Underground Robotic Highways

surprisingly well. Like it's it's a much much more beautiful novel than one might expect if you're not, you know, really familiar with with the actual writings of H. G. Wells and are more familiar with just his ideas and they end up popping up in our movies and pop culture. And not to say that the ideas are not fabulous, but but for an older book, it it holds up

really well. And one of the key ideas in it when when our time traveler character Um travels an enormous distance into the future, he finds that society has a surface world and a sub world, and the surface world is all tiny little dream people just having a great time, while the underworld is the domain of the morlocks. And these are just hulking monsters that do all the grunt work.

They maintain the machinery, so all the pretty stuff on the surface, all of the necessary mechanics and infrastructure underneath, and uh in the in the book, it's kind of a well, it is a nightmaric vision because it's because the people on the surface are stupid from not having to do anything in the people underground or monsters. And it all has to do with you know, the the you know, what is the you know, the industrialization of

of society doing to us. But um, you know, I'm not arguing that having cannibalistic creatures underground doing all of our work is a great idea. Yeah, I'm not saying that's a great idea. Um. But yet you see merit, Yeah, I see there's a little merit because I mean, let's face it, what's what what do we prefer? Do we like power lines or bury you know, up in the air or buried power lines. I gotta tell you, I

like esthetic h harmony. Yeah, so the more stuff we can bury, the better, right, we put our put our sewer lines underground, we put our you know, our power lines won't available underground. Um, if it's if it's kind of unsightly, then then let's see if we can put it in the basement. Right. So, Um, there's this really interesting idea UM of the underground automated Highway, which basically says, hey,

let's take our highway system and bury it underground. And then and then on top of that, well, it will also be basically robotic, so that it'll you know, the cars will drive themselves. It's all underground and everywhere that we currently have a big you know, you know, eight

lane wide stretch of asphalt. You know that that can be just you know, grass again, or a city park or you know, whatever whatever we want to make of it, so that the sur is can be beautiful and more natural and we can just bury all of our necessary infrastructure.

I like it. I love this idea of these rolling hills you calic view, and underneath all the there's a slight rumbling because everybody is hanging out underground getting from point A to point B. Yeah, and probably and since they don't have to drive the car, they get to you know, get to lounge back and read read that book even wanting to read or or or or you know, play video games or checkers or or you know, talk

to your child. You know, the sky's the limit. Anything you want to internet, surf the internet, anything you want to do, take a nap, uh, you know, just not driving. Yeah, in this scenario, I definitely see a lot of tinted windows. I have to say, well, or just no windows? You know, what do you have to see underground? Just more? Oh no, I think it's I don't know that i'd want to see into my fellow passenger passengers got cars, you know,

when they have so many choices of activities to partake in. Yeah, it's a frightening enough proposition, just you know, on the connector exactly. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you on that. So it's on one level, I we both have a lot of thoughts about this vision, especially I mean especially when you factor in that some experts and and real supporters of the idea say will happen fifty two years

extremely optimistic. Um. But but also there's this you know, when you when you start talking about, oh, let's let's automate our transportation and put it underground, you know, instantly think of like subway systems, like preferably the really good ones, um like London, um. Where Yeah, it's like the idea of taking an automated mode of transportation that's underground and out of sight to get from point A to point B. It happens every day in major metropolitan cities and goes

off without a hitch. Um. And I'm actually thinking of two other examples, one great, one not so good, and one is the chunnel right right, I mean that connects um Paris or Brussels. Can't remember, um, but Paris stuff Paris and done and it's brilliant. Right. You don't have to worry about getting on a boat. Um. You know, I don't know, in a couple of hours, you're there, right.

They didn't actually though there at one point there was the you know, the idea of building a bridge, but that basically instead of taking the the sea route, you can just take the underground highway, right yeah. And it's lovely, um. And it's proof that it can be done. You can build a giant underground road. I mean we have you know, some some really impressive tunnels, uh, you know, mountain tunnels in the world that connect areas and you know, we we have the technology, it can be done, but is

it really feasible? Right, And that's where I think about the big dig which in Boston, they took the artery that was going around the city and they rerouted it underneath the city, underneath the city center, and it was horribly expensive. Um. There are all sorts of problems that continue to this day, leaks, so on and so forth. And actually they think that it actually uh meets traffic even worse because it allowed so many more people to

dump into the highways underneath. So you know, any Boston nights out there, shout out and let us know about that. But UM, my understanding is that it probably wasn't the perfect project for this. Now another but but a big plus to this um like dissecting it a little and like ignoring the underground aspect for a minute, um, which which is in itself actually pretty great because when when you look at the amount of of the world that

