This 2.5-year old video is both amusing and frustrating at the same time. It pinpoints the main reasons for traffic and explains how it could be dealt with.
Unfortunately, I think we’re doomed, at least for the foreseeable future.
The video demonstrates that we are in fact monkey-drivers (in some cases, this is very insulting to monkey-kind…) and suffer slow reactions times. This explains why there are grotesque line-ups at intersections in cities. Said intersections are some of the major reasons for gridlock, traffic and everything in between. What the video fails to touch on is that North America is far behind many other countries which rely on roundabouts for traffic flow, and not streetlights and stop signs.
The most frustrating traffic phenomenon is phantom intersections or ghost traffic. In other words, there’s no visible reason for the slowdown when flow returns to normal. The cause of these scenarios ranges from distracted driver to others cutting over four lanes in order to not miss their exit.
I agree that we’ll never change and hoping that drivers will adapt new ideas such as looking further ahead than a few feet beyond their hood to their driving habits, is pointless. This is why I think that traffic will always be.
And as far as the video’s “Structurally Systematized Solution” involving autonomous cars thanks to their ability to communicate at the speed of light and coordinate perfectly, I think they’re way off if we’re to live in the real world, and not some fantasy.
This “simple solution” to traffic is so far from our reality that we’re not likely going to see a fully autonomous automotive fleet for decades to come. In the video, at 4:05, I imagine the chaos when one sensor will fail. The death toll, the insurance claims, the lawsuits… Our current coarse and poor communication system partially limits the number of accidents.
We agree that some Monkeys should be banned from driving however… Have any thoughts? Please share them.
