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Computerized Navigation Systems to the Rescue
Rhys_Lewis writes "There is an article in Newsweek discussing the advantages of traffic avoidance systems in big cities around the world. I can't help thinking that it would be cheaper to subsidise in-car satnav units with traffic avoidance than building new freeways. Surely it makes sense to interactively route traffic than to keep building passive roads?"
What's gonna happen when advertising hits these things?
Your car drives you directly to the nearest McDonalds!
If you want to avoid traffic, spending your money on silly "Traffic avoidance" boxes is a waste. There is a much easier way to avoid traffic; don't use your car!
For a nation that claims to be the world leader, public transport is possibly the worst in any civalised country. Buses are few and far between, train systems are unused for shorter journeys and everyone, everyone commutes into work by car. What a waste!
What is needed is more investment in public transport infastructure. That'll avoid more traffic than a little black box ever could.
Use mass transit.
Although this is a great idea, privacey advocates will not let it happen. Too bad, great idea. I for one, would love to avoid idiot drivers. Hmmm, a non-idiot drivers road... SWEET
Maybe as add-on units...
Traffic info is available here The data is collected from sensors in the road and is updated every 5 minutes
Free cell phone tracking
that people won't get fed up with the stupid things and turn them off. From the article, about 10% of drivers in Japan use the navigation systems. The other 90% are still clogging up the freeways, even if Americans turn out to be as gadget-happy as the Japanese (which wouldn't surprise me).
So, to answer the question in the article, not unless you can force people to USE the satnav units. I for one have used one a few times (in rental cars mostly) and found it incredibly annoying.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
In large metropolitan areas, traffic systems operate a lot like financial markets. As the supply of quick routes increases, so does the demand. This is why building highways doesn't always result in faster commutes. In this case, the same effect will result in a more efficient traffic system, but not necessarily a faster one.
I'm still waiting for my dream to come true - where networked vehicle control eliminates the need for traffic signals and stop signs.
Imagine sailing down city streets at freeway speeds, with perpedicular streams of traffic flowing through another through the magic of precise timing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Rather than come up with hugely expensive and complex systems to route traffic, wouldn't it be smarter to use extant technology to create better ways of moving people around congested city centers?
Well-run light rail and subways with published schedules (e.g. NJ Path trains) would make it easier for commuters to reliably predict their departure and arrival times. Spend the money building roads connecting the suburbs with transportation hubs.
Okay, if you must--set up wireless navigation to get the suburbanites from their homes to the trains!
from georgewellian fuddite corepirate nazi hostage taking execrable.
.conStart(tm) MiSdirection scam to smell which way the wind is bullowing.
obviously a part of the creator's planet/population rescue initiative.
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consult with/trust in yOUR creator.
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www.georgia-navigator.com is a great way to find out problems along Georgia's roads.
Retrofitting all cars with GPS navigation, even if it were free, wouldn't clear up traffic troubles, it would just clog up every alternate route.
Just send traffic information along with GPS information :-)
I can't help thinking that it would be cheaper to subsidise in-car satnav units with traffic avoidance than building new freeways.
The population is growing. The number of cars on the road is increasing dramatically. How do you think you will be able to avoid the traffic when all of the roads are full? There is no way to reduce congestion without building new roads unless, you somehow restrict the number of cars.
...and those pesky bikes and pedestrians are banned, I can hardlt wait.
Walking down a city street will be as pleasant as walking down a highway
Free cell phone tracking
Work on inventing the teleporter.
Stop corporate
This reminds me of the signs telling you whether the Whitestone or Throgs Neck is the fastest route to the Bronx. I always choose the opposite because obviously everybody else is going to go the way it tells them. It is yet to fail me. GWB has something like that but the advice is to always take the local instead of the express. The express always gets backed up first because it has no exits and only two lanes.
Of course, now that I revealed my routes will be forever slashdotted.
If this becomes redundant please be considerate because it took me 3 tries to get it posted. Nice to see that slashdot has fixed this two week old problem.
Put all people not of the ruling class into FEMA concentration camps and enslave them to support the new prison economy. That would reduce traffic.
As long as many people need to arrive at the same place at roughly the same time, there will be traffic congestion, even with the most intelligent of routing aids. Only real passive infrastructure will help (or desynchronization, but I doubt that will happen).
New Orleans and Baton Rouge are good examples of good and bad planning. New Orleans, despite being built on a river that flows both north and south, works. It has a grid that starts with the ancient French quarter. The grid was expanded reasonably when the Americans arived in 1812 or so and continued to expand. It's streets curve with the river and are crossed by streets that look like spokes on a wheel. The city has filled the space between the Lake Ponchitrain and the Mississippi River gracefully, so that there are any number of large streets to get from one end to the other. Baton Rouge is cursed by Bayous. The north end of the city follows a rectangular grid that matches one section of the Mississippi River. It is navicable itself but matches up poorly with the much larger and growing southern half. The sothern part of the city is composed of several large neighborhoods oriented around bayous and rural routes that meet at crazy angles. One two lane road follows the river and only the interstate traverses them all. To get from one side of town to another, a person has to drive a crazy zig zag of short rural routes and the interstate which are always choked.
