From: Avatar Polymorph (avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jan 03 2003 - 22:46:35 MST
Newspaper reports reveal London is introducing a fee to enter the central
area of the city due to traffic jams occuring during 50% of driver time (we
have had a similar system of monitoring for a private highway network in
Melbourne called CityLink, using computer monitoring, it's been around
several years).
Assuming some form of car as we have today (four people in a 1.5m by 3m
vehicle) and a single-level road (let's have it powered by the road surface
via nanotech solar power)...
If the cars are all computationally controlled, are traffic lights
necessary? One would think not - they just criss cross each other
constantly.
Assuming we do not have a vacuum-tube style road, and assuming some distance
between cars for criss-crossing and entering and leaving central lanes, and
assuming no clover leaf patterns or underpasses and bypasses (i.e. the roads
are roughly as they are now) does this make the maximum amount of traffic
bearable something like 4 persons per 10 metres of track? At 60 k per hour =
6 k per 6 minutes = 1 k per minute = 10 metres in a bit over half a second.
So if your residential ratio on the streetfront is about ten metres per
house and contains 4 persons who reside there, traffic should not be a
problem provided you're not jumping off and on the road every quarter of a
second.
This is probably seriously flawed logic... automated public transport may
take the form of minibuses (as in Johannesberg).
I guess you could have Robert Heinlein-style walkways with people on "sleds"
that can slide across fast and slow zones.
There must be lots of possiblities (but please don't just say "downloading
via cable or laser is the fastest, since I am an augmentor not an uploading
type)!
Towards Ascension
Avatar Polymorph
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:35:50 MST