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[offtopic]

We are no longer allowed to buy studded tires for our cars.

interesting. i live in pdx, and it's difficult to find an SUV without studs. and we get no snow. i've always wanted studs to be allowable only to those in areas that get snow, based on your registration address. ODOT says that they're still legal, and they are legal here in portland, are you sure that it's not just a local thing that they are blaming on portland?

You work for ODOT? (the other??) I live and work in Oregon and have some experience, believe it or not, programming for traffic counters. It isn't a difficult task to figure these sorts of things out. The difficult task is to get all the traffic counters together talking on a network as most states don't have an ip network running next to all their roads that they can just plug the counters into.
That would be the high infrastructure cost. However the better counter companies offer wireless connections, ethernet...so on.

True. We are lucky to have the frame relay network here in Oregon running down all the freeways- that's how Tripcheck communicates with all of those traffic counters, loop detectors, cameras, weather stations, and ramp meters throughout the state (I work upstairs from TMOC in the Flanders building, where are you?).

If you know how far apart two counters are, then watching a single car move down the road, and even change lanes isn't a big deal. Heck, most of the good classifying counters already do many of those things quite well across multiple loops.

Yep, that's how Tripcheck's Portland Speed Map works. The loop detectors for the ramp meters track the speed of traffic, and report it back, which is then used to adjust the period of the green lights on the ramp meters.

Actually, I know there are people who've been doing this sort of things for cities for years, and I didn't really find anything new or ground breaking in this piece at all.

Neither did I really....

First of all, as an Oregon resident, I think you guys do good work, mostly; thanks.

I don't deserve the credit for most of that- I'm a software engineer working in central services, mainly on the business end of things. Closest I got was writing the software for Office of Civil Rights to check up on the contractors working on OTIA III to make sure local companies were getting the bridge building business and paying the right rates to their employees.

Another idea I've heard of for solving the traffic jam problem is, rather than minimum speed limits, just have a variable maximum speed limit. Basically, replace all the signs that say "55" with electronic signs that would say "55" most of the time, but if there's an accident, you lower the limit a few miles before the accident, say to 50 then 45 then 40. So by the time you get there, everybody is already going slower anyway, and traffic can flow smoothly (at a slower speed) instead of everybody bunching up and trying to change lanes. Obviously the difficulty here is the cost of replacing all the signs.

We do something similar to avoid a full stoppage for certain maintenance tasks. For instance, when they needed to shut down eastbound I-84 for a half hour to clear a rockfall near Hood River, we just put out 2 Incident Response trucks, driving side by side at 30 miles an hour starting at Troutdale. By the time they got to Hood River, the work was done, so they just pulled off and let traffic return to normal. No need to actually close the road, the rolling slowdown was enough to clear traffic to get the work done.

Are you familiar with this page?

Very familiar with it- I often practice anti-traffic while driving. Another useful page for anybody in Oregon is Tripcheck- great for avoiding traffic foulups in the Northern Willamette Valley or checking on weather, construction, or OnStar reported problems elsewhere in the state. Also check out the new Transportation Options Tab- until I saw that I thought Oregon Public Transportation was really bad, I didn't know how many options we really had.

By the way, what's your opinion of increasing the speed limit on I-205 from 55 to 65? Traffic permitting, the left lane usually averages 65 normally anyway, and it doesn't appear to be a problem. Do you believe there would be significantly more accidents if the limit were increased?

I don't believe there would be significantly more accidents, but for most of I-205 it'd be against our current policy of slowing down traffic in urban areas. I believe that there is a plan in the works for the southern end, but they're waiting to finish the third lane between I-5 and Oregon City first (that's the construction mess you see at the Tualatin interchange currently, increasing traffic flows for the I-5/205 interchange and earthquake upgrades for the overpasses in that area).

Absolutely true- and a point I'm trying to get across to my bosses at Oregon Department of Transportation in their bid to use GPS tech to charge road-mile taxes.

Privacy issues are transactional cost situations. If you're getting more benefit than danger, then the risk will become acceptable. Savings cards give you a return right at the checkout. I say that if we want everybody to use GPS traking for taxes, then we need to give them an equal added benefit, say, adaptive NDGPS based cruise control. Keep the cars separated out with line of sight bluetooth communications of the GPS information of both vehicles, and you've given added value to the driver. Maybe even partner up between a nice mapping software and bluetooth burst communications from http://www.tripcheck.com/ and you can have up-to-the-minute traffic jam avoidance in the Portland area.

Have you ever actually heard of the government producing anything at all?

Actually, I've seen 6 successfull projects go out the door since I've been contracting here- including an ERP project that reduced the number of servers and DBAs used by this agency. We win awards for our public service- even our websites like http://www.tripcheck.com/. My wife's father and grandfather worked for this agency, and we do see projects completed.

We've got the same thing Here in Oregon. I even created an Avantgo page on my server made up of the cameras from my commute- all using their easy to understand external developer's guide.

In Oregon, ODOT has cameras all over the state- though mainly in the Portland Area. Tripcheck gives up to the minute road conditions in a number of weather and traffic sensitive areas around the State.

But for real-time trafic info rather than for transit. Tripcheck recently even added a real-time map of the only real metro area, Portland, with estimated speeds on all of the interstates.

Been going on here in Oregon, USA for years.
Check it out