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.

Comments

Pedestrians

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:If something does go wrong

[dgatwood]

Humans suck at driving. The problem is that 99.999% of the time, you can be borderline incompetent at driving and you'll still get there safely, because things only go wrong on rare occasions. Most of the time, at city street speeds, you could glance at the road for two seconds out of every ten, and you wouldn't crash, because there just isn't much happening. There are situations, however, in which humans are physically incapable of being good drivers. For example:

• Fatigue/falling asleep at the wheel (computers don't get tired)
• Distractions (both driver-initiated and external, e.g. rubbernecking at a wreck site; computers don't get distracted)
• Sudden, unexpected traffic stops in front of you (human reaction time is a large fraction of a second, versus microseconds)
• Backing out of a parking place into traffic (limited human vision versus ability to simultaneously monitor cameras pointed in every direction)
• Intoxication
• Cardiac arrest/seizure/narcolepsy/other medical issues or events

And in some cases, each of those situations can result in a crash with a human driver, depending mostly on luck. Computers, by contrast, won't exhibit any of those physical failings, and thus won't crash in any of those situations, typically.

So the key question is whether they will crash more often in other situations where a human wouldn't (e.g. when nothing is going wrong). As long as that answer is no, then they will likely be safer than human drivers.

Regardless, automation can kinda sorta mostly run trains and other vehicles on fixed guideways in a pristine environment most of the time without failing. That's about the state of things and it's not changing all that fast despite the constant droning from the "futurists" who have been wrong about absolutely everything ever.

That's just not true at all. Google's self-driving cars have clocked over a million miles on the roads, with basically no at-fault crashes. That's a far cry from barely being able to work in a pristine environment on a fixed guideway. It has some ability to recognize pedestrian behavior, avoid obstacles in the road, handle traffic lights (as long as it knows to look for them at a particular intersection), etc. It does require a lot of pre-mapping of the terrain so that it knows where to watch for traffic lights, roughly where lanes are, etc., but still, they've gone way beyond a subway system on a fixed track as you imply.