an alternative is not to use american "intersections" rather roundabouts where no car has to "stop". Then all the cars can merge from their various origins and get off at their various destinations without stopping and, as you say, wasting time and fuel. Forcing people to stop while other people go is so american-culture... but not the world, and it is rather stupid, so why export it.

Surely raising the fuel tax so that americans pay at the pumps the overall cost of the gasoline (including military budget and global military empire to keep gas cheap)... so that the price actually represents the true cost.... then we'll see how motivated people get when they're paying 5 bucks per gallon... i bet true cost will achieve your interests in efficiency much faster than idealistic innovation.

Thanks for the input. But I don't think that the roundabout approach is a realistic solution in the United States. We have a hard enough time merging onto a highway let alone merging at every single intersection. Plus the cost of construction on current intersections becomes unrealistic. I live in the suburbs just out side of DC and most of the time driving on a parkway or major road that is littered with traffic lights. And too often if you hit one of them red, then you hit them all red. I want to be able to drive down the road and never have to use my brake to stop or slow down. Safe; efficient driving.

Seems like another no brainer to me. France has already implimented the traffic circles. Maybe the US should learn to profit from the experience of others. I am sure that the cost/effectiveness of the traffic circle program in France is public information. easy to find out if it pays off or not. Throwing more money into traffic lights, I am sure, is not cost effective.

This is a sweet idea, but as you started to point out, it has some flaws... or at least one, which i am going to talk about. Like the saying, "One bad apple ruins the whole bag," the in-car computer system can only compute traffic decisions in situations where every car in the lane is actively using this system. Because if the car ahead of you fails to maintain whatever speed, like if it slows down for some random reason, the timing will be all off. Even if the decisions are constantly updated, it couldn't give a useful driving speed until the very last second, at which point it doesn't matter because you are already crossing the intersection.

I think this problem could be avoided, but only if every car could communicate with one another. There's a good idea already posted about that, and as they said there, you need some kind of powerful standardization genie that could set specific standardizations and get them in every car. Someone like OSI maybe. They do all kinds of standardizations i think... from drywall screws to networking.

I like the idea but you could get a lot of the benifits without problems by simplifying it. If traffic lights just broadcast their timers then cars could have a receivers in their dashboard that would tell the driver how much time until the light changes. Then a human could determine how to react. Rather than GPS if the broadcast was done via line of sight then presumably the "which light is for my car" question could be resolved

I can see how this would benefit. I don't think having more round interections would help, although I haven't done or seen any studies on it. The rounds in the DC area are actually kind of annoying. In Dupont Circle you have traffic lights at the rounds. What I would Love to see are smarter traffic lights. I'm sick of sitting at a red light, while the other lanes on a green light are empty. If no one is there but me, I should have the green light right? Unfortunatly it doesn't work like that for now.

two comments;

1. instead of having the vehicle just communicate with intersections how about having all vehicles communicate with themselves? this way all driving could be automated, simply punch in your destination and sit back, just like in Minority Report. you would slow down or drive as fast as the car could handle according to what the other cars around relayed back into your cars central computing system.

2. instead of driving a car why not use public transportation!

Expensive and complicated without much benefit. Broadcast of timers is much simpler, but the car still needs to identify which light is sending the signal.

This idea is already in operation in several pilot tests around europe. But it uses basically an intelligent car routing system. Cars not o n the network are assigned other lanes. If a car croses into the automated lane and is an unautomated car then the automated cars take account of this as it is only either in fron or behind them!

In addition you can simply site in the car, take out your pen, point to where on your GPS map you want to go and the car starts, logs on to the network and drives off. There are no requirements for a speed limit and you could find yourself speeding down the fast lane at 150-200kph without your hands on the wheel!

Even id a truck for example swerves into the automated lane it is a lot easier for a machine to react immediately and responsibly than it ever would be for a human.

This is good, but speaking from a large US city I can say that most drivers already take yellow to mean SPEED UP rather than SLOW DOWN. They might use the system to speed more effectively, making the roads more dangerous.

As to the suggestion that the US should have roundabouts, I say: US automobiles are much larger and US roads are more congested than their Euro counterparts. US mass transit in western cities is sparse, and in eastern cities space is limited. Finally, drivers in the US are INSANE. Roundabouts would make driving less safe and more congested.

A system using GPS and construction/traffic reports to create alternate routes could help relieve congestion.