“We want to be part of the autonomous vehicle future,” Doug Hausladen, director of the city Department of Transportation, Traffic and Parking and acting director of the New Haven Parking Authority said Monday. In fact, he said, autonomous vehicles are not the future; they already are here, in the form of self-driving Teslas.
So, by applying to the state Fully Autonomous Vehicle Testing Pilot Program, people in New Haven, from public safety and traffic personnel to hospital employees to those who navigate the city’s streets will be able “to have conversations we’re not having yet,” Hausladen said. “The state is creating frameworks that the city is going to have to respond to.”
Hausladen and consultant Stantec gave a presentation to the New Haven Traffic Commission last week, first reported by the New Haven Independent.
The state program, authorized by a 2017 law, applies to “fully autonomous vehicles” — those, unlike Teslas, that do not require a driver at all. They are rated Level 4 or 5 by SAE International (originally the Society of Automotive Engineers). Teslas are Level 3. Many cars now are Level 1 or 2, such as those that help parallel park or have rear-view cameras.
“The purpose of our activities right now is really to lead in the conversation with policies of the State of Connecticut in order to have a safe system in the future,” Hausladen said. “This is appropriate planning for technology that will be coming online.”
Hausladen said the city must be prepared for driverless vehicles and not just react to their appearance on the roads. “I’ve ridden in Teslas that drive themselves on the highway,” he said. “Semi-autonomous vehicles are on the roads right now driving. We don’t know what to do about it.”
In order to apply for the test city designation, New Haven had to define a corridor in which the vehicles, which run at about 15 mph, would operate. After looking at a number of possibilities, including Dixwell Avenue, Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, State Street station to Union Station, Martin Luther King Boulevard and Legion Avenue, the city staff settled on a route from the 20 York St. campus of Yale New Haven Hospital and the Air Rights Garage, up Martin Luther King Boulevard, across Sherman Avenue and down George Street, behind the hospital’s St. Raphael campus, and back on Park Street.
An alternative would turn right off George Street and left onto South Frontage Road. Each route is 1.7 miles long.
The vehicles would be 16-foot-long shuttles, capable of carrying eight to 16 people. Among the companies that manufacture them are EasyMile, Navya and Local Motors.
One reason for choosing the hospitals and the garage as destinations is because the garage, owned by Yale University, Yale New Haven Health and the city, and managed by the Parking Authority, can be used as a source of financing, Hausladen said. He estimated the cost of the study at $40,000 to $50,000.
The route also is good because “there would be a theoretical replacement of one of the shuttle routes that Yale New Haven Health provides. In the sense of testing … we would have great data before and great data after” to judge its success, rather than using a new, unused route, Hausladen said.
“We’re taking an existing route and then doing performance analytics between drivers and driverless,” he said. Safety and vehicle behavior would be among the issues studied. According to Stantec’s presentation, the vehicles face “challenges” with lane changes and left-hand turns.
During the testing phase, a driver will be required to be on board, as well as a remote supervisor. But the Level 4 and 5 vehicles, designed not to have a driver step in, actually are safer than the semi-autonomous cars, according to Jonathan Garrett, smart mobility specialist for Stantec. “Where you run into trouble is at Level 3 and that’s because the human is required to take over in certain circumstances,” he said.
Crashes of Teslas make headlines, but Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has complained that they shouldn’t because they’re safer than human-driven vehicles. In its January quarterly report, Tesla said its vehicles had crashed once for every 2.87 million miles driven “in which drivers had Autopilot engaged” and one for every 1.76 million miles driven without Autopilot. Tesla reported that, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a car crashes in the United States every 436,000 miles.
Garrett, who was at an American Planning Association conference in San Francisco on Monday, said “there really is a lot of interest behind it, primarily for safety reasons.”
Garrett said that while the shuttles travel at top speeds of 15 mph, that is the average speed of buses and that they would only be put on roads with 25 mph limits. “It is kind of the sweet spot where you can operate on roads that are marked 25 miles per hour,” he said.
The application will be submitted to the Office of Policy and Management by the end of May.
©2019 the New Haven Register (New Haven, Conn.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
