
Singapore Is the Perfect Place to Test Self-Driving Cars - jseliger
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/08/why-singapore-leads-in-self-driving-cars/494222/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAtlanticCities+%28CityLab%29
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jasonjei
Singapore also has a political framework that could force self-driving car
adoption if the powers that be want it. Things that could be mandated such as
self-driving only car lanes and motorways could be possible given the small
size of Singapore and the powerful nature of the government. It would be
unthinkable _at present_ in America to force all cars on certain roads to be
self-driving only. Singapore has the sort of culture that values "safety" over
freedom.

In America, for better or worse, it would take a long time to mandate these
things if they were even possible (considering that the same laws would need
to be passed at least 52 times for states and territories). America has checks
and balances--everybody gets their say.

~~~
dxbydt
>It would be unthinkable in America to force all cars on certain roads to be
self-driving only.

There are private cities (Celebration, FL), private housing communities (1000s
of them), private large corporate campuses, private shipping yards, private
military complexes, private airports, industrial hangars - lots of places
where you could safely force all cars to be self-driving without any
governmental interference.

~~~
jasonjei
But I think for it to have meaningful impact we need interstate public roads
to have self-driving. I haven't looked at the statistics, but most deadly
accidents I read of late happen on interstate roads.

Edit: It's unthinkable at present but I believe if a city-state like Singapore
undertook the experiment and it was successful it could eventually spread
around the world like HD adoption. (That's why I said it would take a long
time to happen in America.)

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ars
Not only is that most meaningful, it olso has the most bang for the buck
(saves people the most time), AND is the easiest technically.

I wrote a long post about it before, but basically I expect self driving
trucks on dedicated interstate lanes to be the start. Then self driving cars
on the same lanes.

Over time all interstates will be self driving. City streets will never be
unless we get AI with general intelligence.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _City streets will never be unless we get AI with general intelligence._

Driving is likely a much easier problem than artificial general intelligence.
Even when it involves evading rampaging toddlers. Sure, if you want perfect
safety, you'll need the car to anticipate a great deal —far more than humans
currently do, like looking at the walkways as well as the drive lanes.

If we merely want something that's safer than a human driver that's probably
nothing more than a (huge) engineering feat.

~~~
ars
> Driving is likely a much easier problem than artificial general
> intelligence.

That isn't actually true. Scenario: Narrow one way road, you get to the bottom
of it and there is an ambulance blocking the road. Behind you is a bunch of
cars, ahead of you is a few cars.

You need to coordinate with other cars to move out of the way, you need to
make use of driveways to turn around, you need to know to override the law and
got the wrong way on a one way.

And that's just one scenario. You need general AI to handle all the different
things that happen on city streets.

Highways is easier - it's controlled access. And if they block the road it's
typically by officials who would have some way to remotely control the self
driving cars and tell them what to do (not that that is not a car of worms in
itself).

> If we merely want something that's safer than a human driver that's probably
> nothing more than a (huge) engineering feat.

Not even close. You would need to do better than 99.99999% perfect to do
better than a human. That number is correct BTW - that's how rarely humans
make a mistake that leads to a fatality. (Injury rate is not quite that good:
99.999% but that's still quite hard for a computer.)

We don't have that level of reliability in a phone, never mind a car. There
are some appliances that are that good, but they tend to be very simple.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Edge. Cases.

Such scenarios are rare enough that they could be handled either remotely, or
not at all. The ambulance won't get through and its patient will die. Tough
luck. But think of the many accidents those automated cars avoided in the
first place. It sucks, but it's still worth it.

Also, cars don't have to be _fully_ automated. They can still be remotely
controlled, or otherwise warn their company that they should call a tow truck.
My favourite example is automated trucks: you'll most likely have a central
dispatch per region, with a few operators that manage 50 trucks each. Once a
truck has a problem the computer can't handle, it just calls the relevant
dispatch, where humans take over.

Also, automated cars don't have to do better than humans in every dimensions.
Safety is paramount, but resilience in the face of unusual situations is not.
It is _okay_ for the computer to get you to your destination a bit more
slowly, or even not at all from time to time. Even public transportation has
way less than 99% reliability for my commute to work, and I still take it.

