Article in the current Private Eye:- (PS - is there a self-driving thread?)
There's a cheap and tried technology for getting the urban traveller efficiently through cities.
From Private Eye
ROAD RAGE
Ministers’ enthusiasm for robo-cars – handy distraction from the government’s dire road-safety record – won’t be dented by the recent death of a pedestrian in Arizona hit by an Uber car in self-drive mode.
New medicines undergo masses of tests before humans take them, yet various governments, including our own, are eager to unleash potentially lethal self-drive vehicles quickly. In 2014 our austerity-obsessed government found £10m for a “driverless car trial”. Last year it predicted: “Fully self-driving cars will be on the UK roads in as little as three years.”
Robo-cars are emerging because technology makes them possible, not because there’s pressing need for them. Their chief proponents – huge motor and technology corporations – say the vehicles would eliminate the many accidents caused by driver error. What they don’t mention is the other types of accidents that would proliferate unless taxpayers splash out on adapting and improving the road infrastructure.
Robo-cars’ safety would also depend on big changes to the way other legitimate road users – including pedestrians and cyclists – get around, and on an infallible cyber-security regime – something the world’s cleverest computer boffins have yet to produce.
The supposed safety benefits of self-driving vehicles are music to the ears of Tory ministers, who love trumpeting vague improvements in the distant future to divert attention from inaction today. Thus environment secretary Michael Gove has banned saes of new diesel and petrol cars from 2040 while Britain falls far short of meeting its 2010 clean-air deadlines; and transport secretary Chris Grayling flags up unproven hydrogen and battery trains while reneging on promises of further deployment of super-efficient electric trains.
Robo-cars are a convenient distraction from Britain’s grim safety record. In the year to September 2017, 27010 people were killed or seriously injured on Great Britain’s roads. The number of traffic police fell by about 24 percent from 2012 to 2017, according to data from two-thirds of forces. Duty on road fuel has been frozen for eight years, while public transport fares have rocketed, stimulating extra road traffic; small increases to fuel duty could have funded proper maintenance and repairs on our roads. Robo-cars would need far better maintenance of roads, including painted lines, but the cost of getting our roads to that standard rises with every additional year of neglect.
Some of the technology underpinning robo-cars is well established. “Intelligent” speed limiters and black-box data recorders could be made compulsory in human-driven vehicles. But Tory ministers have opposed both on grounds of “privacy” and “data protection” and “Big Brother nannying” – while brimming with enthusiasm for self-driving cars which would usher in Big Brother nannying and data-protection issues in spades.
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