Road to Utopia

Dumb questions you might never think to ask a smart highway:

* Can one be cited for driving under the influence when one is under the influence but not actually driving?

* In a car programmed to auto-commute to Pasadena, will there be a pause button should personal plumbing and that last bottle of Evian suggest an early exit at Van Nuys?

* When computers crash, will cars crash?

* Who gets sued if a driverless sport utility rear-ends a driverless minivan?

* And what of that helpless feeling when you, steeped in full and personal control of cars since Dad plopped you on his lap behind the wheel of the family Pontiac, suddenly are driving by wire--look Ma, no hands or feet!--and tailgating at 80 mph?

Here, at the media dry run for August’s public dress rehearsal of the world’s first Automated Highway System, such points were acknowledged as genuine concerns being studied by transportation experts who have started hard-wiring motorists to life in the smart lane.

They are even heavy into examining ways a pilotless car can avoid a tire carcass, dead mattress or a refrigerator dumped by the unintelligent on intelligent interstates. Or, if hackers can reprogram and clone cell phones, what havoc can they wreak on computers controlling the speed and separation of robot sedans?

“These are certainly things we are addressing under the headings of societal and institutional analyses,” says James Rillings, a former NASA researcher whose engineering career has journeyed from space to surface streets as program manager of the National Automated Highway System Consortium.

Rillings--two years into the seven-year federal and private sector program that could leave chauffeuring to a circuit board--believes that resolving the psychological issues won’t take long. For when steam locomotives arrived, it was feared their high speeds might cause brains to shift. Even in the ‘60s, the suspicious were suggesting that microwave ovens should be operated only in fallout shelters.

“But when I came through San Diego airport today, people got into this container, off it went on tracks, and we thought nothing of it,” Rillings points out. “Remember, people were scared of getting in elevators until Otis made them safe.” So public acceptance, he says, simply is a matter of exposure and faith, and automated highways are an inevitability.

“The need is there,” he says. That’s the need to unclog metropolitan highways, reduce traffic fatalities and ease fuel demands.

“The technology is coming,” he adds. That’s the technology of cruise controls that adjust a car’s pace and position in relation to other hard objects; of navigation by the Global Positioning System that talks to satellites and pinpoints your Hertz rental to within 35 feet of the motel you weren’t able to find last time; of the collision avoidance system that warns Air Force One of closing traffic; and of super-IQ computers that recently out-pondered a world chess master.

“And that,” Rillings concludes, “makes AHS just another step in improving the condition of mankind.”

Judging from the recent demonstration--sponsored by the Buick Division of General Motors, the U.S. Department of Transportation, Caltrans, UC Berkeley and other representatives of more than a hundred core and associate members of the Consortium--AHS definitely is a masterpiece in progress.

Clearly with decades to go.

Since November, using a 7.6-mile stretch of a carpool lane on I-15 slicing northeast from San Diego, the program’s 10 Buick LeSabre guinea pigs have logged more than 5,000 miles of automated travel. Most of that distance has been in convoy, and mostly 12 feet apart at 65 mph--but with the easy potential, say test engineers, of 100 mph with only 6 feet of separation.

Cynics immediately will note that tailgating at such speed is a daily norm on the 405.

NAHSC researchers also say they are on top of lane changing, slowing for a curve, accelerating into traffic and maintaining freeway speeds with smoothness. In dry weather and on ice.

Driverless cars also have successfully departed their asphalt test bed at exits predetermined by computer, and then were reprogrammed for the next leg of a trip in nanoseconds.

During media day on the Escondido Freeway, journalists were almost as well automated. One ride up, one ride back. Read a newspaper at the wheel for a still photographer, wave arms out the window for a television cameraman to show this really was hands-off commuting.

Researchers bragged about the inherent safety of the system--but asked us to wear seat belts anyway.

We slid alongside cars in the nonexperimental lanes, including one unfortunate pulling to the shoulder inside a cloud of radiator steam--leaving us to ponder the glory of a $200-million budget to develop an automated highway when we have yet to build an indestructible water pump.

Throughout the mindless motoring, there was this sense of being aboard a ghost vehicle with our fates in unseen hands. The stuff of Stephen King, of course, with Kathy Bates in the trunk.

And then our Buicks were returned to the I-15 test site alongside an abandoned Marine Corps barracks, where they rub shoulders with Hondas and Toyotas representing allied research but of different sponsors, headed in different directions.

There is little about NAHSC’s direction not to understand.

Part involves radar, a means of bouncing, recovering and measuring radio signals from solid objects, and that trick has been around since World War II. And the core of AHS methodology is no more complex than magnetism, a schoolboy science from 13th century China.

