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Comment by jboy55 | Hacker News Reader

I always felt there would be 'carpool'/express lanes that would just be for automatic driving cars. They would communicate with each other and so they could pack together really tightly. You'd enter your destination, then drive you car to the point that you enter the lanes, then the car would take over. It would warn before your exit, then you'd take over.

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I would like to see such a system installed at a high volume intersection. When the light turns green the system instructs all the cars lined up to accelerate simultaneously. The motivation isn’t necessarily practicality, just pure entertainment value.

That’s called a streetcar normally.

Honestly I wish people would just do that. It doesn't have to be in perfect lockstep but it significantly increases the amount of backed-up traffic you can get through the light in one cycle if everyone does that.

One reason super high traffic cities will probably be the first ones to mandate self driving cars will be to optimize limited road infrastructure. Surely Beijing and Shanghai would go for it, they already have what Americans would consider drastic rules that limit when you can drive your own car (like even odd days based on your license plate number).

Now that I think about it, cars’ existing adaptive cruise technology could probably be extended to accomplish something fairly close.

Another benefit could be to have extremely fast lanes instead of more packed-together lanes. With good enough coordination, or a block zone system like trains[/roller coaster trains], you could achieve >120mph cruising. With both of these possibilities though, the requirements are generally that the car completely takes over driving with no way for the human to assume manual control to break the system or otherwise create an unsafe situation for other road users.

We are getting closer and closer to inventing Trains™

That's really not fair here. These would be trains you could bolt onto highways, and "transform" them back into cars as needed.

In a way, even easier? Why not just get on the interstate, bolt cars together. Then you're also saving on gas.

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