4 ms·

> By offering laminar rather than turbulent flow. That's only going to work on roads that are AI-only.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
There are already cities where buying a car is difficult and/or expensive because of traffic concerns. Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, ... I don’t see an AI requirement to be a huge hurdle for those cities.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  There are other actors on the road, namely pedestrians and cyclists. Unless we're going to remove the right of citizens to the street at all, they will be present and will need to be accommodated for.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Computers can or will deal with the other actors as well as humans do now, which is quite a low bar anyways.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      My point is that unless you get rid of them completely, traffic flow is not going to increase. You can't have free-flowing traffic everywhere and also have pedestrians safely crossing the street, and the lower bound on a traffic light cycle today is the amount of time it takes an old person to cross the street from curb to curb.
      - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        That neglects limited access roads and wide boulevards. In either case, even if pedestrians aren’t banned, they are rare enough to be an exception rather than a rule. For example, the old guy trying to make their way across 8-lane Chang-an Road in Beijing...well, there is a reason Chang an road forces pedestrians onto bridges.
        bobthepanda 7y ago
        By and large, today the congestion problem is not really on the massive roads themselves, but where they interface with low-capacity local networks. Most destinations are not located on a limited access road by definition, and the busy exit into city center with lots of pedestrians is not going to get any less congested, AVs or not. In modern Western urban planning, large car-capacity streets aren't considered a good thing to be running through urban areas anyways. Most of the large cities (Paris, Berlin, New York) are taking steps to reduce road widths to more equally distribute the road between pedestrians, cyclists and transit users. As it turns out, building pedestrian overpasses at a convenient enough spacing for pedestrians is extremely expensive.

There are already cities where buying a car is difficult and/or expensive because of traffic concerns. Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, ... I don’t see an AI requirement to be a huge hurdle for those cities.

bobthepanda 7y ago
There are other actors on the road, namely pedestrians and cyclists. Unless we're going to remove the right of citizens to the street at all, they will be present and will need to be accommodated for.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Computers can or will deal with the other actors as well as humans do now, which is quite a low bar anyways.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    My point is that unless you get rid of them completely, traffic flow is not going to increase. You can't have free-flowing traffic everywhere and also have pedestrians safely crossing the street, and the lower bound on a traffic light cycle today is the amount of time it takes an old person to cross the street from curb to curb.
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      That neglects limited access roads and wide boulevards. In either case, even if pedestrians aren’t banned, they are rare enough to be an exception rather than a rule. For example, the old guy trying to make their way across 8-lane Chang-an Road in Beijing...well, there is a reason Chang an road forces pedestrians onto bridges.
      - bobthepanda 7y ago
        By and large, today the congestion problem is not really on the massive roads themselves, but where they interface with low-capacity local networks. Most destinations are not located on a limited access road by definition, and the busy exit into city center with lots of pedestrians is not going to get any less congested, AVs or not. In modern Western urban planning, large car-capacity streets aren't considered a good thing to be running through urban areas anyways. Most of the large cities (Paris, Berlin, New York) are taking steps to reduce road widths to more equally distribute the road between pedestrians, cyclists and transit users. As it turns out, building pedestrian overpasses at a convenient enough spacing for pedestrians is extremely expensive.