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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Next step: all cars are driven automatically and completely synchronized within the city. The capacity gains we could achieve would be astronomical, while parking would become a thing of the past (just treat them like taxis).

I'm very excited about what cities will look like in the future!

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Sometimes I like to imagine what the world would be like if we could have portals. Imagine a door with a keypad, you dial the number of the door you want to connect to, the other end authorizes it and you get portals between the two. Tourism would instantly stop existing, because everyone would live everywhere. The super market would be, literally, next door. The post office would stop existing, Amazon deliveries would be next-second. You might not even need stuff, just pool them with your friends in a shared storage locker for all of you to use.

It'd be amazing.

You need to read The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

I'll give it a try, thank you.

The Hyperion series by Dan Simmons also had a great envisioning of the use of portals (multidimensional houses, the endless river) and a secret downside.

I like the idea of making the cost of transportation negligable.

We'd waste less oil than we currently do.

Crime would be much simpler, too.

I imagine it would! You could rob a house and escape to the other side of the world right away. It would also be a great equalizer, as there would instantly be no borders. Countries would break down and lead to a single language before long. There would also probably be no sense of community, at least not based on where you live.

The Hyperion cantos has an exploration of a similar concept, if you are into sf. Although I can only truly recommend the first book, and to a lesser extent, the second.

Ah, it will probably interest me, thanks. I'll try the first book.

Every time I'm waiting to move past a red light, I wonder what the gains would be if all the dopes in front of me (and piloting my car, and the ones behind me) accelerated more-or-less in concert. It is very, very annoying to wait for the "wave" of moving to work its way back, once you become aware of it...

There would still be some slack in the movement, we could just reduce it substantially. Couple auto car pilots with electric drive trains that provide dependable and fast acceleration...that slack could be very small indeed!

But then, if all your cars were controlled automatically, why would you even need to stop. They could mostly just slow down and hit the lights when they were always green! Perfect synchronization!

Or have no traffic lights and the cars intersecting detect and adjust speed accordingly/create gaps/etc (would look/be scary but it'd work).

The wave exists because you need following distance to drive safely.

Also, because people have relatively slow reactions. A computer could do much better, of course, and still preserve a reasonable amount of safety.

This is my hope for Google cars. Autodriving taxis -- make them with all electric vehicles that stop for recharge when they're low and are replaced by another fleet vehicle? Perfection.

In your future, why do we still have to move?

People like freedom of travel? It would be depressing to spend all day at home, even if it was possible.

If we're only travelling when we like, we might as well drive the cars :)

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