~~~
ars
It's ALL edge cases. Everything. The non edge case are the easy part. It's the
edge cases that is hard.

Saying it's fine "it's just edge cases" completely ignores the difficulty.

> But think of the many accidents those automated cars avoided in the first
> place. It sucks, but it's still worth it.

Did you read the rest of my post? Do you understand just how good the computer
would have to be to have any impact at all? I have a feeling you don't.

> They can still be remotely controlled

No they can't. Wireless internet service is not even remotely close to good
enough to make that possible.

> Also, automated cars ... every dimensions. Safety is paramount

This is why I say highways only. That covers that majority of the use cases,
and the most dangerous part, and the easiest part. It's a triple win. The use
case for city roads is basically non existent with the exception of self
parking.

> has way less than 99% reliability

That 1% doesn't mean death. It's means slowness. That's not what I mean. The
self driving car has to be basically perfect or death is the result.

People very much underestimate just how good people are at driving.

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loup-vaillant
> _It 's ALL edge cases._

Let's arbitrarily decide that 99.9% of driving time is made up of the "common"
cases, and the rest (0.1%) is the "edge" cases. I'm pretty sure there are many
more edge cases than common ones.

Now let's further assume that whenever an "edge" case occurs (that would be a
couple times per hours), the cars just slows down until it stops or stop being
in that edge case. It's not very convenient, but I'm quite sure it is rather
safe.

> _Do you understand just how good the computer would have to be to have any
> impact at all?_

From what I have gathered, computers are already good enough to work on sunny
roads with few surprises. Including towns. Or maybe the google cars don't work
as well as I though they did? I wonder how many times the human had to push
the emergency shutdown button in their tests.

> _No they can 't. Wireless internet service is not even remotely close to
> good enough to make that possible._

Just use a regular cell phone, and communicate through the speakers. 56kb/s is
more than enough bandwidth (space stuff like the Mars rover use way less
bandwidth than that, and suffer from way more latency).

> _The self driving car has to be basically perfect or death is the result._

We don't need computers to be perfectly safe. We need them to be safer than
humans. If automated cars kill on average half as many people as humans do,
that's already a huge win. Not enough to stop there of course, but more than
enough to switch.

Besides, I believe that abiding the traffic code and slamming the brakes
whenever something goes wrong is not hard, and already safer than human
driving (which take chances, speeds, rides too close to other cars…).

Bugs on the other hand may prove most problematic (see Toyota's unintended
accelerations). We may need Nasa like processes to ship that code on the road.

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Someone1234
> Singapore makes a particularly good testing ground for automated vehicles.
> Its manageable size (it’s about three-and-a-half Districts of Columbia),
> flat terrain, warm weather, and well-kept roads provide about as simple of
> an urban landscape as one could ask for. And its government is supportive of
> such technology, having formed an Autonomous Vehicle Initiative to oversee
> research in 2014.

I'd argue we already have too much testing under "ideal conditions." I want to
see self-driving vehicles tested in snow, in rain, in strong winds, in fog,
and on mountain roads.

Don't get me wrong, you absolutely want to start developing it under best
conditions, but if they legitimately want to get this live by 2020 then we
need to expand the scope to less idealised situations.

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jessaustin
Singapore certainly gets rain, of the solid-cube-of-water, when-you-hear-it-a-
block-away-don't-keep-walking-to-your-destination-just-find-immediate-shelter,
oh-so- _that 's_-why-all-the-drainage-canals-are-so-deep variety.

It makes perfect sense to walk before running. I don't really see a "mountain
road" use case for this tech anyway.

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iandanforth
Funny you should say that:

[https://youtu.be/IFwIlflmk2Y](https://youtu.be/IFwIlflmk2Y)

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uberstuber
>Perhaps they’ll also help with the Singaporean phenomenon of the seeming
complete disappearance of taxis when it rains

Are self-driving cars able to handle rainy conditions? I'm not in the industry
but thought this was still an issue.

