[saberdancer]

Throughput is an incredibly important one, but something that seems to get little attention from the tech world at least as far as I can tell. Is there work being done to improve throughput of normal cars at intersections, or at least semi autonomous ones. I am talking about the accordion effect that happens at each intersection/red light that there is. If a whole column of cars could start moving at the same moment, and then spread out with increase in speed it would result in an improved throughput at critical points in the cities.

Is there work in that area? I feel it shouldn't be a massive technical challenge, cars are stationary, lights are visible and in the future could even "talk" to each other to pass along critical information (if the car infront needs to brake for example).

[npunt]

Agree, those are the longer term efficiencies when we have primarily / only autonomous vehicles on the road. At that point we can optimize from the system POV not just from the vehicle POV. But that's a ways off.

[saberdancer]

But there is no reason why it couldn't be done today, even with non-autonomous vehicles. There are cars on the road that can automatically brake if they discover that you are incapacitated, or that something jumped out infront of you. Having some kind of "assisted red light start" which reduces accordion effect could be an easy way of improving throughput. At first only some cars would have it, and effect would be smaller from a system POV, but with time it would propagate.