A world without accidents

Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“Here the road bends. You, most likely, would not pay attention to it, but two years ago a man was shot down here and you could not find the offender, ”says Debra Bezzina. Our van, driven by Rick Byrd, Debra's colleague at the University of Michigan, comes to this seemingly safe, in spite of the January frosts, a bend in the road. But Bezzina told how one man, driving here at high speed, rolled off the road. And he was not the first.

I prepared for the turn. Something unusual happened: a dashboard alarm sounded, a light signal blinked in the corner of the rear-view mirror. Also on a special display, a right turn sign was shown on a blue background, which turned red, warning of danger. Byrd reduces speed.

What just happened was both simple and deep in meaning. This is what, according to Bezzina and Byrd, employees of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), can change the way American drivers are used to getting to their destination. The van in which we are traveling (the UMTRI van with the flashy yellow label “Connecting the Future”) is equipped with a technology to alert the driver in various situations. In our case, the equipment at the curb transmits the recommended speed to overcome turning to such cars as ours. The device in the car caught the signal, assessed the risks and warned us about the danger.
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UMTRI van is not the only car here that has such futuristic equipment. I got to Ann Arbor in the last weeks of the 18-month large-scale test of the communication technology between cars. The test was funded mainly by the US Department of Transportation, which wants to find out what safety benefits such devices can provide. A total of 2,800 cars in Ann Arbor are participating in the program called Safety Pilot. All of them are equipped with devices for transmitting indicators of their speed and position to the same machines. And 400 of them also carry an onboard system, which I observed in a UMTRI van plus cameras, to track the driver’s response to system warnings. Cars, trucks, tractor trailers, and even a bicycle are tied into the system.



“This is the largest deployment of this technology in the world at the moment,” said Scott Belcher, head of the Intelligent Transport Community of America, a trade association of which the UMTRI is a part.

Steep corners warnings are not the only type of alerts that drivers experienced in Ann Arbor - they were a whole set along with the connection between car pairs and transmitters along the roads. In various difficult situations, such as difficult left turns, approaching trains at level crossings, maneuvering in “blind zones”, abrupt stops in front of cars. With the UMTRI technology used in the van, all this made driving in such situations much safer.

Many today have heard about research in the development of autonomous cars that drive by themselves, guided by sensors. The automobile revolution, they say here in Michigan, which we will soon see, will not come from cars that “feel”, but from cars that “speak”. Experts announce the arrival of the “Internet of cars” - and according to some opinions, these will be the biggest changes in our usual trips, since the invention of cars.

The first and most important thing that will give is driving safety. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has already calculated that communication technologies in road-to-car transport, similar to those experienced in Ann Arbor, will help reduce the so-called sober driver errors by 80 percent. “It's even more than seat belts and airbags can give,” says Belcher. "In principle, it will be cars that do not fall into the accident."

Although data from Ann Arbor is still being processed, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently announced that the use of such technologies in new cars will be mandatory. Signals are given to automakers that vehicle communication technology is a new phase in improving the safety of vehicles (some automakers can now offer inexpensive devices for upgrading existing cars). Concern is also being considered that it is impossible to talk about complete safety, until absolutely all cars on the roads are equipped with such technologies.

Having spent enough time polling automotive futurists, you will realize that such innovations can only be a start. Therefore, as soon as you create a world where cars, roads, traffic lights and transport services will exchange information in real time, everything will develop even more dynamically and creatively, as it used to be with the advent of the Internet.

Belcher and others talk about small experiments that are aimed at resolving transport problems throughout the country. In the center of Manhattan, users of the EZ Pass system collect traffic data and regulate the time of traffic lights, thereby reducing the number of traffic jams. In San Francisco, sensors are used to change parking pricing. Experts talk about improving these technologies in the future and developing new ones so that each car can share information about its location and speed.

Some futurists talk about the onset of this transport utopia. In the new reality it will be possible to avoid any accidents at all. Both the design of the car and its fuel consumption and business models will be rethought. It will be possible to rent cars that will drive you like an automatic taxi.

“If you have a communication platform, reliable and secure, you can use it as soon as you like, limited to your imagination,” says Belcher.

Of course, at the moment there are still countless questions that decide in Ann Arbor: how well has this technology been worked out? Some experts ask whether manufacturers should use the technologies used in Ann Arbor - a short-range connection, similar to WiFi, but as modern networks like 4G LTE that are widely used.

Also need to remove concerns about the safety of confidential data. Traffic safety apologists should completely solve these problems and explain their conclusion to other drivers. Researchers say that these aspects will be more difficult to overcome than technological factors.

Some more details about the experiment here .