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MIT Study Shows Stop Lights Won't Be Necessary In The Future (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: An MIT [Senseable City Lab] study based on mathematical modeling demonstrated a likely scenario in which high-tech vehicles, using sensors to remain at a safe distance from each other as they move through a four-way intersection, can eliminate the need for traffic lights in the future. By removing the waits caused by traffic lights, these so-called Slot-based Intersections speed-up traffic flow.The study claims this kind of traffic-light-free transportation design, if it ever arrives, could allow twice as much traffic to use existing roads.
Sure, but remember how having cars that interlocked with each other and shared engine power they exchanged funding for via microcredit transactions would increase traffic efficiency too?
We're a LONG time from having this be a practical thing. Probably at least half a century.
And statistically, it will since autonomous cars are not mythical crash-proof transport machines then you're going to end up with an almighty bang
There's a reason they put windows on a bus... sudden starting/stopping can be damaging to a person. Even in a driverless car, there still needs to be an ability to see the stoplights to know when the car is going to slow down.
Just remember how hard it was when you were a kid that couldn't see the road. Your parents had to say "whoa" and "go" to signal you to adjust yourself.
This is bad research, somebody cut their funding!
What would be the comparative advantage with respect to a roundabout?
I know they are not very popular in the US, but they can be very efficient, and prevent the frustration of waiting at busy intersection (especially if going in the non-popular direction).
Except wouldn't slowing down the cars or making them stay apart by "safe distances" decrease the traffic flow anyways? So you're just back where you started from
How are they supposed to cross? Without lights, there could just be continuous stream of them walking over the road and cars can't pass since they try to avoid hitting them thus causing even bigger jams in big city centers.
Did they also model pedestrian traffic crossing the road in their automated "hoverboards" of tomorrow? Vehicular traffic modeling is all well and good for non-pedestrian intersections, but not for dense urban areas with high volumes of pedestrian traffic.
Seems like they still need to play a part in any scenario with or without traffic lights. Dropping traffic lights may be fine for autonomous vehicles, but that also means that people will just walk when they want to, which'll make cars stop to let them pass. Perfectly fine when there's few pedestrians, but when there's a lot, the automobile traffic will totally come to a half if no one is stopping people from walking into the street.
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Safe!
"...you just need to surrender your individual autonomy and hand over total control to us. It's necessary for increased efficiency!"
You know, this argument seems strangely familiar...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Pedestrians will need implants!
It astounds me daily how many volunteer to be a Darwin award winner
as they step off the curb without looking both ways expecting vehicles to stop for them.
Near hotels in the UK and Australia are words on the curb reminding Mericans to
look "the other way" too. Those little reminders are fully lost to the goof with
his or her nose in his phone.
I recently found a crazy turn signal in this area where vehicles were given
a right turn green arrow at the same time pedestrians were given a walk indication.
Traffic folk are so worried about automobiles that they ignore bicycles and
pedestrians.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
This is all great - I can see it might actually work (but then again, it might not).
But I am typically a pedestrian. How will I cross the street? Do these smart cars just do their "ballet dance" around me? Do I press a button and tell all cars to stop, while I proceed through the intersection? All the article can say is
seamlessly knitting together flows of cars, pedestrians and bikers.
How, exactly? I can see a system of autonomous cars being able to do this, but TFA mentions squat about how it will handle bicycles and pedestrians; only that somehow, magically, it will. There are no pedestrians in the promotional video, so it's pretty hard to tell. How will a computer system predict when I will cross the road? With no "light" to instruct me, how am I supposed to know when to cross?
Seems to me they left out a rather important thing about intersections - the humans using them are inherently unpredictable.
"Government is like fire; a handy servant, but a dangerous master." -- George Washington
We can dispense with them already by using roundabouts.
Problem is humans are at the core selfish assholes, which is why we have traffic lights.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
War will not be necessary in the future says a SHIT Study, once there is enough food for everyone, and we don't have religions based on killing everyone else!
There will never be a time when 100% of cars on the road are self-driving. So lights will always be needed. Some things are only true in simulations, a world without city lights, and climate change.
"...you just need to surrender your individual autonomy and hand over total control to us. It's necessary for increased efficiency!"
You know, this argument seems strangely familiar...
It turns out that's how it works. There is often a tradeoff between safety, efficiency, and civil order on the one hand, and personal autonomy on the other. There is a cost to personal autonomy. If we give everyone nukes, sooner or later someone blows up a city. If we give everyone AKs, sooner or later someone shoots up a school or a mall. If we give everyone cars, sooner or later people kill each other with them, deliberately or by accident. If you give people the ability to control dangerous things with their free will and imperfect responses, other people die and maybe the actor dies.
So you have to make a judgment call about the level of autonomy you desire and how many lives it's worth. If you can reduce traffic accidents a thousand fold, isn't that worth at least making automated driving the default?
I believe that I have seen animations for driverless cars careening through intersections for years, as in going back to the 70s.
