MIT Researchers Plan a World Without Traffic Signals

A team of researchers from MIT, Swiss Institute of Technology and Italian National Research Council have come up with a transportation system plan that does not have any stop signals.

While the concept seems futuristic for now, the researchers believe that they will be able to eliminate traffic lights without depending on self-driving cars.

Carlo Ratti (Senseable City Lab) and Paolo Santi (Ambient Mobility Lab) published a paper in the PLoS One journal substantiating his work on slot-based intersection.

This system will work even for the cars that are not autonomous, say the researchers. "In terms of what kind of technology you would need, you won't need to wait 20 years," Santi says. "We don't need autonomous driving. It's actually much simpler."

"From a technological standpoint, there are no big hurdles to implement this idea," added Santi. A short YouTube shows how this system will work.

"An intersection is a difficult place, because you have two flows competing for the same piece of real estate," said Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a co-author of the study.

"On the other hand, if a system has advanced technology and lacks traffic lights, it moves control from the [traffic] flow level to the vehicle level. Doing that, you can create a system that is much more efficient, because then you can make sure the vehicles get to the intersection exactly when they have a slot," he adds

Despite the idea's ingenuity, there is still a scope of risk to human drivers. The cars that will have the sensors for this system to work would still need humans to drive the car. While the system will dictate the car's cruising speed and trajectory, the driver would still control the vehicle and it is possible to make the mistakes. All it takes is simple disobeying of speed limits or lane changing to wreak havoc on this system.

The researchers admit that for now the idea is largely conceptual and would need paradigm shift in the existing infrastructure, that could take years to implement.