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I think you probably know by now that I'm not a fan of the hype the floats around driverless cars. Don't get me wrong, I love the tech behind them, and I am genuinely excited about the impact they could have on tomorrow's cities. That's why I wrote about research from MIT that showed that driverless cars might not need traffic lights. And why I highlighted work from Duke University that explored how driverless cars could best communicate with pedestrians.
But I am a natural-born skeptic. And in my book, I expressed concern that the benefits of driverless vehicles wouldn’t be felt until every car on the road is autonomous.
Well, on that point, I may just have been proven wrong!
Before we can understand why, we need to talk about why traffic jams form (and this bit features an excerpt from Science and the City)
We’ve all been stuck in a horrible city-center traffic jam, and found ourselves wondering how hard it can actually be to manage traffic. Well, it turns out, it’s very difficult indeed, and it requires a lot of mathematics.
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