While the potential of super-smart AI to improve transport efficiency, costs and environmental impact with self-driving is obvious, it's also expensive and still many years from being ready for broad deployment. It's puzzling that low-hanging fruit like an AI-assisted "Slightly Smarter" traffic light is ignored. It could deliver meaningful improvement today with cheap, easy to retrofit, Raspberry Pi-level tech which already works well enough for a simple, limited use case like reducing unnecessary idling at traffic lights.
For this situation, and similar ones, there are simple solutions. For example, in this situation, the timer should always be running (and resets when the light changes). When a car triggers the sensor, the light should change if the timer is > N. If the timer is not there yet, wait until timer is N.
No AI required, just basic thoughtfulness and requirements gathering.
The trouble with the street sensors is that your car has to come to a stop before it is detected. Stopping and starting cars consumes a great deal of gasoline.
Contrast it with the flow achieved when there's a traffic cop managing an intersection. It's an enormous improvement.
Don’t American cars have that thing that turns your engine off every time you stop? I can’t remember a car I’ve driven in Europe in the last 15 years that didn’t have that annoying feature.
Annoying because there are hardly any stoplights here. So it works by killing the engine for one second at the first roundabout you roll up to before you remember to hit the button that disables it for the rest of the trip.
I always thought they would work great in the states.
Shouldn't they have been pro-nuclear if they actually cared about the planet? But it seems to me they really care more about pushing their own ideology instead.
> Shouldn't they have been pro-nuclear if they actually cared about the planet?
Do you know that "they" aren't? Who is "they" even? None of this makes any sense. This is arguing against a group that is imagined to be homogeneous when that's clearly not the case.
In the South SF Bay Area, our pickup truck gets 13 mpg mixed freeway/city.
Doing 75-80 on flat land, or 65-70 over the Sierra Nevadas, it gets 24 mpg. With city traffic in other cities it gets 18 mpg.
The reason it is so bad here is that the environmental activists passed traffic quiescence laws that try to discourage people to drive by making the roads worse.
Of course, they don’t make obvious fixes to improve public transit, and the bike lane “improvements” they put in are mostly textbook “how to kill bicyclists” designs that European countries phased out decades ago.
Here are two classic favorites: concrete barriers that are too close to the curb to allow street sweeping, and adding bike lanes between parallel parking spots and the sidewalks.
They must have realized people started re-routing their trips to avoid stoplights unless they were making right turns, since they’ve also started erecting barriers or adding red arrows to make it impossible to make right turns on red.
Anyway, this wastes time, but it also costs us at least $100 a month on gasoline. Our primary car is an EV.
Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.
> Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.
sure, but I'd rather just lobby against cars at that point. Especially in a place like the Bay Area that should be mostly served by public transit and dense housing. Lobbying to micromanage idling just feels like a waste of effort for such a negligible benefit.