Pedestrians: Self-Driving Cars' Biggest Foes?

pedestrians-selfdriving-cars-and-39;-biggest-foes photo 1

Like a lot of people who live in towns popular with tourists, I approach summer with a mixture of delight and dread. On one hand, summer in the Pacific Northwest makes the dark, rainy winter bearable. On the other, parts of my city become almost undrivable, thanks to more vehicles on the road and tourists roaming the streets and causing chaos at crosswalks.

There's been lots of talk about how fully autonomous cars may first be deployed in city centers as robo-taxis. This got me thinking about how self-driving cars will react to pedestrian-heavy situations and whether the technology will make things better or worse.

pedestrians-selfdriving-cars-and-39;-biggest-foes photo 2Adam Millard-Ball, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California, has also pondered this. He published a paper late last year that described using "game theory to analyze the interactions between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles, with a focus on yielding at crosswalks." He believes autonomous cars will increase the stakes in the "game of 'crosswalk chicken' between pedestrians and drivers."

Millard-Ball predicts that pedestrians, whether they're clueless like tourists in my town or savvy locals, will take advantage of the caution programmed into self-driving cars to gain the right of way.

Pedestrians Behaving Badly

"Because autonomous vehicles will be risk-averse, the model suggests that pedestrians will be able to behave with impunity," Millard-Ball suggets. "At the same time, autonomous vehicle adoption may be hampered by their strategic disadvantage that slows them down in urban traffic."

Millard-Ball came up with three scenarios for how the interaction between vehicles and pedestrians could change once self-driving cars are added to the mix in urban areas. The first is what he calls pedestrian supremacy, whereby "pedestrians, and perhaps bicycles [will] dominate" the road, he says. Kind of like in my town now.

The second is regulatory response, which puts the onus on pedestrians by threatening them with citations for bullying self-driving cars in crosswalks or other areas where they share the road. I would whole-heartedly support this approach in my hometown, whether with human- or machine-driven cars.

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The third scenario he calls human driver scenario, which essentially brings us back to square one if autonomous cars are so timid that they cause even more traffic backups in pedestrian-clogged city centers. Millard-Ball notes that "human drivers retain the credible threat that they will collide with a jaywalking pedestrian, giving them a strategic advantage in the 'crosswalk chicken' game."

He adds that "some travelers may trade the benefits of autonomous vehicles, such as the freedom to engage in other activities during the trip, for the speed advantage of human driving."

Of course, Millard-Ball's theory on how self-driving cars and other road users will coexist is speculative, and he says that "hybrid scenarios are also possible" instead of one of the three taking precedence. We may have to wait years to see how all this plays out, which means I'll have to endure a few more summers of dodging tourists, whether they are on foot or in their cars.

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