What I find much more fascinating is the economic impact of this sort of thing. How much economic activity is generated by traffic lights. Obviously there are the companies making them, maintaining them, their electrical usage, the cost in having people idle at them, and the ticket taxes generated by having police ticket people for not obeying the tax laws.
I would not be surprised that the savings to the taxpayer and the public by removing a single unimportant traffic light could be well in excess of $100,000 per year. For instance there was one major downtown street near my old house where they had the lights perfectly timed so that you pretty much missed all of them. Thus the average speed on that street in low traffic was maybe 15mph tops. With about 8 lights and the street being 1.5 miles the savings in time alone to get that up to 25mph would be astounding, let alone in gas.
Also many busy intersections are pretty much car accident factories. So to remove those would be just another layer of costs removed.
But what is interesting about all the above costs is that they are all very parasitical. Most of the costs in having a traffic light don't really "benefit" society. Obviously a typical traffic light today massively reduces accidents and other problems but when we have 100% SDCs their removal will only be a net benefit to all.
Where this is also going to get interesting is that some traffic lights are political. For instance there is a neighbourhood in my old city where a 3 way stop was replaced with a traffic light. This then encouraged people to take a short cut through a rich influential neighbourhood so within about 10 days the light was removed and went back to a 3 way stop. I can see attempts to prevent self driving cars from "navigating" through rich neighbourhoods but that is going to impinge upon fundamental freedoms and those laws are going to be hard to sustain. But with enough political influence there will be a way to keep the plebs away from the rich. Which will simply be part and parcel of the many many stupid laws that I see coming when politicians don't realize that every stupid traffic law they implement will be diligently followed by computerized cars. I can see every squeaky wheel along rural highways calling for the speed limit to be dropped in front of their house because of "the children" thus the speed limit will be very much an indication of how influential any given household is in rural communities.
I don't know about Europe, but in the US, Internet connections are crap. Utterly unreliable and slow. There's no way in hell vehicles will be using the Internet for mission-critical stuff. No way. We have no infrastructure to support it, and as long as the government is bribed to not regulate it, we never will.
I don't respond to AC's.
Before doing that it would be very advantageous and far simpler to review the algorithms controlling existing traffic lights, which seem to have been devised by idiots.
There are junctions near me where the lights hold everything stopped for anything up to 30 seconds (and there no pedestrians crossing, in case you were wondering). Another junction has a pedestrian crossing 25 yards before it, and the two sets of lights are not synchronised; usually they are out of phase so when the junction lights go green only four cars are released with the rest of the queue held back at the pedestrian lights, and apart from those four cars nothing moves for about a minute.
There are some very easy wins to be had without waiting for pipe dream technology to appear.
Neither MIT nor anybody else has shown me how their autonomous cars will work with the potholes on Michigan roads, the black ice common in this area, ice in general, the lack of municipal funds to plow many roads, driving on the highway with 6-12 inches of snow on the ground with more coming down, or driving with whiteout conditions where the road is not visible. In Michigan in many places no indication of lanes is visible. The local residents simply memorize where the paint used to be. It's very exciting to us to see a freshly painted road surface.
Nobody can afford to maintain their vehicles so that they're like new. How are autonomous vehicles going to work when the alignment is off, or a tire is leaking, or the suspension needs work? Due to potholes, everybody in Michigan drives vehicles long past when these problems should have been fixed. Not because we want to, but because the average car in Michigan needs $500 in suspension work every year.
Once they have reasonable solutions for those problems, then we can talk about removing stop lights.
As you'll need to be sitting on one as your car goes through a 4-way intersection.
Cyclists and pedestrians fit into this future how? Such a study could only come out of the USA, where everything seems so automobile-centric. :(
My son and I were just talking about this idea a couple of weeks ago. What we were focused on is how much fuel and break pads would be saved by eliminating traffic lights. Here in Vermont they've been putting in a lot of round abouts which have a similar effect but it would be even better we thought if auto autos communicated with each other and solved this.
Problem is humans are at the core selfish assholes, which is why we have traffic lights.
Agreed. In the excellent book "Traffic", (by Tom Vanderbilt), he cites studies showing that in comparison to traffic lights, roundabouts:
- Move a lot more traffic.
- Have a fraction of the accidents.
- Have much less severe accidents, resulting in a fraction of the fatalities.
...Happening already
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
....is an interesting possibility!
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
All it will take is one idiot on their cellphone trying to cross the light-less intersection to show MIT just how short-sighted this idea truly is.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Some of us walk.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Can we have the automated lanes and the 'free' lanes?
I don't want all of these futuristic traffic optimized prius wet dreams messing with my weekend cruises!
I also don't want to have to deal with any new driving rules around having to give right of way to these things.
I don't care what Watson says, he is not Skynet yet!
the problem is.. imagine all intersections becoming roundabouts... it becomes impractical on the smaller levels due to the amount of space they use not to mention slowing down traffic speeds and longer drive distance compared to a straight line. You would have to redsign the cities completely, in which case, there are already plenty of improvements that could be done. hell, properly timing street lights would improve alot of traffic but you don't even see most cities doing that.
