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Traffic Control of the Future
petra13 writes "A high point of the Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems conference this past week was Kurt Dresner and Peter Stone's paper 'Multiagent Traffic Management: A Reservation-Based Intersection Control Mechanism.' They designed an automated system where cars reserve a time to pass through an intersection as they approach it and are then sped up or slowed down to ensure their arrival at exactly the right time. This allows traffic to enter the intersection from all directions simultaneously, eliminating the need for traffic lights and considerably reducing delays caused by stopping traffic. On their website, you can find Java applet simulations to illustrate the system. Especially impressive looking is the six lanes of heavy traffic in all directions simulation. I would love to see this in real life (from a safe distance of course)."
I have to wonder if these simulations or plans account for bicycles or pedestrians?
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This seems really neat, but definately not practical. What happens when a car breaks down or stalls on its way through the intersection?
That six-lane each way simulation is awesome, but they had better modify the thing before actually rolling it out so that the cars don't go so damn close to each other. Computer control or not, I don't want another guy's car 7" from my bumper at 70 km/h...
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
I wonder if you can apply the same logic to items of in a processor. or in a kernel thread scheduler... hmm.
meh
That simulation was pretty impressive when I looked at it. Until I realized something. None of the cars are turning left or right. Theories and math and simulations work great and are often impressive. But real world factors will almost always mess them up.
So one day when there is a way to get from everywhere on earth to every other place on earth without turning left or right give me a call. Until then, let's stop and let people turn left.
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Now all we have to do is convince the general population that their cars are safe in the autonomous control of computers rather than their own two hands. Sure, *I* know that having automobiles controlled by a sophisticated traffic network would be safer and more efficient -- I read Slashdot, after all -- but I doubt very many people in this country would be so thrilled about the idea of giving up their grip on the steering wheel.
Why do cars drive through each other at the intersection?
If its just 2 independent lanes, why the cross-layout?
And why even bother to simulate 6 lanes if there isnt any lane-changing? (at least i havent seen one)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Why have an intersection that no one turns at? Just make an overpass---0 delay always.
..wait, let me RTFA again.
ok, the cars are SUPPOSED to nearly crash at the intersection. Sorry, ditnt RTFA...
But: If this control system would be THAT perfect, you could easily increase traffic saturation by 300% by removing any safty distance between your cars. If its safe to near miss each other at the intersection, it shoulnt be a problem to drive with only 1 or 2 meters to the guy in front of you...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
good point. and what if someone destroyed the controlling unit or broke the connection from car to controller, then what happens? do all the cars simply stop? or does it end up as a huge pileup?
i would definetly not want this system unil ALL the bugs have been worked out.
I know people have already commented on the cars not changing lanes or turning, and the possibility of breakdown, but this system would be easy to exploit maliciously. If an agent didn't slow down the car, or misreported its speed/location, that could make for a lot of... er... amusement?
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Here in Britain, we have a less sophisticated system for letting multiple streams of traffic enter an intersection with minimal delay; It's called a roundabout, and we use them everywhere.
its not offtopic realy,
:( ..use Google!
Posted by michael on Saturday July 24, @04:07PM
from the i-feel-lucky dept./I>
i-feel-lucky? damn even this geek site's crew has a girlfriend..
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Imagine if Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell stated, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral^H^H^H^H^H^H^H voters to the president next year." Scary thought
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Can you really design traffic of the future without every having a clear idea of population growth in various areas? I live by I-95 and really doubt that traffic can be planned for.
Gravity is not just a law, it's also a good idea.
Try the simulations with 9 lanes in each direction and a .1 spawn probability. The traffic light is the lower delay solution in that case. Reservation comes to a grinding halt almost immediately.
Still pretty cool though.
What if one day I decided to tow a trailer and a boat behind me?
There are lots of places where you have a need for traffic control with big or many vehicles, in tight spaces. Such resource allocation is a huge part of many problems. That's where they should market this first, I think.
George Lucas already has prior art on this traffic design as shown in Star Wars Episode 2.
I saw a few of these blue dots collide. Imagine for a moment if something like this really rolled out, how damn scary it would be the first few times, and then imagine the public outrage and dismantling of the system as soon as a single accident occured.
Insurance companies will want real proof that such a system will be stable and as secure as today's intersections before even half-considering it.
:)
Such proof for this system will require that ALL cars in the area be equipped with such systems and an equally large number of intersections handled.
This roadblock to development was what happened to a demo for a system in which cars controlled by computers would follow magnets in a road and drive within 1m of other cars. That was a couple of years back in San Diego.
If cars are going to be automated someday, we'll need to find some compromise which does not require implementation for all vehicles on a road- i.e. a lane for truckers on long stretches of highway.
That's just my 2 cents. Something like this would be really cool should we ever get to this point....or we could just get flying cars and fly over
Stick the granularity on 3 and try: .04 .06
:P
N: 2 -
E: 4 - 1
S: 2 -
W: 4 - 0.1
you can see the system cue the cars on the east -> west road up and create little 'gaps' in the flow across all lanes that sync up with the north/south cars as they cross, nice to look at but it really needs turning and lane crossing, on the low granularity the cars get more clearence which is abit more realistic
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Imagine a theme park doing the 6 lane version as a futuristic thrill ride. You'd have to hose off the seats after every run...
and now, one of those hit a stick in the middle of the intersection and all of a sudden you beat the record for biggest pile-up ever!
What happens if a pedestrian walks into the intersection? If a car's brakes fail or it doesn't accelerate as fast as it should?
This would require that every car on the road has both extremely precise acceleration and precise location reference (possible with GPS, but even that only has resolution of a few meters).
