Forget Smart Cities, ‘Stupid’ Infrastructure Is The Solution For Future Transportation
Summary
Later, as the world caught the fever of self-driving cars, and government transportation agencies and major automakers all fully embraced it, they got seduced by the idea that things were big enough now that you could consider it. The less advanced teams, building things like ADAS lanekeeping or simpler cars, tried to track painted lane markers and found they were badly maintained. While it was able to handle a freshly painted road, it gained extra confidence knowing it was in exactly the place where the left marker is broken 2/3rds of the way down, and there is a repair crack shaped like a duck on the right side. Indeed, if the roads were occupied by full vans at rush hour, their capacity would be astonishing, far greater than any other transportation system including the best heavy rail lines. If you consider a world where nothing is built in, where the directions of lanes and streets can be flipped in software, where what’s parking and what’s road can change with the hour if desired, you will discover there is far more capacity in our existing infrastructure than previously imagined.