Deadliest Summertime Highways In The U.S. Will Be Recast Via Self-Driving Cars

Here's a quick roadway tip for you. If you are heading on a driving trip this summer, please try to avoid the following highways:

·        I-5 in California

·        US-1 in Florida

·        I-10 in Texas

·        I-75 in Georgia

·        I-10 in Arizona

Those are considered the top five deadliest summertime highways, according to a recent analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data on highway fatalities in the United States.

The ranking of the highways was based on the number of human fatalities due to car accidents in the May through September time-frame, covering the years of 2015 to 2017 (the most recently available data).

Deadliest Highways Explained

Why are those particular highways so deadly?

The most likely explanation is because they are generally the main arteries for travel in those respective states and therefore, especially during the summer, a lot of traffic translates into a lot of car accidents, which then translates into (sadly) fatalities.

It could be that many of the drivers are unfamiliar with those highways and have come to the area as tourists, often confused about which off-ramp to take or how they should properly drive as per local customs.

Maybe the regular drivers get fed up with the touristy drivers and when you mix the two together, it becomes a potent and explosive combination. Get out of my darned way, says the seasoned local driver, and meanwhile the driver from out-of-town is upset that the other drivers aren’t allowing them to dart into and out of traffic, driving frantically because they are lost and unsure of where to go.

These deadliest highways themselves don’t seem to be in disrepair, which could be another reason for a high frequency of accidents. You might argue that the roadway signage is at times lacking or confusing, but that’s not bound to be a significant factor in the fatalities count.

It could be that drivers on those highways are driving at high speeds.

Setting aside whether the driver is a local or an out-of-town vacationer, pretty much everyone in a car on those highways is going to be driving fast. Since the highways are a main artery, it also tends to include slower and lumbering trucks and cargo vehicles, moving along at the (nearly glacial) speed limit, and creating a dramatic disparity in speed between the tortoises and the hares.

I’m not going to get bogged down in the ongoing debate about speed limits on open highways, which is a continual combative and argumentative fight that recurs in our society.

Some say that if we lowered the speed limits it would save lives, or if the chances of getting a ticket for speeding was heightened it would save lives.

Others refute that the high speed is the “cause” of the fatalities. Yes, there is usually a correlation between speed and traffic fatalities, but it can be argued that it is misleading to claim that there is a direct causation between the speed and fatalities.

In any case, if you believe that the highway itself is not spurring the fatalities, and even if speed is involved, presumably the "buck stops here" must be the drivers.

It’s those drivers that are at the root of the fatalities.

Magically, if today’s drivers could somehow be transformed into becoming better drivers, being always alert and on top of their game, those enhanced drivers would presumably deal adroitly with higher speeds (if that is the issue), and therefore in a more perfect world those upgraded drivers would reduce or eliminate the production of fatalities.

Getting human drivers to become better at driving is not an easy assignment. Humans tend to resist change. They tend to get bored or distracted while driving. They get upset and allow their emotions to carryover into their driving decisions. And so on.

Okay, if we can’t change humans to be better drivers, perhaps we ought to replace them.

As such, once we have true self-driving driverless cars, ones being driven entirely by AI and there is no human driver involved, what might happen on those deadliest summertime highways?

Let’s unpack the question and see what we can discover.

Advent Of Self-Driving Cars

I’d like to clarify that there is a distinction between fully autonomous self-driving driverless cars, known as Level 4 and Level 5, and cars that are semi-autonomous involving the co-sharing of the driving task with a human driver (referred to as Level 2 and Level 3).

You could try to argue that the semi-autonomous cars will increasingly provide automation that will aid human drivers in becoming better at driving. As such, perhaps the added automation is going to reduce those deadliest highways fatalities.

It might, but it is hard to say whether this will be true.

Keep in mind that you still have the same human driver in-the-loop as you did when the automation was less capable. One concern is that drivers will become complacent, discounting their role as a co-shared driver, and end-up getting into car accidents that they would otherwise have not gotten into, simply due to mentally drifting from the driving task under the false belief that the automation would save them (which it might not).

I’m not going to tackle herein the matter of how semi-autonomous cars are going to impact our deadliest highways situation and instead focus on the true self-driving driverless cars (which we don’t yet have, and for which we barely have Level 4’s, a constrained version of full autonomy, doing limited public roadway tryouts).

Most pundits would likely declare that once we have true driverless cars it will so radically change our world that the number of fatalities on our deadliest highways would drop to zero.

Those same pundits would even go further and be willing to state that the number of fatalities on all and any highways will become zero.

Essentially, no deadliest highways anymore.

All highways become undeadly.

All highways will have zero fatalities.

Though it would be heartening and uplifting to go along with the zero fatalities notion, it is an overly simplistic viewpoint and (unfortunately) not going to happen.

There are several bona fide reasons that we are still going to have fatalities on our highways and streets.

