And cars would be cruising the streets — though not necessarily driven by humans.
The town is fake, and so is the hubbub. The robot cars are real.
At Mcity, a mock-up town built on the University of Michigan campus here, carmakers test the self-driving technology that will soon bring a quantum leap in transportation to Portland and other cities.
Carmakers can evaluate how a self-driving vehicle reacts when a pedestrian appears from between two parked cars, or when lane stripes have faded to the point where they're barely visible.
There's broad acceptance that self-driving cars will fundamentally change the way people and goods move. What's not clear is how they will change the way cities look and function, and whether governments will embrace the technology or side with skeptics.
Regardless, like it or not, the self-driving future is coming faster than most people expect.
On this day, Mcity is more like a ghost town. While the test track is occasionally opened to the public, how it's being used is more often shrouded in secrecy.
It sits behind an 8-foot opaque fence with strict keycard access. The university won't say who tests autonomous vehicles here; only that its leadership circle includes carmakers Ford, General Motors, Honda, Nissan and Toyota, as well as various transportation and technology firms.
The pop-up city is meant to act as an Everytown USA, where vehicles pass through a variety of intersection designs and traffic signals. Buildings can be picked up and moved. Fake tree canopies and a tunnel interfere with GPS signals.
"It's a really sort of compact place where we can create very complicated and interesting scenarios, but in a way that's very controlled and repeatable," said Greg Stevens, Ford Motor Co.'s global manager for automated driving. Ford has publicly acknowledged it's testing self-driving cars at Mcity and elsewhere.
The faux town is built to be as hard or harder to navigate than a real city. Its builders intentionally used faded and graffiti-covered road signs. A small hill is perfectly positioned to hide a stopped car on the other side.
The controlled testing at Mcity is valuable, but carmakers are hungry to give their cars real-world experience on public roads, too.
With each mile traveled, self-driving cars are mapping and remapping their environments to improve navigation. And each interaction with a human driver, pedestrian or cyclist improves their ability to predict road behavior.
"What we're doing is putting our vehicles out on the roads and seeing where they don't work, and then figuring out how to make them work," Stevens said.
The rules of the road in Oregon – and in most other states – are silent on self-driving cars. Only a handful, including Michigan, Nevada and California, expressly allow them to be tested on public roads.
The general public is wary of self-driving technology. A survey conducted this year by AAA found only one in five drivers would trust an autonomous vehicle with them inside it.
Levels of Automation
Cars on the road today — right now — have the ability to park themselves, or steer and brake in response to road conditions.Are they self-driving cars?
To help answer that question, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration identified four levels of automation.
Level 1 | Function-specific automation
The car: Can steer, or it can accelerate and brake, but it can't do both.
The driver: Must remain engaged in driving the vehicle.
Example: Vehicles with features like lane assist and adaptive cruise control.
Level 2 | Combined-function automation
The car: Both steers and accelerates.
The driver: Must remain actively monitoring the environment and ready to take over if something unexpected occurs. The car won't necessarily warn the driver if something unexpected happens.
Example: Tesla's Autopilot mode.
Level 3 | Limited self-driving automation
The car: Handles all aspects of driving most of the time. If it encounters something unexpected, it will alert the driver he or she needs to take control.
The driver: Can read a book or otherwise tune out, but must be ready to take over upon receiving an alert from the car.
Example: The current version of the Google car.
Level 4 | Full self-driving automation
The car: Handles all aspects of driving all of the time. The car might not even be equipped with a steering wheel, and it can make trips unoccupied.
The driver: Enters a destination or a route, but is not expected to be available to take over at any point in the trip.
Transportation planners and regulators, however, see the potential for enormous gains in safety by taking flawed human drivers out of the traffic equation.
"Look at what local agency goals are," said Lauren Isaac, an engineer with the consultancy WSP Parsons Brinkerhoff who wrote a guide on self-driving cars for state and local governments. "Reducing accidents and improving safety is core to government's mission. Improving mobility. They're pretty well aligned with what driverless technology is going to do."
Even so, regulators are wary of giving the green light to technology they don't fully understand. The Oregon Department of Transportation says it's largely taking a wait-and-see approach with autonomous vehicles.
The agency did, however, conduct a top-to-bottom, nine-month analysis last year of what it needs to do to prepare for the arrival of self-driving cars.
"We really do want to be responsive to these technologies as they come out, and we don't want to be caught flat-footed," said Andrew Dick, the state's automated and electric vehicle adviser. "We also want to be responsible. We don't necessarily want to be a national leader in this."
For the state, the arrival of self-driving cars means re-thinking just about every piece of its roadway oversight.
The Oregon DMV, for example, would need to consider how Oregon's rules of the road apply. Does a driver even need to be licensed to use a fully autonomous vehicle? Is that driver responsible in the event of a crash?
Traffic control devices, like stoplights, could be changed (adding small transmitters) to be more easily read by machines. The department is part of a nationwide committee of transportation officials examining the issue.
"It's a conversation that's happening in a lot of different places," Dick said.
Cities, too, will face big decisions when driverless cars start making their way onto Oregon's public roads. Their arrival has the potential to fundamentally change how cities like Portland work.
But there are dueling visions for how exactly the self-driving future might look.
Consider a scenario in which many Americans have fully autonomous cars of their own, which need no human intervention other than entering a destination.
The car can drive its owner from home to work in the morning. Then, instead of parking nearby, it could drive itself back home to wait for a scheduled end-of-the-day pickup.
It's convenient, and not paying for parking in a big city is likely cheaper for the driver. But in that scenario, the car has made twice as many trips the driver might have otherwise.
That means double the traffic and double the energy usage.
"That would disrupt all of our land-use and transportation plans," said Chris Smith, a member of the Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission, which has pushed the city to start planning for self-driving cars.
In another scenario, hinted at by the rapid growth of services like Uber and Lyft, personally owned cars would be rare. Instead, most rides would be provided by self-driving taxi services. No longer reliant on driver-partners or their vehicles, the companies could cut costs dramatically.
They could also build on the carpool services they offer in some cities. Instead of driving one person from their pickup location to their destination, the service picks up other passengers along the way, lowering the cost for each passenger in the process.
Public transportation could operate on a similar model, using autonomous vehicles to ferry riders from their door to major transit centers to make the bulk of their trip by rail or other rapid transit.
"We want the shared mobility future, not the robot chauffeur future," Smith said.
For cities, each option likely points to one thing: empty parking structures but crowded streets.
"All of a sudden, we're downtown going, 'We need a fraction of the of the parking structures,'" said Adrian Pearmine, national director for smart cities and connected vehicles at the transportation firm DKS Associates. "'We need less street-side parking and more five-minute delivery or drop-off zones.'"
Carmakers have pushed for a national framework of laws, hoping to avoid dealing with a patchwork of regulations that might force self-driving cars to turn the wheel over to a human at some state borders.
Federal officials have said the government will release guidelines on self-driving cars in the coming weeks, potentially laying the groundwork for their testing in more states.
That means a self-driving car could be coming soon to a road near you.
Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan and Mcity, is a bustling college town about 40 minutes from the heart of the American auto industry. It's full of unsuspecting drivers, cyclists and the occasional student darting through traffic to get to class.
And autonomous vehicles are already being tested there.
City planning director Craig Hupy recalls researchers offering a bit of ominous reassurance: "Every vehicle we are running in your community has a driver.
"Just don't ask if their hand is on the wheel."
©2016 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
