Here’s the dumbest thing in the world. You pull up to an intersection, the light is red, there’s no one else in sight and you have to sit there and wait for it to turn green.

Traffic lights are the dumbest thing in the world. And this is insufferable because right now, if you, if you’re in a Tesla, the Tesla knows, Oh, no one’s coming from any other direction. It would totally be safe to go, but you can’t because the light is red. I think what somebody needs to do is rip the guts out of a Tesla, mount them in a traffic light and let the traffic light decide when it should be green or red.

How hard is this? This is easy to do. it’s going to take years to upgrade traffic lights, but that’s at least one startup. Somebody should be able to do that. We have all the tech, it’s not that hard. We can use vision or radars or whatever.

Ash: You’re not gonna believe me. So, funny enough, uh, Columbus, Ohio. Project, Pre- Razorfish, Traffic Lights.

Pablos: Wait, that’s a real, that’s a real project?

Ash: It’s a real thing! It’s a real

Pablos: Wait, so somebody did this in Columbus?

Ash: No, us!

Pablos: Oh, you did this?

Ash: is what we were doing!

Pablos: Wait,

Ash: You couldn’t have possibly known that!

Pablos: No, I didn’t. No, seriously, you, you, you worked on a project like this. I didn’t know.

Ash: I mean, yeah, so, yeah, so what was interesting is that project was, so I keep hired to figure out traffic light optimization and it’s, you know, it’s really, really fucking complicated. Like there’s a lot of math to, to make sure that, you know, you know, like that.

To get people going in one direction and all that stuff and, that problem was being solved. And one of them was, do you start going flashy? Back then they didn’t have the little Tesla thing. Right.

Pablos: What year was this?

Ash: Do you start flashing? It’s gotta be like 1995, 1996.

How do you, how do you optimize the sequence of lights so that, the traffic keeps flowing?

What do you do with intercepts? And then Palle, this is even, this is even better. So Palle Peterson, like my partner, Palle’s dad was a crazy, mad genius inventor, he was in the Western part of, of Denmark. He wasn’t even in like regular Denmark. There’s like an Island that they kept him on.

He had convinced them that when ambulances go, that they could start to change the lights faster, like emergency services. Of course he had the hack, but so you would just click the lights to green.

Pablos: Cause he had one of those transmitters that the ambulances have?

Ash: First he invented it.

Pablos: Yeah, I had, the MERT. Oh, that thing. I bought one of those and put it in my car, where I was in Seattle at the time, it only worked on the emergency corridors, only on certain roads where they had, where the ambulances knew, and I didn’t know were set up for that.

It’s like an infrared transmitter you put in your car and it sends infrared signal to like a TV remote to the, traffic light and they change. I could smoke it around town on certain streets. So you’re saying this guy invented the thing?

Ash: Yeah, he invented, whatever the original one. I remember Palle telling me stories like, “dad had designed this thing” and then he convince them that they should all use it and then of course, like, ” I have back door.”

So Columbus, the biggest problem they had was, they just had traffic lights, like each section was on its own. It didn’t live in like a, a grid or it didn’t have any understanding. So the ripple effects were just fucking out of control.

For example, you could have a place where you’re sitting there with a red light and then there’s no one around you.. then you could have another place where, because it was doing its own thing, you could just be in stop and go, it would just create its own eddies of, of hell.

Pablos: Yeah, it feels like that still exists.

Ash: It does because what the problem is, is that no one is running enough, you know, computational fluid dynamics, I mean, that’s the problem.

Pablos: You’d do a simulation now.

Ash: You would, and that’s, and, and, and the horsepower gets better now, right? We have more flops to like mess around with this stuff. But the problem is that we, we still haven’t figured out how to do your thing, which is now what happens when you build the emergency corridor.

What happens if you’re like, all right, so the Tesla says no one’s coming from any side, but. You go through. Are you like a leaky pipe? Go back to like traffic theory, and pipe theory. One of the things that you have is that when you got a pipe, everyone thinks that, let’s, let’s call it. , the 405, let’s call the pipe, 405. What’s the best way to set up the 405, in terms of traffic, is it better to have six lanes, or is it better to have two sets of three lanes and a shoulder or two shoulders and it turns out, that the eddies are the problem.

So,, we get these lame attempts of traffic light, traffic flow regulator, right? We have to go into the. Highway. So I was just thinking that when you, when you started talking about traffic lights, I was thinking problem is in theory, it sounds amazing, but the problem is when you’re inside a mesh.

