Will Smarter Cars Bring 'Optimized' Traffic Lights? (apnews.com) 157
"Researchers are exploring ways to use features in modern cars, such as GPS, to make traffic safer and more efficient," reports the Associated Press.
"Eventually, the upgrades could do away entirely with the red, yellow and green lights of today, ceding control to driverless cars." Among those reimagining traffic flows is a team at North Carolina State University led by Ali Hajbabaie, an associate engineering professor. Rather than doing away with today's traffic signals, Hajbabaie suggests adding a fourth light, perhaps a white one, to indicate when there are enough autonomous vehicles on the road to take charge and lead the way. "When we get to the intersection, we stop if it's red and we go if it's green," said Hajbabaie, whose team used model cars small enough to hold. "But if the white light is active, you just follow the vehicle in front of you."
He points out that this approach could be years aways, since it requires self-driving capability in 40% to 50% of the cars on the road.
But the article notes another approach which could happen sooner, talking to Henry Liu, a civil engineering professor who is leading ">a study through the University of Michigan: They conducted a pilot program in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham using insights from the speed and location data found in General Motors vehicles to alter the timing of that city's traffic lights. The researchers recently landed a U.S. Department of Transportation grant under the bipartisan infrastructure law to test how to make the changes in real time... Liu, who has been leading the Michigan research, said even with as little as 6% of the vehicles on Birmingham's streets connected to the GM system, they provide enough data to adjust the timing of the traffic lights to smooth the flow... "The beauty of this is you don't have to do anything to the infrastructure," Liu said. "The data is not coming from the infrastructure. It's coming from the car companies."
Danielle Deneau, director of traffic safety at the Road Commission in Oakland County, Michigan, said the initial data in Birmingham only adjusted the timing of green lights by a few seconds, but it was still enough to reduce congestion.
"Even bigger changes could be in store under the new grant-funded research, which would automate the traffic lights in a yet-to-be announced location in the county."
"Eventually, the upgrades could do away entirely with the red, yellow and green lights of today, ceding control to driverless cars." Among those reimagining traffic flows is a team at North Carolina State University led by Ali Hajbabaie, an associate engineering professor. Rather than doing away with today's traffic signals, Hajbabaie suggests adding a fourth light, perhaps a white one, to indicate when there are enough autonomous vehicles on the road to take charge and lead the way. "When we get to the intersection, we stop if it's red and we go if it's green," said Hajbabaie, whose team used model cars small enough to hold. "But if the white light is active, you just follow the vehicle in front of you."
He points out that this approach could be years aways, since it requires self-driving capability in 40% to 50% of the cars on the road.
But the article notes another approach which could happen sooner, talking to Henry Liu, a civil engineering professor who is leading ">a study through the University of Michigan: They conducted a pilot program in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham using insights from the speed and location data found in General Motors vehicles to alter the timing of that city's traffic lights. The researchers recently landed a U.S. Department of Transportation grant under the bipartisan infrastructure law to test how to make the changes in real time... Liu, who has been leading the Michigan research, said even with as little as 6% of the vehicles on Birmingham's streets connected to the GM system, they provide enough data to adjust the timing of the traffic lights to smooth the flow... "The beauty of this is you don't have to do anything to the infrastructure," Liu said. "The data is not coming from the infrastructure. It's coming from the car companies."
Danielle Deneau, director of traffic safety at the Road Commission in Oakland County, Michigan, said the initial data in Birmingham only adjusted the timing of green lights by a few seconds, but it was still enough to reduce congestion.
"Even bigger changes could be in store under the new grant-funded research, which would automate the traffic lights in a yet-to-be announced location in the county."
Sure, there are only cars in the traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
No pedestrians, bicycles or horse wagons.
Or motorbikes (Score:5, Interesting)
Many people forget that these are a popular form of transport , particularly in the far east where they outnumber cars 10 to 1 at least.
A self drive motorbike is an absurd idea so unless motorbikes are banned in this brave new world of self driving vehicles, the techbro fantasy of robot vehicles neatly intersecting on computer controlled roads will remain just that - a fantasy.
