate over time, to accommodate a car’s peculiar way of experiencing the built environment... — Geoff Manaugh on The New York Times
"...The flip side of this example is that, in these brief moments of misinterpretation, a different version of the urban world exists...If we can learn from human misperception, perhaps we can also learn something from the delusions and hallucinations of sensing machines. But what?"As self-driving... View full entry
Tokyo-based Robot Taxi ... is still on track to start field tests of its driverless taxi service in one region of Japan by the end of next March [...]
The company, a joint venture between DeNA (one of Japan’s mobile internet pioneers) and ZMP (a robotics firm; tagline “Robot of Everything”) is not building its own cars from scratch. Instead, it’s focusing on adding driverless capabilities to existing cars and designing, creating, and marketing the taxi service.
— qz.com
More on the lead-up to Toky's 2020 Olympic Games: Zaha Hadid ineligible to participate in Tokyo Stadium design-build competitionJapanese government hopes to cap Olympic stadium costs at US$1.28 billionZaha's Tokyo Olympic Stadium cancelled – Abe calls for a redesign from scratch View full entry
Milton Keynes is currently the host city for a set of driverless car trials funded indirectly by the U.K. government — the most ambitious testing yet staged in the world.
If all goes as planned, by 2018, Milton Keynes’ downtown will be served by an on-demand, publicly run system of 30 to 40 driverless two-seater pod cars, which will allow residents to travel between any two points in the city’s downtown without navigating or reacting to obstacles themselves.
— nextcity.org
For a glimpse of the LUTZ Pathfinder autonomous vehicles in action, check out the video below: View full entry
Fleets of self-driving lorries could be tested on UK roads as soon as next year, according to reports. [...]
The initiative would cut fuel consumption, backers said.
However, the plan has been criticised by motoring groups which said such a fleet would be "intimidating" to other road users.
— bbc.com
“Ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything.” And it is this observation that for me epitomizes the problem of the driverless car — it’s the worst kind of solutionism. By becoming so enamored with how technology might transform the car, we’ve neglected to adequately explore how getting rid of cars might transform how and where we live. We’d do well to heed Gorz’s exhortation to “never make transportation an issue by itself.” — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
It's a given that America continues to be a car-obsessed society despite the more painstaking reality of driving a car in many major cities of today. In The New York Times, editor Allison Arieff of SPUR points out that the U.S. is still fixated on selling, using and enhancing the car when... View full entry
On Tuesday at Google’s headquarters, the governor of California, Jerry Brown, signed into law a bill to legalize driverless cars. The bill had overwhelmingly passed the State Legislature. Google, which has been building the cars, says they are safer because they nearly eliminate human error. They could also be more fuel-efficient, the company says, and place California and the United States at the forefront of automobile innovation. — bits.blogs.nytimes.com
