This will be used as a special sign to indicate to drivers that autonomous vehicles are controlling the road at that moment. Today, traffic lights tell us when to stop or go on, but autonomous cars can communicate among themselves and with these traffic lights to organize the traffic flow in a faster and more precise way than humans.
in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.
> in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.
> in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel
To my understanding the idea of the white light is that self-driving cars will at some point be able to coordinate well enough between each other that standard traffic control at intersections would be unecessarily inefficient - not a crutch to assist self driving cars' reliability in some way (it'd be a more challenging navigation scenario than just waiting). Don't think it'd work out in practice any time soon, though.
> standard traffic control at intersections would be unecessarily inefficient
It’s already unecessarily inefficient! I can’t count the number of times I’ve stopped at a red light and waited for 35 seconds with no cross traffic only to be allowed to cross just as a cohort of 50 vehicles has to transition from highway speed down to idle. So much fuel and time is wasted due to bad arbitration schemes!
This sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Follow the car ahead of me, if it’s autonomous. How do I know the capabilities of other cars on the road? What if I don’t know and don’t follow, does it revert back to giving me a normal light even if there are a bunch of autonomous cars around?
What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?
What happens when there is an accident. How does one argue they had right of way, when all the lights are white and everyone is just crossing their fingers and playing follow the leader?
Does this assume all autonomous vehicles are speaking the same language? Has that standard been established, or is this another format war that will need to play out?
Traffic circles seem like they would play out better. When autonomous cars meet they can negotiate things optimally, while normal cars slot in as they normally would with no change in behavior. Carmel, IN would be a good test bed for that theory.
> "What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?"
It seems like the world is missing an obvious application for "AI". Every traffic light should notice a walker or biker, and signal them through their intersection without any manual steps. It would require that cars have lower priority than people, but this is already the case in many places, even if not implemented in a practical way.
I think one of the big issues they started with multi-lane roundabouts, at least near me. Single-lane roundabouts are significantly safer and easier to understand. This would have been the way to go. Instead they got a bad reputation from the start due to the complexity involved in the multi-lane ones.
> follow the car in front of them (if that car is an autonomous one, it will know exactly when to continue or stop)
If the car in front of you is not autonomous, you're still supposed to follow it -- presumably, it's following an autonomous car further down the line. In other words, an autonomous car is responsible for stopping and starting human traffic behind it in the same lane, up to the next autonomous car behind it.
All the same, this sure does sound like it has a lot of failure modes.
NC State University: “Researchers Propose a Fourth Light on Traffic Signals – For Self-Driving Cars“ (2023) [1]
> The researchers acknowledge that AVs are not ready to adopt the new distributed computing approach tomorrow, nor are governments going to install brand new traffic lights at every intersection in the immediate future.
I highly recommend watching the notjustbike video on autonomous vehicles.
It outlines a disturbingly plausible path to a dystopia simply by following the lobbying incentives to logical conclusions. This feels like step 0. I'd strongly suggest that if this is coming to somewhere near you, you object, tell your city no, protest, etc.
I hate to be overly negative but this seems not thought through at all. Is this a published paper? Because this seems like the kind of thing that would pop out of a Reddit thread involving a bunch of tech enthusiasts and zero people with any expertise.
If we just take it as a given that we should allow autonomous cars to self-coordinate traffic intersections (a big if), this proposal still makes no sense. The traffic light is actively yielding control to the autonomous cars. In that case, just let the autonomous cars set the traffic signal appropriately.
You don’t need a “warning” light to tell drivers that autonomous cars are in charge. You need to set the traffic light to the right states. If you can’t do that safely, 100% you’re saying that you can’t let autonomous cars control the flow of traffic through the intersection.
This whole “just follow the car in front of you” directive is a poor attempt to handwave away human drivers. “Look, if we can just make the humans drive as if they are autonomous, there won’t be any issues at all.” It’s absurd and shipping a system like this would be criminally negligent. “Just follow the car in front of you” is not just a lazy answer. It’s nonsense guidance when you need to make a left and the autonomous car in front of you is going straight. “Oops. We forgot drivers sometimes need to turn.”
Just letting the cars set the light would not work for some of the plans with autonomous cars.
