Actually, pretty good, according to Adam Millard-Ball, assistant professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. In fact, pedestrians might end up with the run of the place.<\/p>\n
In a new study published online Wednesday (Oct. 26) in the Journal of Planning Education and Research<\/em>, Millard-Ball looks at the prospect of urban areas where a majority of vehicles are “autonomous” or self-driving. It’s a phenomenon that’s not as far off as one might think.<\/p>\n “Autonomous vehicles have the potential to transform travel behavior,” Millard-Ball says. He uses game theory to analyze the interactions between pedestrians and self-driving vehicles, with a focus on yielding at crosswalks.<\/p>\n Because autonomous vehicles are by design risk-averse, Millard-Ball’s model suggests that pedestrians will be able to act with impunity, and he thinks autonomous vehicles may facilitate a shift towards pedestrian-oriented urban neighborhoods. However, Millard-Ball also finds that the adoption of autonomous vehicles may be hampered by their strategic disadvantage that slows them down in urban traffic.<\/p>\n “Pedestrians routinely play the game of chicken,” Millard-Ball writes. Crossing the street, even at a marked crosswalk without a traffic signal, “requires an implicit, instantaneous probability calculation: what are the odds of survival?”<\/p>\n The benefit of crossing the street quickly, instead of taking a long detour or waiting for a gap in traffic, is traded off against the probability of injury or even death. Pedestrians know that drivers are not interested in running them down — usually. But there is the chance a driver may be distracted, drunk, or a sociopath.<\/p>\n Self-driving cars are programmed to obey the rules of the road, including waiting for pedestrians to cross. Secure in the knowledge that a car will yield, pedestrians merely need to act unpredictably or step into the street to force the risk-averse car to stop.<\/p>\n Self-driving cars could provide the most dramatic transformation in urban transportation systems, and the largest upheaval for transportation planning practice, since the arrival of the automobile more than a century ago, Millard-Ball says. Parking, street design, and transit and paratransit service networks are likely to be revolutionized.<\/p>\n Millard-Ball’s research links urban planning and environmental economics, with a focus on intersections between climate change and transportation policy. In a previous article, he looked at parking strategies in urban environments that might reduce the practice — and environmental costs — of circling the block to find an open spot.<\/p>\n In his latest study, he also suggests that the potential benefits of self-driving cars — avoiding tedium of traffic and trauma of collisions — may be outweighed by the drawbacks of an always play-it-safe vehicle that slows traffic for everybody.<\/p>\n “From the point of view of a passenger in an automated car, it would be like driving down a street filled with unaccompanied five-year-old children,” Millard-Ball writes.<\/p>\n The ultimate impacts of autonomous vehicles depend not only on technological advances and market adoption, but also on how planners and policy makers respond, Millard-Ball concludes. One approach would be to maintain traffic speeds by eliminating crosswalks, erecting fences between the sidewalk and roadway to corral pedestrians, and stepping up enforcement against jaywalkers.<\/p>\n Alternatively, planners could seize the opportunity to create more pedestrian-oriented streets, and relegate drop-offs to the fringes of urban commercial districts.<\/p>\n Autonomous vehicles could usher in a new era of pedestrian supremacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Actually, pretty good, according to Adam Millard-Ball, assistant professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. In fact, pedestrians might end up with the run of the place. In a new study published online Wednesday (Oct. 26) in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Millard-Ball looks at the prospect of urban areas where a Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/i\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}