In short, this tech certainly won't be around anytime soon.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
"Approaching intersection, please close eyes."
cygnuhchur
Where the hell are the semi-trucks and moving vans?
This simulation is pretty, but with the space they give to cars that narrowly miss each other, I don't want to trust an electronic component in my car to accurately report the length of my vehicle within 1 foot. Imagine the fun as some contractor enters the intersection with an extra 2 feet of board sticking out the back and a perfectly legal red flag on it.
And don't forget you'd have to disable the break pedal because a single hesitation will cause a multicar pile up.
... from Boston traffic how?
They just ignore red lights.
John Kerry is a Joke!
The granularity of the reservation system for this simulation is 4 (i.e. the system consists of a 4 x 4 grid of reservation tiles).
Well, I'm not seeing any tiles being allocated or how the applet does it's stuff. It would be nicer if the applet actually showed how the tiles are being allocated and to which car. Source code would be nice as well.
I'd like to see this compared to the roundabout intersection.
if they are not going to consider turning lanes, there is a Much simpiler solution. A Bridge. If every vehicle is only going straight, an elevated bridge is the solution.
the other problem with this solution is average car length. An accepted Average car length is 19 ft. But the first semi truck that goes through this intersection gets t-boned.
This is barely a concept techonology. Every one thinks they are a Transportation Engineer because they drive cars, the problem is always much more complex.
Network management is not a solution to transportion problems.
It would be nice to know whether that light ahead of you is going to change or not so you can speed up / slow down to compensate. It would probably subdue a ton of Class A personality drivers and make the commute perhaps a bit more enjoyable.
In a bunch of cities in Canada, they have a bunch of "If this light is blinking, prepare to stop" lights. Tends to help the traffic flow and mood of the drivers quite a bit.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
...cars in the future will fly, and we won't need roads, just plenty of JP-8 and a GPS!
"Initial success, or total failure!"
remin8.com
I wonder if you could use generic RFID Tags (aka non-Unique) to track the progression of cars, and then use computers to adjust traffic lights such that the least time is lost waiting. Each intersection would have to know the cars approaching it from each side for about the next minute or so, and then on top of that a layer of algorithms that finds the best interconnected rythm for all traffic lights. The goal should be: As long as you go straight, you only have to stop once (in the beginning). Once you are in a bulk of cars that goes straight, you should always have green, untill you turn. At that point, you have to wait to move into the other pack of cars allready going straight. You can then use speed limits to to regulate saftey concerns, and at some points where timing is impossible to force a small delay. Any person speeding would only have to wait at the next traffic light, so that's another benefit. How hard would it be to do something like that, with the help of RFID?
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Done in air traffic control everyday. On a different scale mind you.
Caution: Contents under pressure
It's been my experience that in a lot of towns in British Columbia (where I'm from) that the traffic lights are tuned to force you to stop at most major intersections. I was talking to a friend of mine in the roads department here and he said that the reason it's set up that way is to entice you to take a look at your surroundings and notice the local merchants, instead of just driving by and ignoring them.
I'm not sure if that's BS or not, but it sure seems that they aren't tuned to allow traffic to flow thru at a nice pace!!!
So where's the Frog?
Banu
I wouldn't be willing to relinquish my car to computer control, for several reasons:
1) If only one -- just ONE -- object on the road doesn't play within the bounds of the driving algorithm, mass accidents can happen, because the first car to interact badly with said object now becomes a second unpredictable hazard on the road. With people in control, you only get mass pileups under the harshest of conditions (like blinding rain, snow, or fog).
2) Computer control requires getting real-time updates about road and traffic conditions in the immediate driving region. My eyes give me a 60Hz data refresh rate, with continuous conscious and subconscious processing. Can a computer system beat that?
3) No, it can't. One of my good friends is working on computer driving problems for NIST. Current driving algorithms get horrendously confused about dealing with obstacles. They can't handle the "avoid? stop? try to beat? ignore?" choice. Human drivers make that choice with difficulty but general success; Computer driving can't deal with that choice well at all.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
here's the scary thought besides the obvious "OMG GOVERNMENT CONTROL" scenario
if the computer system were to suddenly fuck up, a miscaculation or a power outage... there'd be wrecks like insanity, and the drivers' fate would be sealed, as they would have no control over their vehicle to get in a position that wont harm them, or veer out of the way, or whatever.
Traffic circles. Then also make great places to dump bodies.
..........FULL STOP.
and I crapped my pants just watching the simulation!
-- duh
The problem with all these traffic management systems is that they are attempting to solve the wrong problem. What they should be doing is asking why there are so many people on the road at the same time all going in the same direction.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
What about mixing traffic lights with a reservation system? as you get near you signal the computer your intentions early (left/right/straight) and it starts giving you a speed to match, the speed would be tuned to try and prevent you needing to stop or slow down too much which makes everything quicker for everyone, if you did break or you didnt have the system installed (or it malfunctioned) you would just drive like normal and obviously stop if there was a car infront of you or a red light. Technically this already exists - its called 'figuring out how fast you should go' but people either dont bother or get it wrong and end up stopping - the advantage would be that the computer _knows_ exactly when the lights are going to change because its the one doing the changing, there would be no safety issues and the whole thing would be optional? It would be like automated air-traffic-control for cars with the backup feature that cars can stop if needed.
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They need some present day network traffic controlling...
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
wider applicability of this? (not meaning to sound like one of those a**holes in today's article about Are-You-Annoying).
