Should We Require Licensing Tests and Graduated Licensing for Self-Driving Vehicles?
http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/UMTRI-2015-33.pdfMichael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle - October 2015
The University of Michigan
Transportation Research Institute
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2150 U.S.A.
http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/
Abstract
This white paper examines whether self-driving vehicles should be subjected to a licensing test as people are, and if so, whether the licensing process should be analogous to the current graduated driver licensing (GDL) systems for novice young drivers.
There are several arguments in support of the need for self-driving vehicles to pass a licensing test that would allow them to operate in all driving situations:
(1) Sensing hardware, spatial maps, and software algorithms will vary among manufacturers of self-driving vehicles, resulting in variability of on-road performance—as is the case with humans.
(2) Visual and sensing performance of self-driving vehicles in inclement weather is not yet sufficient.
(3) Visual-pattern recognition is a potential problem for current sensing systems in self-driving vehicles.
(4) Current self-driving vehicles have not yet been tested thoroughly under a variety of demanding conditions (e.g., in snow).
(5) On-road performance of some current self-driving vehicles is not yet perfect, even in good weather.
(6) Self-driving vehicles will face, on rare occasions, ethical dilemmas in their decision-making.
For self-driving vehicles, in contrast to novice human drivers, experience under one set of conditions that requires certain hardware or software capabilities does not improve performance under a different set of conditions that requires different hardware or software capabilities. Thus, the underlying logic for the use of GDL systems with novice young drivers does not apply to self-driving vehicles: A self-driving vehicle either has the hardware and software to deal with a particular situation, or it does not. If it does not, experience in other situations will not be of benefit.
On the other hand, the GDL approach would be applicable should a manufacturer explicitly decide to limit the operation of its vehicles to certain conditions, until improved hardware or software become available. For example, a manufacturer might feel confident that its vehicles could handle all situations except nighttime and snow. In such a situation, after passing a licensing test related to the limited conditions, the vehicle would be given a provisional license that would exclude nighttime driving and driving in snow. A full license could then be obtained once future updates to hardware or software are developed and made available, and the updated vehicle passes an unrestricted licensing test.
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In cities cars were always disadvantaged. Hard to park, hard to navigate. In the '70s, NYC was not a fun place to drive in, so whenever possible (which meant "nearly always"
I took the PATH from Jersey or walked. If I needed to get through the city, then I drove. Argh. I was too poor to venture into cabs.
It was the same in Baltimore, and the megalopolis in NE Jersey wasn't always a fun drive, but there wasn't much to be done about that. I lived in the far-'burbs around Baltimore and while I could catch a city bus a few miles from my parents' house, well, 'nuff said.
If you're urban, then your perceptions will be that driving is difficult and rare. Same if you're in a very poor neighborhood where the average income is so low as to make affording a car (with insurance and maintenance and gasoline) difficult. Given how society's becoming more segregated by class, this kind of perception will become more common. Near where I live are some poor neighborhoods. Where I teach includes some poor neighborhoods. But when a kid said that nobody his age had a car, most of his fellow students objected strenuously. Not because of rich parents--his retort, "y'all got rich parents"--but because many had part-time jobs paying $9-11/hr and could afford their own cars and insurance. It made the kid feel really bad, but it should have; he was simply wrong. (He was also Af-Am. A white kid with no car knew that most of the students had cars, but whites are less economically segregated than Af-Am and Latinos.)
Houston public transportation runs near where I live. But it has one bus line running this far from the city limits, and serves just a few neighborhoods that are either fairly high density public housing or apt. complexes with a lot of subsidized families. Public transportation makes virtually no sense where I live, with low population density and subdivisions that are essentially large, multibranch cul-de-sacs.)
The middle is still there. It's just smaller as a percentage of the population--we use percentages to show decrease in size even if the numbers are holding steady in a growing population. That statement ignores how the change is happening over time. Some fraction of the the middle class interval dropped down in income (many still middle class, but the lower fringes moving into working class) and some fraction of the middle class moved up in income. I'm avoiding saying that individuals in the middle class moved up or down because that's always happened and because that interval includes new members just coming of age or moving up from entry-level positions or down from the upper class.
Much of the change involves social factors. In the '50s I probably would have married a woman who was a high-school graduate and who, if she got a job, would have gotten a lower-paying job. I have a masters degree. High-school graduate men would have married from the same pool of women, which was large. Now most of the college graduate men I know have college-graduate wives and both make median or near median wages with 1-2 kids, so their two-income smallish families make them high in the middle class bracket, or push them into the upper class. Most of the men with just high-school educations marry wives with the same educational background, and both get lower-paying jobs. They're lower middle class or upper "working class", on the whole. If you divorce or were never married, then you're probably on the lower fringes of middle class or more likely are lower class for household income. With income goes transportation.
Where I live has pretty much median household income. Single-residence houses. And every driveway has multiple cars, one for the husband, one for the wife, and at least one for the kid(s). It's in the middle of a food desert that nobody cares about, since everybody has a car. Who cares that there's not a grocery store with in a mile when everybody works 5+ miles away and passes at least two grocery stores on the way home?
Who knows what havoc a malicious hacker can wreak on the road if he or she breaks into the system and plants malware into the ECU in one of those contraptions. Too much can go wrong with them. 