Pablos: So you need active feedback loops into whatever the thing is that’s running the simulations, right?

Because you need to say, “okay, this guy wants to change the light to green because there’s no traffic around. We can give him 30 seconds to do that and then go back without messing up the synchronization.”

Or, all this could get a lot more sophisticated.

Ash: No, exactly. But I think that’s the key. Right. So I think it’s more like, can you get a brain that’s dynamic, and right now the brain is not.

Pablos: I presume there’s not much of a brain and it’s not a very advanced area,

Ash: It’s a non dynamic brain.

Pablos: One cloud SaaS company could be making the brain for traffic and sell it to every city. Another company could be making the, Tesla traffic light that just knows how to see if there’s any cars around.

Ash: That’s security problem,

Pablos: Why is that? Oh, if it’s centralized, you mean?

Ash: There’s a quote from a person that let’s just say I met. An agency called RAW. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_and_Analysis_Wing) RAW is fantastic. That said, yeah, what happens when 2 minutes before an invasion, all lights go red? An invasion or attack or whatever, all lights go red.

Pablos: I don’t know, This is one of these old People have been saying, what if hackers shut down the traffic lights for, decades, and the only time it ever happened meaningfully was in the fucking movies. So, I, I don’t buy it. If all the lights go red, then people just start going the way they do in Southeast asia.

Ash: Then, and suddenly we’re like in Beirut.

Pablos: I kind of think that’s how they should do it anyway. I was driving in Riyadh a couple of weeks ago, in Riyadh, the lines are painted, but they’re irrelevant. Yeah. It’s a free for all. And what I realized is that it’s actually kind of better because, in the U. S. everybody’s been coddled. They got lanes for this and that, they got the turbo or not turbo lane, I wish. They have a handicap lane and HOV lane and, bus lane, all these different lanes. And then, you got to be a lawyer to read the parking signs. So everyone’s being coddled all the time.

You could probably drive with your eyes closed in a lot of American cities because, everybody’s following the rules. But if someone goes out of bounds, then they’re going to cause a real problem. If you’re in Riyadh, everybody’s driving at maximum speed all the time.

There are no lanes. People are swerving all the time. You got to be on the ball. You couldn’t hit somebody if you were trying. If you literally tried to hit somebody with your car, they would evade you because they’re all doing evasive driving all the time.

Ash: It’s, it’s all, it’s all offensive driving.

Pablos: It’s all offensive.

I’d like to, I’d like to see the numbers. I don’t know if we have good data on safety.

It’s

Ash: interesting. So we were in Vietnam, and you go to Vietnam and it’s a sea of random mopeds. Sometimes, you have the one person in the moped, the best is when you have at least five, right? The whole family. On the moped, you have mother, father, two kids. Then the baby kind of like strapped on like a, koala bear something. That’s, that’s when, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s getting crazy. And what they were saying, it’s like, yeah, “you’re not going to get hit. Walk across the road.” I was like, “what do you mean?”

“Just walk across the road.”

And it’s like, it’s like you walk across. They said “we operate in a stream.” They flow around you.

Pablos: Nobody wants to hit you either.

Ash: Yeah, but it is also a bit slow motion.. So there is a little bit more like speed.

Pablos: A few days ago, I was in Shenzhen. They have, an absurd number of electric scooters. Because they’ve outlawed gas scooters. So everything is electric scooters. You ride them on the sidewalk. So it feels a little sketchy because there’s a lot of fast moving electric scooters and not, they’re not like little Bird scooters. They look like, Honda scooters or something. They’re big, but the whole town, it’s kind of clean and quiet in that sense.

Overall they still have work to do, but the scooters are mellow. It’s all quiet. It’s, it’s busy. There’s a lot of people, but it’s not noisy because today, now I’m in Bangkok and in Bangkok it’s, they got all the gas scooters that China was getting rid of. And so they’re just going full tilt on these, gas scooters with no muffler, no, no catalytic converter, nothing. And it’s just noisy as hell. It’s crazy. And I don’t know. I kind of like it. I like the entropy.

Ash: I do have to say that I, if you look at it, Vietnam felt the safest. Specifically Ho Chi Minh Saigon, it was the safest of the crazy,

So that, that, that felt good. I mean, Beirut was just a whole different story.

