I suppose that once you have laws that allow blocking one type of site then other sites will be pretty easy to be added. A precedent sort of thing. Done once then others will follow.
Pretty amazing that piracy is such a hot topic such that freedoms can be curtailed but everyone’s right to an AR15 must be protected.
Sounds reasonable if you think of the country as big. Attracting migrants is necessary as the birth rate in most educated countries is negative so the population, if left to itself, is declining. Migrants will mostly want to live in cities and probably the bigger ones with more opportunities. The infrastructure will mostly be needed to expand the big cities which will make them a lot less inviting. That might be less of an issue as everything electrified on the way to a low carbon economy, the smog will reduce as will some of the noise.
As I recall it, the system used cameras or maybe radar to detect the cars some distance away so it had time to optimise the lights. The Google system seems to be based on historical data which probably the quickest way to improve using the current technology. My observation is that most traffic lights are set and forget so there are probably huge improvements possible.
As google data is based on mobile phones, they probably do have data on pedestrians as well as cars which could be promising.
To really fix things there will need to be new technology to allow realtime adjustments which introduces the opportunity to detect bikes and pedestrians.
There was research on this at least 10 years ago where approaching traffic was detected and the lights were dynamically adjusted to improve traffic flow. This is the first time I’ve heard of this since.
Sadly, no one is considering optimising pedestrian traffic flows as they tend to have to wait at beg lights for increasing amounts of time. If we want liveable cities then we need to consider walking as a priority.
It’s law and order with a bit of “thou shall not steal”. There’re people who never question the root cause.