is taken up by roads, it's pretty staggering. Well, and not to mention the fact that our population is exploding, and of course we don't have much more land to spare in terms of developing in any more buildings or roadways. Yeah, and Uh. And when you look at accidents, I mean, the roads tend to be pretty dangerous mainly because of human error. I think it's like n of of accidents

can are generally be attributed to human fault. Yeah. In fact, a World or Help organization has estimated that it costs the United States two and fifty billion dollars a year because of traffic accidents. And of course, the larger the population, the more cars on the road and the more futilities. Right, So if you could, if you could, we can actually get to the point. And I think the automated roadways

is that's far less far fetched. I mean a lot of as we'll discuss a lot of Yeah, a lot of the technologies are are on their way or even already here. Uh for that to be a very real possibility. And again, you take the you take the wheel away from dangerous humans, put it in the hands of a of a of a robotic system, of an automated system, and uh, and you're gonna have much safer roads when

it's working. So if we were to do an underground highway, what would need Well, um, first of all the big things that automated the highway system, because you can't bear to bury it. We must first have it, you know. So, um so this and when we talk about automated highway system, we're in visioning roads that have buried magnetic sensors that were contained them with the cars onboard computer. Right. Yeah. Much of the technology that that we're talking about has

been around for for more than a decade. Back in the n U S Department of Transportation sponsored the National

Automated Highway System Consortium. And uh, this was just a test of a number of different technologies you know where it's um where they they equipped like eight cars with several different automated driving systems that included a radar to detect other vehicles, ut you know, magnets like we said, visual sensors to follow the length of highway marked and uh and more and like buried sensors and visual markers

as well. And over the course of the demonstration, the vehicles travel to combine eight thousand miles and carried four thousand passengers without incident when out went off without a hitch, right yeah, yeah, no problems. And that's the really cool part. Right, So we have the technology, we know it can be done, and that's the first thing that we need, right and we have it. Yeah, and a lot of the other technologies,

I mean self driving. The the the dream of the self driving car is like, think of it like a wall composed of many bricks. And a lot of those bricks are already in existing automobiles, especially the more you know, the higher priced vehicles, um uh you know, especially when you get into like really complicated electronic deferentials, but then also anti lock breaks, um you know, even cruise control. These are all examples like a little, little or substantial

bricks in this wall I think we're building. Um. And actually to to talk about the automated highway system in Japan, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization NATO is researching and developing automatic driving and driving information and carrying out these proof of concept test right now, right so

they're well on their way to developing it. A few years back, we also have the the DARPA Urban Challenge UM, which was all about taking robotic vehicles, putting them in an urban or mock urban environment and having them successfully navigate and uh and and out of that has come a lot of the same people that were involved in these The successful aspects of this operation have gone on to say, work with Google, so you have like the

Google robotic car. Yeah, and it's probably should be mentioned to you that the Darker Grand Challenge was sponsored by the Department of Defense. Yes, and of course that we start to think about it, that makes sense because they'd love to have some self driving convoys. I mean that

would save a lot of lives. Yeah. Yeah, they've put they've been been some pretty I'm not sure what the current plan is, but they've put some pretty ambitious um uh plans in place about automating their their their wheeled vehicles in the military. And of course we already haven't a number of you know, we have the U a v S like the Predator and the Reaper up in

the air. So so there's been a lot of work going into it because you know, like take take the human out of the equation, get a robotic vehicle on the road, right, So we're making strikes in that sense. We we've got the automated highway system, We've we've got the technology for that. Uh, we are we've got the technology for driverless cars and uh. The other thing that we need is improved tunnel boring machines. So if you're

going to go underground, what are you gonna do? I mean, you've got to You've got to have something that's massive and powerful that can bore its way through rock. And these things are incredible looking there, like the giant tubes. They look like worms with teeth and not like beetlejuice worms. Put more like the sandworms from Doom Warms with teeth. Yeah. They also remind me of the scene in Labyrinth where the cleaner thing comes through the tunnel, you know, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

