In a world of driverless cars, there’s be no reason to stop at intersections. Cars would just flow through constantly without crashing:
What Intersections Would Look Like in a World of Driverless Cars (The Atlantic)
“There would be an intersection manager,” Stone says, “an autonomous agent directing traffic at a much finer-grain scale than just a red light for one direction and a green light for another direction.”
Because of this, we won’t need traffic lights at all (or stop signs, for that matter). Traffic will constantly flow, and at a rate that would probably unnerve the average human driver. The researchers have modeled just how this would work, as you can see in the animation below.
This would be pretty cool, although I imagine it would take me a while to get used to it. I suspect that I’d be screaming my way through intersections for quite a while, though it might make the simplest trips to the store as fun as a roller coaster ride. (via kottke)