What does a driver do? This seems a rather trivial question. Or is it?
An instinctive answer is that a driver drives. And that road vehicles have primary controls, secondary controls, instruments, mirrors, navigators and infotainment systems which need to be manipulated. More than 100 years of automotive design have led to a handful of well-known controls with well-known interactions which a driver must become proficient at.
But is that the complete answer?
The growing use of automation in vehicles raises questions about what else a driver does. And about what, exactly, the automation should do when taking over from a driver or when replacing a driver altogether.
A starting point for reasoning through such matters is the observation that after more than 100 years of automotive history our society has built up stereotypes and expectations about driving and about drivers. Expectations which cannot be quickly changed. Some catering to some existing expectations is needed during the transition from fully human driven to fully autonomous road vehicles. Fully autonomous road vehicles will need to interact with humans and comply with human social norms in ways that are not too distant from past practice.
This brings us back to the original question. What does a driver do? What are the expectations and the norms?
Here it is interesting to note the scarcity of information. For human drivers there is a great mass of published measurements of driving response times, control actuations, situation awareness and driving styles that are expressed in units such as seconds, meters, meters per second, detection rate, false alarm rate and other such scientific measures. But a driver does more than just drive. What about everything else?
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Quite understandably the first 100-plus years of automotive history have largely been about the physical, perceptual and cognitive requirements of safe and comfortable driving. But due to the increasing use of automation, the next 100 years will have to focus instead on the cognitive, emotional and lifestyle needs of passengers and road users. It is precisely these needs that we seem to still know relatively little about.
Fully autonomous buses are an obvious example of an early deployment that requires answers to questions about what a driver does. But does a detailed list of the physical, perceptual, cognitive and emotional activities performed by bus drivers exist? The answer to the question of what a driver does is currently not fully available.
Some of the physical, perceptual cognitive and emotional activities performed by bus drivers in support of passengers have been noted. For example, one study of driverless buses by researchers at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Finland asked passengers to express their perceptions of traffic safety, in-vehicle security and emergency management.
And a study by researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden considered the bus driver’s role as a point of contact for passengers and as an authority figure who supervises operations.
Fully autonomous buses risk leaving their passengers feeling uncertain about the their trip and potentially feeling unsafe due to the lack of an authoritative human presence. The research team thus investigated ways in which automation can provide route-related information and answer passenger questions.
An investigation by researchers at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain noted the emergence from their focus group data of concerns about the lack of the information traditionally provided by the driver, the lack of on-board staff to resolve or report incidents and the risk of passenger non-payment or non-compliance with the travel rules.
It is currently becoming clearer to everyone that the safe and comfortable operation of autonomous buses requires more than just good driving. A list does seem to be emerging of the things that a human bus driver does. But there is still much to understand, much to document and much to express in the form of specifications.