Already been done with traffic circles.
In some places these are problematic due to some people being too stupid to drive
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
But municipalities will lose all that red-light camera revenue. I predict failure of this concept.
It seems like the assumption is that all cars are willing to participate in the communication necessary to coordinate the traffic flowing in each direction to avoid collisions. When that happens, I think it would be like Japanese synchronized walking. But if you throw an older, human-driven car into the mix, does the coordinated effort break down? If you threw someone who hadn't practiced with the group into that YouTube demonstration, it would quickly devolve into chaos.
Not everyone is going to want to turn over driving to the machine, and even if they are required by law to do so there will almost certainly have to be some scenarios grandfathered in. How will those situations be handled?
Have gnu, will travel.
Pedestrians? Cyclists?
Not everything is going to be controlled by computer
...those pesky humans who want to cross the street. If only we could find a way to autonomously walk, we could program humans not to be so annoying.
Ain't the future, I've been ignoring them for 30 years.
Table-ized A.I.
Here it is in Futurama:
http://theinfosphere.org/File:Chapek_9_Traffic.png
not impractical at all on the smaller level. They are adding them all over the place in the residential areas around here. The huge advantage is that they slow down the idiots that blast through the neighborhood at 50. most people now drive far close to the speed limit.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Some of us still walk too
A research team at the University of Texas at Austin has proposed the same idea a decade ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbAI40dK0A
Traffic lights are not just for cars.
What about pedestrians?
Flying cars for everyone!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's nice, but motor vehicles aren't the only users of intersections and roads.
I'll pretend to have this technology as I go screaming through the intersections.
Now they can drive drunk with impunity! But I suppose they'll be disappointed that they don't get to kill thousands of white Americans every year by running into them while driving drunk...
In order for this to work all vehicles with human drivers would have to be taken off the roads. Also, classes of vehicles such as motorcycles might have to be eliminated. And I suspect that passengers would have to be blindfolded and the driver unable to interrupt the computer in control. People entering an intersection at 40 miles per hour would be terrified to see another vehicle, at a 90-degree angle that would only miss hitting them by a foot or so. Considering peoples' passions for driving I don't see this happening for many decades.
Yeah!
We seem to be really rushing in to this whole automated car thing and people are going end up dead. Seriously.. .Google gets into an accident with a BUS two weeks ago and this week they are trying to justify cars without steering wheels? Have they gone back to the drawing board and tested all possible scenerios related to the accident two weeks ago? Have they tested in all kinds of weather? I invite them to where I live, where lanes on a road don't matter and a four inch deep rut can send a car sideways if you don't line the tires up with it. Now put that rut in traffic.
Seriously, they are not ready and I wouldn't expect them to be ready for at least another five years at least.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So, the self-driving cars should be spreaded all around the world first. for now, I cannot imagine the road without any traffic lights, but I cannot say that that is impossible either because I've seen so many impossible things became possible.
If this is the level we are to expect from MIT in the future we are in bad shape.
I've seen this traffic system before
In order for this to be implemented in the real world, there will have to be a standard.
The standard will be subject to creative interpretation.
Vendors will compete on how good their creative interpretation is at getting you through the intersection faster.
In other words, if this happens, it will turn into a high tech version of the game kids call "chicken".
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
What would be the comparative advantage with respect to a roundabout?
I know they are not very popular in the US, but they can be very efficient, and prevent the frustration of waiting at busy intersection (especially if going in the non-popular direction).
Speed and wear-and-tear. A computer system can keep traffic moving through an intersection at speed in both directions, interleaving cars. But if there is a roundabout, both of the cars have to make (usually) tight turns, resulting in centripetal force and a corresponding need to slow down.
For human drivers, roundabouts cause fewer deaths (because people slow down) but more collisions (because more judgment is involved in determining stay-vs-go).
This method requires too many beneficial ifs and doesn't account for any of the adverse ifs. If there is a power outage and the intersection can't coordinate cars, what happens? If there's no line of sight to crossing traffic for the autonomous cars via weather or elevation, what happens? How does it handle pedestrians or unusual traffic like a windmill flatbed or a wide load? All of these things have to have a smooth transition mechanism.
Whenever someone says X won't be needed or Y is the future, I'm always amazed by the assumptions they've unconsciously made about how X or Y is used across the country. (To the extent that "meddlers" tend to be Silicon Valley or New York residents, the mistakes are often similar.)
The US is a big country, San Francisco, CA and San Diego, CA are different, let alone San Francisco, CA and San Diego, TX.
In some places, no one drives unless they have to, and many don't even know how. In others, if you don't have a car you're insane, a child, or literally are unable to acquire one. In some places, it's 72 degrees F for 95% of the year, in others you spend 5 months surrounded by snow.
It's a big country. Take a road trip or three before you offer your prescription for what people 1000's of miles away from you need. And when describing "how things are", always pre-pend with the phrase "In my State, ...."
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
...until matter transporters are in place!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.