General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

Ontario Permits Autonomous Vehicles on Roads:

http://news.ontario.ca/mto/en/2015/10/on...1444755020

Very exciting news. This means the same infrastructure can theoretically 5x the capacity with no construction, by just running vehicles closer together in road trains or platoons. 100km/h with a 0.5 m gap.

Why do people think safety regulations will allow vehicles to travel at that speed with that gap? Won’t some sort of device between successive cars be needed? It would sort of couple the cars together, so maybe we could call it a coupler. For further efficiency, we could have one special car at one end that could have a really big motor in it so each individual car wouldn’t need to use its engine. A big motor could even use some mechanism to draw power directly from overhead wires, or failing that it could burn diesel fuel extremely efficiently. I see this working for transport trucks and buses as well, although I wonder if it would eventually be found convenient to separate freight and passenger traffic as much as possible.