*Detroit Autonomous Corridor*

The Detroit Autonomous Corridor was a landmark development in testing the viability of fully-autonomous transportation with fully-decentralized traffic control. The corridor was a 30 square mile network of roads, serving as a testbed for the kind of traffic control system that did not rely on signage of any sorts. Gone were the traffic lights, speed limit and stop signs — and so went the street signs as well. The DAC became a landscape *for* autonomous mechanicals of all sorts, not just personal vehicles, but municipal mass transit buses, sanitation, fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency and municipal service vehicles, casper speeders, commercial haulers. Opting for a fully decentralized system, Detroit's Governance Autonomous Organization off-loaded the traffic control challenges to the interoperability of the agents and intelligences occupying the corridor. So long as a vehicle was Equilibrium Consensus compliant, and met Gen 5.4 requirements, it could run in the corridor. There was plenty of incentive for commercial operators to run in the corridor, too. Both above ground and underground arteries made import and export to Canada 65% more efficient than trad transportation.

‘We saw marked improvements in the efficiency of our freight and common-carrier logistics flows’, said Eli Fenwick, Lead Machine Intelligence Generalist for McMann & Tate Supply-Side Logistics, an Indianapolis-based entanglement that manufactures farm supplies and machinery throughout Northern America. ‘What we didn't anticipate were the occasional comms failures causing flow control issues that just propogate both up and down the corridor. It's the one thing we cannot really predict easily. Weather used to be our biggest contingent factor — but you can somewhat predict that. These vehicle intelligences though — I still don't understand how one day they work fine, and then the next day they're bewildered to fasincation by a coyote on the road or a whatever to where they just stop working, sometimes for a whole cycle just grinding things to a halt for everyone.æ The cars were all autonomous and communicated with each other.’

Harry Caul, a consultant from Applied Sensemaking, expresses his doubts about the decentralized systems, ‘With the decentralized networks you're hoping every node operates consistently. But the nodes are interlinked, and the interlinks are a weak point of failure in the whole graph because you can't just take one vehicle out of the flow graph, or tell it to pull into the emergency lane. Once they fail this way they're like a confused deer and they go into an unknown state. You have to send out an autonomous techwrecker to troubleshoot, and often you need to send it out with a tech to get in there and do a manual reboot.’

The alternative of a centralized system might have its advantages in these circumstances, but the additional burden on managing a centralized control system may outweigh the cost factors. Centralized systems also present a centralized point of failure that can also bring the system down, just as decentralized systems have caused traffic snarls when they needn't — for example when Waymo's latest updates had vehicles unable to circumvent debris that had found itself in the road, cuasing the need for manual overrides that took sometimes 30 or more minutes to come online.

In the meantime, get ready for your neighborhood roadways to begin to look more like the 19th century than the 21st as traffic lights, roadway signage and your comforting street signs coming down. Soon there will be no more waiting in long lines at the DMV as we turn in our Driver's License for an Occupant Permit and the ‘steering wheel’ becomes a relic only remembered by a few who lived in the era of the non-intelligent vehicle.

CLASSIFIED: Vintage classic steering