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MIT Envisions A Future Without Traffic Lights

Popular Science

Car traffic is a haphazard combination of moving bodies, flowing through channels and occasionally stopping to let other streams pass. If you think of traffic, not as people and goods in cars, but as a fluid, it makes no sense that cars spend so much time standing still. Yet traffic isn't a perfectly fluid system: it is made of multi-ton metal cars, piloted by people, and the consequences of imperfect movement range from damage to death. So we have traffic lights, and we have cars idling at traffic lights. But with autonomous cars, the future doesn't have to be that way.