Originally Posted by
Tourist
"Nerds" managed to design a spacecraft that flew to a comet which we didn't know what would look like or what would be made of and then landed on it without human input after 10 years in space.
I think they might manage that tricky dilemma.
The road opposite mine is a main bus route. It is also a main residential road. Kerb to kerb it is less than 4 cars wide.
There is marked parking all along one kerb, and about 30% of the other kerb is double yellow, so 70% of it is full of cars.
As a result you can just about squeeze two cars past each other, but not a car and a bus.
The other day two buses came head to head with no room to let the other past, and within 20 seconds a big queue of cars formed behind both buses... I could see this happening about 300m away as I was walking to the shops.
By the time I walked past the buses a few minutes later there was a solid line of probably 80 cars behind them, and nobody was able to reverse backwards because there were cars constantly adding to this stream of queuing traffic.
By the time I was walking back past it half an hour later several police cars had shut the road at both ends to stop more cars joining, and had started turning traffic around in both directions behind the buses. Said to one of the cops as I was walking past how I was amazed it doesn't happen more often, and he said it was the third time this month that he had to come and sort it out (numerous other times where he wasn't the one to turn up and resolve it)
How would automated cars deal with a situation like that, how would they follow police instruction, or know to reverse backwards to allow more room for others to move back?