I can’t wait till robots take over traffic management.
Imagine no need for speed bumps – the robot driving your car will be a complex algorithmic steering machine, not a petrol head.
Imagine no driving aimlessly around the city centre looking for a parking space – you get out of your car at the office door and your robot driver speeds away to an out of town car park.
Imagine no traffic lights – all driving robots will be networked and coordinate your journey with exquisite precision, getting you and everyone else where you want to go without fuss.
And imagine no pedestrian crossings (this is what paradise looks like to me) – all robot vehicles will put human beings first, so you won’t have to apply to cross a road then make a dash for it when the green man flashes. You can cross the street whenever you feel like confident that the robot will slow down to a comfortable speed.
Well, no harm in dreaming is there? I’m sure it will happen sometime but my guess is that for the time being most of the people involved in developing robots are working on pointless projects – military drones and sex toys – and not things that would be of any actual use. Such as a traffic system that doesn’t kill us.
Until the day when robots come to our rescue we’ve got ourselves in a bit of a traffic tangle. Most of our towns and cities were built before the car was invented, but for the last fifty or sixty years the people in charge of town planning and highways have done their best to put the needs of the individual car driver at the centre of their vision of the city. And it’s left us with pedestrian crossings that are a nightmare for the old and vulnerable, an impossible parking situation in most town centres, massive rush hour traffic jams, and residential streets blighted with speed bumps.
This isn’t my idea of progress.
So, what should we do?
One scheme to improve things for all of us is 20 mph zones.
I went to a workshop this afternoon about “20 mph zones and active travel” (didn’t I confess here recently to a very wide streak of masochism?) There were the usual transport types there, as well as people from public health. And before anyone feels a YEP comment coming on, no, there was no sign of fascism – and more than half the people drove to the meeting, so they are hardly anti-car. And, as it happens, not one person in the room had the same interpretation of what a 20 mph zone was for.
And I still don’t know.
Someone in the meeting said that everyone wanted a 20 mph zone in their own street and 30 plus wherever they had to drive … is that cynical?
The health people in the meeting argued that 20 mph zones combatted obesity. I’m dubious.
I walked into Leeds from Thorpe near Wakefield this morning, through loads of 20 mph zones. The biggest was in a new private estate in Middleton where the roads are so tight and twisting that 20 mph is impossible anyhow. Until you reach the main road, then it’s foot down! There are no shops, pubs, social amenities for miles on this estate, a car is a necessity. Walking around here is simply ridiculous. There are no traffic calming efforts, there’s no point.
Half a mile away is an estate built before car ownership became common. It has a wide, straight road cutting through it with great visibility. Even the side roads are straight and long. Nobody takes notice of the hundreds of 20 mph signs. Speed bumps are a challenge, but drivers get used to them. And yet there are loads of people on the street. Loads of shops, pubs, fast food places. Traffic here is much faster than on the private estate but social life is much more possible here.
Before robots rule our roads should we be concentrating solely on the speed of vehicle transit through residential areas to solve the obvious problems? I think slowing traffic in all urban areas is a great idea, but a blanket 20 mph zone alone won’t make everything hunky dory.
Even a robot would realise that.