Drive a highway in some parts of Iowa or New Mexico at 3 a.m. and you can go for miles without seeing another vehicle. A researcher from The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business thinks that loneliness might provide a good place for automated trucks.
Qi Luo, assistant professor of business analytics, studies transportation systems and is looking at the idea of dedicating a portion of those empty nighttime rural highways to semi-automated long-haul trucks to transport freight more efficiently. Cars aren’t using them, he reasons, so why not let trucks take over the left lane?
He said dedicated nighttime lanes would make for more efficient travel for all drivers by removing highway-clogging trucks from traffic during busier daytime hours. With less traffic, trucks could go faster and form convoys—great for fuel efficiency.
The trucks would still have human operators as a safety fallback and to drive it in populated areas with more traffic.
Luo said the idea is still a long way off. The technology for fully viable automated vehicles is at least a decade away, and laws and regulations would have to change, too.
Luo tested his idea with an experiment using existing data on truck traffic between the West Coast and Chicago, which has ample miles of little-traveled highway. He said federally mandated rest times cold be reduced in frequency and duration, since drivers of semi-autonomous trucks work in less stressful conditions. With those changes, two rest sessions could be cut from the driver’s itinerary, saving several hours of road time so the truck would arrive sooner and save significant amounts of money for the trucking company.