innovation

The wind may be free, but it’s not easy to catch

International Transport Forum Maritime , ,

Shipping is rediscovering sail power thanks to innovative projects reaping promising results on the high seas. Selwyn Parker sets sail to find out how, and when, ships may once again be powered by the wind.

Within the next few months, one of Japan’s biggest shipowners, Mitsui OSK, will send a giant wind-assisted coal carrier to sea in an experiment that is being closely watched by the entire maritime sector.

The vessel of 88 900 deadweight tonnes will fly a 52-metre high “hard sail”, retractable to less than half the height, that is designed to convert the wind into, in effect, free propulsion.

Mitsui’s Wind Challenger shows impressive early results

Called the Wind Challenger project, Mitsui has been quietly working on the technology for 13 years and will put it to the test in the Southern Hemisphere autumn. In terms of fuel saved, the shipping group estimates the additional power provided by the sail will enable it to cut the vessel’s greenhouse gas emissions by between five and eight per cent.

If the technology operates to expectations, Mitsui says it may install sails on other big vessels in what would mark another step forward in the belated effort to harness the wind for commercial shipping.

The wind is free. Yet shipping has largely ignored it since sail-powered cargo vessels all but disappeared from the world’s oceans. Until the last three or four years, that is.

Quite suddenly, wind-powered technology is evolving rapidly. Currently, shipowners have a choice of seven different systems, including rotor sails, hard or rigid sails (like Mitsui’s), soft sails, kites, suction wings and turbines.

And the penny is dropping. Gavin Allwright, the secretary of the International Windship Association, tells me: “The industry is waking up to the fact that wind-assist (and primary wind) propulsion systems are needed in the toolbox of decarbonisation solutions. Perception has shifted, especially in Europe but increasingly in Asia too.”

While it’s early stages in the rediscovery of wind, he estimates that the number of installations globally will double over the next 12 months to about 40. And that’s just on larger ships like tankers, roll-on/roll-offs, large bulkers and general cargo, among others. 

About 20 smaller vessels, including cruise ships, already use soft-sail rigs, with more on order.

Largely unnoticed outside the industry, wind-assisted technology is moving rapidly from an experimental process to everyday use. One of several shipping groups to take the plunge, German ferry group Scandlines will in May 2022 install a second Norsepower-built rotor sail on its hybrid-powered Berlin, following successful trials on a sister ship sailing across the Baltic Sea to Denmark where prevailing winds are favourable.

Rotor wind power: German’s Scandlines hybrid ferry in operation

According to chief operating officer Michael Guldmann Petersen, the retractable, chimney-like sail achieved the targeted reductions in CO2 emissions of four to five per cent, quite enough to make the trial permanent. Other shipping groups report similar or better results. The Maersk shipping giant, for instance, calculates an average improvement of 8.2 per cent in fuel efficiency after 12 months of sea trials on a tanker.

Many of the wind-power projects have the backing of emissions-conscious governments. Mitsui’s Wind Challenger programme is funded from Tokyo, while Scandlines’ rotor sail is one of the beneficiaries of the Wind Assisted Ship Propulsion (WASP) project supported by a EUR 4.5m grant from the European Regional Development Fund.

Governments have high hopes for wind-powered ships. A five-year-old EU report estimated up to 10 700 installations by 2030, while UK’s Clean Maritime plan is even more hopeful, anticipating about 40 000 vessels – or up to 45 per cent of the fleet – will be sail-driven to some extent by 2050.

So far, shipping groups plying coastal routes have led the charge and most of them have gone for hard sails, notably from the factories of Netherlands eConowind and Finland’s Norsepower. The latter specialises in rotors, a modernised version of a 100-year-old technology that can deliver fuel savings of up to 25 per cent in the right conditions.

Here, due recognition is appropriate. Anton Flettner was a German aviation engineer who devised what some still call the Flettner rotor. Long before his time, he saw that a spinning cylinder, using the Magnus effect, could harness and boost energy from the wind. A rotor-powered ship crossed the Atlantic as long ago as 1925. However, the shipping industry was looking the other way and Flettner’s rotor was forgotten for the best part of a century.

But Anton Flettner’s day has finally come. Another coastal trader, Netherlands’ Boomsma Shipping, has opted for eConowind’s foldable VentiFoil. Not dissimilar to rotors, it operates on a principle known as boundary layer-suction created by ventilators mounted inside the aerofoils. Boomsma hopes for savings of ten per cent.