Forget about vehicles, dogs, pedestrians, etc., and think about a completely different "problem space":
how much is this like, and how might it be applied to, architectures for managing traffic flows in nets, LANs, p2p networks, grid computing, email systems, etc.?
Technically, others have pointed out the lack of external influences on the system, breakdowns are a good example. This system assumes each vehicle will travel through the intersection at the speed it said it would. There's no room for error correction: if the car crossing in front of it suddenly crashes or breaks down, there's not enough time for that car to stop, and then you end up with a big pile of cars. I wonder how efficient the system would be if each car was required to allow enogh room to stop should an error occur.
It's called a yellow light.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Actually you do, and heres why. If he should slam on his breaks, you will almost instantly hit him. The force you hit him with will be minimal, as he will not have had any time to slow down. Basic physics says if you rear end someone who is doing 68mph, when you are doing 70, will produce a 2mph impact.
Now, you say, wouldn't it be better to have enough room to stop completely, and NOT hit them at all? An excellent idea, but you have to have quite a bit of space to go from 70 to 0 + plus the delta distance you travel in the two tenths of a second that is required for you to react.
Now that is a far mor ideal sutiation, but if you have driven on a freeway in any mahor city, you know that the volume of traffic during a busy period will preclude a 50 foot spacing between each car. With a 15 foot spacing, you only insure that when the person infront of you slams on the brakes, that you will hit them pretty hard.
Lesser of two evils, I'll take the 1 foot spacing.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I have seen congested areas whose intersections have countdown displays next to the walk/don't walk pedestrian lights. I can only surmise they are for drivers because people cross the street against the light all the time anyway.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
The first thing I thought when I was watching the simulation was it would be nerve-wracking sitting in a car when it looks like it's just gonna plow into another car. Instead of doing it in an intersection make a bumpercar ride out of it and everynow and again put in some fuzzy numbers and send bumper cars filled with people careening into each other. People would call it fun and they'd pay you to torture them! Muahahahahahahahahaha...
from the way people drive now - without computer control.
A simple solution to traffic control: a maigc roundabout!
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
While intresting it is useless. If the cars are computer controlled you would never need a six lane highway. Why? Humans need lots of space to avoid driving into each other but computers could do it with milimeters to spare (or that is what is claimed) so you would have a 1 lane road with a safety strip for emergencies and such intersection would take the form of a clover leaf.
Now if they could do the same with vehicles turning it would be more intresting.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Those 3 fucking seconds help with traffic flow so much.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I saw a green dot in the shape of a frog that got hit by a car then it disappeared... Oh wait...I was playing frogger.
Given the number of cars that roll straight through red lights when pedestrians are crossing the road, I reckon that popup roadspikes which activate on a red light would be the best thing yet.
Just fit ambulances and fire engines with spike-resistant tires (the ones that can still go when they are full of holes).
*Then* traffic lights might actually get some damn respect.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
It's like a souped up version of the "Juggler" screensaver...
What about an intersection that results in fewer vehicle-vehicle accidents, is safer for pedestrians, does not require electricity or light bulbs, and has a greater vehicular throughput than a light-governed intersection?
Check out the modern roundabout.
No one turns. In addition to safety concerns, dogs, breakdowns, drunk drivers, etc, you hit on something another AC pointed out above (he's at 0, someone mod him up?) that "highways don't have intersections, eh". Really I think this is more applicable to a situation with all-computer control, not really partial or total human control.
Hypothetically, lets say that turning just boils down to scheduling a longer interval in the area where you turn at. So more cars slow down for someone to turn than just cars zipping through. I think the demo was maybe going for "wow" effect.. i think we probably mostly think this would result in accidents. Presuming it is intended for extensive application, I think we are talking about an "autodrive" system with people as passengers not pilots.
dystopian police state arrests passengers in their own cars, free reg required, news at 11, blah blah blah
I guess it would cost a lot to install this on a large scale and in every car, so NoYes19, I guess I would agree with you that better road design may be more agreeable short term.
Maybe long term, if shipping, mail and passenger transport becomes highly integrated, our roads will become more like a well run train system, and (at least in heavy traffic or high speed long haul situations) we drivers will sit back and sleep until Brooklyn. :)
One other comment, did you watch the simulation for a minute... the cars together tend to take up diagonal line formations. I'm thinking of a 4way with a stop sign or a roundabout as similar to ethernet as this simulation is to ATM (where time is scheduled ahead of transmission) and it got me thinking, what if the cars grouped together in steady patterns instead of (what appears to me to be) an emergent pattern of diagnonal lines (or is that on purpose?) mixed with apparently random scattering of cars through each other? BTW, props to the researchers.
preview? ..bah
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Stop watching bad movies. If you want to see a computer controlled system like this on a smaller scale (or larger) look at computer controlled subways.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In theory you could "synchronize" all the transmitters to a hub/switch so that there are never any collisions. However considering the speed of ethernet combined with the cost of an accurate enough clock I think the collisions are acceptable.
In a way (if I understood it right) a switch is more like a cloverleave style intersection, unlike a hub wich is a regular intersection and only 1 vehicle/packet can be on the intersection at one time, on a switch traffic wich doesn't cross destination or origin never crosses each other.
Then again maybe I am wrong.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
ofcourse it'll be safe. if you can trust the aeroplanes 2 wings to keep you floating in air at 10km or more, why can't you trust a capable computer system to schedule your car. And if you are worried about a flat wheel to cause massibe wreckage .. I fail to see how. That car would be pulled out to the spare lane automatically by the computer. In fact as all the car are being scheduled by a computer, it should be easy to find an alternative route for the most of them, just change the speed of other cars in another route momentarily. This has potential IMO.
