General Road and Highway Discussion

[Canard]

Don't confuse lamp signals with ATP/ATC/ATO. It is extremely rare for accidents on automated metros. The catastrophe in Spain on the AVE (Talgo) was caused when the train hd exited a section of ATO and was under driver control when the accident happened.

But your bar analogy is fantastic - the bar is very high right now. Nobody is claiming there won't be accidents - there will be - but there will be an order of magnitude (or two or three) fewer accidents than today. Again, in 100 years, we'll look at the astronomically high fatality rates and wonder "how did we ever accept this?"

Volvo has a great idea for an interim solution, which is road trains using a lead vehicle driven by a registered, trained "pilot". The cars behind it simply follow at close range and can leave or join by request. I see his as the stepping stone to automated driving technologies.

http://youtu.be/xM5OuR7ICMc

http://youtu.be/tQnVGOoVvVk

The only question that popped into my mind is what if the road train passes an on-ramp in the right lane and can't move one lane to the left to courtesely allow a vehicle on the ramp to merge? Maybe the road train should be in the far left lane, like a designated HOV/Automated Road Train lane?