December 23, 2014 – The city-state that likes to push technology’s limits is launching driverless automobiles as a short-haul service in one of its busiest neighborhoods in 2015. The idea is to reduce congestion by making the service an adjunct to other public transportation.
Singapore is a small island but home to over 5.5 million. As you can imagine traffic congestion is fierce. The government offers free travel on city trains during peak hours and even provides free breakfast vouchers. To discourage drivers for every automobile you must pay a certificate of entitlement, equal to the purchase price of the vehicle. Yet despite the push for public transit use and the onerous cost of ownership, vehicle congestion remains high.
Singapore has been experimenting with autonomous vehicles for a number of years. They have been running a driverless shuttle bus called Navia in two locations in 2014. The National University campus features driverless vehicles as well. And in the Jurong Lake District’s Japanese and Chinese gardens this fall, Singapore deployed driverless cars with an online booking system and vehicle-to-vehicle communication for several weekends.
In simulations driverless vehicles appear to be far more efficient than human-operated cars and trucks. They can operate with double the density and with far less congestion. With autonomous vehicles traffic lights can be eliminated. And with little in the way of bottlenecks, they reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The Singapore test, to be done in one of its most congested neighborhoods, will study the impact on pedestrians and bicycles.
Impediments remain. The GPS maps upon which autonomous vehicles rely for navigation need to be three-dimensional with positional accuracy tolerances of 20 centimeters (about 8 inches).
If the deployment succeeds Singapore intends to roll out autonomous vehicles across the entire island state. They will be the first country to do this but certainly not the last. The United Kingdom, Sweden and a number of American states are deploying autonomous vehicles bringing the technology closer to within a decade becoming ubiquitous globally.
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