Of course you are right, bridges and tunnels are of much more practical, I mean, how long will it take for chevy novas without ai drivers to become extinct? hehe will cities be "ai driven only"? give me a break!
;)
;)
;)
Architects and engineers may have a lot of fun designing good looking and functional bridges that may be dis and re-assembled on the fly at midnight.
Once a bridge design is innapropiate, city employees may replace some parts for a quick upgrade? instead of months of building.
Once all those structures are in place, that may be covered with plasma displays to show a beautyfull landscape and some advertising while they are at it
How about that plasma array suddenly changing the whole lanscape colors to a reddish tone and showing a big sign warning the speeding driver to slow down or else get an automatic speeding ticket in 20 seconds?
How about a police car with flashing lights? once you are closer you notice it was the plasma displays?
Sensors, displays, a VR world to draw the reactions to the situations, all of it exists, you just need an innovative company to put it all together at a nice price, even leasing to governments for that affordability
[ DRIVER IN RED TOYOTA LP 345kj34 SLOW DOWN NOW ]
Now that's real technology!
...of that through-traffic chase in The Fifth Element (you know - the one that was shamelessly ripped off by Lucas in Attack of the Clones).
Police: Are you classified as human?
Dallas: No, I am a meat popsicle.
Put the notifiers in the cars and give each the speed that it needs to go to hit the light just as it turns green. Since there are still lights, it still works for old vehicles (without the notifiers). However, it still puts more info in the hands of the traffic light to control when the light is on/off. Note that to really work properly, the cars need to advertise which direction they're going, so it needs GPS functionality with routing as well.
Something like this might eliminate the idiocy of pulling up to a light at an empty road, stopping, waiting for the sensor to register your presence, wait for the light to actually change, and finally proceeding. Not the full automation shown here, but it opens the possibility of adding it on certain roads in another twenty years or so. The technology would help emergency vehicles immediately (i.e. if the road signals are opened for emergency vehicles before they pass).
The cars following magnets idea might work (for a demo) with places that have bus bypasses. The magnet enabled cars could be allowed to run on the bus lanes.
Aside from making turns, and other emergency situations, what if the technology that enables the reservations, fails? That alone would create an emergency, unless of course you're a damn good stunt driver.
It doesn't run on Safari (Width (0) and Height(0) cannot be less than or equal to 0) or Internet Explorer (NoSuchFieldError: GREEN).
I am wondering why a Java app like this wouldn't work seamlessly across platforms. Are they relying on bits of code that are platform specific?
I am so bored with being 'Mac Marginalized'
I'm trying to think of a way the cars could connect to each other, so that if one fails after the point of no return for entry to the intersection, it would be pulled through by the other car. That way you could mediate the danger of pile up due to failure, by increasing the required distance between the passing cars.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
But if I were a lawyer I'd have a woody the size of a Buick just thinking of the lawsuits ...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
So I've had this idea for a while that could improve traffic a lot with existing technology. The idea is that an OnStar-style navigation system in your car is much more valuable if it reports your average speed in some anonymous way back to a central server, because if enough other people have the same system, it will know the average speed on the road for each of the potential routes it could give you. You are then nicely routed around any areas of congestion, and incidentally all the people without the system benefit because you aren't along with them adding to the problem. The upshot, when enough people have the system, is that the existing roads become more efficient as traffic is evenly distributed over them, using entirely voluntary and largely human-powered technology rather than sophisticated future-AI.
Is this already being done? If not, anyone interested in starting a Palm/cellphone powered version?
I have wished for this for about the last 7 years. I hate stupid traffic lights that give a green light to traffic that is not there.
... years ago. All you need to a lot of real time input data and network cards in the traffic lights. I just think about this over and over again when I am stuck at red lights that are not necessary.
This is something that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) could run
"See the city,
See the zoo,
Traffic light won't let me through"
Have you ever tried to program a traffic simulation? There are few simulations more trivial, so don't be impressed.
Second, traffic simulations based on human behavior are always post hoc analysis. Twiddle the parameters until it looks right, then make up the behavior that fits the parameters. If you've ever had a chance to play with one, they are a lot of fun. Often the whole simulation falls apart with less than a 5 percent change in some parameters.
Actually, this is true of almost all behavioral modelling. If you've ever done any reading in modelling of software systems, you know how hard that can be (try proving the safety of critical sections in a multithreaded system). Behavioral modelling has all of the great concurrency of software modelling with less determinism (or at least it should...). What makes anyone trust behavioral modelling is beyond me.
As a side note, many things in the real world are based on this kind of crappy science all the time. Check out the San Diego freeway system. The I5 805 merge was just recently redone to improve traffic flow. It failed miserably. Staffing levels on military vessels are done by models. The ships are always understaffed initially until trial and error fixes them.
Unfortunately, people think that computer simulations can solve all problems, even when there is no theoretical reason to believe that the model will even approximate reality.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
I am fine with using Java in simulations, but hope they do not use it in the final implementation as well. I am afraid that Java's internal garbage collection mechanism would cause... well, a huge collection of street garbage.
There you are, staring at me again.
I find it interesting that so many people are so quick to come up with problems when a new idea is put forward. New ideas always have problems but they are important starting points for better ideas. If you simply start criticising I don't imagine you will have the imagination to take it farther.
as many have pointed out:
no turning
no dogs
no breakdowns
no bicycles
and as i'm pointing out:
no lane changes
no variable sized cars/busses
no emergency vehicles!
