I was walking down the footpath recently when I thought about how self-driving cars will cope with pedestrians. We currently terrify children into not running onto the road and car drivers make the most of the danger of their cars by driving quickly in close proximity to pedestrians because they reason that most pedestrians will not jump out onto the road because of the self-preservation instinct.
However, Uber’s efforts notwithstanding, most sane self-driving car engineers wouldn’t allow their products out the door if they were likely to run over pedestrians. That leads us to the dilemma that self-driving cars could be so safe for other road users that people could jay-walk without the risk of death or injury, or even that roads could be blocked by children without understanding that they are impeding others, or wilful adults protesting.
The safety of self-driving cars could lead to a re-think of the nature of roads as a shared space, or as ‘the Queen’s Highway’. Will there be greater enforcement of laws requiring flow of traffic (or introduction of new laws)? Will roads become more physically separate from pedestrian & cyclist paths. In essence, will the reduced danger of proximity to self-driving cars make roads slower? Or will it make them more segregated to prevent people walking around on the roads with impunity? Or will we simply learn to better co-exist with different modes of transport and accept that self-driving cars could potentially go much slower in urban/suburban areas to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. everyone else not in a self-driving car)?
