All it takes is a little bit of rain and hundreds of traffic lights go haywire in my city. What makes you think those beacons would fare any better? Politicians don't a crap for long term maintanance of little visibility infrastructure like that, so they're poorly funded.
And you say "private contactors will save the day", please, stop drinking the Ayn Rand Cool-aid.
It would definitely be useful for traffic lights to be beacons, but I think you might underestimate the government time scale for renovating and modernizing our infrastructure on a national scale.
Are you trolling? A startup for traffic lights? Versus actual civil engineers who aren't idiots and who have probably fully explored the solution space of traffic handling arrangements?
Traffic is a political problem, not an engineering problem.
Yeah, for a lesser investment than that, they could put some basic sensors on so I'm not waiting with 10 other cars while a green light stays on 30 seconds in the other direction for absolutely nobody. "Improving traffic lights" is pretty low-hanging fruit.
Why should local municipalities foot the bill for adding beacons to stop lights, etc? I get trying to make infrastructure friendly towards self driving cars, but the general public should not be footing the bill for someone's life choice to buy such a vehicle.
Traffic lights are totally fixable, there's just a huge amount of legacy hard and software systems. Ten years, better tracking systems, and some fuzzy logic. Problem solved.
> Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers
That's because it's designed and run by the government, which has no interest in saving time.
How many hours do we all waste waiting for a light to change when there's no cross traffic? having a "platoon" of cars come to a halt to let one car cross? having a light turn yellow at the last moment to slam on the brakes? How much gas has this cost, too?
By mounting cameras on the lights and a little AI programming, and an optimization algorithm, I bet the lights could be a major factor in reducing gas consumption, smoothing traffic flow, reducing accidents, and saving time.
In fact, the AI could be self-learning, like the fuel injection systems on cars.
I take point with your use of 'correctly' because traffic engineering cannot get every car to its destination without stopping it even if it knew every destination.
Cars already do talk to various traffic lights via underground sensors and occasionally a camera. The investment required to have a fully networked traffic light system with a centralized controller would be immense, and would create an organization with a natural government given monopoly.
Your use of 'correctly' paints a world that seems ripe for more corruption and ultimately worse timings across the network. If you wrote 'better', then I wouldn't have commented. I think I'm nitpicking
My opinion is that the only reason of why governments don't do these is that there is no way to transmit signals from those points. I'm pretty sure that some street lamps do exactly this.
1. Do you want to be the local politician who says "hey, let's raise this to 55 MPH" and then on a bad weather day or just out of sheer bad luck soon after there's a major pile up and then said politician gets roasted?
1. The traffic lights need to be coordinated and that means presuming a certain speed. Now the problem is a lot of traffic lights are close enough that changing the programming of just one should ripple through the entire system and this recently (especially on a regulation making time scale) was a problem consuming extraordinary amounts of computing power.
"Traffic lights should respond to cars, not the other way around"
True, but believe it or not it is incredibly difficult to get right.
I'm on my local council and we recently did some prep work to look into adding "AI" to the towns traffic lights.
Here is the problem; you have to do a significant portion of the lights - or it actually gets worse. A stupid amount of planning goes into light sequencing (at least it does here....) on a macro-scale - so all of the towns lights are pretty much synced to optimize traffic flow as much as possible.
Imagine doing that on the fly for the entire town.
What ''has'' been suggested, and looks good, is a sort of hybrid approach - where traffic levels are monitored and a number of different optimized sequences used to clear traffic jams as appropriate. Even this is a pain because it is essentially the same as replacing the towns system three or four times over :)
And we are lucky in having a medium sized town with large areas of uninhabited farmland (read little traffic) around it.
Not that it isn't a good idea - but I don't think it is a very simple option.
Given the timelines this is happening along, it would not be surprising if we end up with a middle of the road solution that involves some kind of road marker/beacon standard to provide points of reference for these systems. It only took a decade or so to retrofit LED streetlights.
Give it ten years, and that traffic light problem may solve itself.
I would not surprise me if we would eventually see every traffic light broadcast its GPS location, cycle pattern, and phase, either using radio or by modulating their light source.
That still is risky (hackers could hack the logic in a traffic light), but less risky than relying on one central authority to know what he whole world looks like.
Also, I don't think it is a good idea, but chances are police officers will have ways to stop self-driving car without giving visual signs.
I've fantasized about making a more responsive, consistent traffic light for years. Every time it's the middle of the night and I'm sitting at a red light for no reason --- or when I figure out that the sensors are broken and I need to get out of the car and press the cross walk to have the light change, or when I'm on my bike and have no chance at all to trigger the sensors.
All these things I want fixed. I want stop lights to stop sucking.
I want an unprotected left to have the signal on the opposing side turn red sooner if there's a lot of people in the queue ... so that more than two cars can turn per green.
There's countless improvements that could be done but aren't that are purely in software and would use the same signal installations. We're not moving mountains here.
But clearly nobody has done this. Stoplights suck exactly the same ways, in exactly the same amounts, as they did 25 years ago.
And then, instead of making them suck less, we slap cameras on them to make sure that people put up with the suckage or pay a stiff penalty. "This technology has annoying bugs that have never been fixed. But luckily, we've just spent a lot of money on making sure you don't work around them."
Who does that? This is absurd. no new features - just fix the damn bugs.
Lines fade away because there is little money for maintenance but beacons that cost multiples are the solution?
The first thing I thought when I read beacons: Hackers are going to have a field day with them. Add malicious beacons to streets and cars will drive off road at high speeds.
Honestly, it seems like a more workable solution would be to improve the roadways with built-in beacons to indicate where a road is, and where it isn't. The cars would work only on the improved infrastructure, but they would work. I suppose there is a danger of nefarious actors spoofing beacons to make you drive off a bridge, but it seems far-fetched.
Wow, I never thought about it like that, becoming public infrastructure. If that were to happen, what would keep the Department of Transportation in each state from adopting beacons and installing them on mile-markers, etc?
You could probably get away with having one per block; aren't most traffic lights all connected? Or have I just been watching too many movies where hackers take over streetlights?
And you say "private contactors will save the day", please, stop drinking the Ayn Rand Cool-aid.
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