Comment by jamessb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamessb | Hacker News Reader

>British police do not push through congestion with parping, wailing sirens. Instead they somehow unzip it, opening and closing a rolling, convoy-sized gap in the traffic. The clever work is performed by a swarm of police motorcycles, which zoom ahead, blue lights flashing, to halt traffic at the next two or three junctions. Sometimes they create temporary chicanes so that the convoy can cross to the wrong side of the road for a few hundred yards. (Passing through north London, I felt British pride as pedestrians asked motorcycle officers just who we thought we were – a wholly reasonable question. I felt a stab of embarrassment as we hit the M11 motorway and headed at speed up the hard shoulder, leaving stationary commuters to fume in our wake.) In the absence of sirens the loudest noise is the buzz of motorcycles catching back up with the convoy then overtaking it at speed, on their way to close off new junctions ahead.

There's an interesting short documentary about the Metropolitan Police Special Escort Group: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5TkSE_5GsE

This sort of makes me wonder about how driverless cars could be designed to handle this sort of situation. Or any situation where an authorized human is temporarily modifying traffic rules using gestures and verbal communication. Especially in edge cases where they might be giving non-trivial instructions to individual cars.

Well, driverless cars will have to deal with unauthorized humans doing all sorts of weird stuff in traffic.

I think this is a smaller problem.

These will be authorised humans, and thus will probably have some kind of (hopefully cryptographicly protected) id to tell the cars that this is an instruction it probably wants to obey.

So they will take OTA instructions through a backdoor?

More like a front door; one of the biggest problems with backdoors is that they are not supposed to allow the 'owner' to know what is going on.

Humans and non-humans.

Actually, I would think that handling unauthorized humans would be the smaller problem, similar to animals and other obstacles. Stop or maneuver as needed to avoid a collision, then you can try dealing with it, but always have the short term option of just staying put while things sort themselves out. In the case of a human authorized to give orders, you can't just sit still when the situation isn't understood, because you may be being ordered to move out of the way.

Would one simply stop if one were to encounter a intersection that has flesh-and-bones policeman directing traffic (like 'hey there's a meatbag on the road better stop')?

Living in London I've seen this many times for VIPs of the Royal Family and it's quite something to watch. The description of the Met unzipping traffic and then closing it up again is accurate.

The high security convoys in Central London are the most insane thing I've ever seen, n.b. the occupants of the last two unmarked vehicles in this convoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E72KpO4JIM

I've seen various members of the Royal Family in cars round Edinburgh and was always surprised at how low key the security was - usually a Jag with the VIP and a trailing black Range Rover.

This is a video I took of Obama's (empty) motorcade passing through Walthamstow in North East London on it's way to collect him at Stanstead Airport:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHXH2fEyUnc

Police in the Netherlands use this exact same method. The Hague police have an entire YouTube channel dedicated to showing how they keep entire routes clear for an ambulance: https://www.youtube.com/user/TeamVerkeerDH/

I'm guessing from the Delhi experience Mr. Carter doesn't quite figure high enough in the priority list for India or wasn't thought to be much at risk. Convoys arrangements of elected leaders tend to be more elaborate.

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