Six-inch magnetic pegs are buried in the center of the freeway lane, 4 feet apart. Magnetometers beneath front and rear bumpers of the car search for signals from the pegs and feed the information to on-board computers. They, in turn, order actuators to get on with the business of steering left or right. It’s really just a modified, grown-up, full-size version of a radio-control dune buggy.

Radar behind the grille locates the car in front, relays that information back to another on-board computer, which controls vehicle separation by setting and adjusting acceleration and braking. Just like a glorified Universal Studios ride.

Project scientists admit it’s all a brave beginning, and maybe at the same point of development reached by aviation in the mid-’40s when airplanes went from piston engines to jets.

But before AHS flies high, there are several key issues to address, says Steve Shladover, deputy director of California Partners for Advance Transit and Highways, a consortium partner involving Caltrans and four California universities.

Obstacle avoidance--that tire carcass or dead mattress--is an obstacle that cannot be avoided. What technology will allow mixing of manual and automated vehicles on the nation’s 250,000 miles of metropolitan highways? What if a driver falls asleep when it’s time to exit?

And how much redundancy must be built into systems and their components before they can be considered fail-safe? For although computers can land a Boeing 747 and put a man on the moon, they can’t manage an automated, new-fashioned motorcade when a car in the middle of a pack blows its old-fashioned transmission.

Yet resolution is a social demand, knows Shladover, because “79% of our major highways, at peak, are now congested . . . and congestion costs the nation more than $50 billion annually, including the loss of 2 billion labor hours.”

Proponents predict that in its full, final form, AHS will deliver even more important savings.

Traffic accidents--averaging 10 million a year and claiming 43,000 lives--could be chopped by as much as 80%, they say. Driverless cars can’t cut in, pass on the right, sweep lanes or signal left before turning right, and that will reduce freeway angst and raised fingers that often point to violence. In automated convoys, and at constant throttle settings, commuters will draft the car ahead, just like stock car racers, which will cut fuel consumption and air pollution.

Controlling speed and separation--effectively chilling drivers who hit the brakes to change lanes, and in two minutes have created a one-mile backup--will allow a doubling, even a tripling of the number of cars currently on Los Angeles freeways.

And to research our surrendering of the wheel, well . . . there has never been a place more logical than Southern California and Los Angeles.

“It’s pretty simple,” says Michael Patten, head of Pennsylvania State University’s intelligent transportation systems center. “If you can solve a problem on the Los Angeles-area freeways, you can solve it anywhere.”

Yet AHS opponents already are on the rise.

Some civil libertarians fear highway automation is one step from federal identification and location of individuals, therefore an invasion of privacy. There is the hacker sabotage and terrorism issue. On-board electronics required to use the AHS might become an option that many can’t afford. Or they’ll put their option dollars into leather upholstery and a big sound system.

And in a nation with a Constitution that encourages free agents and control freaks, how many will be willing to turn over their car keys to a computer?

Demo ’97 will be staged here Aug. 7-10 to show off NAHSC’s small fleet of intelligent cars and its short stretch of magic highway before Washington movers, California shakers and a whole world of newspeople.

The public is invited to visit the NAHSC Education Center, view a mini-track for demonstrations of vehicle technologies, and maybe attend events at the 7.6-mile test stretch.

Just don’t expect to see automated dogs chasing those automated cars.

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The Road

* Magnetic pegs an inch in diameter by 6 inches are sunk into pavement in center of each lane, spaced every 4 feet.

* Sensors, computers and communications devices: Installed in vehicles, such automated features might be considered luxury options when purchasing a car.

* Keeping your distance: Caltrans says vehicles in I-15 experiment will be kept about 9 to 12 feet apart. The potential exists to bring that space down to about 6 feet.

Technology

Cars driving on automated highways will be guided under lateral (steering) and longitudinal (speed and spacing) control:

A. Lateral control: Automatic steering keeps car in lane. Six magnetometer sensors mounted to front and rear bumpers will send data to on-board computer for analysis. Once the computer determines the car’s position in its lane, it issues commands to car’s steering actuators. (Driver may resume manual control of steering at any time.)

B. Longitudinal control: Adjustst spacing in front and back of vehicles. Radar mounted in front bumper allows all cars in convoy to communicate and coordinate movement. Uses radios, small antenna similar to cellular phone, mounted in rear. Radar sensors communicate with on-board computer, which will then issue commands to brake and throttle actuators.

Sources: Caltrans; National Automated Highway System Consortium. Researched by JULIE SHEER / Los Angeles Times.