This sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Follow the car ahead of me, if it’s autonomous. How do I know the capabilities of other cars on the road? What if I don’t know and don’t follow, does it revert back to giving me a normal light even if there are a bunch of autonomous cars around?
What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?
What happens when there is an accident. How does one argue they had right of way, when all the lights are white and everyone is just crossing their fingers and playing follow the leader?
Does this assume all autonomous vehicles are speaking the same language? Has that standard been established, or is this another format war that will need to play out?
Traffic circles seem like they would play out better. When autonomous cars meet they can negotiate things optimally, while normal cars slot in as they normally would with no change in behavior. Carmel, IN would be a good test bed for that theory.
> follow the car in front of them (if that car is an autonomous one, it will know exactly when to continue or stop)
If the car in front of you is not autonomous, you're still supposed to follow it -- presumably, it's following an autonomous car further down the line. In other words, an autonomous car is responsible for stopping and starting human traffic behind it in the same lane, up to the next autonomous car behind it.
All the same, this sure does sound like it has a lot of failure modes.
I think one of the big issues they started with multi-lane roundabouts, at least near me. Single-lane roundabouts are significantly safer and easier to understand. This would have been the way to go. Instead they got a bad reputation from the start due to the complexity involved in the multi-lane ones.
> "What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?"
It seems like the world is missing an obvious application for "AI". Every traffic light should notice a walker or biker, and signal them through their intersection without any manual steps. It would require that cars have lower priority than people, but this is already the case in many places, even if not implemented in a practical way.
What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?
What happens when there is an accident. How does one argue they had right of way, when all the lights are white and everyone is just crossing their fingers and playing follow the leader?
Does this assume all autonomous vehicles are speaking the same language? Has that standard been established, or is this another format war that will need to play out?
Traffic circles seem like they would play out better. When autonomous cars meet they can negotiate things optimally, while normal cars slot in as they normally would with no change in behavior. Carmel, IN would be a good test bed for that theory.