I mean they're they're incredible looking. Um, they've got rotating disks at the front that have cutting teeth so they can cut through the rock, and then the rock particles fall into a conveyor belt and it's whisked away. And then they've got hydraulic feet that essentially push uh they have touched themself to the tunnel and forced their way through. Yeah, they're like those worms from Tremors, except their robotic yes, yes exactly, or mechanical rather, but I guess they're not

so fulware yeah right yet yeah. Um, but of course the problem with that is that they're super expensive. Yeah, and just uh, like laying out a link, the tunnel can can be extremely pricy. So if we had improved tunnel boring machines in other words, we had maybe more efficient ones where the cost came down, that that would be in the realm of possibility, right right, And then uh, but then they're also they also say that we would really need zero emission vehicles if we're gonna have a

massive underground highway system. Uh, you know, you have to keep the gift to manage the air down there, right, They like a bunch of exhaust would be awful, right, Yeah, So I mean, even if you're like sealed in the view, you know, it shouldn't be like deep sea diving or going to the other planet. You know, they want to add some you know, monicum of of of of air

quality down there in the tunnels. Um. You know, otherwise you're gonna have, you know, people evolving to breathe it and becoming a you know, a hideous underground cannibalistic race if nobody wants really, we don't want it. This presentation is brought to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. But back to the automated UM vehicle system for a second. You know, it's one thing, as always with any technology, to say, here's the prototype doing its thing in a

control environment. But to unroll that to to to say, you know, it's kind of like with the the the digital TV ent and a thing. You know, if someone were to say, all right, by this October, only automated vehicles on the road, that would be unrealistic. Like it would be unrealistic if you were to say, okay, guys, uh, starting this October, if you don't have cruise control, you can't be on the road legally, like that would inconvenience a large number of people and then rightly so right,

I mean, the outcry would be, of course understood. Yeah. It's like the question would be, all right, we're you gonna pay to have cruise control installed on my vehicle? A you're gonna buy me a new vehicle? Uh, you know, and then are you gonna to say nothing of the costs of say, all right, now, all government or state owned vehicles have to have cruise control, and then you know the ones that don't need to be fixed. So

i'm i'm. The estimation seems to be that you would end up having, say like a in the same way we have an h OV lane, you would have an automated vehicle lane, so you could find a way to slowly integrate into into have to have your automated systems more or less alongside um the normal drivers. Huh. Okay, So if I have my BMW two dollar collision a version vehicle, yeah, then I could join that lane. Yeah, you could travel down like Ritchie Highway, and and and

I only drive with other robots. Because the other thing that comes to mind is that, you know, it's one thing to come up with an automated system where you know, individual robotic cars drive alongside other robotic vehicles, but then it's it's a different thing entirely to say, all right, these robotic vehicles are driving alongside crazy people who are driving their own vehicles. You know. It's it's that you have to account for so many other things, right, because

the idea is to lower the incidents of traffic collisions. Right. So yeah, in the real world setting, does that negate it entirely? Yeah, some like crazy man driving around flipping off robot cars because they're inconveniencing him because their their draw driving the speed limit because they're programmed to write, right, and who gets the ticket? It's a robot car yeah, yeah, who Yeah, who gets the ticket? Who? Who's responsible in

an accident? Um? You know, is it the manufacturer? Is that you know what what does the driver have to do with it at that point? Yeah? Which makes me think about the Google car, right because it has been developed, right and uh it naturally did there was one incidence of an accident. These are truly driverless cars, like they have them cruising around San Francisco with no one in them, and it turns out that they one of them did

get rear ended by someone. So it does beg that question, like who's responsible, Like with if Google starts working with Toyota or Ford to give them their technology. You know, if I've got a banged up car, who's gonna Who's

gonna assume responsibility? Right now? One thing that comes to mind in all of this when we again we we talk about like underground automated highways, and you think of subways, you think of automated highways on the surface, and you end up sort you think about trains, you know, and uh so on one on one level, I want to there's a part of me that wants to make the argument, Hey, this is all stupid. Why don't we just have awesome

public transportation. But that flies in the face of especially of the like the very like American idea that you know, I want my own car. I want to control that environment because like the train ride this morning, I listened to my own music, I read my book and uh, you know, kind of shut everybody off. But then again, I also had to like stand like ear to ear

with with some random stranger. Um the platform had to weight on the platform was you know, my schedule was entirely at the mercy of whatever Martha was doing this morning, and you had to enter the social contract, right like, you know there, I'm sure there was no belching. I'm going to assume you have not written Heart of Lately from you. Yes, yes, there was no belching on my part.

