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Originally Posted by kingsway
The craziest one I've ever seen though, is in the south-west of the country - take a look at the 'Magic Roundabout'...
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I've driven over the one near Swindon, going to Cirencester, without any problem at all.
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I wonder how long it will be until cars become autonomous
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It'll take a bloody long time.
Think of the liability to start with.
Who will be to blame for an accident ?
Think of the problems associated with it :
- most countries can't even keep a dumb road network in good shape or implement legally correct traffic signs everywhere ;
- a smart road network will take ages to implement; so who's going to do the driving on the dumb stretches of road in the meantime ?
The ever less experienced human error machine ?
- making the cars intelligent, means it'll take ages for all cars to use the system, but what with the dumb cars in the meantime ? how do you compensate for these ?
- the DARPA challenge showed that even the biggest companies and the smartest universities didn't come up with fail-safe / fail-proof soft- and hardware.
- the traffic priority rules were simple US 4-way stops; any idea how tough it'll be to implement the entire world's traffic rules ?
- how is the system going to react to superfluous / left-behind traffic signs, that any human will discard as nonsense ?