> While that sounds like a nice idea in theory it's the same as "digitizing" road traffic.

Traffic lights instead of mad max intersections are better.

Then there's subway Automatic Train Control.

I don't know that Air Traffic Control staff don't have computer systems for establishing which plane owns what airspace. They at least did do it manually already following specific processes, so it can be at least augmented and a computer can check for conflicts automatically (if it isn't already). And, sure, ATC could still use radio, but there could be a digital standard for ensuring everybody has access to all local airspace data. Or maybe that wouldn't help.

Your ground vehicle wanting to cross a runway could have the driver punch "cross runway 5" button (cross-referenced with GPS) and try to grab an immediate 30 second mutex on it. The computer can check that the runway is not allocated in that time (i.e. it could be allocated 2 minutes in the future, and that would be fine).

But, as pointed out elsewhere, obviously some of this is already present: stop lights are supposed to be present at this intersection.

The problem is knowing before today how to handle the case where a ground vehicle isn't across the runway in those 30 seconds.