I wonder about this. Certainly this is true about the current state of autonomous cars, but...
Hypothetically, if all the cars are synced, you eliminate certain congestion effects. E.g. traffic congestion travels backwards like a wave. But if all cars stop and start in unison, that's eliminated.
Likewise, synchronized cars can drive closer to each other, merge more efficiently, and reserve alternate routes.
> Hypothetically, if all the cars are synced, you eliminate certain congestion effects.
Sure if you also remove, people, bikes and everything else. Congratulation, you just invented a grade separation. And if you are going threw all the effort of grade separation, you know what a good idea? To push as many people as possible along that route. And you know how you do that, by not putting each human into a huge 2t box of steel.
If you had the incredibly inefficiency of cars, to grade separate you would need to grade separate a HUGE space. And grade separation is incredibly disruptive. Grade separation is only worth if you can push lots of people threw.
> Likewise, synchronized cars can drive closer to each other
Because synchronized cars never have a mechanical failures or emergency break?
Here is an idea, you create these things called 'couplers' and then you physically couple multiple 'cars' together and then you actually can be really close together.
How about this, we move away from cars, and have beautiful parks for the people who live in these places. with nice restaurants having seats in what is now the road, with some nice not so fast trams going threw. And then some nice high density rail under or over on a guide-way.
Here is a good video going threw all these points and how great this scenario actually would be.
> Sure if you also remove, people, bikes and everything else.
To clarify, I'm talking about fluid-dynamic-like models of traffic congestion (oversimplification: traffic behaves like a compressible fluid). It's been a while since I studied this, but my impression is that synchronizing can eliminate some of these effects (perhaps make traffic more like a non-compressible fluid).
So I wasn't implying that people and bikes and mechanical failures would never stop traffic, but rather that traffic can better respond to those obstacles, and flow rate can be improved.
It's nothing but a dream for now, but in a distant future, self-driving cars wouldn't need to obey any human traffic controls because they could seamlessly weave through intersecting traffic.
I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, but as someone who primarily walks and bikes it absolutely is my dream. Self-driving vehicles will obey all traffic laws, have super-human attention and focus, show absolute deference toward vulnerable road users, never road-rage, never "roll coal", and will probably honk only in the most unusual of circumstances.
Perhaps in the future I'll have enough trust in autonomous digital systems (and their designers) to close my eyes and walk across a street while high-speed traffic seamlessly weaves around me, but the sum of my experiences to date don't give me confidence that these sorts of systems wont occasionally fail in extremely catastrophic ways.
At least when I cross in front of a human driver I can ensure that they're looking me in the eye while they run me over.
> At least when I cross in front of a human driver I can ensure that they're looking me in the eye while they run me over.
I think you would be lucky to get such a courtesy. Most drivers probably wouldn't notice they ran you over unless it showed up in the stream they were watching on their phone while "driving".
I think you'll be surprised at how quickly you get use to self driving cars. They're technologically completely amazing, but about as exciting as an elevator in operation.
Yeah that works exactly as long as you don't 'abuse' the AI and simply cross the road whenever you like. And then we are back in the 'jaywalking' logic. Why should AI cars break for you if you are braking the law.
And eventually its either illegal or exactly like in the 30-40, some car people will start to build rails, so you can't cross the street whenever you want.
Actually building safe infrastructure where bikes are save, is the actual solution. And we don't need fancy AI cars to it either.
> Why should AI cars break for you if you are braking the law.
Building technology that acts in the same space as biological beings obviously must acknowledge their indeterminate behaviour. Children, elderly, and pets exist and must be accounted for, a model of reality that assumes everyone following laws is flawed, all that. What you’re describing is obviously unrealistic and not what will happen.
What will happen is that you simply prevent people from getting on the road with physical barriers. This happened in some place in the 30s and even where it didn't, it was simply made illegal.
Hypothetically, if all the cars are synced, you eliminate certain congestion effects. E.g. traffic congestion travels backwards like a wave. But if all cars stop and start in unison, that's eliminated.
Likewise, synchronized cars can drive closer to each other, merge more efficiently, and reserve alternate routes.