A demo of the Ventifoil in action

The wind may be free, but there have been teething troubles in harnessing it. Some shipping groups tell me it’s been a steep learning curve for the crew of some vessels, for instance, in maintaining and deploying sails. And some manufacturers have had to send their sails back to the workshop after storm battering.

While all this technology is about adding power, one shipping group prides itself on deriving all its propulsion from the wind, save for a small engine to be used in port. In mid-February, Brittany-based Grain de Sail placed an approximately EUR 10m order for the construction of an aluminium cargo schooner that will transport fine products, mainly coffee, chocolates and wines, across the Atlantic and sail back with raw materials. The yacht will have a payload capacity of 35 tonnes, seven times more than its predecessor currently plying the oceans, plus bulk liquid tanks. Each crossing should take about two weeks.

The first of the fleet: Brittany’s Gain de Sail’s first sailing cargo ship is already in operation

Being driven 99 per cent by the air flowing across its 1 170 square metres of sails, the vessel’s crew costs are cut to the bone. Although the schooner will carry a crew of about nine, just two will be able to handle it at any one time.

Selwyn Parker is an independent journalist and author of Chasing the Chimney Sweep about the first Tour de France of 1903.

The International Transport Forum’s report on Navigating Towards Cleaner Maritime Shipping shares lessons from the Nordic Region’s work to meet energy and environmental policy goals, including energy diversification, cutting air pollution and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Get the report

Fertile Ground for Innovation: A Fresh Look at Rural Mobility

International Transport Forum All Transport , , ,

Our rural regions are highly car-dependent, creating huge problems for those who do not want to use their car or cannot drive or afford a car. Carl Adler looks at innovative transport options that better connect rural users.

New options on offer: A rural mobility hub in France | Copyright: Ecov France

Rural areas around the world are in the midst of significant changes. Remote workers from urban areas have taken up residence in the countryside. Families looking for fresh air and space have sought property in small towns and villages. Rural societies have also been rocked by high levels of outmigration and shrinking economic opportunities. The growing gulf between cities and rural areas represents one of the most significant societal divisions within many countries today. Transport discrepancies between rural and urban areas are an oft-overlooked and critical aspect of these broader differences. Within the world of transport, urban mobility is a frequently discussed and highly visible concept, while rural transport is often an afterthought or missing entirely from the discourse. In fact, mobility policies for rural areas are often addressed through an urban lens. This leads to service which does not align with the realities of rural life and further disenfranchises rural residents from participation in society. Furthermore, broad initiatives to decarbonise transport which tend to prioritise urban transport, threaten to sweep rural mobility issues under the rug altogether.

Transport policies become a tipping point in the urban-rural divide: “Gilets Jaunes” protests in France

By taking stock of rural transport realities and innovations in the field, ITF’s Innovations for Better Rural Mobility report provides policymakers with a path forward to provide rural-dwellers with excellent mobility solutions. The report’s strongest message is political: to be successful, new rural transport initiatives must stem from the experiences of people living in rural environments.

Rural and remote mobility is characterised by heavy dependence on private cars. This is unlikely to change in the near future. However, many people living in rural areas cannot drive or do not own cars. These individuals are often members of the least-advantaged segments of society: the elderly, low-income people, individuals with physical mobility constraints. Providing mobility options to rural areas is an important way to foster inclusion and give all rural-dwellers an opportunity to live full lives.

There are several common logistical challenges related to providing good practice mobility solutions to rural areas. Distances are often too great for micromobility solutions to be implemented as standalone modalities. Demand is frequently perceived to be too low for conventional means of shared transport like bus lines to be practical or financially viable. However, these obstacles make the field of rural mobility a fertile ground for innovation. For example, a Finnish pilot programme aimed to unify different forms of subsidised rural transport (e.g. paratransit and schoolbuses) through a digital platform in an attempt to merge parallel or redundant transport networks into one system. An app-based carpooling system in France has given people a new and reliable way to get around. Digital innovations such as these are vital to making rural mobility as efficient and user-friendly as possible, thus increasing access and use.