=
turning can be solved, the outer most lanes are for turning, and would theirfor not place a lease on the forward motion but would place a lease on the crossing lane so any oncoming traffic the crosses in the turning lane would be told accordingly.
lane changes would have to be allowed only far between intersections, and disallowed in the intersections.
no generic vehicle size could be accounted for, but every vehicle must state it's size when placing lease, so busses could get more intersection time. ALSO, busses should have a higher priority and that could be stated with conditions to acceptance while placing lease.
accidents can be handled via a motion detection system at the intersection seeing non-leased action and routing traffic to other lanes around the incident. if their are 6 lanes, and an accident or breakdown occurs blocking 2 lanes, then the other 4 lanes must be routed for traffic instantly.
Emergency vehicles(EV) must take top priority and must also place a lease as they arrive. other traffic would route around the EV.
pedestrians should not be allowed and high walls and fences should protect such roadways. also, the incedent detection system should be able to see non-lease activity and if it is moving. Then adjust traffic speeds accordingly and signal for human intervention.
=
though these intersections would be autonomous, they would require human monitoring of signaled events, and human can make deccisions and lower traffic speed to adapt.
Starting 2020 driving on a highway or in most city-centers without being on autonomous control would be a crime. Starting 2010 driving a vehicle not sending valid transponder signals would be a crime.
Of course the transponder signal will drive privacy advocates nuts, but I don't think you can get to a robust autonomous driving system without it. I suspect transponders are coming anyway for other reasons, so best to make lemonade out of lemons. Yes you will be taxed for in city driving -- sorry, it's coming anyway. Yes cops will know where your car was in any 48-hour period -- get over it. Yes you will no longer be able to speed - who cares as long as I can blog /. while I ride, and my average arrival time is lower due to everyone optimizing the available traffic ways.
As to unexpected hazards like pedestrians, cars will have built in radar (already practical) that reacts much quicker than even the most alert driver. Drivers will have to be insulated legally from any liability for hitting a pedestrian when said pedestrian jaywalks in an autonomous driving zone, as will the autonomous driving system manufactures.
Will children and pets be hit by robot cars? Yes, but congress will have to mandate legal protections as long as aggregate fatalities fall. Gross negligence in equipment manufacture could still be prosecuted, but any system certified by government for use should be immune from legal persecution as long as the accident falls outside of the parameters the government mandates it be able to handle. The legal challenges are the true roadblock, even if aggregate safety is improved.
While we're at it, lets lower the sound level of emergency vehicles, but have a signal override your loud radio to inform you that there is an emergency vehicle approaching. Same for trains. This could lead to some additional pedestrian accidents, but not if pedestrians are trained to use existing traffic systems better. Children could (should?) be equipped with transponders to alert the system to increase safety margins (i.e. slowdown). Of course transponders on children is another hot button topic, but I'm not referring to some 24/7 implant, but a device they carry when in downtown areas, same for the handicapped and the elderly, even your average citizen if they wish to enhance their own safety.
Transponder abuse must be a severely prosecuted crime for obvious reasons, both for sending false signals or for stalking individuals by tracking their signals.
You can fight these changes, which I believe will come, or you can live in a less technologically advanced nation. Other countries come to mind: "autonomous driving mandated ... in Japan" (ongoing /. joke). We will not have robot servants, we will not have autonomous highways, we will not have other unthought of applications of technology if we are not willing to allow our physical presence to be tracked in real space (and this means everybody). How that information is used and stored is where we must concentrate or efforts in the privacy fight.
Granted sufficiently intelligent systems would not need transponders and
Letter To Iran
But giving EVERY car in the nation a foolproof automatic guidance system is that much cheaper. Not to mention the time till every old car is kicked of the road (because even a single car WILL create a huge mess of such a crossing, plus even ONE faulty guidence system will do the same).
And if 2 cars hit each other and convert a lot of their kinetic energy in waste metal, then NO guidence system can stop the next 50+ cars from wrecking into them. Even the fastest regulation circuit cannot simply make kinetic energy dissapear.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
That granularity is set too low and results quickly ina lane choke. Experimenting abit .04 .06
N: 2 -
E: 4 - 1
S: 2 -
W: 4 - 1
Granularity 12
This results in what looks vary close to crashes after the intersection. Certainly an uncormforatble stop. The more traffic the bigger number of reservations you need (~24 in this case). I hope that in real life it would be implemented with better failure modes. Darn html :(
-- I need to remember to update my sig
This consideration is, in fact, what prevents a lot of possibly great stuff from happening. But if you even breathe the words "tort reform" you get branded a hyper right wingnut.
--- Ban humanity.
We actually have a system like this in Pakistan. Traffic lights are equipped with timers that tell you when the light is going to change. What ends up happening is that some drivers will try to accelerate through the intersection when the light is about to turn red. This can actually cause serious problems if traffic from the other side has already started to flow. So I really don't think its much of a solution.
I could say this scheme can't work in practice, but I would only be 99.99999% sure of it. The reason it can't work is left as an exercise for the reader -- a very easy one, I might add.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
Here I thought I was the only fan of Police Quest II. :)
A properly designed yellow light (which most of them in real cities are, or at least areas with proper engineers working the roads) turns yellow and stays yellow long enough that cars traveling at the speed limit will have enough warning to safely stop before the light, or to safely make it through the light.
3 second yellows implies that the road is a very low-speed road. Road safety engineers assume a 1 second reaction time, leaving us 2 seconds deceleration time; assuming this is a two lane road (a likely assumption, since 4 lane roads almost never have such a short yellow) and using standard lane widths (12 ft for an urban travel lane, we'll even throw a center turn lane in at 14 ft for ya) giving a total of a 38 ft wide road, the speed limit on the road in question is (at minimum, from intersection clearance time) 10 mph minimum and (at maximum, from stopping time assuming the typical rule of thumb of 15 feet per second per second deceleration and 1 second reaction time) 20 mph maximum. Thus, I would guess your 3 second yellow is on a 15MPH speed limit road, and the problem is really that you're being an asshole and speeding.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Hey, how about a BRIDGE!?