First, on streets there will be pedestrians and those pedestrians can take sudden and unexpected actions that belie the physics of any car, whether human driven or AI driven, being able to stop in time to prevent either a fatality or an injury.

You might say that pedestrians won’t be on highways, and though generally true, there is still a chance of pedestrians getting mixed into highways, though admittedly slim. There are though motorcyclists, which if humans are still allowed to ride motorcycles, provides a possibility of having true driverless cars getting into accidents due to motorcycle entanglement that could lead to fatalities or injuries.

Furthermore, the idea that we are going to overnight switch out conventional cars and suddenly have only driverless cars is a silly and obviously untenable possibility.

The economics won’t allow this to occur.

Therefore, there will be a mixture of driverless cars and human driven cars on our highways.

Some say that we ought to restrict human driven cars once there is a prevalence of self-driving cars, perhaps setting aside designated lanes that are only for driverless cars, or only for human driven cars. Another idea is that human driven cars might be restricted to being used only at certain times of the day or certain days of the week. Will human drivers put up with such restrictions?

An additional factor that many aren’t considering is the chances of the AI having any latent bugs or errors in it. Plus, the specialized sensors and computer processors can have faults or failures. And, a car is still a car, meaning that the kinds of car issues that can arise will still occur, including blown out tires and other physical breakdowns.

All in all, we don’t yet know how this will play out.

It seems pretty certain that we will have a mixture of human driven cars and driverless cars, along with human driven motorcycles and pedestrians, which will continue for the foreseeable future.

As an aside, there are efforts to turn motorcycles into semi-autonomous and even fully autonomous versions (see my article here about these advances).

Figuring Out The Fatalities Hotspots

My point about the advent of driverless cars is that we will continue to have fatalities, though one would hope it will be less than the number that we incur today.

Suppose the real-world impact of the driverless cars is that we do indeed have less fatalities, oddly enough it could be that those deadliest highways would still be the deadliest highways.

Allow me to explain.

Perhaps the mixture of driverless cars and human driven cars on those particular highways will continue to have fatalities. If the number of such fatalities is lessened, it would imply those highways are now “safer” as a presumed result of having the driverless cars. That’s good.

Meanwhile, suppose we make the assumption that all other highways are also being lessened in terms of the number of fatalities, once again due to the driverless cars entering into the picture. That’s good too.

Yet, it could be that those specific deadliest highways will still have the highest number of fatalities, in comparison to other highways, albeit at a lesser count than the highways usage of today involving conventional cars.

Ergo, those deadliest highways are still the deadliest ones.

There’s another possible twist.

Maybe the fatality counts on the existing deadliest highways drops precipitously. That’s good.

Suppose though that the other highways aren’t being frequented by self-driving cars as much. It could be that with a limited supply of driverless cars that those scarce and costly vehicles will be positioned in locales where they can make the most money, likely the places where those existing deadliest highways are.

This could then mean that those other highways will now become likelier candidates for being the deadliest highways.

Another qualm some have expressed is that human drivers might gradually find themselves becoming deskilled in the driving task.

Why?

Well, if you are routinely using a fully autonomous car, you aren’t exercising your driving abilities.

You might stop driving for a while and your driving skills begin to decay, meanwhile for your summer vacation you decide to rent a car, a conventional car or even a semi-autonomous car, and now all of a sudden you are behind the wheel again.

This might increase the chances of car fatalities when you have large segments of society that nearly gave up driving and then opt to jump back into the driver’s seat.

Conclusion

It is conceivable that instead of open highways being the deadliest roadways, perhaps the deadliest driving locales would shift toward the outskirts of cities.

Here’s the logic.

On the open roads, let’s suppose that the driverless cars help in reducing the traffic fatalities. Pretend also that those long stretches would be driven primarily by truly autonomous cars and trucks.

Back towards town, we might have a larger mixture of human driven cars and autonomous vehicles, along with the plethora of pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists. Inside the core part of a city or town, the speeds would be low enough that car accidents involving driverless cars or conventional cars would produce injuries but hopefully not as many fatalities.

The speeds at the outskirts of a city might be higher, such as on local freeways, tending toward more severe impacts when car accidents occur, producing fatalities.

Some number of years from now, once we have a prevalence of self-driving driverless cars, the deadliest roadways might be the freeways bordering and interconnecting cities. An added basis for thinking this would be that some assert that with the emergence of self-driving cars that people will decide to live further outside of the cities, commuting to work via the ease of using a driverless car.

The volume of car traffic at the outskirts of cities might correspondingly increase as a result of that societal shift in where people live and work.

Anyway, please drive safely this summer and if you aren’t able to avoid the deadliest highways, I ask that you keep your eyes open and your mind focused on driving your car.

You, your family, and the lives of others that might be on their summertime vacation depend on it.