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Hey look, completely custom rides! [polaris.com]
Look, even more! [brp.com]
And here's another motorcycle manufacturer nobody has ever heard of with multiple models [harley-davidson.com].
Congratulations on not having a fucking clue. These have been around for at least a decade.
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No, these are a thing offered by major brands. They look weird but also fun at the same time.
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No they won't. You've been able to buy 3 wheel scooters for years but they're not popular. People like 2 wheelers for many reasons, not least filtering in traffic so they're not going away anytime soon.
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You mean something like this [polaris.com]?
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Good luck filtering in that. He probably means something like this:
https://www.piaggio.com/us_EN/... [piaggio.com]
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So if we completely ignore this bit of the summary:
Liu, who has been leading the Michigan research, said even with as little as 6% of the vehicles on Birmingham's streets connected to the GM system, they provide enough data to adjust the timing of the traffic lights to smooth the flow...
then yeah I guess we have a problem for you to yell about. Did you not figure that motorbikes can fit comfortably into the 94% of vehicles that were not reporting?
Or, and just follow the bouncing ball on this - someone makes an aftermarket widget that you clamp to the handle bar on your motorbike that sends your position and speed to the network exactly the same as if you were a car. You know, like we did with GPS navigation systems in cars before they ba
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"Try reading, or thinking for half a second please."
Try taking your own advice mate. Ever wondered how a train of close together self drive cars and 2 wheelers who filter are doing to interact?
Re: Or motorbikes (Score:2)
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More importantly, we already have self-driving cars. They attach to each other, several in a row, typically riding on an electrified, self-guiding road surface. They're known as "trains".
Re:Sure, there are only cars in the traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
We used to have these "smart" traffic lights. The had a sensor that could tell when a car was getting near or waiting. The sensor could be in the road or mounted on the light (e.g. radar).
They were particularly good at intersections where one direction was much busier than the others. The busy one could get a permanent green, until someone was actually waiting at the other. Or at the very least, as soon as one road cleared, the lights could change instead of being on a timer and waiting for nobody.
I'm not sure why we stopped using them. Probably cost.
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The sensors for emergency vehicles are now infrared and rely on sending specific patterns. You can send the same codes with a Flipper Zero and suitable IR emitter board (it has to be pretty bright to work).
Yet another technology that relies on people not knowing how it works or being able to cheaply build the hardware to spoof it.
Re:Sure, there are only cars in the traffic (Score:4, Insightful)
"Yet another technology that relies on people not knowing how it works or being able to cheaply build the hardware to spoof it."
And also not being a dick. Even if I knew how to fool the lights that I was an fire engine, I would not do it. Simple solution, take a picture of every vehicle when it triggers that operation, and follow up on the ones not a emergency vehicle.
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The road leading from my house has one of those at the junction with the main road.
The traffic lights that let me out onto the main road are red at all times, except when someone approaches the junction, then it starts the sequence that leads to it going green to let them out.
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I wish more people knew this.
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Agreed. I see many people every day who stop their vehicle one or more car lengths behind the white line. Getting on their rear bumper generally induces them to move forward.
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Yeah, it seems a LOT of folks driving big SUVs or Pickup trucks...do not know where the nose of their car actually is....
Sitting that high, they are stopping far short of the line because they're just going by how it looks from up there...not realizing they need to pull forward to actually hit the line.
It's annoying as hell.
Often if
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Its anywhere you see a "Stop Here On Red" sign, and the sign is telling you exactly where your vehicle needs to be to trigger the sensor.
I wish more people knew this.
A subset of those signs in my area also have a special light hanging that illuminates once the sensor is triggered. It makes it easy to see that you have stopped at the correct spot.
Induction loops were the old solution. (Score:2)
Nowadays, it's usually done with cameras and 'motion detection' software.
If you are observant you may see cameras mounted on many traffic lights.
Source: my buddy who manages the local traffic dept. I was trying to get a metro fibre network up, and he wanted access to connect his cameras. And i wanted access to his conduit which was already installed - although not always big enough. And he wanted rack space in my server room. Etc.
