one benefit of a fully computer controlled traffic system is that when the computer knows exactly where all the cars are at, it becomes safer to go MUCH faster

only reason we have speed limits is because you simply can't trust a human to drive safely and react in time to someone else's stupid decision.

not only do we not have to worry about reckless drivers, we can get to places much faster...which is ironic because most reckless drivers are trying to get to their destination faster than everyone else. it's because of their arrogance that we have to slow down so we don't kill each other.

Taken to it's logical conclusion (where all road vehicles are automated) things like processing visuals becomes a lot simpler.

Most of the information will be preprocessed data - the road infrastructure, and knowledge of every other vehicle in the system. That's what it becomes - one homogeneous and optimisable system; not a single robot car making it's own decisions. Processing is done by servers in advance, not individual vehicles.

Real time visual processing then only has to be on the look out for things that are out of the ordinary, such as a deer running onto the road, and take caution. Something that is much easier to do when done with well coordinated cooperation with every other vehicle around you. The car behind isn't going to hit you; nor is the oncoming car in the opposite lane.

Even if every car in the situation doesn't have the stopping distance, they will all turn (where possible) in a coordinated manner to avoid or reduce collisions. The situation may be avoided in the first place, because the system knows about dangers specific to this stretch of road and will have limited speed and increase distance between vehicles appropriately.

If there is one thing that humans absolutely suck at, it's unspoken mass cooperation in an emergent system; our roads being the prime example.

People can't even keep the appropriate distance from the car in front to prevent collisions in an emergency stop; let alone leave enough distance to prevent traffic jams. Imagine a red light (real or virtual) turns green, and every car for a mile back accelerates at the same time. There's no queuing (the cause of jams).

Emergency services get a clear, safe and direct path to their destination.

Who knows, maybe the system even knows you have a flight reservation or a business meeting, or if you're just going to the mall or visiting friends and can prioritise intersections accordingly (though that is getting a little Orwell meets Skynet).

The hard part is going to be getting from our current fully manual and emergent system to a fully automated and coordinated system; but I'm really excited by the prospect it might happen in my lifetime.

Wasn't saying any of this above panty-knotters, merely an intonation of things to come already in place,innocently served to the masses to remind us all that we're watching you,no where to run or hide from total real-time surveillance.

Also, a serious waste of technology for the sake of advertisement, misappropriation of funds with a view to instilling in the poopulation the reality of technology as a means of identification and eye-in-the-sky,one very goddamn light-post for your....safety. Bullshit.

You could use a $30,000 pair of bi-noc-u-lars that will tell you what type of plane you're focusing on with real-time heads-up of tail numbers ,points of origin and destination,etc....You can't buy one a gadget shop though now can ya??

No chaos, it's a serious problem that money is wasted on advertising when it could be used to oust assholes from power though....

Cast...muumph. Stunts meh, CGI FRIDAYS.... Jokes and gags?? (see Family Guy reruns)- Creator of Family Guy feature film destined to reign in first-place in next week's box receipts??...Death of comedy, art, and pop-culture on skids running downhill into a sewage-bilge pit.

*doublepromote *quality

One promote each for Destin and Flula

What does one's comedic timing matter when history has shown them to be a hypocrite?

I'd guess what it matters is everything, and that's why we're destined to repeat such a meaningless struggle with ourselves.

@00scud00-Well....think about ethics and morality of which there exits some modicum of universally agreed-upon standards and then try to get at least a half-planet full of humans as populous as ours bees today to abide by a fundamental framework based on the same, and you've got yer clusterfuck of a paradigm destined to perhaps survive it's own ignorance after some external or orchestrated deluge, with a semblance of a reasonable outcome for anyone left standing.

Sorry to comment to the uniformed rather harshly, but you may want to get a WORLD clue .White, black, (insert color here), cops are the strong-arm of dicks destined to cause your personal world problems, and they're being bred with control in mind and the ranks of skank are taking applications for dumb-asses everywhere who wanna join the home team, Baybylon.

I dunno, if you were the engineering manager in charge of the stock there, and saw that they wanted to run over a hilux with $mil+ tyres destined for refurb.....would you take the risk that the already end-of-life tyre wouldnt collapse and cause damage to the superstructure of the cat?

They are worth a bit more than the tyre even....just a thought.

Ex-wife's grandmother was a Ukrainian Jew, fled the bullshit-Got several American revolutionary war patriots from my mother's side, most-likely destined to be another front-line protester of political and police state bullshit in this lifetime-

ALL politicians and their complicit enforcers need be rendered into history's forgotten ranks-

Glad to see fewer and fewer 'NRA bad (cue chimpanzee sounds)' comments here as well VoodooV. I would also point-out that the 'new west, cops and robbers' scenario is much more frightening a prospect considering that it's the intentional breeding grounds for absurd levels of criminal activity that is the systemic result of the insanity of a once prosperous country's hijacking by political/totalitarian criminals since the 60's 'hippies' sold-out and became corporate lackeys and lawyers of and for, the criminally insane.

"NRA soundbite of "buy a gun! pew pew pew! bad guys dead, live happily ever after!" would be one interpretation of the NRA's message, another would be, "Hey dumbass? Arm yourselves against being one of the first to go when the government fails you and the future you thought you had disappears overnight."

@Sundamx-He won, he's alive and the bad guys are dead. Five people dead IS a win if those 5 people still walked the planet the broken, unrepentant, criminal thugs that they were destined to remain.

