Welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am joined, as always, by my brother, the man who once tried to network our toaster to the neighbor’s garage door opener just to see if he could.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And for the record, Corn, that toaster experiment was a foundational study in local mesh networking. It just happened to result in a very burnt bagel and a very confused neighbor.
Well, today’s prompt from Daniel is significantly more sophisticated than your kitchen-based chaos. Daniel is looking at the big picture of human movement. He is arguing that electric vehicles are just a stopgap—a temporary band-aid—on our way to a fully car-free society. He wants to dive into autonomous public transport and the idea of a massive, city-wide vehicular mesh network.
It is a timely one, Corn. We are sitting here in February of twenty twenty-six, and the conversation around mobility has shifted so rapidly in just the last eighteen months. Daniel’s point about electric vehicles being a stopgap is something we are seeing play out in urban planning offices all over the world right now. The "E V honeymoon phase" is starting to wane as people realize that a traffic jam of electric cars is still, at the end of the day, a traffic jam.
It is a bold take, though. For the last decade, we have been told the electric vehicle is the endgame. It was the solution to the climate crisis, the answer to urban pollution, the savior of the American driveway. But Daniel is arguing that even if every single car on the road is electric, we still have a fundamental geometry problem. Too many metal boxes, not enough space, and the massive resource cost of personal ownership for eight billion people.
He is spot on about the geometry. Think about it this way. A standard parking space is about one hundred and eighty square feet. In a city like Los Angeles, there are an estimated eighteen million parking spaces. That is a staggering amount of real estate dedicated to stationary pieces of metal. Whether those pieces of metal run on gasoline or lithium-ion batteries doesn't change the fact that they are taking up space where people could be living, working, or planting trees. And then you have the "resource trap." To transition the entire global fleet to E Vs, we would need to mine more lithium, cobalt, and copper in the next twenty years than we have in the last two thousand.
So, if the E V is just the bridge, what is on the other side? Daniel points toward autonomous public transport, or A P T. We have spent decades obsessed with the individual self-driving car—the "robotaxi" that takes you from your door to your office in solitary comfort. But Daniel is suggesting the real efficiency gains happen when you automate the backbone of the city—the buses, the shuttles, and the light rail.
Exactly. The "robotaxi" model actually risks making traffic worse because it encourages more "deadhead" miles—cars driving around empty waiting for a fare. But A P T? That is about high-capacity throughput. So, to Daniel’s first question: what is actually happening at scale? Are there real-world proofs of concept where this isn’t just a pilot program with two shuttles in a retirement community?
I think people assume this is still "future tech," but the scale in certain parts of the world is already massive.
It really is. If you look at China, specifically Shenzhen and Beijing, they have moved past the experimental phase. Shenzhen already has the world’s first fully electric bus fleet—over sixteen thousand buses—and now they are layering on what they call the "national vehicle-road-cloud initiative." They aren’t just testing one bus; they are testing entire corridors where the buses communicate with the road infrastructure to maintain perfect intervals. They call it "platooning." Imagine five buses traveling inches apart at forty miles per hour, acting like a virtual train.
I remember reading about the A R T system—Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit. It is basically a trackless tram, right?
Precisely. It was developed by the C R R C Zhuzhou Institute. It looks like a sleek, modern tram, and it can carry three hundred to five hundred people, but it doesn't need steel rails. It runs on rubber tires and follows virtual tracks painted on the road using optical sensors and lidar. They have these running in several Chinese cities like Zhuzhou and Yibin, and they just started testing a version called S A R T, or Super Autonomous Rapid Transit, in places like Lahore, Pakistan and even parts of Australia. The goal there is to provide the capacity of a subway at a fraction of the infrastructure cost because you aren’t digging tunnels or laying steel rails. You are just "digitizing" the existing asphalt.
That covers the intra-city piece—getting around within the urban core. But Daniel also asked about inter-city transit. That seems like a much harder nut to crack because of the higher speeds and the sheer unpredictability of highway traffic.
Inter-city is definitely the frontier, but the "scale" there is actually being driven by freight. There is a project on Interstate thirty-five between Laredo and Dallas where autonomous truck fleets from companies like Aurora and Kodiak Robotics are starting trial operations at scale. The logic is that if you can prove a forty-ton semi-truck can navigate a five-hundred-mile highway stretch safely, a long-distance coach bus is the next logical step.
It’s the "follow the leader" model.
