I thought this would be a good general thread topic for any ideas on this.
I’ll start: One of my biggest fears in city driving is being broadsided at an intersection by a driver running a red light. A majority of these intersections are blind and I often have a dreadful sense of literally taking my life in my hands when entering one. Not only that, but entering intersections happens with such frequency in city driving that it’s easy to let one’s guard down. I don’t know what the statistics are on this type of collision, but it seems logical that this presents a potentially lethal situation on a routine basis.
I think there must be some simple innovation that would warn a driver that an intersecting vehicle was approaching too fast to stop in time, or at the very least inform the driver of the presence of vehicles approaching a blind intersection. Maybe it would involve some sensors in the road that could determine the speed of an oncoming vehicle, and somehow graphically relay this information at a glance to the driver approaching the intersection.
The most patent evidence of the lack of innovation is when you’re bumper to bumper on the highway with miles of empty airspace above you that isn’t being utilized.
The scenario you describe does not really arise out of government ownership of roads. That’s just bad driving.
Why not? The road maintainers would have an interest in improving their security in order to atract drivers. Its also conceivable that car insurances would offer more services like covering roads for “free” to their clients, and they would have an interest in negociating with those that offer more safety.
I would say the biggest improvement would be the material of the road. We have been using asphalt, concrete and stone for centuries, because the state ran it for centuries. Surely a chemical engineering company would have developed a cheap composite that would be able to keep the road from being repaved and becoming to slick.
Waiting for red lights would also change. I think they have a very important use, but sometimes waiting at a red light when I can clearly see no other cars are coming is annoying and wasteful. A censor of some sort as mentioned above may be used, or at least have a blinking red light so people can drive through the intersection, IF THEY CAN CLEARLY SEE NO CARS ARE COMING.
Hell if private industry owned roads a century ago, we’d have flying cars to out compete other popular roadways.
at least the road to Serfdom would be free, instead of the destination
Good point. I have thought of this before. I occasionaly have to get up very early in the morning during the winter months, (4:30a.m) for wrestling tournaments. I have to drive to the school where I get on a bus and ride to the location of the event. However on my way there I always get stopped at the same light. There is obvioiusly nobody out on the quiet suburban roads of my city at 4:30, nobody that is except for the police officer watching the traffic light from an adjacent parking lot. At 4:30 in the morning, You arent going to want to sit and wait at a light for 30 seconds when there is clearly not anybody on the road. I completely agree this is very frustrating.
Thats like saying that training wheels don’t make a child a better bike rider. True, the wheels themselves do not improve the child’s abilities, but with wheels the child is able to ride when he would otherwise not be able to.
A safer road is one that makes up for the short comings of the drivers.
You sound as if you think people deliberately have accidents. Thats not true of even reckless drivers.
That is not what I am trying to say. What I am trying to say is that the situation originally posted (about the blind intersection) would occur reguardless of if the road was privatized or not. Dont get me wrong, I am in no way shape or form in favor of state ownership of the roads. Obviously like everyone else here, I am strongly against it. However, in my mind, I believe that there are always going to be accidents, and if the blind intersection of the road was privately owned, I dont see what innovation can make it more safe.
One thing you see in other countries is a timer or progress bar on lights, so you know how many seconds you have until the next light.
I would not take traffic lights for granted. Perhaps it’s preferable to use a traffic circle, more underpasses, or a totally different convention. There is also the opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to predictive traffic monitoring, so cars never get red lights. Adding special roads for computer-driven cars would eliminate lights entirely. All this is off the top of my head - we really have no idea what entrepreneurs could come up with.
Well, I will have to say…without state control of roads, you wouldn’t see red light cameras designed to penalize drivers and raise state money, without improving safety much at all. Rather, in a private environment, only 2 things matter to road owners: safety and congestion. The camera systems at stop lights in such an environment would rather be used to improve traffic flow by switching the lights more intelligently.
Private roads also means private regulation (discrimination against bad drivers). You may have to prove you have insurance and a safe driving record before being allowed onto a particular company’s highways. In the case where someone drives recklessly, they could be reported to the company, who may wish to take action after several complaints. We are much more likely to see camera systems that survey all areas of the road, eliminating the profitability of fraudulent accidents, such as cutting someone off and slamming on the brakes.
Perhaps the best case for private roads is that central planning simply isn’t getting the job done. More cars are entering the highways then ever. With gasoline taxes, we should see new roads being built all over the place, facilitating this new traffic. Instead, we see congestion. Private highways would rather use pricing to regulate congestion. While many would cry foul that this discriminates against poor people, they do not see the big picture. By regulating prices to maximize profit, we avoid extreme congestion while raising money to build new roads. Then, we maximize profit while lowering rates and overall congestion…and so on and so forth…until our highway systems can actually keep up with consumer demand.
Good point! Basically after the lights turn red a simple radar could detect a driver who approaches too fast to stop in time and warn both him and the others with a loud siren.
There’s an even simpler approach. Traffic circles or “roundabouts”. These are becoming more common where I live. They’re actually quite nice and could be used in place of many multi-way stops and even many traffic-signaled intersections. Supposedly, statistically, they are much safer and keep traffic flowing much more consistently.
In fact traffic lights, to me, seem like a icon of government: expensive, unsafe (even deadly) and inefficient. Furthermore, they keep adding more and more complexity to these systems trying to “perfect” them.
By the way there’s an even further positive side-effect of these traffic circles (vs. traffic lights) which is the reduction of the number of cars sitting and idling (emitting CO2 while not producing any benefit for anyone) not to mention fuel consumption (slowing, stopping, sitting, accelerating, etc.)