I'm back from one European tour and this weekend back in Budapest for our "Singularity University Summit" on the 15th and 16th. If you are nearby, come check it out.

While I've been away, a few news items.

UK Grants and plan for Milton Keynes

In the UK, they want to push for advanced transportation. This includes a 75 million pound grant program, and some money for a robocar taxi system in the town of Milton Keynes, NW of London. Milton Keynes is one of those those "cities of the future of the past" -- a planned community with an unusual geometry, and the planned pods may fit right in. At first, they are planning a PRT-like service with private ROW for the pods, and the people involved include companies from the PRT field like ARUP. (It was reported in some news reports that ULTra, which makes the PRT for the Heathrow Airport -- I rode it last month -- would be involved but they do not appear to be.) The big news is that the plan is for the pods in MK to eventually leave their private ROW and become self-driving taxis operating in the town.

(With any luck I may be on public radio tomorrow talking about this.)

Eventually a billion pound investment is planned in advanced transportation tech.

A town taxi is a worthwhile project, especially because the town can clear the roadblocks. I am less optimistic about what "big infrastructure" project companies like ARUP will do, because they have a different mindset. The great thing though is that even if these cars begin caged, the precedent will let them become truly useful by going door to door. MK was a town designed to be polycentric, with services in every block. Such towns are harder to serve with transit as trips go from anywhere to anywhere. Transit usually goes hand in hand with centralized towns where the vast majority of trips are to and from the city centre.

More studies

The Eno Transportation center released a report on the economics of robocars. This report outlines the cost savings with different levels of deployment, and predicts huge financial benefits even with modest deployment -- something readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear reported.

Other studies released include a survey that suggest that 90% of people would use a robocar if it reduced their insurance rates. What's interesting about this study is the huge number of positives. Prior studies have all seen much smaller numbers of people willing to use a robocar 20-35%. Those studies have been couched in the idea that it's a new, expensive thing, not a money saver.

At first, robocars will be more expensive, as all new technologies are. But they will save people money in the long run, and the insurance savings will actually be only a small part of that equation. My own forecasts suggest that the price of driving can be cut by at least a third, perhaps by half, through the use of smaller, more efficient vehicles. While the costs of fuel and accidents (insurance) are high, the cost of depreciation is still the biggest cost in operating a car.

Measuring safety

In another nice tidbit, Chris Urmson, the head of the Google car project, gave a talk at RoboBusiness where he outlined some safety metrics being tracked. One of the big problems with robocars is that since humans have accidents only ever 250,000 miles and fatal accidents every 80 million miles, you can't just drive every new software revision hundreds of millions of miles to compare it to humans. So Google is tracking how often the car does "risky" behaviours that are often found before accidents, like weaving out of lanes or other unsafe moves. And the results, he reports, are very good at present.

Cliff Nass

There has been lots of news coverage in the last month in various media -- it is becoming so regular I don't report it here. But one sad item sent to me involved the sudden death of Clifford Nass of Stanford's REVS center. Cliff was an HCI expert who was moving his expertise towards cars and other related technologies and was a fixture at local events, always willing to be contrarian with facts to back it up -- my kind of guy. It's a tragedy.

Another survey had serious numbers of people saying that once they got a robocar "they would never drive again." All these surveys do have an issue as they just propose a hypothetical and let the respondent figure out what it means. The real answers will come when more people get a real chance to try one out.