Exactly. In Europe, the S H O W project—which stands for Shared automation Operating models for Worldwide adoption—has been running pilot sites in twenty cities across the continent. They are looking at how these autonomous buses handle everything from the narrow, cobblestone streets of Graz to high-speed inter-city links. We are seeing a shift where the "bus driver" is becoming a "mission commander" who oversees a fleet of three or four autonomous coaches traveling in a convoy. It reduces drag, saves energy, and increases the density of the highway.
It feels like the technology is there, but the "at scale" part is still heavily dependent on the city’s willingness to push out human drivers. Which leads into Daniel’s second big idea—the mesh network. He’s imagining a system where every vehicle and every traffic light is a node. Herman, we’ve talked about V to X—Vehicle-to-Everything—before, but how close are we to a true mesh?
We are closer than most people realize, but the terminology is important here. What Daniel is describing is essentially C-V to X—Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything. For a long time, the industry was split between D S R C, which is a dedicated short-range communication based on Wi-Fi, and the cellular version. As of twenty-six, C-V to X has essentially won the war. The F C C in the U S and the regulators in the E U have cleared the way for the five point nine gigahertz band to be used specifically for this.
Why did the cellular version win? Was it just a matter of five G coverage?
It’s more about the "Sidelink" capability. This is the "mesh" Daniel is talking about. C-V to X allows for direct communication between devices—car to car, car to light, car to pedestrian—without needing to go up to a cell tower and back down. That is the "PC five" interface. If a bus a hundred yards ahead hits its brakes because a dog ran into the road, it sends a broadcast packet directly to every car behind it. That happens in less than ten milliseconds. To put that in perspective, a human reaction time is about two hundred and fifty milliseconds on a good day. The mesh is twenty-five times faster than your brain.
Right, so the mesh becomes a collective nervous system for the road. But Daniel’s specific point was about the traffic signals themselves acting as nodes. He’s suggesting we might not even need physical lights eventually.
That is the "Day One Deployment District" concept. Atlanta actually launched one of these in late twenty twenty-five. They have a three-mile round-trip route where the shuttles and the traffic lights are in a constant state of negotiation. The light doesn’t just turn green because a timer went off; it turns green because the autonomous bus requested "preemption" to stay on schedule. In a true mesh, the "light" is just a data packet. You could have an intersection where cars from four different directions all arrive at once and they don't stop. They just adjust their speeds by two or three miles per hour so they "weave" through each other with inches to spare. It’s called "slot-based intersections."
I want to push on that, because it sounds terrifying. If the "light" is just a data packet, what happens to the human-driven car? This is the "mixed traffic" problem you always bring up. If I’m driving my old twenty-ten Toyota that doesn’t have a V to X node, am I just a blind spot in the network?
That is the single biggest hurdle to Daniel’s vision. In a one hundred percent autonomous environment, the efficiency is god-like. But the moment you add one unpredictable human who decides to change lanes without signaling or who gets distracted by a text, the whole system has to revert to a much more conservative, "stop-and-go" model. The mesh is only as strong as its weakest link.
So, is the answer retrofitting? Daniel mentioned every vehicle acting as a node. Can we just stick a box on a twenty-year-old car and call it a day?
Actually, yes. Companies like Denso and Commsignia launched aftermarket V to X solutions last year. You can buy an On-Board Unit, or O B U, that plugs into your car’s O B D-two port and broadcasts your position, velocity, and heading. But for the network to be "feasible" for collision avoidance, you need a high penetration rate. If only thirty percent of cars are on the mesh, the mesh can’t guarantee safety. You need something like ninety-five percent before you can start removing physical signals. That is why some cities are discussing "V to X Mandates," similar to how we mandated seatbelts or backup cameras.
Let’s talk about the network requirements for a second. Daniel asked what kind of network would be required. If we are talking about every car in a city like Jerusalem or New York or London broadcasting its state ten times a second, that is a massive amount of data. Is five G actually enough?
It’s not just about the "G." It’s about where the processing happens. This is where "edge computing" becomes the hero of the story. You don’t want a central server in a different state trying to coordinate an intersection in downtown Jerusalem. The "brain" has to live in the Roadside Units—the R S Us—mounted on the poles where the traffic lights used to be.
So the pole is the server.
