Nicholas Leippe wrote: > In California, at rush hour, it seems that everyone has gotten the idea that > there just is no space, so deal with it. I've been on 4-lane highways where > all four lanes were literally half car lengths apart, all doing 75. Just > squeeze the packets in tighter and send them down the line. Hover your brake > constantly, because there are no 'outs'.
Quite true. In a sense, CA drivers follow the same principles that trains depend on. My wife found it nerve-wracking, but I thought it was pretty cool. Although it works smoothly most of the time, the CA system still can't avoid the fact that humans have a minimum response time of nearly 1 second, and that's only when they're very alert. However, if we could wirelessly and securely transmit a brake signal between cars, we could fix that hole and the freeways could behave even more like trains. I'm not talking about cars that drive themselves, I'm just talking about a single enhancement to human response time that could save lives in congested areas. I've been tempted to set up computer simulations of such a system. The simulation would include many kinds of drivers. The simulation might even be complex enough to require a serious Linux cluster. (Ha! I'm on topic!) Oh well, just dreaming. Shane /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