But but yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, I guess you could make that arguments like, man, I wish I could ride my own little slight you know, capsule, so I could just totally let myself go on the ride, right, you know, like, but is it but is it possible to continue to pursue this, this American ideal of freedom and cars into the future, you know, like this is a very cool system. Driverless cars are amazing, but you know, is it something that we can sustain? Yeah? Just does

the car eventually just become way too expensive? I mean cars are pretty freaking expensive now. Um. So, um, you know, at what point does it just is become beyond the pet the pail, you know, just something that an individual cannot own a car, which actually you look at some interesting models with like uh, you know, a car rental or shared use situations like one level like zip car, which is already in use a lot of places. Um

and uh. And then there are other neat ideas like you you see examples of like stackable car systems systems where you say, you you fly into a city, check out a vehicle to airport, and then check it back in in another check in station. Uh. They're a number of different kind of like the d with bicycles. In some cities, there are a number of different um experimental Amsterdam,

Yeah yeah. Um. There's also something called the road trains, which are basic basically groups of cars with similar destinations.

And Volvo is actually working on an EU initiative for road safety and has created a platoon road train and so these are guided by a lead vehicle and that's being driven by a human um but the other cars follow in succession, and they all have computer controlled cars that are electronically tethered in this sort of convoy, and each vehicle in the platoon measures the distance, speed, and erection the vehicle directly in front of it, so it

adjusts its movements to stay information. And of course what's the weak linked here. If the lead car goes out of gets out of control, or has a breakdown, then you don't know where you're gonna end up. Yeah. Of course, no Volo is built in a breathalyzer, so if if that lead person is drunk, then they can't even start the car. But it reminds me of like some of the situations where you have dolphins or whales beaching themselves.

Some of those have been tied to like a dominant uh, the lead whale becoming disoriented and it just like it ends up on the on the beach and then they push you a well meaning humans come out push everything back out to sea. They just wind up on the beach again because the lead vehicle is broken, right, yeah, right, Because there's always going to be some sort of user error. So I mean to hit your wagon to someone I

don't know how I'd feel about it. I didn't want to know the person, you know, um find out if they had any sort of agenda. And and plus it sort of makes it a train, right yeah, I mean that that's the concept of a train. You just have a bunch of car ours um that are fixed together, rather than that the actual trains. But then the idea of completely removing humans from the equation that also has some problems as well, right yeah, I mean, actually, think

about pilots. They thought the automated system right, and essentially, uh, that was put in there so that pilots didn't have to worry about a thing. They could take off, they could land, they didn't have to do anything. It was it was all going to happen for them. But what they found is that the pilots, when they didn't have anything to do, became really kind of like daisical. They got sleepy, they weren't paying attention, and so they said, okay,

this is this actually is not a good idea. What we need is for the pilots to assume the responsibility on takeoff and landing. And of course we've got the automated system and that's the backup so that made things

a lot safer. Yeah, I think some of the that you look at some of the plans for you know, automated highways, and I think it would it would kind of resemble that because obviously, like the automated highway would not necessarily begin at your driveway, you know, in the same way that you don't actually get the highway to,

you know, take the entrance ramp. So it would be something along those lines where, yeah, you you drive through your neighborhood, you drive through your town, maybe you you know, you go whole months without using the automated highway system and then you you know, you launch onto it, right, You're right. Could never purely be you'd have to have some sort of override system that you could switch between.

So but that's I mean, that's just interesting. You can you imagine that sort of studies that would come out of that, like when your brain has to switch back on and and start to look at distances and you know, and work again basically. Yeah, Um, So I don't know, And I wonder too, like with with truckers and um and I wonder we may have some trucker listeners out there.

I would I hope it did um, Like, I wonder if you would end up in a situation where like truck driver drives the cargo to the the automated highway system and then kind of gets off, you know, exits the vehicle, let's it carry, and then it just automated carries the cargo across the country and then as it's lead being, somebody else jumps on. So you end up with just sort of local um truck trucking operators. Well,

and truck drivers don't get mad at me. But actually, in this scenario too, you wouldn't necessarily need to have a truck driver, right Like, if you had a point A to B and if the company did like a place where you loaded and unloaded, then you could just send a truck ten thousand miles or maybe shorter three thousand miles you know, down the road and it gets to the drop off point and you don't I mean really, in theory, you wouldn't necessarily have to have someone there.

So but again, what does this sound like? Yeah, a train, Yeah, well there's a human on the train. But true, yeah, but I mean, you know, just having the technology, I mean, which what are you doing is you're sort of duplicating this other system that exists. Yeah. And it's it's interesting how you know, we kept hanging onto our car as we you know, the car became this important part of not just American culture. It's just you know, it's just

but but especially American culture. UM. And and so I can I tend to only see like an underground automated highway um coming into being if if we just continue to have, like any an increasing attachment to our vehicles, like like an religious attachment to it, like like one's total the total of oneself worth. Uh and uh, it's just like spiritually attached to the automobile. Um. That's the main way I see something like this like truly taking shape.

