Michigan planning 40-mile roadway for self-driving vehicles
What could go wrong?
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and fellow state officials announced Thursday that the Great Lake State could soon have a 40-mile stretch of highway dedicated solely to automatic, otherwise known as self-driving, vehicles, The Associated Press reports.
“What may be the world’s most sophisticated roadway will be built here in Michigan — to help increase the safety, efficiency, resilience and operations of roadways in the not-so-distant future,” the Democratic governor said.
The lane in question would be the first of its kind stateside and would run on Interstate 94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit, where Ford — one of nine autonomous vehicle and auto companies on the project’s advisory board — is renovating an old train station to accommodate the company’s self-driving fleet.
The undertaking, which would link University of Michigan to Detroit Metro Airport and downtown Detroit, and is supported mostly by companies funded by Alphabet Inc. — which owns Google and intends to apply the technology to other large metro areas.
The project, led by Cavnue, will kick off with a two-year study to determine how existing lanes and shoulders would figure into the project or whether new lanes need to be constructed.
The study will involve collecting data using autonomous vehicles with human backup drivers along the intended roadway as well as U.S. 12.
Once active, the autonomous vehicle lane — which would be run by the Michigan Department of Transportation — would be utilized by self-driving shuttles and buses and eventually, self-driving freight trucks and qualified automated personal vehicles said Jonathan Winer, the co-CEO of Cavnue’s owner, the Alphabet-funded Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners.
Sound mildly terrifying?
Fear not, said Winer, who noted that a central computer system would link every one of the self-driving vehicles and share data from roadway sensors and other cars to coordinate their speeds. This way, they could drive quicker than regular, human-operated cars. How reassuring.
Even if the project began with self-driving vehicles alongside human-driven cars, “full-scale implementation” would require a barrier, said Winer, who noted the study will take into account how the vehicles should handle humans or wildlife entering the self-driving lanes.
At this juncture, self-driving vehicles are unable to safely operate alongside human-operated vehicles under all weather and traffic conditions, University of South Carolina law professor Bryant Walker Smith, who studies vehicle automation, explained to the outlet.
In 2018, self-driving vehicles hit a snag when an autonomous Uber SUV hit and killed a woman in Arizona.
With News Wire Services
