There's a major arterial near my house. One day, the power went out in the area, and the traffic lights went dead. I discovered to my amusement that throughput on the arterial and its crossings increased dramatically, as drivers simply cooperated with each other.
There are already cameras on top of all the lights. How hard can it be to hook them up to AI that is instructed to maximize throughput? The current system will block 3 directions while having a green light on the 4th which has no traffic.
I once complained to a friend about this, and he told me that the traffic engineers were experts and I was lying. The next day I was driving on that road, and got a red light. You could see on down the distance 3 greens. There was no other traffic, and no cross traffic. So I sent him a photo. He conceded :-)
Yeah, my city traffic engineer is an ass too. There was an intersection I went through every time I left my old house. Outside of rush hour, it functioned much better as a four-way stop than a signalled intersection. I pointed this out and he said “that is inappropriate for two arterials”. Um, I live there. You don’t.
WalterBright · · focus · HN ↗
There are already cameras on top of all the lights. How hard can it be to hook them up to AI that is instructed to maximize throughput? The current system will block 3 directions while having a green light on the 4th which has no traffic.
I once complained to a friend about this, and he told me that the traffic engineers were experts and I was lying. The next day I was driving on that road, and got a red light. You could see on down the distance 3 greens. There was no other traffic, and no cross traffic. So I sent him a photo. He conceded :-)
devilbunny · · focus · HN ↗