Which basically removes people.
A simple fact is that faster moving traffic is necessarily less dense; the gaps between vehicles must be larger to account for small variations that matter more and more at speed.
Let's ban distracting billboards in more States, as in Maine, Vermont, Alaska, and Hawaii.
Let's expand annual vehicle inspections to more States.
More surveillance tech, automation, and regulations aren't the answer.
I'm not sure that follows. Cars that communicate can accelerate and brake together even in unexpected situations.
You need the space because of variations in cars; some have better brakes than others, some may be heavier so need more time to slow down, others may be on wetter patch of road, etc.
And one car may not even get the signal, so only slows down when it observes the vehicle ahead of it doing, an observation that needs time.
Or a car starts accelerating as the one in front just stalls.
It may all be better than human reaction times, but for robustness, which is really very necessary, you're going to get the same dynamics.
And this all assumes only good actors; somewhat optimistic in my view.
This isn't entirely true, connected vehicles would still have some delay due to radio propagation time, but it's ns per vehicle instead of hundreds of milliseconds. Additionally, you can entirely compensate for it in ways you really can't with humans.
A horde of cars where 100% of them consistently operate in a failure-free state and have comms that can't be hampered by the environment - that group could maybe do this.
For example, cars could share the positions of pedestrians and bikes with each other to ensure that even cars with no direct line of sight are aware of them, making the roads safer for everyone.
Likewise, if traffic lights are integrated into the system, the waiting times could be much shorter as cars can dynamically slow down to allow pedestrians to cross, wihtout being contrained by fixed time blocks of green/red.
They don't scale to really busy streets, and one of the failure modes would be perpetually blocked vehicles.
And this still leaves other road users that aren't autonomous cars up in the air.
If you put a cam and a computer with a crosswalk it can rigorously figure out (and transmit) someone is crossing the road. Very much more so than a vehicle approaching from around the corner.
Only if there is something seriously wrong with the road system. A highway ought to have higher throughput than any surface road. What you describe is not normal or nominal
But I guess this would work/be status quo for non-autos if we kept the signals so peds and bikes knew they could still cross and probably not get run over by someone who decided to switch back to manual control.
Yup, those trains! They'd have a shorter and more irregular schedule, but autonomous convoys would behave pretty similarly to that. Outside of emergencies like drivers assuming control to swerve into pedestrians, I guess.
Plus, like you say, no need to remove any of the infrastructure of really safety assumptions of today, just augment.
And notably, trains don't stop for pedestrians.
Or another way:
Roads are a shared resource. Train tracks are not.
the issue is that unlike trains, roads are so numerous that they are hard to avoid, and it is financially unrealistic to bridge or tunnel for non-motorized users across every road, particularly if you want that crossing to be accessible.
Near me? A few. Not sure how busy, but I get caught on my commute about once a week.
While I totally agree with your points, I don't see how this is any worse than today. Connected convoys don't need to go at every green light (like that one robot planet from Futurama) they can wait for pedestrians. The biggest difference would be clearing intersections quicker.
If anything, it might codify how hostile parts of the US already are to pedestrians, with beg buttons that may or may not work properly. More efficient cycles with less gaps may give people even less time to dart across during a cycle where they may not have the green but there is no cross traffic.
None of this resembles the way we treat cars at all.
The biggest use of simultaneously acceleration in those situations would be around road maintenance and other situation where road speed or number of lanes are reduced, with heavy congestion as a result.
PLEASE build human scaled walkways _away_ from roadways. In my climate zone, please also provide roofing over them to shade from solar and downpour events.
My dude, this is literally exactly what I had in mind.
Cars are freedom, cars are status, and the people who don’t want them are peons in relation to those who do. This is a fact of living in societies with the best transit in the world. Using it is simply admitting that you’re poor.
Though I suppose, mixed cities will ultimately push cars out, which will separate the two better and allow the car world to do whatever automated works it wants without harming anyone
You can't design the world as anyone is a good actor. Most are indeed good actors, but most and all are different quantities.
That's why the approach should be very careful in what to trust or not. Not only: there are various situation where it's not possible to avoid a crash but there are few possible crash options, the human might choose badly (for him/her, for someone else) but it's a personal choice. A machine choice it's the responsibility of the machine vendor if any. So even if today there are essentially a lack of norms on that topic being "so new essentially not existent", tomorrow we will need to state clearly it a car crash while self-driving ALL consequences, positive and negative must be on the car's OEM. As a result such ADAS will be less and less "acting" trying to protect their OEM more than anyone else, defeating the initial purpose.
The sole solution for this responsibility is that such systems are not made by a company but by an open community, so they are a product of humanity not of some vendor, and we are all partially responsible and partially in control of them. This of course can only exists in a society where universities are OPEN and FREE for all, funded by the public not some private interests, so all can participate depending on individual skills and will, not on wealth. FLOSS must be mandatory to avoid making it a business at all.
Something theoretically possible of course, but very unlikely in current societies...
If the cars could come to a consensus about the maximum common braking ability between them, they could also coordinate all of them stopping at that rate.
As another commenter has pointed out such a system makes life for other road users: cyclists, pedestrians, horses, most uncomfortable (to put it it exceedingly mildly).
How would this work? If even a single car has a malfunction it would cause a massive pile up? The amount of work people will do to avoid using trains is insane
I was at a stoplight the other day and I was about 30 cars back. I could still see when the light turned green. I counted ~30 seconds before the car in front of me moved at all. I did not make it through the light.
If the cars could talk to each other, they could all start moving together (slowly) and then accelerate and spread out, resulting in much higher throughput and preventing traffic jams.
From a standstill, all vehicles waiting could accelerate simultaneously rather than create pressure waves due to human reaction times.
With fully-autonomous coordination, might also be possible to do away with traffic lights and other control elements to negotiate scheduling of vehicles moving across each other so they cross intersections using precisely-allocated time slots without stopping.