India to Launch Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication System to Curb Accidents with Palki Sharma

Good news! It only alerts and does not override the human driver. Only new cars first. Motorcycles exempted. Security, hacking issues not resolved yet.

Waymo driverless cars navigated 7,000 dark traffic lights during the San Francisco blackout without accident

Amazing stuff!

"... Waymo said the self-driving system in its robotaxis treats dead stop lights as four-way stops, just like humans are supposed to. That should have allowed the robotaxis to operate normally in spite of the massive outage. ...

While a lot of focus has been placed on the instances where Waymo’s robotaxis got stuck during the power outage, the company shared that its vehicles “successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday.” ..."

Waymo explains why its robotaxis got stuck during the SF blackout | TechCrunch

Mobility Pricing Pretext

Trigger

I recently read this article titled “Mobility Pricing: Wege zur Kostenwahrheit im Verkehr /Anreize für eine kostengünstige, staufreie und intelligente Verkehrssteuerung” (German language) published by the Swiss think tank Avenir Suisse in September of 2013.

A Central Planner’s Delight

That is exactly what it is! The authors of this article and I bet you other proponents of this concept as well dress up their misguided big government ideas as market based solutions, which they are obviously not.

The subtitle of the article is revealing. It proposes an intelligent traffic management. Well if that is not obviously a statement that big government is superior to free market solutions, then what is?

Most profoundly these authors and other proponents of concepts like Mobility Pricing have an myopic and narrow-minded view of the world.

Other Solutions

For example the authors of this article to not even mention telecommuting in their article. What a humongous blind spot as is so typical of central planners!