This is a terrible world for pedestrians, bicycles, or anything other than an autonomous vehicle.
Which basically removes people.
A simple fact is that faster moving traffic is necessarily less dense; the gaps between vehicles must be larger to account for small variations that matter more and more at speed.
Let's ban distracting billboards in more States, as in Maine, Vermont, Alaska, and Hawaii.
Let's expand annual vehicle inspections to more States.
More surveillance tech, automation, and regulations aren't the answer.
I'm not sure that follows. Cars that communicate can accelerate and brake together even in unexpected situations.
You need the space because of variations in cars; some have better brakes than others, some may be heavier so need more time to slow down, others may be on wetter patch of road, etc.
And one car may not even get the signal, so only slows down when it observes the vehicle ahead of it doing, an observation that needs time.
Or a car starts accelerating as the one in front just stalls.
It may all be better than human reaction times, but for robustness, which is really very necessary, you're going to get the same dynamics.
And this all assumes only good actors; somewhat optimistic in my view.
This isn't entirely true, connected vehicles would still have some delay due to radio propagation time, but it's ns per vehicle instead of hundreds of milliseconds. Additionally, you can entirely compensate for it in ways you really can't with humans.
A horde of cars where 100% of them consistently operate in a failure-free state and have comms that can't be hampered by the environment - that group could maybe do this.
None of this resembles the way we treat cars at all.
The biggest use of simultaneously acceleration in those situations would be around road maintenance and other situation where road speed or number of lanes are reduced, with heavy congestion as a result.
PLEASE build human scaled walkways _away_ from roadways. In my climate zone, please also provide roofing over them to shade from solar and downpour events.
My dude, this is literally exactly what I had in mind.
And notably, trains don't stop for pedestrians.
Or another way:
Roads are a shared resource. Train tracks are not.
But I guess this would work/be status quo for non-autos if we kept the signals so peds and bikes knew they could still cross and probably not get run over by someone who decided to switch back to manual control.
Yup, those trains! They'd have a shorter and more irregular schedule, but autonomous convoys would behave pretty similarly to that. Outside of emergencies like drivers assuming control to swerve into pedestrians, I guess.
Plus, like you say, no need to remove any of the infrastructure of really safety assumptions of today, just augment.
the issue is that unlike trains, roads are so numerous that they are hard to avoid, and it is financially unrealistic to bridge or tunnel for non-motorized users across every road, particularly if you want that crossing to be accessible.
Near me? A few. Not sure how busy, but I get caught on my commute about once a week.
While I totally agree with your points, I don't see how this is any worse than today. Connected convoys don't need to go at every green light (like that one robot planet from Futurama) they can wait for pedestrians. The biggest difference would be clearing intersections quicker.
If anything, it might codify how hostile parts of the US already are to pedestrians, with beg buttons that may or may not work properly. More efficient cycles with less gaps may give people even less time to dart across during a cycle where they may not have the green but there is no cross traffic.
For example, cars could share the positions of pedestrians and bikes with each other to ensure that even cars with no direct line of sight are aware of them, making the roads safer for everyone.
Likewise, if traffic lights are integrated into the system, the waiting times could be much shorter as cars can dynamically slow down to allow pedestrians to cross, wihtout being contrained by fixed time blocks of green/red.
They don't scale to really busy streets, and one of the failure modes would be perpetually blocked vehicles.
And this still leaves other road users that aren't autonomous cars up in the air.
Cars are freedom, cars are status, and the people who don’t want them are peons in relation to those who do. This is a fact of living in societies with the best transit in the world. Using it is simply admitting that you’re poor.
If you put a cam and a computer with a crosswalk it can rigorously figure out (and transmit) someone is crossing the road. Very much more so than a vehicle approaching from around the corner.
Only if there is something seriously wrong with the road system. A highway ought to have higher throughput than any surface road. What you describe is not normal or nominal