Exactly. The pole gathers the data from the fifty cars in its immediate vicinity, runs the coordination algorithm, and broadcasts the instructions back. We are talking about sub-ten-millisecond latency requirements. Five G-Advanced is the current baseline, but the industry is already looking at six G for the late twenty-twenties because it offers even higher reliability and "centimeter-level" positioning. You need a network that doesn't just have high bandwidth, but extremely high "determinism." You need to know, with one hundred percent certainty, that the packet will arrive on time. In a mesh network, a "dropped packet" could mean a dropped bumper.
And what about the "mesh" part where cars talk to each other without the pole? If two cars are on a collision course on a rural road with no infrastructure, can the mesh save them?
That is the "V to V" or Vehicle-to-Vehicle layer. That is already operational in many high-end vehicles from Cadillac, Audi, and Ford. The cars use that five point nine gigahertz band to talk directly. It’s like a digital "shout." "I am here, I am going this fast, and I am turning left." If the other car’s "ears" are open, it can calculate the collision risk and override the driver. It’s called "Collective Perception." One car’s sensors see a patch of black ice, and it tells every other car within a mile to adjust their traction control.
It sounds incredible, but it also sounds like a cybersecurity nightmare. If every car is a node and they are all listening to each other’s "shouts" to make life-or-death decisions, how do you prevent someone from spoofing a "ghost car" or sending a "braking" signal to an entire highway just for fun?
You have hit on the most sensitive part of the architecture. The entire system relies on something called the Public Key Infrastructure, or P K I. Every message sent by a vehicle or a traffic light has to be digitally signed with a certificate that proves it’s a legitimate, registered device. These certificates are rotated frequently—sometimes every few minutes—to prevent tracking and spoofing.
But we’ve seen how even "secure" systems can be compromised. Remember the ransomware attack on Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s rail system back in twenty-four? That wasn't even a mesh network, and it still paralyzed the schedule.
Right, and that is a massive concern. In a mesh network, the attack surface is huge. Every car is a potential entry point. The industry is currently working on "misbehavior detection" algorithms. Basically, the network uses a consensus model. If one car is shouting "I’m braking!" but its neighbors’ sensors see it moving at sixty miles per hour, the network flags that node as compromised and ignores its data. It’s like a neighborhood watch for data packets.
It’s like a blockchain for traffic.
I knew you’d go there! But in a sense, yes. It’s a decentralized ledger of "truth" about where things are in physical space. If the majority of nodes agree that the road is clear, one rogue node can't easily trick the system into stopping.
Let’s go back to Daniel’s "E V as a stopgap" thesis. If we have this perfect mesh and these autonomous buses, do we even need personal cars? Or is the "car-free" society more of a "personal-car-free" society, where we still use cars, but they are all shared, autonomous pods?
That is the "Mobility as a Service" or M a a S model. We’ve seen cities like Helsinki and Berlin really lean into this with apps like Whim or Jelbi. The idea is that you don’t own a car; you own a subscription to the city’s movement network. Maybe a small autonomous shuttle—like the ones from Holon or Beep—picks you up at your door for the "first mile" and drops you at the autonomous rapid transit hub. It’s about "multimodal" efficiency.
I think the psychological barrier is the biggest one there. People love the "freedom" of their own car, even if that freedom mostly consists of sitting in traffic and paying for insurance and hunting for parking. But Daniel’s point about affordability is real. He mentioned he can’t afford an electric vehicle because he’s busy buying monitor mounts and tech gear.
He’s not alone. The total cost of ownership for a car is skyrocketing. Between insurance, maintenance, and the high cost of E V batteries, the "freedom" of the car is becoming an expensive cage. If a city can provide a mesh-coordinated, autonomous transit system that is faster, safer, and cheaper than owning a car, the economic argument will eventually win over the emotional one. We are already seeing this with Gen Z and Gen Alpha in mega-cities. They aren't getting driver's licenses because they don't need them. Their "freedom" is their smartphone and a reliable transit network.
So, what does the transition look like? If we agree E Vs are the stopgap, how do we get to the car-free endgame? Is it a slow phasing out of parking spaces? Or is it a "big bang" infrastructure shift?
It’s already happening through "tactical urbanism." Look at Paris under Mayor Hidalgo. They have removed thousands of parking spots and turned them into "velopolitain" bike lanes and cafe seating. Barcelona has the "Superblocks" where they cut off through-traffic to entire neighborhoods, forcing cars to stay on the perimeter. As the autonomous mesh becomes more reliable, cities will start designating "A V-Only" zones. Once you have a zone where only mesh-connected autonomous vehicles can go, the efficiency of that zone will be so much higher—no traffic lights, no congestion—that people in the neighboring districts will demand it expand to them.
