I've always imagined a protocol that lets cars communicate their planned speed. I'm pretty sure this is how cars will work in the future. A decentralized mesh of coordinated vehicles. This means that cars can:

Maximize constant speed time, improving energy consumption and traffic flow.
Minimize distance between vehicles based on speed and acxeleration while complying with safety standards.
Connect to devices such as semaphores in order to tell if the vehicle will pass or not, to make a better decision.
Connect to other mesh devices such as AI cameras that feed events to the vehicle mesh.

Public is obviously the best option though. Imagine a city with no streets, only subterranean public transportation. You wouldn't even need such a large public transportation system, cities would be a fraction of the current size. I wonder what percentage of the area of a city is wasted on streets.

[–] duffman@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In the 90s in school, I did a report and imagined computers would be too expensive to have in every car, so the road itself would have wireless infrastructure to control the cars.

[–] player2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 months ago

Sounds like a use case for SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS!

[–] phx@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

A hybrid system would be cool. I could see a future where electric vehicles could link up to a pod like train cars for long trips along standard routes, and schedule automated disembarkation for their "stops" to continue the rest of the way to their destination. Full autonomous driving is a difficult problem be a lane pods of this nature could be quite efficient and easier to automate

[–] vocornflakes@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

PRT is kinda like this, but they don't link together.