You're ill-informed if you think that 'no amount of training will stop a bullet' besides, that sounds like a sound bite from an idiot and all-to-vocal fringe of semi-conscious do-nothings.

Not so much dumb luck in this scenario when you crunch the outcome and consider the body count.

Which is exactly when you want medical facilities around. Of course, if everything goes perfect there's no need for doctors and hospitals. Similarly, it would be theoretically easy to have a plane take off, fly to it's destination and land on instruments without a pilot, but the reason we have pilots on board is for when things go wrong.

You can't foresee the future, and you can't be certain that the birth will be normal.

I realise that the health of the mother and child is an ongoing process, but if either die in childbirth it's not going to be a very long process, is it? The fact is that there are plenty of situations that are inconveniences in a hospital, but life-threatening emergencies at home.

Anyway, as I said, my opinion here is entirely academic. I'm glad your kids came into the world safe and sound.

It's crazy to look at a day which took place so long ago. All of these long dead people who could never imagine that somewhere, in some way, their faces and smiles would be seen again in the year 2014 in a flickering electronic glow.

You could almost imagine that day, and for them, seeing the weird camera rig set up on a car. Kind of thing you'd remember and talk about for a bit, then just forget as time went on. And there it is, 2 seconds from a day you barely remembered and it's destined to last the distance of human civilization. Always there to be turned back on and come back to life.

Toward the end there's a kid on the right side of the screen who hitches a ride on the back of one of the cars. He hops off toward the end of the street as the camera follows behind him for a bit. Just before he reaches the building and turns around to smile, a car crosses his path full of well dressed guys and the kid raises his hat in what I want to imagine was with a sarcastic ear to ear grin.

1906. Just crazy.

More info here - http://avherald.com/h?article=46d32419

Initially they had to hold because of a Cessna disabled on the Kilimanjaro runway, but it actually sounds like they just landed at the wrong airport afterwards. They had been cleared for landing at Kilimanjaro, but Arusha's runway was visible from their position and with the same orientation as their intended destination.

The passengers were initially told they had in fact landed at Kilimanjaro, 50 km away, and were then stuck on board the aircraft for 3.5 hours until stairs could be brought from there.

Reader N writes:

At least 100 people (police, fireman, military, airport officials) were on the runway, taking pictures with their phones, and no one gave us any explanation, no words from the pilot, nothing.

Funny now, but it was not quite funny 2 weeks ago.

The roads have a capacity.
~15 feet per car.

100 feet of road will fit about 6 or 7 cars, bumper to bumper.
Alternatively, 100 cars will require 1500 feet of distance to fit.

If a driver keeps 30 feet in front of him, at all times, even when stopped in traffic, then that takes the total per-car size up to 45 feet.
100 feet of road now fits 2 cars.
100 cars now require 4500 feet of distance to fit.

The greater the distance kept between cars, the bigger the strain on road capacity, and the farther back the traffic jam will stretch.



Traffic jams in massive commuter areas do not exist because people are driving too close.

They exist because the rate of people entering the highway exceeds the rate of people exiting the highway, for a long enough duration that the highway 'runs out of room' to fit the cars.

You can widen the roads to increase capacity, so the traffic jam doesn't go as far back.
You can increase highway speed limits, so that people can attempt to 'evacuate' the highway faster.

(Travel-capacity in terms of cars-per-second of any given section of road, is 'cars-per-second-per-lane x number-of-lanes'. Increasing either factor will improve travel.)

...But you can't eliminate the jam.

The rate of 'highway exit' is determined by the number of exits, and the capacity of the exit roads to absorb traffic from the highway.

When people exit from a highway, they usually go into local traffic, and are met by a light within 100 feet.
Between the lights, and other cars looking for parking spots, pedestrians, etc, local traffic is a dog.

Highway traffic can't diffuse out of the exits fast enough, and the traffic backs up on the exit ramps, and then backs up onto the highway. Once the traffic backs up onto the highway, exiting traffic consumes a lane for queuing, which forms a choke.


Basically, to avoid a jam, the rate of people entering the highway can not exceed the maximum possible rate of people exiting and diffusing into the destination city.

Because 'everyone goes to work at once', and local traffic is not geared to rapidly absorb exiting traffic, the jams are unavoidable.

Driving with a massive space in front, refusing to fill in the gap, only uses up the highway's buffering capacity more quickly.
That leads to the 'complete' jam happening sooner, where traffic is queued all the way from the destination, all down the highway, and onto the feeder roads miles away, blocking local traffic elsewhere.




IMO, if people really care abut stopping traffic jams, they should put a commuter parking lot at every exit at major commuter areas.

When you exit off of the highway, you would immediately wind your way through a parking lot, and at the other end of the lot you would exit into local traffic.

The parking lot acts as a buffer, allowing the highway exit lane to not get backed up, and prevents the queue from building up onto the highway.

That way the traffic on the highway can travel without chokes.

Although, this would just move the "parking lot" occurring on the highway, into a literal parking lot. You'd still be stuck waiting a while, as the rate of people exiting the parking lot into local traffic would still be limited by the rate at which local traffic can absorb the highway traffic.

Basically, to have literally no waiting, the city streets absorbing exiting highway traffic need the same uninterrupted cumulative bandwidth as the highway.

In the end, if you want to fix highway traffic jams, fix city streets.




You can make the argument that keeping more space in front will make people more comfortable with driving faster, and traffic will move faster.
But, that faster moving traffic will merely more quickly arrive at the same clogged exit, and queue with the same other cars waiting to get onto the local roads.

-scheherazade