Anyways it's a pretty impressive little system.
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These types of in-road sensors are everywhere in metro areas of Texas. Nearly every intersection that has a traffic light, relies on these sensors. You can tell when one of them is malfunctioning, because a random left-tern arrow will stay green for a LONG time.
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We used to have these "smart" traffic lights. The had a sensor that could tell when a car was getting near or waiting. The sensor could be in the road or mounted on the light (e.g. radar).
They were particularly good at intersections where one direction was much busier than the others. The busy one could get a permanent green, until someone was actually waiting at the other. Or at the very least, as soon as one road cleared, the lights could change instead of being on a timer and waiting for nobody.
I'm not sure why we stopped using them. Probably cost.
I see them fairly often. I think there's two main reasons they're not used more often.
1) It's a bit of a niche scenario, if both roads get lots of traffic they both get timed lights, and if one road gets way more traffic the other just gets a stop sign. There's a narrow band of traffic imbalance where it makes sense.
2) If people don't know about the pad they can end up waiting a really long time for the light to change, and drivers who know about the pad are sometimes creeping around trying to find it if th
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There are plenty of traffic control systems in the US that do this too - after a certain hour they go to an uncontrolled intersection essentially by flashing the yellow light in all directions. And then at a certain time in the morning they go back to whatever timings or sequencing they would normally use.
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Not to worry, some places will pay to install all the hardware then either not turn it on, or adjust it to make traffic worse.
Austin does this because they want to be a walkable/bikeable city, ignoring everyone who lives outside the city limits and comes in for work.(and cannot vote for city council).
Apparently they took the opening scene of office space and though that would be a good way to encourage walking, even if you live 20+ miles outside the city limits.
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Just playing devil's advocate here: why would the people in the city want to do anything to make their own lives worse to improve the lives of people that live outside the city and don't pay for the infrastructure, and don't have votes with which to let their opinions known?
There was once a mayoral election in Portland, Oregon where one of the candidates put up billboards along congested traffic corridors saying "if ${CANDIDATE} was mayor, you'd be home by now!" - unfortunately for him, all the people sitti
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Now only if there was a way to pre-empt the signal changes for an event such as a manual button press, where the button is strapped to a physical pole holding the traffic signals up...
In theory no stop is required (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cars weaving through each other in cross traffic as guided by gps and AI.
What could possibly go wrong?
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worst case scenario we can resent the packet, err car. meat popsicles are replaceable.
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> That requires precision timing though.
And 0% chance of mechanical failure.
OR consciously make the lives/efficiency tradeoff.
Some people would accept that.
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I fucking HATE roundabouts....
Thankfully not many of them around, but in some newer areas I've driving they're trying them out...ugh.
Re: In theory no stop is required (Score:2)
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That's because the roundabouts you're using are either poorly engineered, or the people in them have no fucking clue what they're doing.
Roundabouts in Europe work really well, because European drivers know how to use things and aren't selfish shitbags that cut everyone off because of their own self-importance like basically 99% of drivers in the US.
The reason why roundabouts don't work in the US, is because of US drivers. Think of that guy who sees that a lane is closed ahead, and instead of merging where
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Please define how such a system could "fail safe" or even operate without 100% coverage of all entities moving through an intersection, including bicyclists and pedestrians.
Seems like if the timing is off by even a little bit, which would be 100% of pedestrian crossings, someone is getting killed.
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You haven't experienced Houston or LA traffic, have you! There are many, many intersections where there are multiple lanes, with a never-ending stream of traffic in multiple lanes at once. If there weren't a protected left turn arrow, in some places you could wait for hours for a gap in traffic large enough to allow a left turn.
pedestrians under / overpass will be needed. (Score:2)
pedestrians under / overpass will be needed.
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Why? We've already developed cross walk buttons. I imagine they would work even better under automation.
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You mean as done by a human driver every other day?
