And when something's glitching? Say an avoid-ground routine and a go-down routine, plus some sort of importance measurement (very near ground? go up fast). All reasonable in a self-piloting machine.
Now say the go-down routine gets abnormally high importance, or fires off a million times per second.
Unlikely? Yes, but so is what happened. And I specifically included "consider if", because it's not what happened, but could conceivably, and was probably one of the panicked fears going through their heads.
What I got from the article was not that naked roads should be everywhere, but actually that they absolutely shouldn't be everywhere. They should, however, be considered, as should a great many other possibilities, in the context of the specific environment that a traffic engineer is designing for. Instead we too often see a bias towards signs and signals and too much copy+paste of what has been done elsewhere.
Once upon a time I used some vim plugin--and that one sounds familiar--to allow me to compile from within vim and then jump to that paragraph in the dvi viewer. I think I could also click a paragraph in the dvi viewer and jump to that text in vim.
It seems worth pointing out that you can affect the safety of as many or more people by walking into a skyscraper, stadium, festival, &c., or by walking near train tracks when a train or two is due to come by, a major bridge during rush hour, &c. The searches may be easiest to do for air travel, but the same thing could be done nearly as easily for any tall building.
A little bit less so though, as planes fall quite easily (and quite quickly) from what would be relatively minor disturbances at those other locations.
It's kind of like saying walking on a wood-bottomed rope bridge is the same as walking on a suspension bridge. Except the rope bridge is a couple miles in the air. Essentially perfectly safe, but if one person cuts the ropes, you all go down. If someone decides to take out a chunk of a road's bridge, there's more danger to the people nearby than to the bridge as a whole; it's much closer to the same risk you run by simply standing near someone else.
Then, there's always those pesky squirrels deciding the rope looks tasty (ie, geese + engine). That's a different problem entirely, though.
Unfortunately they have non-transitive equality when used with standard dictionaries. For example, if O and R are ordered dictionaries with the same entries in different orders, and D is a standard dictionary with the same entries, then O == D == R but O != R.
