8 years ago
3
The Scary Efficiency of Autonomous Intersections
As you know if you've driven anywhere ever, traffic lights are part of a vast conspiracy designed to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible for you to get where you want to go. Lights change from green to red because someone might be coming from another direction, which isn't a very efficient way to run things, since you spend so much of your travel time either slowing down, speeding up, or stopped uselessly.
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Aren't there simpler to implement solutions that also work with human driven vehicles? I'm thinking about roundabouts and smart trafic lights, that stay green on the larger street and have detectors on the smaller ones crossing them to automatically switch a few seconds after a car arrives, so both waste less time waiting.
Another intermediate solution to make it work with human drivers is to have an automatic driving mode (already available on a few car models) that could be automatically turned on 100 m away from such an intersection, so the human driver loses control of his vehicle (after indicating which way he wants to go, with right ahead as a default if they don't react in time) to optimise the intersection crossing and retakes control once the intersection is passed.
I would like this to happen as soon as possible! I really hate traffic.
I like to remind people who drive and complain about the traffic that they're not stuck in traffic, they are the traffic : they contribute to it just as much as every other car in there.
I take the public transit in the winter and my bike in the summer, to make the traffic smoother for others, and to take away the useless stress for me. There are always options if we are willing to take them (and the more we do, the more useful they will become because the city will have to adapt to a critical mass changing behavior).