Sure (Score:3)
All traffic lights will be green for me once I figure out their algorithm
I don't think self-driving is enough (Score:2)
I think, for this to work, we'd need "self-driving with no manual override available".
yeah right, maybe in "20 years"... (Score:2)
where I live its still common to stop at a red when no one else is even at the intersection, and wait a minute or more.
It is 2024. They've managed to put cameras all over the place for purposes of raising revenue, ie ticketing people who run red lights. However they can't seem to use those same cameras for purposes of improving traffic flow. It is the simplest thing in the world that if I'm the only car at the intersection or approaching, I should get a green light.
Add on top that driverless cars only
Re: yeah right, maybe in "20 years"... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they didn't put the cameras up for the purpose of rising revenue. They put them to stop people like you driving past at red light. Red is red. There is no allowance for others not entering the junction yet.
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In my town, they put up red light cameras managed by a private company u set contract who got paid for every ticket they issued providing incentive to hair trigger ticket every vehicle near the intersection with zero flexibility. Locals knew those lights would ticket for the tiniest fraction of a second "error" and avoided them like the plague or were super overly cautious and fucking up traffic flow while visitors ate an inordinate number of tickets.
Eventually they got sued by a local lawyer who spent yea
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Nobody believes that shit.
Re: yeah right, maybe in "20 years"... (Score:5, Informative)
No, they didn't put the cameras up for the purpose of rising revenue.
Riiight. Cities would never [time.com] shorten yellow light times [koaa.com] to increase revenue, [cbsnews.com] resulting in reduced safety. [motorists.org]
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They've managed to put cameras all over the place for purposes of raising revenue, ie ticketing people who run red lights. However they can't seem to use those same cameras for purposes of improving traffic flow
This is because of the arrogance of city planners and traffic engineers. They think the know better than everyone else and force their "solutions" on everyone, even when that "solution" has been shown to be inefficient or dangerous. Take the process they use to set speed limits, for example.
Almost all traffic engineers do a terrible, un-scientific job and this will only give them more power to do an even worse job more powerfully.
Do self-driving cars even need traffic lights? (Score:2)
The car should be able to negotiate the stop based on trajectory determination and communication with the oncoming traffic. If there is no communication with the other vehicles or objects that are on collision trajectory then it should stop. Otherwise follow some protocol for slowing down or whatever.
Re: Do self-driving cars even need traffic lights? (Score:2)
That's the point of the article, the light changes to white to indicate the autonomous cars can have at it and human drivers just follow the lead, but revert to standard behavior when humans or human operated vehicles are in a position not to have a free for all.
I don't think it'll be worth it, or at least there's lower hanging fruit we haven't bothered to do (shortening green lights when no incoming traffic as detected by cameras for example)
Small steps get to the goal (Score:3)
So ransomware stops all traffic (Score:3)
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meanwhile... kids on bikes exist
Public transport (Score:2)
Re:Public transport (Score:5, Insightful)
Because as has been discussed countless times, public transport doesn't go to/from where people need and sucks if you need to carry more than a small bag. Public transport has very few ideal use cases and countless less than ideal or entirely useless cases.
The idea that my 85 year old mom is going to walk 3 blocks, wait for a bus, switches busses 3 times, then walk 3 more blocks and then reverse the process to get home from her cancer treatment is ridiculous. Maybe she should ride a bike?
Healthy people with limited use cases forget they are not the norm.
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Sorry to hear about your moms problems but there are dozens of countries with low rates of car ownership. I doubt their elderly just get left to die with no medical attention because they dont have access to cars. Mortality rates certainly dont seem to support that.
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Because as has been discussed countless times, public transport doesn't go to/from where people need and sucks if you need to carry more than a small bag. Public transport has very few ideal use cases and countless less than ideal or entirely useless cases.
Found the American. Europeans, many of whom don't even own a car are laughing at how absurdly stupid your view is.
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Found the European who has no grasp how large, and open, the U.S. can be. Cities are about the only place where public transportation can really work. Once you get to the suburbs you're relegated to shopping centers and not your Aunt May's house for public transportation.