Finally, different localities have experimented with implementing transport hubs in rural areas. These typically bring various forms of transport, like buses, car-sharing stations and bicycles for last-mile connectivity, into one physical space. In addition to helping rural residents connect to many more types of transport, these mobility hubs can be further drivers of economic growth in rural areas and function as spaces of congregation and commerce.

The SMARTA Project provides a snapshot of Europe’s rural mobility situation

In light of the exciting changes digital technologies can bring to rural mobility, now is an opportune time for policymakers to look at rural mobility policies. Throughout this exercise, it is of the utmost importance that rural mobility is considered differently from urban mobility and that policy is informed by people living rural lives. In the words of Professor Laurie Pickup, the Innovative Mobility for the Periphery Working Group chair, “Peripheral, outlying, marginal, etc. – are urban words. Rural areas may be ‘peripheral’ to city-dwellers, but to rural communities, these areas are the centre of their worlds.”

Carl Adler is a Master student at Sciences Po Paris and is working on an internship at the International Transport Forum.

Join ITF’s “Ask the Author” session with your questions on rural mobility on Thursday, 27 January 2022. Free registration here

“Transport for Inclusive Societies” is the theme of the ITF 2022 Summit, to be held in Leipzig, Germany, from 18 to 20 May 2022. See the Summit programme

Born out of need: How the Global South is driving transport innovation

International Transport Forum All Transport , , , , ,

By Will Duncan

The world’s emerging nations are fertile ground for radical and creative mobility solutions. Government-supported innovation is helping the Global South become a leading force in the future of transport.

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RT-Mart electric bus in China | Photo: Mars Hartdegen/Flickr

The transport sector is moving quickly these days. New technologies, shared services, and GPS are changing how we get from A to B. But perhaps one of the most interesting trends in transport is where, exactly, these innovations are coming from.

“The future of transport is in the Global South’s hands,” says Bambang Susantono, former transport minister of Malaysia and now vice-president of the Asian Development Bank.

It’s easy to see why: Twenty-seven of the world’s 33 megacities are in the Global South — a term that describes low- and middle-income countries in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Extraordinary economic growth and rapid urbanisation have brought sudden change to the Global South. With progress comes a host of challenges — and, first among these is transport.

But need begets innovation. And thus, the assumption that innovation flows from rich to less prosperous regions, from industrialised to developing countries, from the northern to the southern hemisphere is being challenged. Inspiration for tomorrow’s transport solutions can be found in the Global South’s emerging nations by those who care to look.

Decades ahead

Take shared mobility. No other topic preoccupies city officials, transport planners and entrepreneurs in the industrialised North today as much as the question of how to get more than one person into a car built for four or more.

In the South, it’s been a reality for decades. “Shared mobility is everywhere when I travel cities as a global researcher,” says Fábio Duarte, Professor of Urban Planning in Curitiba, Brazil. “I take taxis in Brasília, hold on tight to ojek motorcycles in Jakarta, or figure out how to reach my destinations with matatus in Nairobi.”

Durante says that “thinking of shared mobility as a novelty is a narrow view held in the Global North”. It ignores the creative ways that societies with few cars and inadequate public transport are coping with the lack of options.

WhereIsMyTransport, a UK start-up, secured USD 1.5 million in funding in 2016 to create an accessible and accurate data service for Cape Town’s formal and informal transport routes. Informal shared minibus routes make up a significant proportion of the city’s commutes, which is typical of many cities outside of Europe and North America. WhereIsMyTransport’s digital map has made these services visible. They’re presented as complimentary or, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to any other way to get around the city.

After securing further investment, the company has expanded its data and mapping service throughout Latin America and Asia. A recent project saw informal transport in Mexico City mapped to include over 30 000 informal minibus routes.

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Formal and informal transport networks in Gauteng, South Africa. Source: WhereIsMyTransport

The South is electric

Electric mobility is another example. Despite ambitious pledges, the share of electric vehicles in the Global North remains marginal: just 2.5% of 2018 car sales in the UK were electric, 2.1% in France, and 1% in Japan. Only Norway stands out, with just under 49.1%.

The world leader in electric mobility today is China. Almost 99% of all electric buses and two-wheelers, and 40% of the world’s total of private electric cars can be found there.

This hasn’t happened by accident. The electric mobility revolution that is sweeping the Peoples’ Republic is the result of deliberate government policy. Beijing’s regulatory push mixes substantial investment into research and development, and strict emissions standards designed to force out internal combustion engines with targeted subsidies that have reduced risk for transport operators looking to adapt to the new cleaner technology. Thus, research, industry, and government are steered towards a prevailing direction, turning the country into a world market leader.

Both national legislation and city halls are in a position to provide the “enabling framework” for healthy competition, innovative ideas, and for market disruptions with the potential to greatly benefit citizens.

Emerging nations find themselves with greater freedom to innovate, as they tend to be less restricted by the historical legacies of some more developed countries. “Developing countries can break the mould of traditional transport,” says Susantono. ”The Asian car market is less wedded to internal combustion engines; hence the region now has the largest share of e-vehicles worldwide,” Susantono explains. “In this dynamic, governments of the Global South can be the leaders of change.”

In a further article looking into transport innovation in the Global South, we take Indonesia’s Gojek as a case study and examine Southeast Asia’s bustling on-demand transport market.

expanding

To learn more about global transport innovation, check out the ITF Corporate Partnership Board’s new report Expanding Innovation Horizons: Learning from transport solutions in the Global South.

Will Duncan is currently studying a Master in Public Policy at Sciences Po in Paris, and is an intern at the International Transport Forum at the OECD.

 

“We must reinvent mobility”

International Transport Forum All Transport, Rail, Road , , , , ,

Michael_Cramer square CroppedMichael Cramer of the European Parliament’s Committee on Transport talks about the imbalance between transport modes and the lessons from “Dieselgate”.

A lot of innovation is happening in transport right now – headlines about self-driving cars and electric vehicles abound. Are we finally on the path towards sustainable mobility?

Cramer: Billions are still invested in forms of mobility that ruin our climate. And it’s still all about cars. Without reinventing mobility we will not be able to stop climate change. A veteran German politician, former Munich mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel, said it well as early as 1972: “Cars are murdering our cities. Those who sow streets will harvest traffic”. Even if one day all cars will be electric, they will still be murdering our cities. When all cars are self-driving, they will still be murdering our cities. We must reduce emissions, sure. But it’s not only about energy efficiency, we must also reinvent mobility as a whole. 90% of car rides in German cities are shorter than 6 kilometers. These are ideal distances to go by tram, bus, bicycle or to walk. Electric cars are being subsidized with billions of Euros – indiscriminately, regardless of the real effect. By comparison, peanuts are given to support the use of electric bicycles or of cargo bikes, where they could have a real impact – cargo bikes could take over half of inner-city deliveries. Neither is there enough investment into the electrification of rail. The interests of car manufacturing are still dominating policy decisions.

But all car companies are busy rethinking their business models. Most are taking a broader view and branch out into areas like Mobility as a Service. Is your description not outdated?

The car industry must change much faster if it really wants to avoid the fate of the large energy utilities. Those ridiculed renewable energies for decades and now find themselves rather wrong-footed. Edzard Reuter, who was boss of Daimler-Benz from 1987 to 1995, warned thirty years ago that car manufacturers would only survive if by evolving into providers of mobility. In those days, Daimler-Benz not only built cars but

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“It’s still all about cars” (Photo: Oran Viriyincy)

also trucks, busses, trams, light rail trains, high-speed trains and even bicycles. His successor sold all those activities. Today, automotive companies are completely dependent on car sales, while they could have profited from the global boom in trams and light rail, for instance. I don’t see much innovation coming from big players who can hardly budge; it will be small and agile companies that plant the seeds of change.

What about the institutions that set the rules under which innovations either thrive or fail – do governments and regulatory agencies also need to become a little more agile?

Let me be a little cynical: No, they really don’t need additional agility. They need to discover what it means to be agile in the first place. One way of becoming more flexible, reactive and creative is to listen less to lobbyists. Take the “Dieselgate” scandal. We Green members of the European Parliament had to go to enormous lengths to get an inquiry going into the tempering with emissions tests. This inquiry has found EU member states and the European Commission guilty of negligence. The committee of inquiry proposed to set up an independent body with responsibility for controlling vehicle emissions. The Parliament’s transport committee, which I shared at the time, voted for this proposal as well. But it was  subsequently killed in the parliament by organised interests who lobbied deputies with the spectre of job losses in their region.

 

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Cycling freaks (Photo: ITF)

What is the lesson from that for you, as a policy maker?

It is hard to stomach that Diesel is still subsidised in many countries, despite being much more harmful in terms of NOx, NO2 and particular matter than standard petrol. Half a million people die as a result of particular matter, NOx and NO2 emissions every year in the European Union. Imagine our drinking water would be polluted like that – there would be immediate action. Not for the air we breathe. Europe’s political institutions – the Council, the Commission, and the European Parliament – must work harder. If after this criminal fraud we can’t abolish subsidies for Diesel, we shouldn’t even be using the word “sustainability”.

Ultimately, are you an optimist or a skeptic regarding the future of human mobility?

A bit of both. We have all the opportunities in the world. When I started out in politics, I was treated as a freak because I advocated cycling as a mode of transport. But it is now a reality. In Copenhagen more than 50% of all inhabitants cycle to work. In Berlin, the number of cyclists has doubled over the past ten years, and without major policy interventions. People will do what is right, and that is my hope.

 

Michael Cramer is Member of the European Parliament for the Green Party.  He chaired the Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism from 2014-17 and remains on the committee. Cramer also heads the parliamentary platform “Rail Forum Europe” and initiated the 10 000 km-long Iron Curtain Bicycle Trail from the Baltic to the Black Sea. On 2 June he will discuss new business models in transport and  the role for authorities with other experts at ITF’s 2017 Summit on “Governance of Transport”. Part of the Summit programme is a bicycle tour led by the mayor of Leipzig.

 

The Return of the Itinerant

International Transport Forum Road , , ,

By José Viegas

Autonomous road vehicles are attracting a lot of interest and  investment these days. It’s fair to predict that both the public discussion and the flows of money will keep growing. Attention is focused mainly on autonomous vehicles for passengers (think Google car, Tesla Autopilot) and automated road freight transport (think truck platooning, Otto).  Availability of those vehicles will lead to disruptive change in two other domains: private mobility on the one hand and professional transport services on the other.

Itinernat LibraryThe profound technological change implied by autonomous driving will inspire radical innovations in the way vehicles are used – as happened with phones, which have become much more than just devices to make calls since they became mobile. This innovation happens like a wave that feeds on itself until mature usage patterns emerge after something like 10 or 15 years. We must humbly recognise that nobody can claim today to have a clear vision of what those usages will be in one or two decades.

But that shouldn’t stop us of thinking boldly today about what might happen. Personally, I believe that itinerant services will be a new important usage area for autonomous vehicles. Such itinerant services were very popular in the 1950s and 60s in many countries, particularly with libraries. Those vans were serving areas that had few or no public libraries or bookshops, but still had many potential interested readers. I was an intensive user of a library van during my summer holidays for some years and have fond memory of the value it provided in terms of access to varied reading.

Changing places

Post offices or banks on wheels as well as rolling points-of-saleFood Truck grass for vegetables or clothes were also common in many regions, and sometimes still are. Recently, this phenomenon has seen something of a revival with the appearance of food trucks that bring high-end cuisine literally to the streets of hip urban quarters – in principle a modern, upmarket take on the Kebab or ice cream vans of yonder.

Automated vehicle will create a real opportunity for the resurgence of itinerant services, I believe. There seems to be a particularly strong case for them where the self-driving vehicle can provide some form of sophisticated equipment to which clients otherwise would have to travel. The most obvious examples that come to mind are in the health sector. The collection of medical samples for diagnostics purposes, for instance, could probably be organised with specialised self-driving vehicles, very likely with remote human support from a medical professional.
Vehicle autonomy not only reduces the cost of provision of those itinerant services and makes them more accessible to its users. Self-driving vehicles also make it much easier to change locations during off hours – during night time or on public holidays, say. Entrepreneurial spirit, associated with technological innovations in other sectors than transport will have a quite field to explore. The whole field of “experiencing”, presently a key target of the travel industry, comes to mind in association with virtual reality and possibly differentiated catering evoking the places thus visited.

Mobile Post officeUltimately, marrying a time-honoured service idea with
modern self-driving technology could help bring a wide range of
sophisticated services that currently can only be accessed in more time consuming and often costly ways to people everywhere. The space of opportunity for business innovation is clearly there.


Forever circling

So my bet is that we will see the re-emergence of itinerant services, but possibly on a much larger scale and with greater variety than the good, old fashioned library on wheels I knew. Unlike my bookish van, which returned to its depot in the evening and left from there again the next morning (with a good night’s sleep for the driver in between), the trips of a self-driving itinerant service will no longer have a clear origin or destination. It will be forever circling around, with “destinations” simply a succession of events along the way. Some of its functions could probably be performed without even stopping.mobile hair cut

From a transport policy perspective, this will be a more efficient and less travel-intensive way of providing certain services. For other business models,  this approach will generate new markets and probably additional vehicle kilometres on the road.

What the combined effect of all this will be nobody can say. What we can say is that autonomous vehicles will spawn new forms of mobility, and that it will pay off to carefully monitor this development – to spot new business opportunities, but ultimately also to enable them to thrive in a transport system that is efficient, safe, user-friendly, not only once we reach a future steady state, but throughout the radical transformation transport is entering.

José Viegas is the Secretary-General of the International Transport Forum

Driving from a distance

International Transport Forum Road , , ,

How remote-controlled trucks could pave the way towards fully automated driving

José Viegas, Secretary-General, International Transport Forum

driving-distance-remote-controlled-trucksAre we going to be comfortable letting go of the steering wheel? Many car makers and technology companies are betting on it. A flurry of recent announcements is predicting that driverless cars and taxis will be on our cities streets within five years. Uber just began a pilot of self-driving taxis in Pittsburgh, Tesla’s latest business plan clearly targets “fully self-driving” vehicles, and Ford is gearing up for mass market driverless car production by 2021.

Much less media attention has been devoted to a related issue: the possibility that driverless trucks will soon be roaming our roads. For this scenario the key question is a slightly different one: Are we ready to share the roads with dozens of tonnes of steel when there is no human in charge?

Once it becomes available, the operating flexibility and cost reductions from driverless operations offer trucking companies and their customers a strong carrot for its adoption. The International Transport Forum estimates that on long-distance routes driverless trucks could be operated with a cost advantage of 30% or more compared to conventional manned trucks. The advantages for hauliers are obvious: Drivers represent the biggest chunk of operational costs and at the same time a constraint on using trucks at full capacity – they do need breaks to rest, after all. Taking humans from the cabin means trucks could operate all day and night without having to stop, except for refuelling.

When machines take over

There are many issues that need to be solved before driverless technology can be cleared for use on public roads. Some are technical and need to be resolved by engineers and computer scientists. Others are public policy issues: Governments need to make the call as to when the machines can take over. This involves deciding how and when driverless truck systems demonstrate lower (real and perceived) risks of crashes than the current situation with humans doing the driving – and especially that they do not fail in situations that humans would normally handle well.

No driving system can ever be 100 per cent safe, whether humans or computerised systems are in charge. But in well-defined situations – for instance on motorways, where there is no crossing traffic and speeds are similar – automation technology may soon safely handle driving tasks for 99.9% or even 99.99% of driving time. But can there be a clear-cut percentage or success rate for allowing operation without a driver in the cabin that would satisfy the safety concerns of regulators (or of road users, for that matter)?

In the United States, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently published guidelines on automated vehicles. These provide an early indication about how it will judge when the machines are ready to take over. The US approach appears to be that driverless vehicle developers will be required to set out clearly how their vehicles respond to given situations (such as a loss of communications) and how they comply with each road rule.

A matter of feelings

Yet accepting robot trucks is not solely about rule compliance and crash probabilities. It also has a highly subjective dimension. That humans systematically overestimate their own driving skills is a well-documented fact. The result of this, among other factors, is 1.25 million road deaths every year on the world’s roads. Objectively, machines will probably be able to do better soon. Yet public acceptance may well depend more on how people would feel if they heard on the news that a 32-tonne semi-trailer with no human driver in the cabin had been involved in a fatal crash. Regardless of the actual crash performance of driverless trucks, the idea might well be scuttled if the public’s perception is dominated by unease, fed by rare but highly publicised crashes.

It is thus worth thinking about ways to move towards driverless trucks and the benefits they provide while reassuring the community that machines haven’t taken over. Three options warrant consideration.

The first is so-called platooning. In a truck platoon, several vehicles form a closely-spaced convoy in which only the lead truck has a human driver who navigates traffic. The following trucks are linked to the lead truck by wireless data links and automatically maintain a safe distance with the vehicle in front. If the trailing vehicles were allowed to operate without driver, quite significant cost savings would be possible. Although platooning has received a great deal of attention, e.g. from the European Union, the need to co-ordinate drivers and vehicles may make it less attractive than fully automated driving. Controlling “centipede” configurations of vehicles will also introduce new challenges for truck drivers as well as the other drivers on the same road.