Currently with cars you need green-red periods. But some researchers are considering scenarios, where in the future the cars just reserve the intersection for a few seconds and then pass through. That would be a lot of flickering between green and red.
There are scenarios and simulations where they show that we can get a lot more (fuel and time) efficient if we just let cars pass by each other in these reserved time windows. In many of these scenarios cars just go over the intersection at full speed during their reserved time windows.
NOTE: I am just reporting on what I know other researchers are currently investigating and proposing. I am not saying I think this is a good idea. At least I would consider this a security nightmare, because hackers could very easily have cars crashing into each other at full speed. Also I would be very very worried passing through an intersection behind an autonomous car and just trusting that this car not only reserved their window, but also reserved some additional time for me.
When I took my drivers license the mantra was "NEVER just follow the car in front of you. Make your own judgement". I agree with all your points, this seems like a retarded idea by people who don't understand the basics of traffic safety.
The United States will get extra traffic lights (and the literally obscene amount of money it will take to attach that to every single intersection across the country) before we spend the time, money, social and political capital to keep moving toward more walkable cities, so overall car load can be dramatically reduced and population health can be improved.
Installing some stop lights seems much cheaper than redesigning our cities.
I don’t think “walkable” cities is an answer to anything. Walking is hard for children and the elderly. Public transit is SUPER slow. If cars fit on the road, then people will use cars. They are just a superior traveling experience in almost every way.
Public transport is often the fastest way to get around in some cities for some locations. I live in Prague and it's generally faster to take the metro or tram than drive. Obviously not in all cases, but the majority.
Walkable city doesn't mean you can't have a car, it means there are other (often faster) transport options and amenities within easy travel distance without a car. Children and elderly can still be transported by car.
This was my experience as well while I was stationed in Germany. If you wanted to go downtown, public transport was the clear choice. It was faster, and I didn't have to spend time parking my car.
We have a lack of imagination when it comes to cars. (That, and market-driven commercial interests.) "Cars, but electric!" to deal with climate change. "Cars, but autonomous!" to deal with...what? It's not clear what problem self-driving cars are meant to solve that mass transit couldn't do much better. And this idea of a white light is nuts, for the reasons others have given in comments. It just shows how far off the rails we're willing to go (pardon the pun) in attempting to stick with car-based solutions.
Is this AI slop ragebait to drive engagement? If this is real then like others have said here it makes zero sense. The only benefit of allowing cars to control the intersection would be for cross traffic to interleave. No human driver could safely navigate that.
Why wouldn't the autonomous cars just follow the normal 3 light traffic patterns? We have a great number of human drivers running red lights daily. Now we are to have these same human drivers “following” an autonomous car through them too? Is this article just lacking a lot of critical detail or is this just a terrible idea?
What happens if a human-driven car comes up to the intersection and just stops in confusion instead of just driving on? Imagine the road rage of whomever is behind that guy.
If lights are out on a normal intersection, then it becomes like a four way stop, so I guess a confused driver might treat it as such, except there would be a lot of people following autonomous cars— in fact no non-confused human driver would even pause before crossing through the intersection. This would make people using the four-way stop protocol very mad.
All in all this sounds like a very dumb idea, even if the tech works perfectly, which it won’t.
This is an ai-generated slop article without sources.
Originally reported in Feb 2023 from the source [1].
And a link to the original paper titled: "White Phase Intersection Control Through Distributed Coordination: A Mobile Controller Paradigm in a Mixed Traffic Stream", also from Feb 2023 (may be paywalled) [2].
And previously discussed in Feb 2023 (1 comment) [3].
The white light
This will be used as a special sign to indicate to drivers that autonomous vehicles are controlling the road at that moment. Today, traffic lights tell us when to stop or go on, but autonomous cars can communicate among themselves and with these traffic lights to organize the traffic flow in a faster and more precise way than humans.
in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.
> in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.
Eventually they will reinvent trains! (:
> in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel
To my understanding the idea of the white light is that self-driving cars will at some point be able to coordinate well enough between each other that standard traffic control at intersections would be unecessarily inefficient - not a crutch to assist self driving cars' reliability in some way (it'd be a more challenging navigation scenario than just waiting). Don't think it'd work out in practice any time soon, though.
