Comment by wsinks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wsinks | Hacker News Reader

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I take point with your use of 'correctly' because traffic engineering cannot get every car to its destination without stopping it even if it knew every destination.

Cars already do talk to various traffic lights via underground sensors and occasionally a camera. The investment required to have a fully networked traffic light system with a centralized controller would be immense, and would create an organization with a natural government given monopoly.

Your use of 'correctly' paints a world that seems ripe for more corruption and ultimately worse timings across the network. If you wrote 'better', then I wouldn't have commented. I think I'm nitpicking

This is getting into traffic research territory - i.e. given the entire dataset (current and historic) can you shorten average trip time vs individual cars just doing whats best for them. Either way, having a real time data infrastructure seems only positive.

Traffic lights are already remotely controlled by city planning departments, it's the software that's missing. My whole point is that driverless cars, where the city enforces data sharing and maybe even some routing, can have a real impact on throughput times.

The best part is that most of this is just software. And not ~$2B to make a 1.7 mile subway line or 10+years to make a bus lane (see SF)

I agree with you that the idea seems intuitively like it would be better, however I'm skeptical that it will work and that it is the 'correct' way to run traffic.

To quote your own example, this will be controlled by the government, which takes a long time to do physical infrastructure projects. So I would lately just assume it's not worth the investment dollars.

That’s the best part. The pooled driverless EVs doesn’t require any physical infra for the govt to build or buy! It’s one reason I think we’ll get to a more optimal future vs public transit which requires big govt programs and building.

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