How much gas is wasted at stop lights? How much of our lives? How much of our happiness is lost as we wait, inhaling fumes, blocked in on all sides by equally dissatisfied drivers. We don't really have stats on any of that, but we do know that 3.6 billion hours and 5 billion gallons of gas are wasted every year waiting in traffic.

Why do we do it? Because there's no better solution. But not for long! If we're gonna have to live with cars, we might as well find solutions to these horrible problems. Computer scientists at the University of Texas have created a program that can control simulated cars at a six-lane intersection without traffic lights or crashes . Of course, this assumes that every car is run by an automated system and I can imagine that it would be extremely frightening to be in one of those cars.

This model is amazing, to watch a hundred rectangles headed for eminent doom before missing one another by the width of a pixel. Think of all the gasoline that could be saved! But don't think about what would happen if the system crashed.

 You can also run the simulator with traffic lights, or you can design your own custom scenario (be careful though, cause I almost crashed my computer when I asked it to take control of an 18 lane highway.)