Do you think it could happen? Well, it could. I mean a lot of things can happen, you know, But it's just you know, it comes down to we do we do we have the money to spend on it? Do we want to spend the money on it? Is it worth it to us? You know, it's the same argument about like going back to the moon or or sending man manumissions to Mars. You know, we could we could do it, yeah, but but are we is it? Does it really make sense to our values, right, And

we're having this conversation right now. In a hundred years, fifty years, fifty years, it could be in existence. Um, but I mean, does make sense that you would start to adopt some of the technology now and then you know, with maybe two years, three hundred years. Who knows that a complete overhaul would have happened. I don't know. We'll see or maybe we won't. Somebody will see. I hope I see it. I have to say, I love the idea of it just cruising along and being able to

do you know, read or or whatnot. It's a lovely proposition. But then, but then also like maybe you don't have to travel around as much in the future you're doing everything digitally, right, or like beaming your consciousness into your clone body that works at the office. Well, I know, but sometimes a hologram just doesn't suffice and you actually have to to go somewhere. Okay, yeah, well, hey, we have an article about this on the website called how automated,

How underground Automated? No, it's called we will we drive on your ground automated highways And you wrote it. I wrote it, so it's it's even worse than I can't remember the name of it. But but yeah, so I go into a lot of the same facts that we're covering here. We also have an excellent article on automated dri driverless cars aren't any driving, So just drop drop any of that language into the search bar on the

on the homepage and you'll get some cool results here. Yeah. So, hey, I have just a little listener mail here, and I feel like we're probably going a little long, so I don't want to I can't read a lot of it.

And we actually received a lot of cool stuff, uh regarding our dream Inception podcasts, which talked about problem solving that takes place while we sleep in our dreams and sometimes gives us those key breakthroughs for uh creative endeavors, be they artistic or scientific in nature, or even emotional. Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm distriguring out how to you know,

orchestrate your your own life. So we received a lot of emails, and I'm not gonna have time to read all of them, but I thank everybody for sending them in. We received several things from programmers. UH. A listener by the name of Abraham says, I'm a I'm a design engineer mechanical and I find that as I am working on design, designing complex design end and I cannot conjure up a solution during the day, I have a Eureka

moment during my sleep. Sometimes this happens with just more than work as well, life issues, problems with hobby builds, on airplanes and such. So I thought that was interesting from Abraham Um. Then we also heard from a listener by the name of Griffin Um and he says, for my own story, I used to be a software developer earlier on when I was learning rapidly and using my

new knowledge. I recall so many episodes where I woke up fully aware that I had been working on understanding a problem and solving it all night long in bed. One very powerful one was an understanding of multidimensional data rays. At the time of this dream, I saw myself hand handing myself a glowing fruit, and as I took it from another me, I said thank you, and the other me said you're welcome. That was a fun challenge, and

the other met cartwheeled away. So that's that's just I. I love that as well, So I thank Griffin for sending that in and we also heard from listener. My name of Jim, and he was a software developer at A T and T Bell Bell Lads in the late nineteen eighties. He says, that was about twenty seven at the time, so I was still learning source code. UH version and control systems were just starting to be used, and they weren't as easy to use as they are today.

We had about twenty five developers all making changes to our software on the daily basis. The challenges was to gather all of those changes and produce a stable version of the source code that would compile, link and run. It was like trying to hurt cats, he says. One evening in March, I went to bed a bit earlier than usual, around ten pm, UH. I was drifting off to sleep in an idea flashed to my head and it woke me up like a bulk of lightning. I knew how to solve the problem. It was obvious and

extremely elegant. It was so simple that I was sure there was surely that I was missing something. So I ran to work the next day and subjected my UH poor boss to a detailed whiteboard description. I showed it off to several people and convinced my teammates to give it a try. And it turns out the idea of worth like a charm for it, and the idea led to a tool used widely in a T and T. So it's very cool. Yeah, so in a very interesting

real life stories. They're about dreams helping us to solve our problems and the and the kind of stuff that's going on in our own mind. I mean, you don't need a better excuse to sleep and dream, right, Yeah, yeah, I got a problem, go to sleep, sleep on it,

just like your grandma said. Yeah, just like she did. So, Hey, if you have some interesting feedback about about dreams, or about the dream of the underground Automated Highway and UH or any kind of technological or planning um fixes that could help our our commuting woes than dropped by the Facebook or the Twitter, we are Blow the Mind on both of those and we'd love to hear from you. Also, feel free to drop us a line at Blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on

this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast on in the upper right corner of our homepage. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has a RYE. Download it today on iTunes, m