Installed in London in 1868, the gas-powered traffic signal exploded, killing the policeman who was responsible for operating it. In the 150 years since, the stoplight evolved from a dangerous novelty to a crucial part of our world. Today, there are some 12,460 traffic signals in New York City alone. Still, some urban planners and scientists say the stoplight is nearing the end of its useful life as urban infrastructure—and that its design flaws waste millions of hours of our time unnecessarily.

This week, a team from MIT published a study in the journal PLoS One examining a radical proposal: Get rid of the stoplights completely. Led by Senseable City Lab‘s Carlo Ratti and Paolo Santi of the Ambient Mobility Lab, the paper proposes something called a “slot-based” intersection, or SI, where cars and infrastructure communicate through an algorithm that choreographs a graceful dance of vehicle platoons through an intersection.

It sounds like madness at first glance, but slot-based network design has already populated other industries. A great example comes from airlines, as Ratti and Santi point out. Take Southwest—instead of letting people line up all at once to board a plane, the airline divides people into six batches, each of which boards at an explicit time.

“We tend to think we’re better than some piece of software, despite the fact that 80% to 90% of accidents are due to human error.”

The process may irk passengers—especially middle-seat suckers—but it’s actually among the fastest ways to board a plane. It’s a form of “slot-based” scheduling, which is already in use everywhere from air traffic control to business management. The basic idea is that actors in a system are grouped into batches, and the speed of their movement is carefully controlled to move them more efficiently through a space.

It’s known as the “slower-is-faster effect,” as Santi and Ratti explain, pointing out that while slot-based design has appeared in other industries, it hasn’t arrived in traffic design yet. They think that time has come, and in their paper, they demonstrate how it could double the efficiency of intersections and cut delays “to almost zero.”

What would their system look like in practice? As Santi explains, a slot-based intersection would rely on two things. First, a sensor-equipped car would need to communicate its trajectory—right, left, or straight—to a central algorithm controlling the intersection, which would group it into a “batch” of other cars going in the same direction. Second, the central software system would need to be able to control the speed of each platoon, using cruise control-style software that already exists in most cars, to limit the speed of your car as it moved through the intersection.