Autonomous Vehicles and Intersections

As we’ve seen, there is no question that Autonomous Vehicles can already navigate and keep from colliding. They can even do it in 4-Dimensions: the usual 3 in space plus Time. Let’s see what that means for our current approaches to traffic control, starting with intersections.

With cars controlled by people, crossing roads are a major source of crashes and injuries. So we have invented a whole range of control mechanisms: stop signs, traffic lights, traffic circles, clover-leafs, and jug-handles (a New Jersey oddity – I love this Wikipedia entry because the language is almost as confusing as the intersections J). These do a reasonable job of reducing crashes (euphemistically called “accidents”, but I believe that is just an attempt to hide the seriousness of this national calamity, 40,000 deaths/year and 1 million injuries; they may not be “on-purposes” but that doesn’t make them accidents, at least one person or vehicle was at fault, so I will avoid the euphemism).

However, these mechanisms also delay and annoy us, and have their own share of crashes. (Have you noticed that lately there seem to be more people running red lights, creeping ahead after stopping, and other egregious behavior?)

Anyway, if you think about what the copter swarms are doing, it’s clear that Autonomous Vehicles don’t need any such controls at intersections! They don’t even need to slow down! They can just time their crossings so they don’t run into each other. Later I’ll talk about my proposals for intersections and traffic management in more detail, but you get the basic idea.

Unless you love roller coasters and bumper cars, as I do, you may not want to be watching out the window while your Autonomous Vehicle whizzes through an intersection at 120 mph, only feet away from a vehicle crossing in front of you. But I predict very few people will be looking out the window anyway, they will be too busy reading, writing, texting, dictating, watching videos, talking, and other more physical activities.

To get from my house to the mall (hey, it’s New Jersey) I go through 3 stop signs and 8 traffic lights, one of them twice because of the jug handle. So it takes 10-15 minutes to go 5 miles, even though the speed limit on most of the distance is 50 mph. And at busy times it takes a lot longer.

And of course the speed limits are another mechanism for managing crashes. So the 25 mph, 40 mph, 45 mph, and 50 mph speed limits I encounter on that trip to the mall can be replaced with whatever the Autonomous Vehicles can safely manage in each situation.

Thus I predict that one of the big attractions for Autonomous Vehicles, and my proposed system, is how fast you get where you want to go. And also how fast you can get things delivered to you.