Avoiding Red Lights By Booking Ahead 299
RedEaredSlider writes "Peter Stone, associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, has presented an idea at the AAAS meeting today for managing intersections: a computer in a car calls ahead to the nearest intersection it is headed towards, and says it will arrive at a given time. The intersection checks to see if anyone else is arriving then, and if the slot is open, it tells the car to proceed. If it isn't, it tells the car that the car remains responsible for slowing down or stopping. He says that even with only a few connected cars, the system still works, even if the benefits are still only to those who have the connected vehicles."
Re:Already implemented here (Score:4, Informative)
And they often don't detect motorcycles so you stand at a red light for a few minutes without crosstraffic until you decide to go ahead against the red light.
Re:Roundabouts (Score:5, Informative)
One source says there are less then 1200 roundabouts in the UK.
A slide in some American organisation's powerpoint presentation. It's ridiculously wrong.
There are 66 cities in the UK. That figure would mean just 18 roundabouts per city. If you forgot about all of the ones on the motorways and A roads in the countryside and towns. Which anyone who knows the UK can see is stupidly low.
Heck Milton Keynes alone has around 300 roundabouts, and thats only a town, not a city.
There doesn't appear to be any count of the number of roundabouts in the UK. There are far too many to count.
There's not really any reason to second guess why that powerpoint slide has it so wrong. But just for the hell of it... I guess they asked the UK Highways Agency. Which only maintains motorways and major trunk roads. Most roads and therefore roundabouts are under the jurisdiction of local councils. It's kind of like the difference between the US federal government and individual states and counties.