Can something as common as a drive to work be improved by the power of Peaxy technology? Let’s dream together…
DRIVING ME CRAZY!
For most of my life, I have been lucky to work just 2 miles from home, so I have not been exposed too much to the commuting woes of Northern California. For example, when I first arrived in Silicon Valley, the 101 freeway had two lanes in each direction separated by a wide median strip planted with oleanders. Over the years, the median strip disappeared and 101 became a freeway with four crowded lanes in each direction. Last year, a fifth auxiliary lane and a second high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane were added in each direction in the portion between Marsh Road (Facebook) and 85 (Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft).
For the past two years I have been a commuter myself, barreling down 23 km to Peaxy near the San Jose airport every day. Unfortunately there is no usable public transportation, so I am condemned to this daily freeway maltreatment. It starts after 2 km, when I enter 101 on the Embarcadero slip road, where about 20\% of the drivers illegally cross two double lines at a 90º angle to force themselves in a passing lane before the actual freeway entrance, while pushy Gbusses force themselves from the HOV lane to the exit lane and a few 100 m later a slew of cars try to make a –90º turn from the leftmost lane to the San Antonio Road exit.
During the past two years I have tried to develop a driving model that would reduce my stress, but not very successfully. Recently, I was finally able to see a sophisticated model in action and it was an eye-opener: two of us Peaxy commuters got to ride a Google Car from the Googleplex down 101 to Peaxy and back.
PREDICTING THE UNPREDICTABLE WITH MODELS
Sitting behind the “driver”, I had a good view of the laptop on the lap of the Peaxy colleague in the front passenger seat, displaying the car’s computational model of the surroundings based on the lidar spinning on top of the car, a radar in the front of the car, an inertial sensor in the rear wheel axis, and last but not least, on countless hours of tweaking the model based on the feedback of skilled professional drivers like Anja—our pilot on this trip—who rides full-time for her work.
On the console, we could see the freeway lanes, our projected route, and the surrounding vehicles. When a vehicle creates a dangerous situation, it is marked with a danger sign. The model recognizes the lights of emergency vehicles and can pull over according to the law. However, it ignores other car’s blinkers. In fact, the American driving culture is that the other drivers are your enemies and you do not want to warn them by letting your intentions to be known: the blinker is either never turned on or left blinking.
While, as a human, I can model a few cars around me, Google’s algorithm can model all relevant cars around our self-driving car, in all directions. When our car gets in the blind spot of another car, the icon of that car is flagged with a danger sign. With a surprising frequency, the flagged cars cut us off at a dangerously close distance. Since I was not driving, I could look in the offending cars and I never saw those drivers turning their heads to check the clearance. Therefore, they are all driving erratically without looking, resulting in the other cars being cut off, breaking and propagating this backwards to the following cars.
Like computers can beat humans at chess because they can predict a larger number of steps, Google’s car is better than human drivers, because it can model far more vehicles than a human can. Yet, humans are too reckless for Google’s algorithm to be completely foolproof. For example, at one point in Santa Clara, we were in the right lane and a big truck tried to pass us driving above the speed limit and on the shoulder. Our pilot Anja recognized—maybe from the truck’s plume of black exhaust fumes—that he did not have enough torque to pass us, and the shoulder turned into a ditch a few meters further ahead. This would have left the truck driver to either go full speed into the ditch or ramming us, so Anja hit the big red emergency button and floored our car’s brakes.
Those reckless drivers are in part professional drivers who spend their working day on the freeway driving trucks, taxis, limos, etc. This indicates that most humans might be unfit to drive cars in today’s traffic. When I was a teenager, I thought that by 2001 I could fly to the moon with PanAm and get from Lugano to Paris in a couple of hours on a maglev Trans-Europ-Express (TEE) train. It would never have crossed my mind that in 2015 I would be driving a car on a freeway full of unskilled erratic drivers who behave like they would be playing in a video game.