by Dave Taylor

Created on: May 10, 2007   Last Updated: May 20, 2007

Automated automobiles are coming soon. Remember the movie "Minority Report"? You may not see pods quite that sexy, but that is undeniably a glimpse of our future. America will probably be the last to join this future, kicking and screaming for no good reason because its infatuation with control and ownership of its vehicles, but it is coming to somewhere enlightened for sure and soon.

There are a lot of reasons that automated automobiles are our future. By automated autos, I mean cars that you don't drive but that go the "last mile" as opposed to public transportation which only goes on certain routes.

There are a couple directions automated autos can go. One heavy area of research is in automated cars that use our existing infrastructure of roads. I believe this is excellent research but ultimately the wrong direction and doomed to stall out. Going from research to deployment will be very dangerous, and the sensor and image processing hardware required on an automated car will be prohibative and wasteful.

Our current infrastructure is also incredibly wasteful. We have 6-lane highways which are often empty. And on the flip side, we have surface streets which are virtually unoccupied during rush hour. And a single accident can cause hours of traffic and waste the time of many tens of thousands of drivers.

And as long as you have a system where manually driven vehicles are allowed, you will have a recipe for danger, lawsuits, and frustration. It's for this reason that I believe the inevitable solution will come in the form of a new infrastructure.

I believe this new infrastructure will be a huge improvement over the last. The new streets will look similar to the old streets, but with grooves in the ground that remind you of a cable car, only the cable beneath will carry electrical power and data instead of mechanical power, and that power will be inductively transferred to the vehicle above it. At every corner, you will have a variety of sensors pointing down the length of a segment of road, infrared, visual camera, possibly radar. These will be used for safety, spotting animals, fallen trees, children, and pedestrians, and applying emergency brakes to pods headed towards them and re-routing traffic around obstructed segments.

The streets, particularly in residential neighborhoods, will also be much thinner, because you do not need lots of room for cars to pass each other or room for particularly large cars. Because you have the option of temporarily making a street

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