The Right to Drive vs. the Privilege of Avoiding Accidents

Having sufficient faith in humanity to believe that the average person is indeed far more sensible, perceptive and intelligent than the popular media so often seems to portray her or him to be, I am optimistic that the majority of people reading this in most countries around the world already know that driving a motor vehicle is indeed not a "Right" and that this is so virtually universally. 

For my fellow US Citizens who may be skeptical, attention is invited to the first ten Amendments of our Constitution appropriately enough titled the Bill of Rights which clearly delineated those well over two centuries ago, reinforced since by further Amendments, executive action, legislation and judicial determinations — especially those of the Supreme Court.  Driving, comma, Permission to Engage In, has never seriously been considered for elevation to the status of Right, being efficiently administered by individual states' departments of motor vehicles at their good discretion and hardly requiring the level of national attention and scrutiny as, say, empowerment to vote, freedom of speech, or the assurance of due process of law. 

Our friends in other nations can commensurately turn to their own constitutions, acquis, or other documents of similar national significance — and not find Driving listed as a fundamental Right there either. Likewise they generally can find the governance of motor vehicle operation relegated to a purely ministerial function of licensure. Note that the requirement of a license itself is a pretty decisive spoiler as far as the ability to call something a Right. Driving a personal car or commercial vehicle, flying an airplane, operating a hair salon, practicing medicine or law — it's essentially indisputable that if the government requires one to file an application, pass some kind of test or inspection, and maintain licensure in good standing to engage in an activity, such activity is not a Right, nor even an entitlement, but effectively the lowest tier, least protected form of official permission there is: a privilege. 

Moreover driving was a hard-won privilege at that, with considerable effort required by the public and the nascent auto industry among others just over a century ago to overturn the so called (in the British Commonwealth and many US States) Locomotive Acts aka "Red Flag" laws which had effectively stymied mechanized road transport development and adoption for decades. In allowing the new technology to finally share the highways, there was clear consensus among all stakeholders that motor vehicles be operated safely and with clear accountability by what was welcomed as a much more reliable (and humane) successor to the animal-conveyed road transport that had existed for millennia: A properly qualified human being who had earned the privilege to drive. 

With that small administrative matter out of the way, it is of far greater importance and immediacy to now consider the more practical tradeoffs in terms of the advent of Connected & Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) technology that is happening much faster than much of the population yet realizes. Among those that do see the change coming, there is an extremely vocal faction of self-styled driving advocates (many of the same ones who have misappropriated the term "Right" discussed previously) who decry the end of the driving era and elimination of their personal enablement (by any name) to enjoy manually piloting a vehicle down the road as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had done. 

The practical, inescapable reality is that driving itself is far from disappearing, such that with the increased economic empowerment from the local to the national level by all quantitative indicators we continue to drive more than ever, as recently detailed in the November 2015 KPMG report on vehicle miles traveled (VMT). For at least several years to come, moreover, much of that driving will continue to be done in the traditional manner, by a properly licensed human being. 

Now, however that human being has access to a growing array of powerful tools not available to our ancestors through Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Essentially ADAS is technology that is able to sense, detect, even predict to address a hazard and either warn the driver or intervene directly to prevent an accident. The main premise behind ADAS is that it is not subject to distraction or fatigue, and has the ability to identify hazards that no human driver could such as a pedestrian moving behind a parked vehicle and about to step into the street. As defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) there are six ADAS Levels with zero (0) being a 'traditional' vehicle solely monitored and controlled by a human driver while Level 5 represents a fully self-driving car. Levels 1-5 thereby are achieved through an incrementally higher combination of autonomy, the vehicle's independent internal ability to sense, analyze predict and react through its own sensors much as a human driver would and connectivity with other vehicles, roadside or back office systems (including the cloud) and its overall environment to obtain both comprehensive and closely tailored data and information related to hazards, congestion, weather, etc.

It is unrealistic in the extreme to expect that the world will any time soon reach a point where the governments of the world will mandate Level 5 — or more precisely make it conditional to the privilege of driving our roadways. Indeed I would suggest that focusing on that outcome would be a waste of effort for both advocates and opponents of self-driving cars. Rather, it is far more appropriate, and in the mutual best interests of all drivers and those affected by their actions — including but not limited to cyclists, pedestrians, insurers and emergency responders — to prioritize on achieving those first near term benefits of CAV and ADAS that stop far short of taking full time control of the vehicle versus alerting or intervening to prevent accidents. Thereby the far more critical question here deals not with the personal preferences of drivers, but in the ability of even a small degree of automation to eliminate the 1.25 million road traffic deaths worldwide each year, including the well more than 30,000 in the US which, alarmingly have started trending higher as of the end of 2015 despite all of the crash protection technology incorporated inside and outside the vehicle in recent decades such as airbags, crumple zones and improved seatbelts and guardrails.  

Undeniably, the first line of defense against automobile accidents was a qualified driver, and this will remain so in many context for years to come. Improved crash survivability technology has also saturated the automobile industry with substantial benefits to vehicle occupants but this is reaching its limits of effectiveness and in any event has done (and will do) little if anything to protect those pedestrians and cyclists, or others errant vehicles (and drivers) encounter. The next step in the evolution is, and must be, the ability to eliminate the accidents themselves — and this is exactly what ADAS promises, indeed is already doing. 

Humans have done as good a job as possible, but as with every other aspect of our lives, technology stands ready to help and to resist would be no more logical than the "Red Flag" laws that once kept automobiles themselves off the road. I would like to think automobile users along with regulators, OEMs, civil engineers, and technology providers among others have collectively learned something in the last 100-or-so years. Even the staunchest driving advocate will have to concede that the ability for technology to reliably mitigate otherwise undetectable, split-second hazards, or even those natural brief moments of human inattention or bad judgement and in so doing save lives and property including their own, is a positive development. 

So, let's please all agree to stop arguing about driving "Rights" — and focus for the foreseeable future on the "Privilege" that everyone both on the road and next to it deserves: That of ourselves, our families and future generations never having to experience an accident in the first place. 

(Note, an updated version of this post appears as a feature article in the Fall 2016 edition of Thinking Highways, per link below)

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