> standard traffic control at intersections would be unecessarily inefficient
It’s already unecessarily inefficient! I can’t count the number of times I’ve stopped at a red light and waited for 35 seconds with no cross traffic only to be allowed to cross just as a cohort of 50 vehicles has to transition from highway speed down to idle. So much fuel and time is wasted due to bad arbitration schemes!
This sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Follow the car ahead of me, if it’s autonomous. How do I know the capabilities of other cars on the road? What if I don’t know and don’t follow, does it revert back to giving me a normal light even if there are a bunch of autonomous cars around?
What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?
What happens when there is an accident. How does one argue they had right of way, when all the lights are white and everyone is just crossing their fingers and playing follow the leader?
Does this assume all autonomous vehicles are speaking the same language? Has that standard been established, or is this another format war that will need to play out?
Traffic circles seem like they would play out better. When autonomous cars meet they can negotiate things optimally, while normal cars slot in as they normally would with no change in behavior. Carmel, IN would be a good test bed for that theory.
> "What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?"
It seems like the world is missing an obvious application for "AI". Every traffic light should notice a walker or biker, and signal them through their intersection without any manual steps. It would require that cars have lower priority than people, but this is already the case in many places, even if not implemented in a practical way.
People will do basically anything to fix junctions except install roundabouts.
I wonder how many millions of days humans sit in cars and look at empty crossroads and a red light.
I think one of the big issues they started with multi-lane roundabouts, at least near me. Single-lane roundabouts are significantly safer and easier to understand. This would have been the way to go. Instead they got a bad reputation from the start due to the complexity involved in the multi-lane ones.
> Follow the car ahead of me, if it’s autonomous.
The statement in the article is not conditional:
> follow the car in front of them (if that car is an autonomous one, it will know exactly when to continue or stop)
If the car in front of you is not autonomous, you're still supposed to follow it -- presumably, it's following an autonomous car further down the line. In other words, an autonomous car is responsible for stopping and starting human traffic behind it in the same lane, up to the next autonomous car behind it.
All the same, this sure does sound like it has a lot of failure modes.
No they’re not “coming”:
NC State University: “Researchers Propose a Fourth Light on Traffic Signals – For Self-Driving Cars“ (2023) [1]
> The researchers acknowledge that AVs are not ready to adopt the new distributed computing approach tomorrow, nor are governments going to install brand new traffic lights at every intersection in the immediate future.
[1] https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/02/traffic-light-for-autonomous-c...
Not to mention, who will pay to replace current lights ? Doing that is not cheap. So, I doubt we will ever see that.
I highly recommend watching the notjustbike video on autonomous vehicles. It outlines a disturbingly plausible path to a dystopia simply by following the lobbying incentives to logical conclusions. This feels like step 0. I'd strongly suggest that if this is coming to somewhere near you, you object, tell your city no, protest, etc.
Link to the start of where he starts outlining a path to dystopia (though the first half of the video is informative too) https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=_RPIAzkW9LGBJmmA&t=1683
I hate to be overly negative but this seems not thought through at all. Is this a published paper? Because this seems like the kind of thing that would pop out of a Reddit thread involving a bunch of tech enthusiasts and zero people with any expertise.
If we just take it as a given that we should allow autonomous cars to self-coordinate traffic intersections (a big if), this proposal still makes no sense. The traffic light is actively yielding control to the autonomous cars. In that case, just let the autonomous cars set the traffic signal appropriately.
You don’t need a “warning” light to tell drivers that autonomous cars are in charge. You need to set the traffic light to the right states. If you can’t do that safely, 100% you’re saying that you can’t let autonomous cars control the flow of traffic through the intersection.
This whole “just follow the car in front of you” directive is a poor attempt to handwave away human drivers. “Look, if we can just make the humans drive as if they are autonomous, there won’t be any issues at all.” It’s absurd and shipping a system like this would be criminally negligent. “Just follow the car in front of you” is not just a lazy answer. It’s nonsense guidance when you need to make a left and the autonomous car in front of you is going straight. “Oops. We forgot drivers sometimes need to turn.”
Just letting the cars set the light would not work for some of the plans with autonomous cars.
Currently with cars you need green-red periods. But some researchers are considering scenarios, where in the future the cars just reserve the intersection for a few seconds and then pass through. That would be a lot of flickering between green and red.
