Traffic Lights with Four Colors and a New White Light Are Coming

This sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Follow the car ahead of me, if it’s autonomous. How do I know the capabilities of other cars on the road? What if I don’t know and don’t follow, does it revert back to giving me a normal light even if there are a bunch of autonomous cars around?

What about non-vehicle traffic, like bikes and pedestrians?

What happens when there is an accident. How does one argue they had right of way, when all the lights are white and everyone is just crossing their fingers and playing follow the leader?

Does this assume all autonomous vehicles are speaking the same language? Has that standard been established, or is this another format war that will need to play out?

Traffic circles seem like they would play out better. When autonomous cars meet they can negotiate things optimally, while normal cars slot in as they normally would with no change in behavior. Carmel, IN would be a good test bed for that theory.

The white light

This will be used as a special sign to indicate to drivers that autonomous vehicles are controlling the road at that moment. Today, traffic lights tell us when to stop or go on, but autonomous cars can communicate among themselves and with these traffic lights to organize the traffic flow in a faster and more precise way than humans.

in other words corporate interests cant develop a tech that works reliably so they take over a public chattel to change the standard for everyone so they can operate a weak tech development.

The United States will get extra traffic lights (and the literally obscene amount of money it will take to attach that to every single intersection across the country) before we spend the time, money, social and political capital to keep moving toward more walkable cities, so overall car load can be dramatically reduced and population health can be improved.

I hate to be overly negative but this seems not thought through at all. Is this a published paper? Because this seems like the kind of thing that would pop out of a Reddit thread involving a bunch of tech enthusiasts and zero people with any expertise.

If we just take it as a given that we should allow autonomous cars to self-coordinate traffic intersections (a big if), this proposal still makes no sense. The traffic light is actively yielding control to the autonomous cars. In that case, just let the autonomous cars set the traffic signal appropriately.

You don’t need a “warning” light to tell drivers that autonomous cars are in charge. You need to set the traffic light to the right states. If you can’t do that safely, 100% you’re saying that you can’t let autonomous cars control the flow of traffic through the intersection.

This whole “just follow the car in front of you” directive is a poor attempt to handwave away human drivers. “Look, if we can just make the humans drive as if they are autonomous, there won’t be any issues at all.” It’s absurd and shipping a system like this would be criminally negligent. “Just follow the car in front of you” is not just a lazy answer. It’s nonsense guidance when you need to make a left and the autonomous car in front of you is going straight. “Oops. We forgot drivers sometimes need to turn.”

No they’re not “coming”:

NC State University: “Researchers Propose a Fourth Light on Traffic Signals – For Self-Driving Cars“ (2023) [1]

> The researchers acknowledge that AVs are not ready to adopt the new distributed computing approach tomorrow, nor are governments going to install brand new traffic lights at every intersection in the immediate future.

[1] https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/02/traffic-light-for-autonomous-c...

It's also not four colours and a new white light which would be five lights altogether.

Oh, boy! Byzantine generals in the traffic lights... Wonderful.

What happens if a human-driven car comes up to the intersection and just stops in confusion instead of just driving on? Imagine the road rage of whomever is behind that guy.

If lights are out on a normal intersection, then it becomes like a four way stop, so I guess a confused driver might treat it as such, except there would be a lot of people following autonomous cars— in fact no non-confused human driver would even pause before crossing through the intersection. This would make people using the four-way stop protocol very mad.

All in all this sounds like a very dumb idea, even if the tech works perfectly, which it won’t.

This seems more relevant: A blue light indicator on cars which Mercedes has proposed for self-driving mode active: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/mercedes-adds-ne...

Is this AI slop ragebait to drive engagement? If this is real then like others have said here it makes zero sense. The only benefit of allowing cars to control the intersection would be for cross traffic to interleave. No human driver could safely navigate that.

As prophesied almost a decade ago. https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?si=d5OcQV4HA9vDFgnC

I highly recommend watching the notjustbike video on autonomous vehicles. It outlines a disturbingly plausible path to a dystopia simply by following the lobbying incentives to logical conclusions. This feels like step 0. I'd strongly suggest that if this is coming to somewhere near you, you object, tell your city no, protest, etc.

Link to the start of where he starts outlining a path to dystopia (though the first half of the video is informative too) https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=_RPIAzkW9LGBJmmA&t=1683

- AI illustration: check

- LLM generated slop text: check

- AI generated ads: check

Into the trash it goes

Did an autonomous vehicle write this?

Then suddenly a wild man with a cone will disturb the whole thing! (Smart autonomous cars aren’t smart when you put a cone/pylon on its hood)

This is an ai-generated slop article without sources.

Originally reported in Feb 2023 from the source [1].

And a link to the original paper titled: "White Phase Intersection Control Through Distributed Coordination: A Mobile Controller Paradigm in a Mixed Traffic Stream", also from Feb 2023 (may be paywalled) [2].

And previously discussed in Feb 2023 (1 comment) [3].

1: https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/02/traffic-light-for-autonomous-c...

2: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10038635

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34730399

Why wouldn't the autonomous cars just follow the normal 3 light traffic patterns? We have a great number of human drivers running red lights daily. Now we are to have these same human drivers “following” an autonomous car through them too? Is this article just lacking a lot of critical detail or is this just a terrible idea?

But doesn't this mean that AI cars will prioritize themselves over human drivers?

Imagine busy road with a more rarely used side road. AI cars on main road will never give a green light to a human driver waiting to enter from the side road.

Four colours and a new white light? Oh, the white light is fourth colour. Terrible idea and worse article.