To reduce traffic, ditch yellow lights and form platoons of self-driving cars

Credit: MIT SENSEable City Lab.

A recent paper co-authored by MIT researchers did the math on how best to allow competing traffic through an intersection. The results, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, suggest that once cars can connect to city infrastructure, traffic lights will be a suboptimal way to regulate traffic through city streets.

Instead, the paper suggests, cars should talk to computers at intersections and be allowed through the crossing via a slot-based system, without the need for yellow lights. Better yet, once fully autonomous vehicles hit the road, even greater efficiencies could be realized by having the cars talk to each other to form platoons that move through intersections.

The researchers start by acknowledging the inadequacies of the 150-year-old traffic light—at any given intersection, they say, there are so many variables that any one breakdown in the flow of traffic can be disastrous for the whole intersection. "This explains why traffic can rapidly deteriorate in cities, resulting in widespread congestion and immense societal and environmental costs,” the paper notes.

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