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Comment by salman89 | Hacker News Reader

What are things city planners can do from an infrastructure perspective so that we can drop the amount of data that needs to analyzed in real time? For example, can we use special paint for road lines in order to make the cost of detection of road lanes lower?

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keeping up with maintenance is probably the most important thing towards making either self-driving or human driven cars safe. faded, worn, or poorly-visible road markings and signage has got to be a huge challenge. Signage and marking is already very well standardized and optimized for low ambiguity.

making anything special is probably just going to make things more difficult - the cars have to be able to drive anywhere, regardless of whether the road has the correct markings or not.

I'll argue that signage and marking is already very well standardize and optimized for low ambiguity for human vision, but we are able to build things that humans cannot see but technology can.

The cars do have to be able to drive anywhere, but that doesn't mean we cannot improve quality of service in other areas. Suppose we can build roads where self driving cars can safely travel 100mph+ due to special infrastructure - I do see that as a big benefit.

Some people are using LiDAR/computer vision to decide where maintenance is needed http://www.nicta.com.au/media/previous_releases3/2012_media_...

I can't imagine many too many cases where they'd be useful in everyday situations because if the car can't handle everyday situations then it's not going to be a good car and is going to sink to the "we're concerned for safety" lobbying that rivals will engage in to ban it off the road until they've caught up. Perhaps QR-code machine readable parking with the available hours, that'd be useful even without self-driving cars.

see:

http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ParkingTransportandRoads/Par...

http://www.tamworth.nsw.gov.au/Images/UserUploadedImages/144...

The purpose of most signage and road lines is to decrease ambiguity (Are there three or four lanes here? Which is better for a left turn?) and increase throughput safely. If signage could be made less ambiguous in such a way that self driving cars benefit, that's a good thing.

I think, however, that such a scheme should be based on single point of truth, ie. no QR-codes: The signage that a human can read should be the same that the computer can read.

The car knows where it is to within a few cm. No need for anything except a database of parking information. Don't clutter up the environment with QR codes that humans can't read.

Last week we had snow on the road and I couldn't see the lines. On my way into work this morning, I noticed some truck had drop clumps of hay on the road. I am thinking that the car better be able to handle things without extra work on the road.

They should let every electronic light have some infrared LEDs and come up with a standard communications protocol to allow for fast transfers of alerts without the overhead of image processing.

For example, emergency vehicles could be broadcasting their presence and speed.

Schoolbuses could be doing the same and also broadcast when they are letting children out. same with the blinking light on school zone signs.

Emergency vehicles already broadcast their presence to traffic signals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_signal_preemption#Line-...

What you're looking for is something similar to ADS-B in aircraft, hopefully designed properly this time with encryption and authentication.

I'd love to see better integration of live traffic safety data into the cars' navigation (ie. Highway police logging lane or road closures). So, if there's a big accident on a major freeway, cars will automatically begin to find early detours rather than getting caught in gridlock.

No! Do it like humans do it - use deep learning to let it grok its environment better with less / different sensor data. Also, make it pay attention to history (it may already, I don't know) and give it something like object permanence.

Move car parking between bike lanes and the street, as they do in Amsterdam.

Drop billions of RFID tags into asphalt, make a millimetre-accurate real world map and rent the data to Google. Or do nothing and let Google figure it out.

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