There are scenarios and simulations where they show that we can get a lot more (fuel and time) efficient if we just let cars pass by each other in these reserved time windows. In many of these scenarios cars just go over the intersection at full speed during their reserved time windows.
NOTE: I am just reporting on what I know other researchers are currently investigating and proposing. I am not saying I think this is a good idea. At least I would consider this a security nightmare, because hackers could very easily have cars crashing into each other at full speed. Also I would be very very worried passing through an intersection behind an autonomous car and just trusting that this car not only reserved their window, but also reserved some additional time for me.
When I took my drivers license the mantra was "NEVER just follow the car in front of you. Make your own judgement". I agree with all your points, this seems like a retarded idea by people who don't understand the basics of traffic safety.
Oh, boy! Byzantine generals in the traffic lights... Wonderful.
As prophesied almost a decade ago. https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?si=d5OcQV4HA9vDFgnC
The United States will get extra traffic lights (and the literally obscene amount of money it will take to attach that to every single intersection across the country) before we spend the time, money, social and political capital to keep moving toward more walkable cities, so overall car load can be dramatically reduced and population health can be improved.
Installing some stop lights seems much cheaper than redesigning our cities.
I don’t think “walkable” cities is an answer to anything. Walking is hard for children and the elderly. Public transit is SUPER slow. If cars fit on the road, then people will use cars. They are just a superior traveling experience in almost every way.
Public transport is often the fastest way to get around in some cities for some locations. I live in Prague and it's generally faster to take the metro or tram than drive. Obviously not in all cases, but the majority.
Walkable city doesn't mean you can't have a car, it means there are other (often faster) transport options and amenities within easy travel distance without a car. Children and elderly can still be transported by car.
This was my experience as well while I was stationed in Germany. If you wanted to go downtown, public transport was the clear choice. It was faster, and I didn't have to spend time parking my car.
We have a lack of imagination when it comes to cars. (That, and market-driven commercial interests.) "Cars, but electric!" to deal with climate change. "Cars, but autonomous!" to deal with...what? It's not clear what problem self-driving cars are meant to solve that mass transit couldn't do much better. And this idea of a white light is nuts, for the reasons others have given in comments. It just shows how far off the rails we're willing to go (pardon the pun) in attempting to stick with car-based solutions.
Density would save money on all kinds of infrastructure. Driving is also hard for children.........
Is this AI slop ragebait to drive engagement? If this is real then like others have said here it makes zero sense. The only benefit of allowing cars to control the intersection would be for cross traffic to interleave. No human driver could safely navigate that.
Why wouldn't the autonomous cars just follow the normal 3 light traffic patterns? We have a great number of human drivers running red lights daily. Now we are to have these same human drivers “following” an autonomous car through them too? Is this article just lacking a lot of critical detail or is this just a terrible idea?
Did an autonomous vehicle write this?
It's also not four colours and a new white light which would be five lights altogether.
“There… are… FOUR… lights!”
- AI illustration: check
- LLM generated slop text: check
- AI generated ads: check
Into the trash it goes
Four colours and a new white light? Oh, the white light is fourth colour. Terrible idea and worse article.
What happens if a human-driven car comes up to the intersection and just stops in confusion instead of just driving on? Imagine the road rage of whomever is behind that guy.
If lights are out on a normal intersection, then it becomes like a four way stop, so I guess a confused driver might treat it as such, except there would be a lot of people following autonomous cars— in fact no non-confused human driver would even pause before crossing through the intersection. This would make people using the four-way stop protocol very mad.
All in all this sounds like a very dumb idea, even if the tech works perfectly, which it won’t.
Then suddenly a wild man with a cone will disturb the whole thing! (Smart autonomous cars aren’t smart when you put a cone/pylon on its hood)
Whoa, this is absolute trash.
[dead]
This is an ai-generated slop article without sources.
Originally reported in Feb 2023 from the source [1].
And a link to the original paper titled: "White Phase Intersection Control Through Distributed Coordination: A Mobile Controller Paradigm in a Mixed Traffic Stream", also from Feb 2023 (may be paywalled) [2].
And previously discussed in Feb 2023 (1 comment) [3].
1: https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/02/traffic-light-for-autonomous-c...
2: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10038635
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730399