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The Intelligent Intersection Could Banish Traffic Lights Forever (arstechnica.com)
Jonathan M. Gitlin reports via Ars Technica: With a degree of coordination -- between vehicles, and with traffic infrastructure -- traffic chaos should theoretically be banished, and less congestion means fewer pollutants. Clemson researcher Ali Reza Fayazi has provided a tantalizing glimpse at that future, a proof-of-concept study showing that a fully autonomous four-way traffic intersection is a hundred times more efficient at letting traffic flow than the intersections you and I currently navigate. Because cars don't sit idling at the lights, Fayazi calculated it would also deliver a 19 percent fuel saving. Fayazi designed an intersection controller for a four-way junction that tracks vehicles and then uses an algorithm to control their speeds such that they can all pass safely through the junction with as few coming to a halt as possible. What makes the study particularly interesting is that Fayazi demonstrated it by interspersing his own physical car among the simulated traffic -- the first use of a vehicle-in-the-loop simulator for this kind of problem. Fayazi drove his real car at the International Transportation Innovation Center in Greenville, South Carolina, where a geofenced area was set up to use as the simulated intersection. Using GPS sensors, his car was just as visible to the intersection controller as the virtual autonomous vehicles that were also populating its memory banks. Ideally, Fayazi says he'd like to have tested it with an autonomous vehicle, but they are hard to come by, particularly in South Carolina. Instead, the intersection controller directly governed his speed in the study (as it did with the simulated vehicles), and this controller sent him a speed to maintain in order to safely cross the junction. Over the course of an hour, the intelligent intersection only required 11 vehicles to come to a complete halt. By contrast, when the simulation was run with a traffic light instead, more than 1,100 vehicles had to stop at the junction over the course of an hour.
Aside from the obvious pedestrian issues (which can be addressed by the Buddhist street crossing technique: just walk at a constant speed through the intersection), this is a pretty obvious solution.
...is way to make drivers drive at the mandated speeds. Which, of course, they won't do; you only have to look at how speed limits are obeyed to know that.
not CLEM-zun
...and motorcycles, and baby strollers, and delivery people moving boxes, and letter carriers, and dogs, and cats, and children playing.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I've driven a bunch of times lately in Europe and its amazing how long you can go without ever coming across a traffic light.
This sort of optimization can work well, obviously, for traffic continuing through the intersection, but what about real-world traffic that needs a left-turn at intersections?
But for now - as in, for at least the next couple of decades and probably longer - we need to allow for human drivers.
For as long as I can recall, my region has had semi-intelligent lights, with pre-set schedules tweaked by data gathered from sensor loops in the pavement.
Unfortunately, while that tells you if at least one person is waiting at the light, it doesn't tell you how many cars are coming, how far away they are, or how fast they're moving (though you could simply assume the speed limit for that last one).
By adding in some cameras to identify vehicles that aren't yet at the intersection, lights could anticipate and change for optimal flow. I can't count how many times I've sat waiting at a light while the other direction has no cars... only to see the light start changing they come around a corner. A smart light would have seen there was no traffic in the other direction and immediately flipped to green as I approached resulting in a lot less car idling. And you wouldn't have to rip up the intersection to put in the sensor loops, either.
Intelligent Intersections Already Exist, they're called "Roundabouts" or "Traffic Circles" depending on your geographic location.
In most cases they eliminate the need for idling cars, they process much more cars per minute than a traditional traffic light, all cars can go through at an intelligent speed without the need for computers or artificial intelligence calculating algorithms.
Best of all, it works with human controlled vehicles too. There's going to be a lot of them on the road for decades even if we have AI cars available to the public tomorrow.
It's really quite ridiculous we don't have more of them in the US instead of four-way stops and traffic lights.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Funny how this pops up and most of the comments are immediately pointing out obvious problems that everyone would have thought about. It's a proof of concept, and as a concept this is a seriously good one. Yes there's issues with pedestrians, and with cars not enrolled, but there's ways to manage and work around those. Intersections like these are the way of the future, as are autonomous vehicles. Driving a car is going to go the same way as riding a horse - a hobby activity not an every-day thing.
