Monday, 11. January 2016
Reading Time :
2 minutes
“When Henry Ford introduced the Model T over a hundred years ago, people could not have anticipated the impact of automobiles on their world,” notes Henry Okraglik. What we can be sure about is that the driverless car phenomenon is fast upon us.
There is a split in opinion amidst our experts over whether autonomous cars will need dedicated lanes during the transition. Here are the two sides of the argument:
Dedicated Lanes
The worry is that drivers of traditional vehicles won’t be used to driving with driverless cars: “AV will allow us to increase the capacity in driving lanes. “So at the beginning, we may have one lane with AVs and one without. People will need to get accustomed to driving alongside self-driving vehicles,” says Scott Shogan, Connected/Automated Vehicle Market Leader at WSP in the US.
No Dedicated Lanes
On the other hand, Jan Hellåker, Program Director at Drive Sweden, doesn’t think we will build dedicated lanes for self-driving vehicles: “We won’t build new roads. We already have dedicated lanes for bikes and city buses. Autonomous vehicles will run on these bus lanes,” he says.
Here are some of the other changes that we think are coming: