Dear Gadkari-ji, test separate lanes on roads for autonomous cars

Dear Gadkari-ji,

The Prime Minister has been very aggressive about pursuing a Digital India strategy. He has roped in Silicon Valley stalwarts and getting them to invest in noteworthy projects such as Wi-Fi in train stations and connecting villages to the Internet. However, to take the game to the next level, it is imperative that India becomes the hotbed of the next new innovation. Every country and region aspires to be the next Silicon Valley but it is harder than it sounds. Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and a leading Venture Capitalist in Silicon Valley, wrote an influential essay on the futility of trying to be the next “silicon valley”. He suggested that governments should instead focus on making an area more regulatory-friendly to the next emerging technology.  Here is an excerpt:

But policymakers shouldn’t be trying to copy Silicon Valley. Instead, they should be figuring out what domain is (or could be) specific to their region—and then removing the regulatory hurdles for that particular domain. Because we don’t want 50 Silicon Valleys; we want 50 different variations of Silicon Valley, all unique from each other and all focusing on different domains. Imagine a Bitcoin Valley, for instance, where some country fully legalizes cryptocurrencies for all financial functions. Or a Drone Valley, where a particular region removes all legal barriers to flying unmanned aerial vehicles locally. A Driverless Car Valley in a city that allows experimentation with different autonomous car designs, redesigned roadways and safety laws. A Stem Cell Valley. And so on.

So, could you as the roads and highways minister usher in an era where India is considered the “Autonomous Cars Valley” of the world by easing regulations?

As many people know, self-driving vehicles are going to be the future of transportation. The impact is going to be so profound that KPMG’s report says the car insurance market itself is going to shrink by 60% by 2040 because autonomous vehicles will be so prevalent that it will lead to drastically fewer accidents and insurance claims. Governments see the writing on the wall and are passing regulations to be at the forefront of these innovations. Most of these regulations are around testing these vehicles with no government allowing an autonomous vehicle to roam freely on the roads.

In India, the challenge is even harder because of haphazard nature of road traffic and driving discipline. No autonomous software will account for the random auto-walah or an animal coming out of nowhere to cross the road on a highway. Why not turn this problem and turn this into an opportunity and leapfrog other governments? Instead of following western regulations of trying to co-mingle human driving lanes with autonomous vehicles, why not separate the two?

Here is a potential plan to test the concept:

1. Pick five to ten roads with varying distances of about 10-40 kilometeres. These roads can be near places connecting villages to urban towns or smaller towns to bigger cities.

2. Have a lane of about 40-80 feet within the larger road where only autonomous vehicles can use those lanes. This will be similar to High Occupancy Vehicles lanes in the US where only vehicles with two or more passengers can go on those lanes. However, the autonomous vehicles will have additional features of not allowing human drivers to easily cut into these lanes.

3. Work with Google, Tesla, Uber, Mercedes Benz, BMW, GM and other car manufacturers to test their autonomous vehicles on these lanes.

4. Once they are able to test these vehicles, start free transportation of people in the initial stages to prove their safety.

5. If the test proves successful, scale it up nationally to test with trucking and other logistical vehicles as well.

The New York Times recently noted that the biggest problem for autonomous cars is human errors of other drivers on the road. Separate lanes for autonomous vehicles would make car manufacturers’ lives much easier by removing human errors from the equation. This makes the algorithms in the autonomous driving software much easier to develop and leading car manufacturers will jump at this opportunity for such a “clean state” approach. This will also give a huge boost to the “Make In India” initiative and make India a potential leader in autonomous vehicle manufacturing technology.