Driverless cars soon to hit Texas roads

The Texas Department of Transportation announced this week that the US Department of Transportation selected Texas as one of 10 states selected as a proving ground for automated vehicles.

TxDOT is partnering with Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI), University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Transportation Research, Southwest Research Institute and 32 municipal and regional partners. Initial testing will take place on closed research proving grounds, a TxDOT press release reads.

According to an article on the TTI website “Urban and freight test beds in the following cities offer real-world environments where a variety of scenarios may be explored:

Austin Area — Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and Riverside Drive corridor.

Houston Area — Texas Medical Center, Houston METRO HOV lanes, and Port of Houston.

Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington Area — UTA campus, Arlington streets, I-30 corridor and Managed Lanes.

San Antonio Area — Fredericksburg Road/Medical Drive corridor and bus rapid transit system.

El Paso Area — Tornillo/Guadalupe Port of Entry.”

As great as autonomous vehicles sound, I’m a little leary. On the one hand, there’s the rise-of-the-machines-Terminator-Skynet scenario involving artificial intelligence which I never gave any thought outside the realm of science fiction until the world’s biggest nerds including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and even Tesla’s own Elon Musk starting going on about the dangers of it.

But on the other hand, I can’t help but think how pleasant it would be to travel amongst traffic without the raging egos behind the controls.

Just imagine driving in an environment where the juvenile motorists are free to fiddle with their phones and wage Twitter wars instead of racing to pass the less manic who are going the speed limit only to whip around them to immediately slow down and turn 100 feet later.

Beyond the appeal of avoiding minor annoyances, driverless cars could significantly reduce collisions. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 18 percent of all car crashes involving injuries were a result of distracted driving. The National Safety Center estimates 28 percent of all crashes result from cell phone use.

It seems there is some difficulty focusing on the task at hand and self-driving cars could mean safer travel.

When I saw that Arlington was one of the locations for the proving grounds, it reminded me of a series the Dallas NBC news affiliate did a few years ago. They discovered that although Arlington was the only North Texas city at the time that prohibited citizens from texting and driving, police officers there had experienced numerous crashes as a result of texting and typing on their in-car computers while driving.

Maybe TxDOT could team up with Arlington PD and give these automated cars an extremely thorough testing.