I saw a good article on c/upliftingnews about AI improving traffic signal controllers. It’s good and all, I just can’t help but think of the “look at what they need to have a fraction of our power” meme while reading it

  • jeff_hykin@lemmy.worldOP
    5·
    1 year ago

    Additionally (I still love roundabouts) there can be a max-wait-time problem when there is heavy traffic in one direction.

    If a basketball game ends there can be 20,000 cars bumper-to-bumper trying to leave. Let’s say (looking at a map) they’re going left-to-right through an intersection.

    If there’s 1 car trying to go top-to-bottom…

    • If the intersection is a stoplight it doesn’t matter. Even if there were 20 million left-to-right cars; it’s still a 5 or 10min wait for the top-to-bottom car.
    • If the intersection was a stop sign it also doesn’t matter; it’ll be the left-to-right cars turn then the top-to-bottom cars turn
    • At a roundabout though (at least in the US), vehicles entering on the left always take priority over vehicles entering from the bottom. So the top-to-bottom guy could be there all night

    Game days on my campus can cause a 2 hour wait on a 1 mile road. My campus is unusual, but just FYI absolutely insane wait times do happen regularly in some cities.