Excerpts from Now I Know -
The Town that Drives Itself
Ghost towns have a few hallmark features — lots of buildings, lots of roads, and no residents. These uninhabited towns were once bustling with commerce and community, but for reasons which often differ from place to place, they’re now desolate and abandoned.
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That’s hardly a ghost town. It’s bright, clean, and airy. And — importantly — the stoplights are working.
Really, that’s the most important part. Mcity wasn’t built for people. It was built for cars — autonomous ones.
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Mcity opened its doors — er, roads — in 2015. It is a 32-acre urban landscape with all sorts of roadways. There are railroad crossings, roundabouts, differently-paved streets, highway on-ramps, crazy intersections with confusing left turns, and more. The buildings, as you can probably tell by the above, are just facades, and there are no people beyond the researchers; instead, there are fake pedestrians that don’t know how to safely cross the street. (The image below is an example.) The purpose of the city is to test driverless cars and the technology which controls them, with researchers across disciplines and employers taking advantage of this one-of-a-kind city.
http://nowiknow.com/the-town-that-drives-itself/
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