Shona Craven: Be glad robotaxi technology is being trialled elsewhere

You’ve got two options: keep walking and risk hypothermia, or use an app to summon a self-driving robo-taxi. Which do you choose? Which is the safest option?

Such a dilemma might not be as far in the future as you think, with the UK Government planning to roll out self-driving vehicles by 2025 in a bid to revolutionise public transport, improve rural connectivity and reduce accidents.

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If you can drive, and the thought of travelling in a driverless vehicle fills you with horror, there will of course be no compulsion to get in one. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to avoid sharing the road with them, so your safety will still be directly affected by their reliability, and indeed their defences against being hacked. A scary prospect, especially for dystopian thriller fans.

Passengers on Scotland's first 'driverless bus' earlier in May

However, headlines this week served as a reminder that our roads – especially fast, busy roads – are never truly safe, and human drivers are prone to disastrous errors of judgement. In the past year there were nearly 900 reported instances of vehicles being driven the wrong way on English motorways, an increase of more than 10% on the previous 12 months.

While some of these incidents involved drink-driving, others have been attributed to drivers mindlessly following satnav instructions rather than using their own brains to assess road layouts and read signs.

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In response Edmund King, president of the AA, quite reasonably called for drivers to “use common sense”, but Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, suggested the addition of a further layer of technology might solve the problem of people relying too much on technology, saying: “The ability of information to be fed to and from our increasingly connected and intelligent cars must create the opportunity for alerts to be generated and displayed within the vehicle.” Hmm.

In May, Scotland launched the UK’s first autonomous bus service, ferrying passengers between Edinburgh and Fife – but the sci-fi feel of it is somewhat reduced by the fact that there is not only a human being in the driver’s seat (who can take control if ever necessary) but also a “captain” dealing with tickets. It remains to be seen how driverless vehicles will be received, and much depends on what headlines we read from other countries.

Residents of San Francisco have this month become global guinea pigs after California’s Public Utilities Commission gave the green light for two competing robotaxi services to transport paying passengers around the clock in the city, following a period during which they operated during restricted hours or by offering free rides.

The city’s fire department chief was among those who opposed expanding the use of the vehicles, offering as evidence 55 reports of them interfering with emergency responses. Activists spent a week in July putting traffic cones on top of robotaxis in order to disable them, and to encourage other members to express their opposition before the regulator made its decision. They had a range of objections, from general opposition to the creep of technology and surveillance, to concerns about traffic blockages and an incident where a robotaxi killed a dog.

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Accidents involving autonomous vehicles are naturally more likely to make the news, but the details of that last one don’t actually make for a very strong argument against their use. There was an “autonomous specialist” (ie, a human) in the driving seat when the little dog ran out from behind a parked vehicle, but he or she didn’t see it. The car did detect it, but there wasn’t time to avoid the fatal impact.

Accidents happen, and people are fallible. Is at least some of the fear of autonomous vehicles not underpinned by a degree of delusion and arrogance about our own abilities as drivers, both as individuals or as a species? How many of us are able to instantly identify, for example, the location of an ambulance or police car that has just activated its siren? How many times do slow human reaction times or ill-judged manoeuvres cause life-threatening blockages?

Of course, autonomous vehicles are designed and built by humans – and then put on the roads by profit-making firms (with human shareholders) competing for dominance in a given market. I’m certainly glad Glasgow isn’t a test city (though the traffic cone issue might have made that a non-starter).

Days after the robotaxi expansion in San Francisco was approved, numerous vehicles simultaneously halted and caused traffic chaos for 15 minutes. The cause, it seems, was “connectivity issues” resulting from an influx of festival-goers into the city. It doesn’t inspire confidence, does it? If there’s one thing you don’t want to be thinking in relation to autonomous vehicles, it’s “they really should have seen that coming”.