The future of transport is about more than driverless cars

The future of transport is about more than driverless cars

The problem of moving people around efficiently is a bit of a ticking time bomb, as the global population grows and concentrates in already overcrowded urban centres.

Add to this the fact that we’re all getting older and living longer, and the urgent need to cut down carbon emissions, and we’ve got a serious challenge on our hands. Technology will no doubt play a huge role in addressing that problem, but many of the people working on that at the moment are not doing so from Silicon Valley, but in Holland.

It shouldn’t surprise anybody to learn that the Netherlands has the highest bicycle use rates in the world. Much less known, however, is the fact that they have a long and proud history of pioneering automated driving technology going back to 1995, or that its electric bus manufacturers are thriving due to the government’s directive that require all public transport vehicles sold in the country to be zero-emission  by 2025.

I learned all this while touring Holland last month as a guest of the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency, who were keen to show off their innovation in the area of automotive technology and mobility.

As is always the case with such trips, you take everything you’re told with a grain of salt, but at the end of a rather gruelling 3-day trip (the Dutch don’t believe in over-pampering journalists and even my jet-lagged American colleagues were held to 7:30am starts) I was left rather impressed.

It wasn’t any one particular company or technology that stood out, however, but the way that everyone I met seemed to be so focused on how it all fit together into long-term and sustainable strategies. Much of the focus where it comes to smart mobility tends to be on the “sexier” tech of self-driving cars – it is, after all, as one of our hosts put it, “the first large-scale deployment of robotics in a society at large in human history” but that’s only part of the picture.

Because as vehicles become smarter and more automated, there will also be advances in data communication between cars on the road and between cars and roadside installations. In other words, there is a need to teach those “autonomous” cars to take into account real-time data about their surroundings and other vehicles.

Automated driving in real life should take into account the role of data, object detection and social driving. These are all incredibly complex things to try and teach a machine, says Robbert Lohman from a start-up called 2getthere, which works on automated transit applications ranging from Automated People Movers to Shared Autonomous Vehicles.

Read more : https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/10/06/future-transport-driverless-cars/