We know the volume of cars could be increased dramatically by computer-operated driving systems, but physicist L. Craig Davis recently published a study showing that most non-accident traffic is caused by, well, bad drivers—their excessive slow-downs cause ripple effects in the order of exponential magnitudes. Thankfully, he believes this could be prevented by a simple adaptive-cruise control system, which if one in five cars had, the flow of traffic would be dramatically improved. Instead of slamming the brakes, cars would instead absorb slowing traffic with the buffer of space between them, curbing the rippling traffic aftermath. Not bad, and when something accident-related does happen we can always deploy the robots.
[Via TechDirt]
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