A rural road can be a lonely place at night. 

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. To a Tippie College of Business researcher, that loneliness provides 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 so why not let trucks take over the left lane? 

Luo said it is still just an idea. But he recently presented some preliminary findings from his work at an intelligent vehicles symposium sponsored by the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE). 

Luo says his idea is similar to High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes found in many metro areas, where freeway lanes are dedicated to carpools or buses during morning and evening rush hours but can be used by any driver during other times. What if, he wondered, they did something similar for trucks?

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, who would serve as a safety fallback if something should go wrong. The driver would also control the vehicle entirely in populated areas with more traffic.

Luo said the idea is still a long way off. The technology for fully viable automated vehicles isn’t there yet—he thinks at least a decade away. Laws and regulations would have to change, too. Speed limits, for instance, would have to be adjusted so trucks could drive faster during overnight hours.

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) would also have to change regulations requiring truck drivers take mandatory three-hour rest sessions after driving for 11 hours. But Luo said that since drivers in a semi-autonomous truck are in a less intense work setting than if they were completely in control of the rig, the DOT might ease that requirement when the time comes. 

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 that if mandatory rest times were required after only 10 hours instead of 11 and reduced from three hours to two, two rest sessions could be cut from the driver’s itinerary. That would save several hours of road time so the truck would arrive sooner at its destination and save significant amounts of money for the trucking company.

Media contact: Tom Snee, 319-384-0010 (o); 319-541-8434 (c); tom-snee@uiowa.edu