No. of Recommendations: 12
The infrastructure cost would be prohibitive
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If you visit Japan, you'll find that, whether in a big city or the tiniest town, every sidewalk has a row of textured tiles running down the center with a different texture leading to each building entrance and, changing yet again at each intersection. All this expense and effort was taken country-wide to assist the blind when they take walks.
Cars equipped with sensors are smart enough, even today, especially with the assistance of a good GPS to recognize the boundaries and intersections of roads. Tagging stop signs (possibly with unique QR codes) and broadcasting (wi-fi?) the color of traffic lights is easy enough. The challenge will be how to find a legal parking space. As an alternative to tagging of fire hydrants, parking signs, driveways and so on, the same method used to locate permanent speed traps on sophisticated GPS apps (like Waze and Sygic) could be used to incorporate them into the software's database.
At some point, if society buys in to the concept of autonomous vehicles, rather than the car bobbing and weaving in competition with others, the traffic of a city or highway could be considered a system and routing conducted by a centralized system where AI would optimize the flow of traffic to reduce average travel time and optimize fuel/battery efficiency.
Can this be done today? Nope. But it would be easier than creating the internet was.
Jeff