It’s like the early days of the car itself. Cars were a nuisance until we built the roads for them and pushed the horses out. Now we are looking at pushing the human-driven cars out to make room for the mesh.
Exactly. And the "mesh" doesn't just help cars. Think about the pedestrians and cyclists. In a true V to X system, your smartphone is a node. If you are walking toward a crosswalk, your phone broadcasts a "V to P"—Vehicle-to-Pedestrian—signal. The autonomous bus three blocks away already knows you are there and adjusts its speed so it doesn't even have to stop; it just glides past right after you cross. It’s a "frictionless" city.
That is the "invisible siren" concept you mentioned earlier. I think they are doing that in the Netherlands with ambulances?
Yes! The "Emergency Services Priority" system. All ambulances in the Netherlands are now connected to a national digital alert network. When the ambulance is coming, it sends a digital "siren" to the dashboards of every car in its path. It doesn't just scream at you with a physical siren; it tells your car exactly which way to move to clear a path. That is the power of the mesh. It turns a chaotic collection of individuals into a coordinated swarm.
So, back to the feasibility. Daniel asked if it would be feasible and what kind of network we need. We’ve talked about five G, edge computing, and P K I security. But what about the "hardware" of the city? Do we need to dig up every street to put in these Roadside Units?
Not necessarily. Most modern L E D streetlights are already being replaced with "smart" versions that have power and mounting points for sensors. You can "piggyback" the V to X mesh on the existing lighting infrastructure. The biggest physical cost isn't the nodes; it’s the sensors for the "non-connected" objects. If the mesh is going to be safe, it needs to see the dog that ran into the street or the kid on the skateboard who doesn't have a smartphone.
So the "mesh" isn't just vehicles; it’s a total situational awareness of the street.
Precisely. The poles will have lidar and cameras that "digitize" the entire intersection and broadcast that "world model" to every vehicle. This is what we call "Collective Perception Messages" or C P Ms. Your car doesn't just rely on its own cameras; it "sees" through the eyes of the traffic light and the car three vehicles ahead. It’s like having a god-like view of the road at all times. It eliminates blind spots entirely.
It’s fascinating, but I can already hear our listeners thinking about the privacy side. If the "mesh" knows where every car, phone, and person is in real-time to coordinate movement, that is the ultimate surveillance state.
It is a massive trade-off, Corn. The V to X standards include "privacy-preserving" measures, like the "Temporary Identifier" system I mentioned. Your car doesn't broadcast "This is Herman’s car." It broadcasts "I am Node Seven-Four-Two." And every five minutes, it changes to "Node Nine-One-Eight." But at the end of the day, for the system to work, it has to know exactly where "a person" is. Whether we can keep that data anonymous is the technical and political battleground of the next decade.
I think the takeaway for Daniel is that his "weird" vision is actually the baseline for urban planning in twenty twenty-six. The "E V as a stopgap" isn't just a fringe theory; it’s becoming the consensus because we simply can’t fit eight billion electric cars on the planet. The math doesn't work. The lithium doesn't work. The space doesn't work.
And the proofs of concept are moving fast. If you want to see the future, look at the "Day One" districts in Atlanta, the trackless trams in China, and the autonomous minibuses in Europe. We are moving from "self-driving cars" to "cooperative transit networks." It’s a shift from the "ego" of the individual driver to the "ecosystem" of the city.
Which, honestly, sounds a lot more relaxing. I’d much rather read a book on an autonomous bus that never hits a red light than navigate a traffic jam in my own "eco-friendly" electric car.
I think we’ll get there sooner than people think. The technology is hitting its inflection point right now. Analysts are saying twenty twenty-six is the year the global autonomous fleet will start growing tenfold. We are at the start of the explosion.
Well, if you’ve been enjoying this deep dive into the future of how we move, we’d really appreciate a quick review on your podcast app. It helps more people find the show and join the conversation.
It really does. And if you have your own "weird prompts" about the future, or anything else, we want to hear them.
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This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to Daniel for the prompt that took us from monitor mounts to the death of the traffic light.
Until next time, keep your nodes connected and your latency low.
Goodbye, everyone.
Goodbye!
