4 ms·

The article is fairly unimaginative. First, when most vehicles are self-driving, you no longer need traffic lights or lanes. An urban street that is currently

by kps 13y ago

The article is fairly unimaginative. First, when most vehicles are self-driving, you no longer need traffic lights or lanes. An urban street that is currently 2+2 lanes could be used as 4+1 in the morning and 1+4 in the evening if that is what traffic requires. Second, self-driving vehicles remove a current disincentive to commuter microcars. A single person could easily get around in a car a third the size of a current subcompact if they didn't have to worry about being run over by land yachts. Beyond the lower cost, a half-lane vehicle could have a speed advantage in urban traffic.

Zigurd 13y ago
The article just mentions the perverse result that drivers drive closer to cyclists wearing helmets. That's just one aspect of how poorly most drivers drive near cyclists. Imagine being able to ride your bike in complete safety because the car behind you is literally incapable of running you over.
- jellicle 13y ago
  You may not have paid much attention in physics class, but there is no possibility at all of having a situation where vehicles are both "literally incapable of running you over" and are travelling at a speed greater than 10mph or so.
  - gverri 13y ago
    That's not true. A self-driven car is made to anticipate decisions. Just like a normal human can stop if it sees something approaching. The difference is that the attention span, view range and response time of an AI is much superior than that of us. Of course it won't be 100% perfect. But just enough to make traffic some orders of magnitude safer.
- ufmace 13y ago
  On the flip side, imagine what some cyclists will do if the cars are actually programmed to never run them over, no matter what they do. They would have to be given a pretty large 'bubble' around them with relatively slow traffic to really make sure of this, and then some cyclist will be a jerk and swerve all over the road erratically, throwing traffic into fits, just because he can do it safely. That's one of the trickier aspects of robo-cars that we'll have to figure out how to deal with when they start making up a significant amount of traffic. When humans are in control, there will always be a few people who are inclined to act like jerks as long as they can get away with it. On the roads today, the imperfect drivers around us and the prospect of a nasty crash tends to keep us all honest. What would the troublemakers do if the roads were 95%+ robo-cars that will drive such as to never hit them, no matter what they do?
  - Zigurd 13y ago
    Seems like a non-problem. Self driving cars won't bunch up behind slow traffic, or will route around it. Lots of cities move at bicycle speed or lower, and the only reason cyclists are not out in traffic lanes away from where they can be "doored" is aggressive drivers. You might even decide to bike if it got safer.
noir_lord 13y ago
Small high speed enclosed golf carts that drive you to the office, drive off and charge themselves then either move the next person or wait for you to finish before driving you home. I'd love one of those, you could even have a pool of larger internal combustion engined ones if you know your trip is going to exceed the range of the golf cart.
nkoren 13y ago
Sure, if you have 100% self-driving vehicles with good vehicle-to-vehicle communications, you can even do intersections like this: http://vimeo.com/37751380 http://vimeo.com/37751380 However, there's one further requirement for removing traffic lights and lanes and such: no pedestrians (try to imagine crossing the street in the above simulation). If you believe that cities should be designed for human beings, then this is a real problem. So let's say you want to remove the traffic lights and create a high-speed continuous-flow system comprised of lightweight energy-efficient micro-cars. How could you make this compatible with human habitation? By removing the roads entirely, and running the vehicles on cheap segregated infrastructure, either below or above ground. Sound fanciful? This technology already exists, and is much more mature than self-driving cars. It's called "Personal Rapid Transit" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit), and has been prototyped successfully for decades. The first commercial system began operating in 2010, and there are now three PRT networks in public operation (The Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, Terminal 5 at London Heathrow Airport, and a national park in Suncheon South Korea). When it comes to self-driving cars, freeways / motorways will be relatively easy to automate, because they are already pedestrian-free continuous-flow environments. I expect to see vehicles available which can do that by the end of this decade, or possibly early next decade. Mixed-mode surface streets will be far more difficult, however, and while they are likely to become automated in the longer term, I suspect that this will only happen at very low speeds -- possibly as low as 10 km/hr, which is the speed at which humans and vehicles can interoperate in a truly safe manner.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Cool, they incorporated turns! I saw that no-stop intersection when they first had it with purely straight traffic and no turns, and never checked it out again. My problem with that approach is that there seems to be very little room for error. And while we might say that AI drivers wouldn't make errors, the rest of the equipment is not necessarily so reliable. Seems like such an intersection would be one seized brake line or one engine sputter away from massive fiery death.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
coob 13y ago
> An urban street that is currently 2+2 lanes could be used as 4+1 in the morning and 1+4 in the evening if that is what traffic requires. No need for self driving cars to do this…
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > No need for self driving cars to do this… 100% self-driving cars may reduce the marginal infrastructure costs of enabling this conversion, thus making it economical to do on more of the roads where it might be useful; its done now in some places, but its usually limited to the very worst bottlenecks because the cost of doing it safely (usually involving retractable dividers and lots of signage and other signalling systems.)