Smart cruise control - radar mounted to your front bumper "locks on" to the car in front and tries to maintain a set distance from the car in front. This is a near-term technology; expect to see it implemented in vehicles in the next 5-10 years.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Will it be Bruce-proof when he cruises around in his taxi? And when will the 3D applet be released?
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
None of the cars are turning left or right. Theories and math and simulations work great and are often impressive. But real world factors will almost always mess them up.
Human beings, with their *superior* driving skills, don't fare very well in turning a motor vehicle, either.
This is why major intersections feature dedicated turn lanes and turn out lanes. Unforuntately, this leads to the creation of mix-master style Interstate Exchanges. In the American Southwest these still have quite a poor accident record (given how much more controlled the environment is for turning vs. an uncontrolled intersection.)
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"Welcome to the Future of Urban Living as brought to you by your Peronal Motor Carriage," said 1940's Ford.
"Welcome to Traffic Jams and Smog," said the 1960's Real World.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
NTSC interlaced video shows 60 fields per second.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
She used to travel a lot to China and it looks just like a Chinese intersection... except they all slam on the brakes right in the middle... :-!
Comes to think of it, Egypt... they don't call the horn the "Egyptian brake" for nothing...
segfaulted
A car chase scene in a movie through a traffic system controlled this way would rock, two manually controlled cars, everything else automated and trying to compensate for their erratic movement. It ends when someone does some maneuvering with some sudden deceleration to get the chaser nailed at an intersection, causing a 16,384 car pileup.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
In the USA at least, commercial airline travel is much much safer than riding in a conventional automobile.
And yet people don't care. They think air travel is dangerous but thinking nothing of their cars that kill 30,000 per year and injure millions per year. In terms of human life, there's a WTC catastrophe *every month* on the highways.
So it's not about safety. It doesn't matter whether an automatic system is safer than a human-controlled system or not. People want contro and don't actually care about safety.
until it breaks :o.
I believe phyruxus is talking about automatic towing/pushing for a dead (like doesn't move) car. I think some sort of electric magnet would be the way to go that would automaticaly activate pushing the care infront of you....this is actually a general solution to having a car going to slow infront of you...clearly this would have to be included in the reservation system so a car doesn't push another car out of its closly timed reservation....but this is rly just making a new reservation for a longer car.
That is my biggest complaint about the simulation, it expects perfect preformance by the agents. A traffic control system must be fault tollerant, a stop light inherintly does this, the reservation system does not. A simple way to increase the tolerance of the reservation system is specify that no car can have a vehicle infront of it that is within it's stopping distance. Which isn't so simple because stopping distance is a function of speed and in an intersection vehicals that will be infront of you must also be considered. Because of this the model of just reserving a path through the intersection breaks down, because there is a buffer on the side of a path which size depends on th speed of other vehicals; this makes the vehicals query for the forecast on the intersection in a certain time frame, not just ask if a certain reservation works.
See how agents are being used in supply chains here.
I do this already by looking at the cross intersections lights...
no use downshifting if its 2 seconds from green.
In a bunch of cities in Canada, they have a bunch of "If this light is blinking, prepare to stop" lights. Tends to help the traffic flow and mood of the drivers quite a bit.
Those often work fairly well, and some spots even show an estimate of what speed you should maintain to make the green light up ahead around the corner.
Something cool I saw a long time ago, when I was a kid visiting another city, was a main drag that spanned the whole city, with many intersections along it. You could make every single light if you stayed at a certain speed while on this strip. I wish we had something like that here, it seemed to work very well there.
I seriously doubt that this would work. Think about it for a second... I mean, the DMV can't even set up the timing on intersections now, and everytime they do they even screw things up more.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
I think the only chance to get a system like this implemented is to have a pilot project in a country where a) people are not as crazy about driving their own cars as here in the US, and b) there are lots of public funds available. Switzerland comes to mind here. Imagine such a project is implemented in, say, a city like Lucerne, and the result is that the accident rate goes down by 90%. Then the rest of the world simply would have to listen!
"You might eventually even see completely automated robot trucks that go from central depot to depot. Local drivers would then deliver within the more complex city traffic. The same model currently feeds just about every metropolitan convenience center."
...
Where I live, this has already been implemented; in fact, it is quite common.
We call it the TRAIN
It's virtually fully automated
I've got an idea - create a mass transit system where cars link to each other and contribute to the overall propulsion of the train. This way we can all go in straight lines together and unlink when we need to go home. Kind of like a bicycling team, but the one who leads is the one who expects to travel furthest. People drive up to get in queue, and link at a speed exactly the same as which the train is travelling. When they need to get off, they begin to drive at a calculated speed and then come off the train. That way we dont need a bunch of lanes. Will someone make some java applets now?
