Driverless Vehicles Make Inroads in Military - Velodyne Lidar

Q&A: Tom Bamonte
Tom Bamonte serves as the general counsel for the North Texas Tollway Authority. Over
the past five years he’s written articles and made presentations to legal and transportation
industry groups on driverless and driver-assisted technology. He maintains a Twitter site
devoted to the technology (@TomBamonte) and is a contributor to Driverless Car HQ.
Q: What are the major legal hurdles you see
on the horizon for self-driving car technology
A: I’m actually an optimist in this area and am confident
that the legal system will be capable of handling liability
issues arising from this technology, just has it with all
sorts of new technologies over the past century.
There is a risk of overregulation where folks, primarily
the federal government, may prematurely come in and
attempt to occupy the field and slow the rapid pace of
innovation in this area. But overall, I’m optimistic that
our legal system can handle this technology without any
significant reconfiguration or major changes.
Q: How do you think the issue of privacy will
come to play in connected vehicle and connected
infrastructure debates
A: We in the toll industry have a lot of experience dealing
with highway users and privacy. What we’ve learned
is this: Users are very concerned about having data about
their individual travel patterns shared. We don’t get a lot
of resistance, however, to us harvesting data from travel
patterns as a whole to improve safety, traffic management,
etc. As long as connected vehicle technology is
used for general data harvesting, as opposed to tracking
individual drivers, we’ve set a good example in the toll
industry of how to find an acceptable balance.
Q: In what ways do you imagine cities changing
once driverless cars become a ubiquitous
technology
A: There’s been some work in this area suggesting that
driverless vehicle technology will promote sprawl. I think
the opposite may be true. More efficient use of existing
highway space, which is what this technology offers, allows
cities to have more density around their existing
highway networks. What that means is that if you could
double, triple, even quadruple the carrying capacity of existing
streets, and especially expressways, you could have
denser retail and residential development around our existing
highway system. So I see this technology as a way to
densify urban development, as opposed to it being something
that will further promote sprawl.
Q: Many states, with varying transportation
needs and population densities, are looking
into passing driverless car legislation. Do you
have an opinion on how different regions with
different densities should take these types of
factors into account when writing driverless
car legislation
A: I don’t think the law needs to reflect the different levels
of density and urban development in our states. We’re
early enough in the development curve that just getting
vehicles out there to be tested, and have the highway
authorities and cities and states working in this area, is
what we need. We’re all going to figure it out together.
At this point I think it’d be premature to have a different
driverless vehicle law for, say, Montana or Wyoming
versus Connecticut or another densely populated state.
Q: What immediate benefits do you foresee
in creating the proper infrastructure for selfdriving
or connected vehicles
A: There are opportunities to facilitate the deployment
of driverless and connected vehicle technologies by selected
infrastructure improvements. On expressways,
for example, could the road communicate useful information
to vehicles in such a way that we could have
driverless vehicle lanes that provide guaranteed travel
times from point to point
On the safety side, there may be ways for the infrastructure
to talk to vehicles to disable cars that are going in
a wrong-way direction. Wrong-way vehicles cause a lot
of damage, a lot of accidents, and there could be a way
14 MISSION CRITICAL • May 2013