PRE2016 3 Groep11

Introduction

The traffic system in the Netherlands will change over the duration of the next couple of years due to the change in the autonomy of the vehicles as well as the amount of completely autonomous vehicles that will be put into use in traffic. This report will look into the changes that might happen to the traffic systems such as traffic lights or even new road systems specifically designed for the autonomous vehicles.

Authors

• 0960493 Tim Houthuijs
• 0934016 Kevin Jenniskens
• 0958509 Matthijs van Raaij
• 0948190 Sarah Rohder
• 0903327 Floris Tulner
• 0945501 Lars Verstraelen

Assignment

To review the changes that might happen in the traffic over the upcoming years, we will focus on making a research report.

Due to the changes in the traffic, there will need to be changes in respect to the traffic system to make the traffic flow more efficient as well as reduce the chance of accidents. The focus lies in a traffic system with a part human driven cars and a part autonomous cars.

We will divide the future into certain timestamps: 5 years, 10 yrs, 20 yrs, etc.

We will also divide traffic up into different situations in order to be able to look into different aspects: - the highway (lots of cars driving at high speed); - in the city (crossing and interaction with people); - countryside (not a lot of traffic).

Assumptions

In order to solve our main problem we need to make some assumptions. these assumptions help us to better address our problem statement. It also helps to break down the problem in its core problems and solutions. By simplifying the problem you make your problem more understandable. So our assumptions we made are the following.

We assume that the current traffic system is suboptimal in terms of: - Waiting in line for the traffic lights. As well as in terms of safety. - The current traffic system is also suboptimal in in terms of CO2 emission. - We also assume that self driving car will be fully autonomous in 20 years from now . - Robots make less errors than persons.

USE aspect

In order to make a research that sheds light onto every part, we do not only look at the technological side, but also at the USE-side. This means that we will look at the user, society and enterprise aspects that are within a civilisation such as the Netherlands. Each side has its own actors, which bring their own opinions on the matter. These can be in favour, against or indifferent, depending on what side they represent.

User

In the user side of the spectrum, we have the following actors: - drivers of non-autonomous cars; - the people inside of autonomous cars; - and the pedestrians and cyclists.

These actors also have different values, which have to be taken into account. These include safety for the people inside of the autonomous cars as well as for the pedestrians and cyclists. Autonomous cars are safer in general, but with the reduction of the amount of traffic lights, it might be more dangerous for the non-autonomous part of traffic. Another value is the effectivity of traffic, which looks at how much traffic is being regulated, such as traffic lights, which influences how fast people get to their destination.

Society

For the societal aspect, we have the actors being the ANWB and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment. They look at the pros and cons of the situation. The pros include the increase in safety amoung drivers, as this will rise due to the decrease in accidents. This means that the contribution of insurances will drop, which is beneficial. Another pro is that there will be more jobs for maintenance in traffic, due to the preparation needed for autonomous cars in traffic. On the other side, there is the reduction of jobs for truck drivers, which lies around 200.000.[citation needed] The difference between rich and poor will also become larger, as the poorer people will not be able to afford autonomous cars.

Enterprise

At the enterprise side, we have got the actors of the producers of the autonomous cars (think of for example Tesla or Google), and software companies that develop traffic systems (examples to be looked up). These actors also provide certain pros and cons. These include more jobs in the autonomous car industry, large sales for autonomous car producers and lots of jobs in the informational sector. This last one may have an issue as there might not be enough people in this sector.