Only in one direction, though. Cascading timers suck if you're going the other way.
who needs computers for this sort of thing Uk has at least 2 notable pieces of road
Coventry ring road, picture the scene your decending a ramp to get on to the main ring road on the same stretch of road cars ect are leaving the ring and coming on to an extension of the ramp which runs on and off on to another road yes two streams of traffic crossing over constantly.
coventry
coventry
alternatively there is the magic round about in swindon
swindon
5 mini roundabouts arranged in a pentagon with 5 roads leading off
both scary to drive but apparently have low accident rates
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Working in feet and seconds
s1(0)-s2(0)=7/12
a=-32.2 (ie a 1 g stop)
First car
s1(t)=v0*t-16.1*t^2
s2(t)=-7/12+v0*t
They collide when s1 =s2
so v0*t-16.1*t^2=-7/12+v0*t
so t is sqrt(7/(12*16)) or roughly 0.2 s
so the car in front will have slowed by 6 fps, or 4 mph.
So the OP was wrong, with a 1g stop, but not by much, and if she'd assumed a more realistic acceleration, she'd be right, or wrong by less.
Is it really better to die of a heart attack than to run into another car?
Sigmund
Niven and Pournelle depicted something like this about 30 years ago in their novel, The Mote in God's Eye . Humans encounter a clever race of aliens (the "Moties") who excel at improvising and cooperation. Rather than live by complicated rules as we do, they invent solutions as problems arise. Roads have no lanes or traffic controls; vehicles swarm along seemingly without organization, but nobody crashes. Pedestrians simply walk through traffic and it avoids them. Things get hairy when the Moties set about reconfiguring the systems aboard the humans' ship, just because they can.
This has long been a favorite book of mine. I hope it gets turned into a movie, now that we have the technology to do it really well.
There will be no personal-automobile without oil. Thinking the future is going to have automagic cars drive on self-regulated highways is fantasy-land.
This is like saying we are all going to have a nuclear-powered space-ship in our garage.
Has anyone told these people about consumption, peak-oil, ecological-footprints or pollution? Are we hoping to divine usefull materials to replace everything we have that is made from oil today? In the same quantity? Enough for all?
I drive like this all the time. If I approach a green light, my crossing is reserved but if I approach a red light, I slow down enough to get there when it turns green.
Other than that, drive on main roads where green is longer than red. If you approach a green where very few cars are around you know it's been green so long it will turn red by the time you get there so slow down early to save on brakes. If you approach a red where cars are lined up chances are it will turn green pretty soon so go with the flow. There are certain streets known to line cars for miles - avoid them.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
We have the same thing in the US, and they're particularly heavily used in Massachusetts; for example, a number of exits on 128 are exits with rotaries(which is what we call them)
The busy ones in Boston are a source of great stress for everyone, because enough people don't quite know how to use it; often times the rotaries are so large, nobody realizes it really IS a rotary, where incoming traffic yields to rotary traffic- so you'll have people stop IN the rotary because they think they're merging onto the main road, even though they have no yield sighn. Worse, some of the rotaries(like the route 2 rotary) are TWO LANES and some people just do NOT understand that you shouldn't be in the outside lane if you're not going to make the next exit, and you should NOT be the inside lane if you are.
All of this is made worse by a lack of state-controlled signage; local towns are responsible for deciding, save on state routes, what signage to put up, and both towns and states are quite bad about putting up "reminder" signs. In their minds, there's a)speed limit signs, b)street signs c)stop signs. d)sometimes Yield signs. That's pretty much it.
Please help metamoderate.
...car chases on COPS. "He's heading for the intersection. He isn't stopping! Oh, wait, nobody stops anymore."
All yellows on city streets in NY are three second yellows. 35MPH speed limit.
Be less aggressive when you're being wrong, 'kay?
I've had this sig for three days.
I had an idea of a traffic management system similar to this, however my idea would _actually_ work in the real world. My idea still relies on traffic lights to control traffic, and cars would not be both travelling in an intersecting path. My idea works on the principal of attempting to keep track of every car on the road (even better if people had an anonymous transmitter in their car that would regularly flash their location, and destination (with the ability to be turned off for privacy)).
My idea is that traffic should be moved into nice little "packets", with anyone outside a "packet" eventually being forced into one by means of having to stop. Each "packet" consists of around 50 cars, and each car's approximate location is inserted into a computer system, which uses a "chess-like" algorithm (runs through many possible outcomes to find the best one) to attempt to get each packet arriving at an intersection just after a packet coming from a perpendicular direction, and at the same time as a packet coming from the opposite direction. When those two packets finish passing through, two more packets should be just arriving from the perpendicular direction to see a green light just in time to pass through without stopping.
I dont see why my idea couldnt work, and by using some of the ideas from this other idea, it could be improved a lot.
Genetic algorithms are not designed to, and will not, find the perfect solution. They won't even necessarily find a good solution. They're just one approach to function approximation where the goal is to optimize something resulting from the output of the function. It would not be ideal to use them; it would be ideal to find an optimal solution by analytic means. Failing that (typically because the problem is too hard), only then do we turn to approximate solutions like genetic algorithms.
I grew up in Tijuana, Mexico. We've been using a computer-less version of this system for years...
In Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) they are testing a new form of pedestrian signal indicator. In addition to the standard Walk and Don't Walk indicator is a countdown timer as to when the traffic light is going to turn RED. At the 2 second mark, the traffic light goes from GREEN to YELLOW and finally to RED at 0.
When I first saw it in action I thought it was an incredible idea and now I can't wait to see it at every intersection in the city.
Now I wish they would do something about those idiot peds that decide to hobble across the intersection on a DO NOT WALK light and don't make it across before the opposite traffic gets a green light.
well, at least this is the kind of dream that this system was designed for. I'td work perfectly in free-floating space where the only need for specific "roads" to be taken are for residential, commercial, safety (etc) reasons. This would work wonderfully (think of the sort of intricacies that could be accomplished in three dimensions.
I'm surprised the Jetsons didn't ruffle its animated feathers with slight of the hand animations like these.
