In 1997, as a culmination of six years of research,the National Automated Highway System Consortium demonstrated an automated highway system in a 7.6 mile stretch of I-15 in San Diego. The 7.6 mile stretch was separated from the rest of the highway (probably for safety reasons) and included magnetic markers to be used by vehicles for sensing. Not only did they demonstrate automated driving on the roads, they showed the cars platooning at close distances which has the potential to increase highway capacity by 200% (which is the ultimate goal of the AHS, to relieve congestion). I found the following video which I presume to be part of the project (although it doesn't show the more interesting demonstrations):
More comprehensive video available at the PATH website (overview, platooning demonstration, AHS History) but you'll need real player plug-in.
Right after the demonstration, in 1998, DOT cut funding for the NAHSC. Most articles attribute the issue to DOT budget crunch and a shift to a more near term goal of reducing accidents. However, an article by the Sanghyon Cheon (pdf) discusses the short comings of NAHSC in detail: (Incidentally, the money ultimate moved to the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative, which researched why accidents happen and spawned off more projects improve safety, which is still going on)
"Research focused on demonstrating the automated technology, with less attention given to the diverse political and institutional issues raised by stakeholders. Consequently, the consortium did not make much progress on finding ways to resolve these latter issues and reach an agreement."
"National Automated Highway System Consortium has dual responsibilities, both to evaluate and to promote fully automated highway systems... The Transportation Research Board committee pointed out that NAHSC's ability to fully and critically evaluate automated systems was susceptible to criticism in light of its promotional role."
"One of the critical problems for the automated highway system development is that the impact of AHS on society and environment is unclear yet."
"One of the main reasons why the National Automated Highway System Research Program (NAHSRP) failed was that the program was trapped in technology-optimism. Several U.S. DOT reports on AHS show that there are no technical and non-technical showstoppers. However, legal, institutional, and societal challenges just as critical as technical issues. Moreover, these institutional and societal issues cannot be settled in one day, because they are much to do with people's perception, behavior, consensus and social changed based on those."
The article lists and discusses many of these non-technical issues that were not addressed by the projects: Land Use and Environment, Safety, Equity, Public Acceptance, Finance, Privacy Intellectual Property, Liability, etc.
After DOT funding was withdrawn from Automated Highway Systems, research has generally shifted towards a more evolutionary model, where major infrastructure investment and dedicated automated lanes aren't necessary. While the debate for a more seamless integration of automated vehicles existed during the NAHSC project, the lack of DOT support may have pushed companies and researchers in that direction.
The features and technologies that will eventually evolve into AHS are described in this article by the Federal Highway Administration. In short current cruise control will develop into Intelligent Cruise Control where cars not only keep speed, they keep distance and relative position to the surrounding traffic (adaptive cruise control is available today in some cars). This would be followed by Autolane, the ability for cars to keep their lane. Those two features in combination would become the first generation of Automatic Highway Driving. The second generation will include platooning (where cars in automatic mode close gap distance) where the benefits of de-congestion start to appear and automatic lane changing (and possibly automatic entering and exiting the freeway).
While many of the social issues with automatic driving is not addressed by the evolutionary model of automated highways, it's clearly a more non-intrusive introduction of the technologies. While in a perfect world, we greenfield the entire system with up to date technology, that is not possible for such a investment and infrastructure heavy system such as transportation.
In the mean time, there are many other advancements outside AHS that may become the building block for automated driving or change the public's perception of it. The most obvious is the DARPA projects where vehicles were designed to traverse a bumpy mountain zone using on board intelligence and GPS signals. Toyota now offers automatic parallel parking as a feature on many vehicles. GPS for public use was in its infancy during the 90s but now common place with Nav Systems. Meanwhile Navteq and Tele Atlas are creating lane level detail maps of roads in the US (already available in Japan) so vehicles can determine which lane they are on the road. Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration (VII), the follow up to IVI and NAHSC is creating standards for vehicle to infrastructure communication which may also lead to vehicle to vehicle communication (also demonstrated in San Diego 97).
I talked to a manager in the industry about this and he predicted automated highway driving in 2020 and automated city driving in 2025. A news article covering the demonstration in '97 stated "it may sound farfetched, but the technology is there." So what's missing? What will tip this change? Is it all in due time? Or is this something we don't desire (i.e. videophones)?
Further reading:
- University of Washington's Innovative Transportation Technologies Website's overview on AHS.
- Smart Cars and Automated Highways from Mechanical Engineering Magazine.
- California PATH's overview of the 97 demonstration.
- What happened to all the Automated Highway Systems?
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