And the OP is correct. You can only carry a bag or two on a bus/tram/whatever, unlike having a car where you can fill your trunk and even the backseat if necessary. Making multiple trips each week is time consuming and not everyone has
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They don't understand our country is different. They think this is just like Europe but with stupid people. They can't understand why we do things differently here. Our stupidity is the only explanation they can conceive of. The arrogance, ignorance and elitism they display makes me laugh at how "absurdly stupid their view is".
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It's only stupid if you are an European that has no concept of how US cities and the country is laid out as a whole.
Everyone here is NOT in a densely packed urban center where public transport generally seems to work....
The US is a very large country, and the majority of the land is not occupied by dense urban type cities...not to mention the extreme diversity of weather, and land type spread
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Re: Public transport (Score:2)
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Around the world, public mass transportation in urban areas -- Yes, there's that word again "urban" in case you missed it -- is a well-proven first choice for getting the vast majority of people from A to B. Getting that many cars off the roads also frees up more space & less congest
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I saw it. My mom and I live live in an urban area. She still needs ride to her doctor's. There is no way in Hell she can get there on public transit.
When public transit is brought up to the same level of convenience as driving which will require a near complete rebuild of our civilian transit system lemme know. Until then driving is the only option for her doctor's, shopping trips, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
My kid takes the school bus. I don't drive her. It provides A->B->A transit on a
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help her from her treatment to the car, load her walker, and make sure she makes it safely back to her apartment? Are you fucking nuts?
Firstly, we should not be using edge-case to inform policy. That's... silly.
Secondly, really beginning to sound like your mom shouldn't be anywhere near the driver seat in any vehicle.
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We use edge case all the time. Are you aware of the building requirements created by the Americans With Disabilities Act?
By definition that's edge case and it literally impacts the construction of every single public business and government building.
Do you hate disabled people? Should we end the ADA?
My mom doesn't drive. I pick her up and drive her and deal with the doctors, make sure she's safe at both ends and so on. Should I hire a taxi, hope it arrives on time, have it wait downstairs with the meter
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If you want to redesign the entire transit system to make public transit useful to more people, go for it. I've never said not to. I've only said the current system does not serve very many people very well.
My mom doesn't drive herself home. I pick her up, I drive her, I drive her back and I deal with the medical staff, insurance, and everything else she needs for her visits. The last thing I need on top of all that is fucking around with public transit. If public transit becomes useful, lemme know. U
Seems like over engineering (Score:3)
Here in Scotland, the majority of traffic lights are fitted with cameras. Traffic flow is automatically adjusted, depending on the number of vehicles on each of the approach roads.
I don't want the self-driving utopia. (Score:2)
What's the point of having a car if you can't control it the way you want? Having a car is about flexibility and freedom. Instead of self-driving cars we need better flow control, highly dynamic light systems that can sense approaching cars, etc.
White? Bad colour choice. (Score:2)
Having a red-green colour deficiency where I'm green weak, green already looks white.
Now, I'm in the UK so rely on identifying a traffic light vs a street lamp via it's design, thus I then can know a white light is green and that is coupled with the lights position, which is of course on the bottom, always.
How does this affect US drivers? I'd say that instead of white, it should be blue, as that colour is entirely unambiguous (although tritans may have a problem) as it is not currently used on any lights I
Bkuje is the emergency services colour (Score:2)
You don't want it being used on every street corner.
I meant blue obv (Score:2)
Fat fingers day
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The difference there is they flash and flicker. This would be a constant light.
Futurama robots meets Viet Nam bicycles (Score:2)
Betteridge says... (Score:2)
$49 for 80/20 (Score:2)
My $49 security cameras do object segmentation well enough to eliminate those two-minute red lights with noone else around except for the autistic cop hiding in the bushes.
That technology is good enough to optimize lights with 80% of the benefit and will continue to improve, getting times down (e.g. traffic wave approaching light about to turn yellow).
The last 20% needs realtime tracking and remote shutdown of all vehicles - which is the true goal of many technocrats.
Be on guard.