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
The average human being is simply incapable of truly predictive and predictable driving, and thus incapable of being a good driver. Coincidentally, those are the very same people most often caught in mortal accidents; Darwin himself might suggest that in fact this is exactly the way Mother Nature had planned it, and no accident at all.
figure "8" "stock car" racing? It's insane, and yes, there are serious wrecks, but the loops are small enough that the cars don't get up to fatal speeds. It's a nerve-wracking game of chicken- who will speed up and who will slow down?
Actually, it's very simple. Notice that you can easily turn right in this system. Then, by doing three right turns at correct junctions, you actually are turning left.
While this may sound like an annoyance to the human driver, it's nothing to the computer (well, it does involve some complication of the algorithms, but I believe that can be overcome). And the time you waste on performing these complex turns should be more than reclaimed by reduced waiting in the junctions.
You know, I've never worked in NYC, but I've visited, and one thing I recall is the following: the yellows go to red, and then there's another couple seconds of pause, and then the reds on the other side flip to green. Also, many members of ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers, the traffic engineer equivalent to IEEE) have been bitching about NYC's idiotic 3 second yellow standard for a long time now. Let's also note that NYC's drive to a 3 second yellow was spearheaded by an insurance industry group that also pushes red light cameras (and that the far too short 3 second yellow has been proven to cause higher numbers of entry-on-red, which results in higher ticket revenue). Something that causes higher numbers of crashes and tickets, being pushed by an insurance industry lobbying group? Gee, you don't think they might want to be able to jack up their rates for drivers, do you?
My aggressiveness comes from the fact that I spent most of my high school summer jobs working as a surveyor's assistant, meaning that I dealt with more than a few road engineers. I'm not dumb, and I picked up quite a bit. Having a civil engineer for a father probably helped too. Oh, and knowing of the existence of the Highway Safety Act (1966) and the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices. Which used to lay out exactly the principles I talk about, until it was modified in 2000 to remove the "based on formal site engineering studies" for politically motivated reasons (specifically, the lobbying by red light camera and insurance industry people, and also the desire by most cities for increased revenue from red light cameras). However, even the watered down version states the reason for a yellow light to be (paraphrasing) "to allow motorists adequate time to stop prior to the intersection and to clear the intersection." ITE/ASCE's most recent publication setting forth the method of determination would be Determination of Left-Turn Yellow Change and Red Clearance Interval, published in JTE. Specifically it deals with those issues for left-turn intersections. Unfortunately, the paper is not free, unless you have access to JTE through work or school or membership. Another non-free reference is ITE's #JDB04A20
Be less aggressive when you try to talk back to someone who knows what they're talking about, okay? NYC is hardly the typical example for road safety, by the way - you freaks don't even obey your lane lines, much less your traffic signals.
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(I read with sigs off.)
...it's called a overpass/tunnels
As other have already noticed, the system doesn't not account for turns/pedestrians/hiccups/etc. We already have a device in the road system to avoid slowdown in it the intersection. It's called overpass/underpass. It's less scary when it's working and less dangerous when hiccups occurs (and hiccups do occur).
This system assume the best case scenario when everything work as planned. What about sub-optimal cases(not to mention worst case)? What happens when a vehical slowsdown, breakdown, run out of gas when the vehical is inside or just left the interscetion?
Mmmm.... bumper cars on ice...
Really, cars can never control themselves this well in inclement weather...
What happens when a car loses control of itself? No-fault insurance, anyone??
I've never seen a yellow longer than 3 seconds around where I live, but I suppose it can be different where you live. Here, it is apparantly fashionable (profitable) to stick a traffic light with traffic cameras instead of a stop sign.
wait. I just read someone's post and your response about ticket revenue, etc, pretty much says it all.
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Is there any data on fuel economy with this close by driving? I think that there is a lot to be saved on the highway.
nosig today
What happens if a vehicle has a failure before reaching the intersection, then slows and comes to a stall in the midst of all the traffic that was supposted to just "pass it by" as it cruised along the intersection? We can't just have 'em all hit the breaks, because collisions would be unavoidable at these proximity rates, no?
In my opinion for these things, the main problem is not how well it works, it's how well it fails.
It has to fail better than the system it's supposed to replace. It's easy to design a system that works well, it's not so easy to design a system that fails well.
The cost of human brains, training (and incompetence) is typically a sunk cost - you're going to have those already whether you want to or not - esp for situations where the systems fail (unless the systems can be reliable enough which is unlikely).
He stated that this is the first iteration of this project and that they fully plan to incorporate turning, more variance in vehicle performance, support for legacy vehicles, and unexpected events such as a car breaking down.
He stressed that the system would depend highly on the auto manufacturers making their navigation systems fully compliant, since it's almost a given each will have their own proprietary software interface.
"Don't waste your time or time will waste you" -MUSE
Though I think it'd be cool to just be able to fly down the road and zip through an intersection (there's one particularly aggravating one on my daily commute that comes to mind...) each and every time without having to stop, all while traffic from the intersecting roadway gets the same treatment -- staggering cars inside the intersection in a sort of N/S--E/W--N/S--E/W dance (I'm visualizing something like the intersecting lines of a marching band -- and I've always wondered how the guy with the drum doesn't snag the guy with the trombone as they pass...) All in all, I think this kind of thing would be REALLY cool (on the order of The Jetsons or Blade Runner cool, even!), but I have to think of this as well:
as long as car windows are transparent, this kind of thing will probably rate a solid 10 on the 10-point Pucker Factor scale, and I'm already wondering if auto upholstery of the future will be made durable enough to survive it.
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