Handing over control

A second transition option is that of part-time human control: Drivers remain obligatory on all trucks, but their role is reduced to taking over from computerised systems when unexpectedly difficult driving situations arise. Such passive driving technology is well-advanced: Truck manufacturer Daimler is testing driver-assisted automated trucks on the highways of Nevada in the US.

This will help build experience with autonomous driving, yet the approach also has its limitations. Most importantly, the hand-over between machine and human is particularly risky. The driver still needs to pay full attention and be ready to act at all times – so while his task may be less strenuous, he will still need rest. With machines in charge most of the time, there is of course the risk the driver will not always be ready to take over quickly enough. Not least, the need to have drivers on board means there is no significant reduction of operating costs, making this option less attractive to hauliers.

A third option is remote driving. Imagine control rooms where professional drivers are set up in a cabin-like environment that closely mimics the information and tools available in a real truck. These drivers would remotely monitor and control a number of otherwise self-driving trucks and intervene, taking manual control of steering, indicating, accelerating and braking, when and where needed. The relatively low complexity of driving on a motorway would make it possible to operate a fleet of trucks with a much lower number of drivers than that of the trucks under their control.

Truck driving as an office job

What sounds like science-fiction is already being tested in the real world, albeit in different contexts. Drones are just the most obvious example: the US Navy is currently in advanced tests of a remotely controlled fighter jet. In maritime shipping, Rolls Royce is working on freight ships controlled from land. In Australia, enormous trucks operating in the iron ore mines of Western Australia are being controlled by drivers in a centre 1 200 kilometres away. In the Netherlands, the remote control room approach is being used for the operation of low-speed driverless WEpod minibuses that operate on the five-kilometre route between the University of Wageningen and the city of Ede. And an Estonian firm is testing small robot vehicles for urban delivery in Washington, London and Hamburg that will be overseen from a control room in Tallinn, thousands of kilometres away.

Driving from a control room has obvious advantages. For the driver, trucking becomes a regular office job similar to that of an air traffic controller. Rather than having to sleep in the truck cabin somewhere in a parking area with no facilities, he can go home to the family at the end of the day. Compared to full automation, the remote driving approach also ensures some continuity of skills, as the best truck drivers redeploy to control centres that offer more stable and comfortable job conditions.

Herding trucks like sheep

In the control room, remote drivers would be alerted by the on-board systems when difficult situations arise on road in which computers perform less well than humans – such as bad weather that hampers sensors, or ambiguous situations a computer cannot easily adjudicate. Initially, the threshold for human intervention would be set low, but with growing experience and self-learning systems it could be raised to a level where the control centre steps in less and less.

A control room (perhaps owned by a truck manufacturer) could begin trials with a high ratio of drivers to trucks, even one-to-one. It would collect data (and share it with the regulator) on how often and under what circumstances drivers have to take over (and how often this occurs simultaneously). If the data shows that interventions from the control centre are sufficiently rare, its operator could gain regulatory approval to gradually bring more trucks under the control of each remote fall-back driver, depending on the risk aversion of the regulator.

Finally, remote controlling does not require the co-ordination of trucks as in the platooning approach; it could be operated anywhere with suitable communications coverage. This raises the challenge for control room operators: They will need to invest in the facilities, on-board systems and communication technology necessary to support remote interventions in a given area. As one-to-one remote operation would not be profitable (but a likely first step), investors would need to be confident that regulators will allow higher truck/driver ratios once safe performance has been demonstrated. But for vehicle manufacturers, the investment as such is easily within their means. And given the cost reduction and performance increase they would offer, the potential demand for remote-controlled trucks is evident.

A feasible path

The control centre model for driverless trucking on motorways seems to be a feasible path towards fully-automated trucks. It would also be directly applicable to other areas currently relying on professional drivers, such as taxis and buses. The significant cost savings would be attractive to operators, while the availability of drivers as a fall back in case of system failures could allay concerns about giving full responsibility to a robot.

If we knew that a highly skilled human driver was always ready at a moment’s notice to take control of the vehicle, wouldn’t we be more willing to share the road with it?