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ptaipale
Do taxis actually disappear - which seems counter-intuitive; where would they
go, and why would the drivers suddenly not want to take rides when it rains? -
or is it just that all free taxis are grabbed immediately when it rains, thus
there are no free taxis?

There we can answer that the seeming complete disappearance ox taxis when it
rains will persist, because the ratio of customers per taxi shoots up when it
starts to rain.

(Where I live (north Europe), you practically don't flag taxis on the street
but order it on the phone; when I was living in Beijing, I think the rain
phenomenon was simply that all taxis were taken as the first drops came down.)

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gbog
It's worse than that: taxi drivers count the amount of money they made in a
day and stop when it's enough. Then if it rains they make their day quickly
and go home, while they will cruise much longer during low demand days.

This is a classic example of short term view and the invisible hand going bad,
found in Thinking fast and slow.

~~~
Someone
Citation needed. I would think most taxi drivers are smart enough to figure
out that it is better to work a few more hours more on rainy days and sit in
the park on sunny days than to work a few hours more on sunny days and sit in
the park on rainy days.

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nazgob
You got one. 'Thinking Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman. Sometimes people
don't optimize long term and just prefer to get 'daily' rate and go back to
their families. This might turn bad if sth happens and they can't ride for
some time and could use the 'rain' money. Book is really good, highly
recommended.

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squozzer
I can foresee several phases in the development of "robocars".

Phase 1 - dedicated lanes for robocars, to mitigate problems with the still-
dominant human-piloted cars. Robocars capabilities at primitive level, will
likely have human-usable controls.

Phase 2 - once their safety and compatibility have been established, robocars
will freely mix with human-piloted cars. Robocars will accommodate errors
committed by human-piloted cars, and will no longer need human control.

Phase 3 - robocars dominate the roads, while laws and economic structures
(e.g. insurance) will favor robocars. Robocars will have localized
coordination capability.

Phase 4 - robocars will act in concert over large (metropolitan) distances to
smooth traffic flows. Human-piloted cars will become as horses are today - a
hobby for the rich.

Admittedly, I am mixing adoption phases with technological ones.

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startupdiscuss
Seems like the correct title of this piece should be the less dramatic:
"Singapore will also get self-driving cars."

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serg_chernata
I don't know, there's nothing groundbreaking here but they do explain why.

~~~
startupdiscuss
I didn't see that. They're not arguing that the US doesn't have places with
"flat terrain" or "good weather" or many of the other things.

Just that Singapore also has it.

Now they are not evenly distributed in the US, so surely in the US it will
happen in certain pockets first.

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devnonymous
I think the important bit is the government buy in and support for this. As
far as autonomous driving is concerned, legislation might end up being the
bottle neck in most nations.

~~~
czahedi
Also don't forget the lack of driving & car ownership by the population.
That's hugely important.

In the States, the plethora of drivers & traffic creates countless more
variables for an autonomous vehicle to deal with.

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limeyy
All this attention to "self driving cars" makes news look pretty poor. It'll
take years for them to become reliable.

~~~
ma2rten
Do you have a source for that claim? I might have fallen victim to Google's PR
here, but I was under the impression that they are reliable already - at least
in controlled conditions (low speed, good weather, well mapped area).

~~~
notahacker
Depends on the threshold for reliability. As of the end of 2015 in the 1.3
million miles Google cars had driven on public roads in California, human
drivers had been required to prevent 13 incidents where Google assessed a
collision would have happened without human intervention, a further 56 where
the driver intervened for safety reasons and 272 times due to more minor
sensor issues (using quite conservative thresholds)

That might not be bad for new technology and was showing trend improvement,
but it doesn't compare favourably with accident rates for human drivers

[https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-
annual-15.pdf)

~~~
gozur88
But once they have accident rates that compare favorably with accident rates
for human drivers, they'll have a saleable product. Self-driving cars don't
have to be perfect, they just have to be better than people.

~~~
asafira
Also, let's say the accident rate was slightly better than that of an average
human's.

Among people, there are some good drivers and some poor drivers. The average
driving ability --- including fast reflexes for dealing with accident
situations, for example --- is somewhere in between.

Is it fair to possibly force self driving cars on the good drivers?

(they probably shouldn't jump on the self-driving car bandwagon early anyway,
but just a thought.)

