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in the self driving future, there will be a place for off road trucks and fast cars on race tracks. We probably won't let those type of vehicles on the main ro

• bitL 12y ago
  Still, if you think about it, what will be then the difference between having all cars self-driving, and public transport? All cars will be queued automatically, possibly flow-"optimized" at junctions, behaving like a special type of public transport (if we manage to create a proper real-time highly intelligent scheduling). When you look at how Google computes the fastest route in their maps/online navigation, they basically have some precomputed grid of "main" traffic centers, and they route all local traffic to the nearest of those centers. The main centers have pre-computed distances/times/routes between each other, so they can be stored in a distributed hashmap, and the lookup of the fastest route takes nanoseconds. The remaining "local" part is then computed on the fly. I am curious if a similar algorithm will be used in our self-driving future - you'd have local part of the route where you'll board a self-driving car and that will lead you to one of those "main" centers where a super-fast transport will move you to another "main" center, either by having you to board an express-train like device, or putting the whole car or just its interior there. What do you think? I think Chinese can probably experiment with such approach in one of their experimental cities ;-)