This is probably a bad idea. We know that eventually the roads will be owned by the corporations. The corporations will want to give preferences to businesses that are willing to pay more. Then we have a road neutrality movement. I have enough aggravation supporting net neutrality. Please don't add road neutrality to this list!
Also, isn't this kind of what roundabouts already accomplish in a fairly elegant way?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Aside from the whole how do pedestrians and other vehicles with either non-functioning or missing telemetry modules, how will this be kept secure and without the possibility of jamming or spoofing the signals?
As an experiment, this is interesting. As something practical, it doesn't work at all. We can eliminate traffic signals by making it illegal to have any vehicle that doesn't have the required hardware/software. Are people going to have autonomous refit kits for their classic cars. What happens when there is a problem with GPS? There could be a prank/civil disobedience movement that could snarl traffic all over - jamming GPS is ridiculously simple. Not to mention, imagine a nation set up this way. If a war broke out, one of the first things an enemy nation would do is bring their society to a screeching halt by jamming gps. Or even better, sending bad information.
I'll stop now, because I don't want to get too far into tl;dr territory, the whole thing boils down to spending a hellava lot of money to implement a terribly fragile solution to a problem.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I cannot remember which one it was, but one part of one comic had a way to change lights that was quite interesting. If more than one car is coming to an intersection and the light was red, you could put in money to make it change. The person who put in the most got it to change. Many times it would only take a penny, but if many rich people were in a hurry it could start a bidding war. I always think of this when I come to stupidly controlled red lights where I am the only car.
On another note, I was just in Norway and Denmark for 2 weeks. I rented a car and in most areas I was at there were no lights or stop signs. Almost all traffic was controlled by roundabouts where needed and places where there would have been a stop sign in the US, there was a yield sign in Norway. I liked it.
If you're in the US, face it, you live in a car centric society.....we're not all going to bend just of you (an insignificant minority).
I wouldn't be so sure of that. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was one example of the United States "bending" its regulation of interstate commerce to the needs of a minority.
If you can't afford to buy even a cheap used car, I'm having a problem knowing how you can afford to have a family with kids in the first place?
The family member without a car might not be the head of household but instead one of the kids, such as a high school senior or college student commuting to his first job.
But if you don't want to have a car...Uber it.
Uber has two expenses that a bicycle lacks. One is fares. The other is a cellular data plan, as not every place I go has an open WLAN.
Some areas accommodate bicycles just fine, though. Where I grew up riding bicycles was relatively safe compared to where I live now, where I wouldn't let my kids out of my neighborhood on their bikes. And the problem is not the bikes, it's the drivers. I do get what you're saying, though - if there's no room for a bike on the road, it shouldn't be there because it just screws everybody up, but there's no reason that, if we can have sidewalks for pedestrians, we can't have bike lanes.
We do live in a car-centric society, but I also think people are waking up to the problems this has caused and believe, on the whole, especially as time goes on, more and more people are dialing it back, taking public transportation, moving closer to work, telecommuting. At least, I hope we're waking up to the fact that it's caused more harm than good and wastes huge amounts of our personal time.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
They aren't crossing anything. They're literally riding on the pavement instead of the bike lane.
Nothing against cycling, but if the majority of them are going to cry to have tax-payer dollars spent on a fucking paved road just for them, it seems fucking stupid that they don't.
Yes, I'm getting angry.
I tend to rant.
Despite your rhetoric, you do point out a large problem, the glass left on the road. probably 99% of it is from either car accidents, or drivers/passengers in cars dropping bottles on the road into the cycling path. During cleanup after accidents it seems that the standard is to make it "good enough" for car traffic to go through with no thought of cycling traffic which is highly prone to punctures from pieces of glass. Why they don't take the extra 10 minutes to actually clean up all the glass is beyond me, other than their priority being to get car traffic flowing. It doesn't matter if you're riding 150 PSI road tires (though I mostly know only of 120 PSI being commonly ridden), or 60 PSI cross tires, they are all susceptible to sharp shards of glass working into the rubber and puncturing the inner tube. I've even had punctures on mountain bike tires riding down the same roads as my road bike.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]