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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Smart Lanes | ||
| Roadways that monitored, directed and controlled traffic. |
The problem of how to control the movement of large numbers of private vehicles has been a recurring question for science fiction writers (Americans, anyway). One of Robert Heinlein's early short stories, The Roads Must Roll, address similar technical issues. In his case, the roads themselves provide motive power.
| John had taken the wheel at Barstow when I-40 fed into I-15…He could brake and steer and control the throttle. The road sensors now measured his speed and how much his Jeep veered from the midpoint of his lane. The state would fine him for high speed or a wide dispersion from the lane midpoint. They all drove on smart lanes that billed and fined the driver by the second. |
| Technovelgy from Nanotime,
by Bart Kosko. Published by Avon Books in 1987 Additional resources -
|
Another writer who works with this issue is Philip K. Dick - see his story Minority Report. Traffic control systems using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) devices in license tags has also been implemented.
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
