NTSB Chairman Hart Upbeat About Automated Vehicles
WASHINGTON — Automated vehicles can be the biggest asset in improving the safety of America’s roads, Christopher Hart, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a speech June 30 at the National Press Club.
“An [automated] 80,000-pound truck will be safer, eventually, than one with a driver,” Hart told Transport Topics moments after his speech. “The transition from where we are now to that point, that’s going to be a challenge.”
Asked what one step the nation can take to enhance safety, Hart replied, “Automation,” before specifically mentioning collision avoidance systems, “one of the foundation stones” of the transition to era of automated vehicles.
Hart praised the trucking industry for its willingness to consider the use of onboard event recorders as boons to safety while he criticized the availability of synthetic drugs over the counter at truck stops.
Hart’s topic was to be self-driving, but both in his remarks and in the question-and-answer session afterward, he also addressed aviation, transit, rail and commercial trucks.
“Driverless [vehicles] are coming,” Hart began after Press Club President Thomas Burr of The Salt Lake Tribune referred to the fast-growing autonomous vehicles field as the “wild, wild West.”
Hart said automation is the biggest factor that can help improve safety — it can save “many, if not most of” the 32,000 lives lost each year in traffic accidents in the United States. The NTSB chairman also touted automation’s potential to greatly unclog the nation's congested roads by reducing the needed space between vehicles.
Hart also sees driverless vehicles as alleviating such human factors as fatigue, distracted driving, impaired driving and a lack of fitness for duty, all of which are on the NTSB’s Most Wanted List of advocacy priorities.
“Most accidents are due to driver error, and if there’s no driver, there will be no driver error,” Hart said. “The first [fatal] accident [involving a driverless] vehicle] will get a lot of attention," he added, "but this train has already left the station. Eventually, we won’t need a driver.”
However, Hart also noted that there is a downside to automation.
“What if automation fails? Will the [operator] be aware of the error and be able to take over to avoid a crash?” Hart asked, citing the 2009 accident on Washington’s Metro system in which nine people died because of such a failure. “The human is the most unreliable part of the system.”
Hart acknowledged the complexity of rules on America’s roads, where state laws have the biggest role — unlike aviation, which is almost fully regulated on the federal level. The chairman did say that he is encouraged by the safety improvement in all modes of transportation in recent years.
Asked about liability issues, Hart said that if a vehicle swerves today to avoid a collision with an 80,000-pound truck and fatally strikes people standing nearby, the driver likely wouldn’t be charged. That would probably also be the case in the future for someone who is just a passenger in an automated vehicle.