Yes but only in Europe (Score:3)
Not in the USA where infrastructure is a dirty word and traffic lights are still largely time based and pattern based like they were designed by some kind of Amish farmer.
For smart infrastructure go check out the Netherlands, where it's not abnormal to see green yellow and red lights all on at the same time, or pedestrians on one side having a green and the other still a red because the system intelligently knows how many people, bicycles, cars are where, and who is able to cross safely at any given time.
Re: Yes but only in Europe (Score:2)
This is why we cant have nice things. (Score:2)
Did someone just invent traffic circles? (Score:2)
...but require fancy automation for them?
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Exactly my thought - optimized traffic light is called a 'roundabout'.
The Dutch barely have cars and have smart lights (Score:2)
Privacy issues (Score:3)
> "The data is not coming from the infrastructure. It's coming from the car companies."
Did nobody else see this?
At what point will we not be able to opt out of sending all our data to the car companies (and from there to insurance, advertising, political activism (think: abortion access), private investigations, blackmail (we know about that floosie on 39th, want us to tell your wife?), whatever.
If only you let us control everything.... (Score:2)
...life would be so much better. Don't you see?!!
OMG (Score:2)
"But if the white light is active, you just follow the vehicle in front of you."
People seem already unable to distinguish between red and green and I don't mean the color-blind.
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TL;DW induced demand means you'll just see increased traffic until the roads are clogged again. Cars are terrible people movers.
That seems unlikely to be the case. Roads clog because too many people need to get from point A to point B at the same time of day. There does come a point at which the roads are adequate for the population, and they won't clog except when there are accidents. And with adequate numbers of self-driving cars, the number of accidents should fall off a cliff, which means they won't clog at all.
The real problem with road systems, in my experience, is that pretty much everything they do to try to "improve" the
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Time traffic lights to maximize traffic flow on primary arterial roads, and use long cycles to encourage people to turn right and make a U-turn (mid-block) rather than wait for a left turn out onto those roads.
With enough volume, you're just adding more packing capacity... Eventually the entire flow will meet an interruption which will propagate backwards and lead to stalling on the primary routes.
The biggest contributor to a lot of the failure experienced was our decision to cross the streams. Gridlock exists because we chose to go with grids. This is the least efficeint, and most error-prone, design. Yet we're stuck with it. Thus the only practical solve is to get creative about effective public transport.
Roundabouts have proven effective in reducing collisions but have in some cases made the volume issue worse
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Roads clog because we keep giving them away for "free". Building capacity induces demand. If we charged more per mile or had more congestion charges, the amount of clogging would go down.
Re: Not all voluntary... (Score:4, Insightful)
The road that was built to take commuters home to a town of 50,000 people in 1930 was not widened when the town expanded to 100,000 people in 1960 and was not widened when the town expanded to 500,000 people today.
Induced demand is probably real, but is dwarfed by pent-up demand.
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Or we could convert existing lanes to bus-only lanes, and run buses every 10 minutes or less to fit with people's schedules and improve transfers. When buses no longer get stuck in traffic [youtu.be], people will take the bus unless they have to drive, and that will free up a LOT of road space [imgur.com].
So we can cure congestion on busy roads practically overnight whenever we want to.
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When buses no longer get stuck in traffic [youtu.be], people will take the bus unless they have to drive, and that will free up a LOT of road space [imgur.com].
I think you underestimate just how slow buses are. All your proposal will do is massively slow down cars and make life miserable for everyone. Stopping for other cars isn't what makes buses slow, but rather stopping four or five times per mile to pick up and drop off passengers. Even if you manage to get that down to 20 seconds per stop, that's still 1.6 minutes per mile, meaning that even if the bus moved at the speed of light in between stops, it would *still* only achieve an average speed of 38 MPH.
Induced demand is not just for cars and roads (Score:2)
Induced demand happens with any transport medium. It happens strongly with improved rail links too. If you make a train journey faster, people will use it to make new journeys they did not do previously by any means.
If you build it, people will use it. How shocking!
The only way to ensure people don't use it is not to build it, so no-one moves anywhere.
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