by kps 13y ago

Zigurd 13y ago

The article just mentions the perverse result that drivers drive closer to cyclists wearing helmets. That's just one aspect of how poorly most drivers drive near cyclists. Imagine being able to ride your bike in complete safety because the car behind you is literally incapable of running you over.

jellicle 13y ago
You may not have paid much attention in physics class, but there is no possibility at all of having a situation where vehicles are both "literally incapable of running you over" and are travelling at a speed greater than 10mph or so.
- gverri 13y ago
  That's not true. A self-driven car is made to anticipate decisions. Just like a normal human can stop if it sees something approaching. The difference is that the attention span, view range and response time of an AI is much superior than that of us. Of course it won't be 100% perfect. But just enough to make traffic some orders of magnitude safer.
ufmace 13y ago
On the flip side, imagine what some cyclists will do if the cars are actually programmed to never run them over, no matter what they do. They would have to be given a pretty large 'bubble' around them with relatively slow traffic to really make sure of this, and then some cyclist will be a jerk and swerve all over the road erratically, throwing traffic into fits, just because he can do it safely. That's one of the trickier aspects of robo-cars that we'll have to figure out how to deal with when they start making up a significant amount of traffic. When humans are in control, there will always be a few people who are inclined to act like jerks as long as they can get away with it. On the roads today, the imperfect drivers around us and the prospect of a nasty crash tends to keep us all honest. What would the troublemakers do if the roads were 95%+ robo-cars that will drive such as to never hit them, no matter what they do?
- Zigurd 13y ago
  Seems like a non-problem. Self driving cars won't bunch up behind slow traffic, or will route around it. Lots of cities move at bicycle speed or lower, and the only reason cyclists are not out in traffic lanes away from where they can be "doored" is aggressive drivers. You might even decide to bike if it got safer.

noir_lord 13y ago

Small high speed enclosed golf carts that drive you to the office, drive off and charge themselves then either move the next person or wait for you to finish before driving you home. I'd love one of those, you could even have a pool of larger internal combustion engined ones if you know your trip is going to exceed the range of the golf cart.

nkoren 13y ago

Sure, if you have 100% self-driving vehicles with good vehicle-to-vehicle communications, you can even do intersections like this: http://vimeo.com/37751380 http://vimeo.com/37751380 However, there's one further requirement for removing traffic lights and lanes and such: no pedestrians (try to imagine crossing the street in the above simulation). If you believe that cities should be designed for human beings, then this is a real problem. So let's say you want to remove the traffic lights and create a high-speed continuous-flow system comprised of lightweight energy-efficient micro-cars. How could you make this compatible with human habitation? By removing the roads entirely, and running the vehicles on cheap segregated infrastructure, either below or above ground. Sound fanciful? This technology already exists, and is much more mature than self-driving cars. It's called "Personal Rapid Transit" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit), and has been prototyped successfully for decades. The first commercial system began operating in 2010, and there are now three PRT networks in public operation (The Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, Terminal 5 at London Heathrow Airport, and a national park in Suncheon South Korea). When it comes to self-driving cars, freeways / motorways will be relatively easy to automate, because they are already pedestrian-free continuous-flow environments. I expect to see vehicles available which can do that by the end of this decade, or possibly early next decade. Mixed-mode surface streets will be far more difficult, however, and while they are likely to become automated in the longer term, I suspect that this will only happen at very low speeds -- possibly as low as 10 km/hr, which is the speed at which humans and vehicles can interoperate in a truly safe manner.

mikeash 13y ago
Cool, they incorporated turns! I saw that no-stop intersection when they first had it with purely straight traffic and no turns, and never checked it out again. My problem with that approach is that there seems to be very little room for error. And while we might say that AI drivers wouldn't make errors, the rest of the equipment is not necessarily so reliable. Seems like such an intersection would be one seized brake line or one engine sputter away from massive fiery death.
- knowaveragejoe 13y ago

coob 13y ago

> An urban street that is currently 2+2 lanes could be used as 4+1 in the morning and 1+4 in the evening if that is what traffic requires. No need for self driving cars to do this…

dragonwriter 13y ago
> No need for self driving cars to do this… 100% self-driving cars may reduce the marginal infrastructure costs of enabling this conversion, thus making it economical to do on more of the roads where it might be useful; its done now in some places, but its usually limited to the very worst bottlenecks because the cost of doing it safely (usually involving retractable dividers and lots of signage and other signalling systems.)