Like Beirut, it definitely, and I think it was my CTO who at the time was driving me around and I was like, yeah, I’m pretty sure Antoine, this is the oncoming traffic. He goes, “yeah, that’s why there’s no one going the same way as us.” Like, “because they’re coming at us,” it was like, his logic was flawless.

Right. So at that moment,

I was sort of like, it’s true. We don’t have anyone going the same way as us. Cause we’re in the fucking oncoming traffic lane. He had made the fourth lane, which was go at, like, it worked, so I don’t know what to say.

Yeah, I mean, they went, they went beyond lanes, the lanes were just like like you said, they’re, they’re paint on the road there.

All right. So that was traffic lights for, for the last 30 minutes.

Pablos: Obviously traffic lights aren’t going to work there. Okay. I have another idea, which is related. So, the fleet of deployed Teslas is massive, like in most U. S. cities anyway, maybe other places. And Teslas are driving around all the time. And they could probably figure out, like within some window of accuracy, where all the open parking spots are.

Like they’re probably not looking for it now, but Teslas are just driving around. They see where the open parking spots are. And so if they were trying. They could just aggregate that data and tell you like, “Oh, you’re looking for a parking spot. Here’s the nearest one because a Tesla drove by it 12 seconds ago.”

You see what I mean?

Ash: Interesting.

Pablos: That’d be a superpower for teslas.

Ash: That’s, that’s, that’s, that would be great. I mean, that’s like, that’s like Spot Hero on crack.

Pablos: Yeah. Who wouldn’t buy that car? Oh, you could buy a Kia. Or if you get a Tesla, it’ll tell you where the fucking parking spot is at.

Ash: Yeah. So it’ll tell you the next, the next location. I like that. The thing that you have to figure out is how do you save it?

Pablos: Well, You wouldn’t know for sure. The things could sense in any spot they have a sight line to that could see is it is it empty? Is it staying empty? Is somebody pulling into it? You could maybe make statistical probabilities for different streets. Stuff like that.

Ash: It definitely helps when you’re doing the parking lot, shuffling, just going around and around and around. And then, you just hope that, that someone pulls out right.

What a Tesla could do is could wait for the next Tesla.

Pablos: Mm hmm. Oh, yeah. There you go. Now we’re talking. There you go. Tesla baton.

They’re doing that, with their, charging stations anyway. Tesla drivers are playing a video game where they’re like, You know, waiting for a, for a charging supercharger spot so you could, you could do that.

And then there’s, yeah, I like that one. I think it would be useful though, even if you just, you know, it knows where you’re trying to drive to and it could figure out like, okay, you’re going to have a real parking problem in that area. Street parking is a lost cause.

Ash: But if there are four Teslas there.

Pablos: It’s hard for a Tesla to know when somebody’s going to leave.

Ash: It does, because the preconditions 10, 15 minutes, see, like, if you set departure time on your Tesla, because you were preconditioning or

Pablos: Oh, why Would you do that? My car doesn’t know when I’m going to leave.

I guess you could. You could gamify it. This guy’s got a meeting. At 3 o’clock, so he’s gonna have to leave by 2. 45, so probably there’s gonna be an empty spot here. I don’t know, maybe. Might be possible.

Ash: I don’t know that you’re going to synchronize with the calendar, but I mean, that could be kind of cool, but I’m just saying that there’s definitely precondition, which, which you’re supposed to do. So if you’re plugged in at home, right. Or, but like any of these chargers, there’s like a precondition so that your car is warmer and like ready and like all that crap, right?

Like they’ve been doing that for some time.

Pablos: Oh, I see, oh, I see what you mean, right. I get it. I get it. So, so I don’t drive a Tesla, but what, but precondition you’re saying is like, I’m going to go. So warm up the car or cool off the car.

Ash: So fancy cars do that, but also when the electric cars came in, the batteries have to have like been revved or whatever.

Pablos: There’s a thermal window

Ash: Or, or set them up.

Pablos: I see.

Ash: You got it.

Right. So that’s why they want to know when you’re leaving. That way you’re not, you’re not cold driving your, your Tesla.

Pablos: Yeah.

Ash: So that means they know, right? So if you want maximum range, they’ve got to like do that little thermal thing inside to get the battery, like not, minus five or whatever the hell it is outside. So, so they already know. So in cold places, this would work well.

Pablos: Intriguing. Okay, so there’s another idea, at least for Tesla if not a startup.

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