Session 1A of Velo-city kicked off today with a discussion about Autonomous vehicles (AV). First on stage was ECF’s own road safety and technical policy officer, Ceri Woolsgrove. He examined some of the claims made about the capacity and impacts that autonomous vehicles will have on the future of transport, and particularly what opportunities and drawbacks might present themselves.

The car industry and AV enthusiasts are unsurprisingly very optimistic about AVs and their potential to shape ‘the cities of the future’, as was discussed in the opening plenary of Velo-city. Ceri, was alas, less enthusiastic, although he (along with all the other participants) identified clear positives for cyclists from these new technologies. Speeding, drink driving, and other very human problems would become a thing of the past with computers in charge.

His main concern was the journey that we will take passing through all the very difficult technical steps as we (slowly) move from manual, to semi-automated, to fully autonomous vehicles. The problems were illustrated very strongly by Virginia Sulivan of the Adventure Cycling Association, who was very positive about the benefits of AVs to compensate for the depressingly large amount of distracted drivers on the roads of the USA. However, she gave examples of the difficulty of testing AVs to recognise and deal with Cyclists, pedestrians and other Vulnerable Road Users in the USA. A particularly tragic incident where an AV in testing failed to recognise a pedestrian who was walking their bike along a road and killed the person, was certainly impactful on the audience.

Diving into the technical details of testing AVs, John Parkin for the University of West England, explained his experience of running real-world and simulator trials of AVs, focusing on people’s perceived trust of AVs in several different circumstances. He found that people had a very high trust in AVs when using them, which was actually increased when they were interacting in some specific circumstances with a bicycle user, whilst trust levels remained similar when interacting with a pedestrian. John left on a more philosophical note, explaining that the “use of AVs won’t be to do with technology, but to do with how we as a society choose to deal with AVs”.

This quote flows well into the final speaker’s question. Cristopher Oster, University of Delaware, asked, if AV’s are coming, how do we adapt, and how do they adapt? In answering, Cristopher pointed out that we are a long way off a fully autonomous vehicle, (despite claims from certain manufacturers), but these vehicles don’t exist yet for a number of reasons. Better we get ahead of the curve and plan and regulate now, to ensure the worst doesn’t happen.