[ExI] Driverless cars for law enforcement

[Dave Sill]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:58 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 , Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Irresponsible, yes. But speed limits are sometimes ridiculously low and
>> speeding isn't *always* unsafe.
>>
>
> Agreed, but what really gets me is that in 2015 most traffic lights just
> run off a timer (usually mistimed and out of phase with other traffic
> lights) and are as stupid as they were in 1950.
>

I couldn't agree more, John. Timing lights seems like such a simple problem
compared to, e.g., self-driving cars. But if we can't do that simple thing,
how are going to make real progress?

Imagine self-driving cars that advertized their project routes to a central
traffic control system that could not only time lights but adjust the speed
and routes of cars to optimize flow? Of course, the biggest wins would be
when there are no human-driven cars on the road. Red lights would be
unnecessary because cars could safely interleave through intersections.
Passengers might not want to watch, though.

-Dave
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20150217/dbf92595/attachment.html>