~~~
victorhooi
People (especially males I've noticed) seem to equate good driving with great
reflexes.

I have pretty good reflexes, but that doesn't make me a good driver.

I equate good driving with common sense, not speeding over the limit or taking
unnecessary risks, not tail gating people, and in general not being a tool.

I.e. when you're driving a 2-tonne metal tank going at 80 km/h, good == safe.

In this sense, autonomous cars have already far surpassed us.

~~~
asafira
I apologize if I made it seem like I meant great reflexes meant good driving.
Instead, I included it because great reflexes might help people get out of
accident situations (say, like properly pulling the handbrake when the car
starts spinning out of control, or turning away from a deer in the right
direction last second, etc.)

Again though, I was discussing the situation in which cars were only slightly
above average, meaning there were likely situations where _some_ people would
do better than it and might be putting themselves in more risk going into a
self-driving car.

(if your point was more to make sure people don't take the wrong message away
from my post, sorry for this response then!)

~~~
Retric
This assumes self driving without human intervention. If your in the car you
can keep an eye out for danger and still be far more relaxed. Open road on a
sunny day, no cars, sit and chill. Creeping along at 5mph in a traffic jam,
relax it's all good. Driving in a more complex situation ok, manual time.

People suck at paying attention to boring situations. So, the easiest part of
the trip is likely the best thing to automate.

Remember, the actual accident rate is very low. Further cars and humans are
likely to make different mistakes so if you supervise and the car does sub
second reactions and 24/7 360 degree vision the combined rate is likely to be
great.

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jefe_
Test in Thailand... if you can dodge a tuk-tuk, you can dodge a toddler.

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jakeogh
Of course totalitarian regimes want self driving cars. They take control away
from the people and all kinds of ways to track the people.

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upgraded
I love the Autonomous trend. When will the government put in actual firm
consumer policy to encourage Tesla and other electric car makers to return ?

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dharma1
It would, but there are a lot of "uncles" driving cabs today who would not
have any jobs left once self driving cars took off

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system16
There were a lot of uncles who lost jobs when rickshaws were banned. Progress
requires change.

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samfisher83
Singapore is a country that is less than half the size of houston,tx. It might
be more manageable there compared to many other places.

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projectramo
Only if there is a particular value in getting the whole country to shift at
exactly the same time.

What harm is there in, say, letting a suburb of Pittsburgh try it out. Then
extend it to Detroit and so on.

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hellofunk
Singapore definitely has some of the worst driving standards of any major city
I've lived in around the world, so if you can stand up against them with a
self-driving car, that is definitely promising.

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keldlundgaard
Please elaborate.

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Gigablah
In other words, the poster hasn't lived anywhere else in Asia.

~~~
hellofunk
I'm comparing Singapore to other first-world big cities, but there are other
places in Asia where you could make a similar claim.

One of the most surprising discoveries upon moving there was that, unlike
nearly everywhere in the West, in Singapore a pedestrian does not have the
right of way. In the U.S. this is ingrained into all driver education courses,
but in Singapore they do not even slow down around pedestrians who are
crossing a street.

The other observation that jumps out to anyone I know who has visited
Singapore is how the buses are driven. A Western bus driver would likely lose
his job for driving as erratically as they do in Singapore. In fact just a
couple weeks ago one of these drivers killed a pedestrian [0, 1]. I'm
surprised it doesn't happen more often.

Self-driving cars would be in for quite a test on the roads of Singapore.

[0] [http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pedestrian-dies-
after-...](http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pedestrian-dies-after-bus-
runs-over-him-outside-toa-payoh-bus-interchange)

[1] [http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/bus-
drive...](http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/bus-driver-
jailed-for-killing-pedestrian)

