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WIRED 2015 is our annual two-day celebration of the innovators, inventors, artists and entrepreneurs who are reinventing our world. For more from the event, head over to our WIRED 2015 hub.

Self-driving cars and big data could remove eight out of every ten cars on the streets of New York City, according to architect and engineer Carlo Ratti. "Digital hasn't really killed physical space. Digital and physical are kind of combining," he told the audience at WIRED2015. "Bits and atoms coming together with us in the middle."


You're totally blurring the distinction between public transportation and private transportation Carlo Ratti, director, Senseable City Lab at MIT

Ratti, who heads MIT's Senseable City Laboratory, is trying to understand how everything from cars to people to waste move around the world. He has already collaborated with Uber on its UberPool service in New York City and he sees self-driving cars as the next step in making urban transportation more efficient. "In order to do that you need to develop new mathematics," he said. "You're totally blurring the distinction between public transportation and private transportation."

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Data architect Vincent Whiteman WIRED

With effective use of ridesharing, Ratti believes New York City could remove 60 percent of all cars from the streets. Make every car self-driving and that number grows to 80 percent. And developing a better, mathematical understanding of how things move doesn't stop there. Ratti and his team are also tracking trash.

Gallery: Self-driving cars could remove 80 percent of New York's traffic Gallery Gallery: Self-driving cars could remove 80 percent of New York's traffic + 6

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In a Seattle trial, 500 volunteers bought everything from old electronics to tin cans and mouldy banana peels, onto which Ratti and his team attached tiny GPS tags. "After tagging all of them, we started following them".


Most items up in municipal landfill after a few days, but some items, cell phones and other electronics, criss-crossed the United States, spending almost two months before coming to its final resting place. Ratti compared this level of understanding about waste to how the world has optimised the supply chain.

"What if you could do the same thing with the the removal chain?" he asked. "You can take all the data and try to optimise the system."

His early experiments are already changing people's behaviour. One of the volunteers in the Seattle trial, who donated an empty bottle of water, vowed to never drink it again after realising it ended up in a huge landfill, where it would likely remain for centuries. "If you take data and big data and you share it with people then it can promote very interesting behaviours change," Ratti said.