It has an effect on people. New Orleans is known for it's couteous and polite drivers. Baton Rouge is full of hot heads. Insurance companies do take note of driver attitudes and told me what I knew from simply driving in one of their publications.
Just try getting the people of Baton Rouge to buy a gadget that's going to tell them the interstate is clogged and there's no way around it. Ha! My 1970 VW van farts in your general direction.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If every single route into the city is jammed, I fail to see how an intelligent traffic router is going to make a profound impact.
:-) )
Roads are simply over capacity. We either need to get better mass-transit, build new roads, or have a lot of people telecommute.
(I guess we could try compression, that sometimes works in networking, right? Everyone has to drive 2-door specs
Those systems can be quite useless when EVERY route is backed up and jammed every morning and evening for your commute.
'ta
I remember like 20 years ago, my Dad speculating on how it would be better if there was a way to not have to stop at toll booths, rather just drive your car through some kind of reader and let it send you a bill. Looks like he predicted the future to some degree (EZ Pass).
Now the other idea, and stay with me here, would be to have some kind of autopilot for your car on highways. Much like we have an HOV lane, could you envision cars equipped with a system that, once in one of these lanes, you could program the exit you wanted to get off (or maybe the mileage distance) and have the car simply follow the lane in the road up until that point (adjusting speed to traffic conditions accordingly of course)? I know it sounds far fetched, but under the right circumstances it could work. It would eliminate the worst part of traffic, which is the incredibily demanding tedious and boring act of staring at the brake lights of the car in front of you in a creeping traffic jam. Wouldn't that be best handled by a computer?
Sorry to rant, but I think I've thought about this a little too much - as I definitely have traffic jam hang ups ...
Would this be IPV4 or IPV6?
~*~ Tara
It would seem that if there is a traffic jam on Road A yesterday at a certain time. Then the computers decide it will happen again at the same time today. They would send the cars down street B and jam it up instead???
traffic using the same information. Yes, like that's going to help anything.
The only solution is to provide enough bandwidth. Sooner or later a limit on the amount of traffic will be reached as nobody is going to drive for more than 24 hours/day.
That's a point that is lost on the mentally-challenged planners where I live. These turds are closing roads, narrowing roads, lowering speed limits and installing roadblocks instead of making life easy. My daily commute time has gone up by 40 minutes daily over the last 5 years. That's over five full days of my life lost per year.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
The problem is that the planners do not plan for the future. Hampton Roads, Virginia has this problem. They expand and put in alternate routes, then people move to the outlying areas and traffic just gets worse. Instead of addind another four lane expressway, they should add an eight lane expressway and by God do not choke it off at a two lane tunnel. Anyone who had driven the 464/264 interchange in downtown Norfolk knows what I'm talking about.
Yeah, car navigation's a real good idea.
Try to use a technological system to bypass the symptom while ignoring the root of the problem.
Traffic congestion (during rush hour) is caused by people commuting from the suburbs to the city to get to work. But why do people commute? Why not just live in the city near to where you work? Well, the housing is shite and bloody bloody expensive for what you get, it's cheaper and better to live in the burbs and then spend 2 years of your life sitting in a steel cage in traffic.
So traffic congestion is a symptom of a housing problem. The solution? Good quality low cost housing in areas with bad congestion. It'll never happen though, it's a politically unacceptable solution, there are too many powerful interests making money from the high demand, low supply, expensive accomodation in towns and cities.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
All it takes is a few people zooming around inserting them selves rudely to slow down the traffic flow. Some drops in speed provide room for others to merge, but most drops in speed make it easier for cars to pack in. When cars can't merge in, traffic has to stop in order for them to be let in.
I have a secret suspicion that there are less than 20 people messing up the commute (per roadway). Those days that the traffic flows uncannily smooth is when most of those people call in sick.
Sometimes the geek/technology solution can't overcome social patterns.
Why are the roadways clogged?
"Because they're stupid, that's why everyone does everything." - Homer Simpson
postmodernsideshow.com
Enough of this bullshit! Driving is fun, and maybe people should just pay attention to the road and get off the damn telephone!
m.
Get your fat, lazy ass out of your Bin Laden approved SUV and on mass transit or a bike, and maybe, just maybe, there won't be so much traffic. Oh, I forgot... it's all about your comfort. Well, if you're fucking stupid enough to take a job an hour or two away from your home, you get what you deserve. No black box is going to give you any useful advice when the whole fucking city is pretty much grid-locked, eh?
The simple solution is not to continue to use cars, but to use intracity transport pods. (basically cars that run on tracks within a city.) It is currently being tested in Europe and it works amazingly well, and unlike roads, it is uses electricity (produced from hydro in le Pays-bas, you don't mix in people you can't drive into the service (Which is pretty severe). There is no need for traffic lights, etc, since the service is properly designed to handle that from teh start. It can go considerably faster (for a ton of reasons.)
Or we can decide to stay with archaic cars and tar roads and continue to support the oil industry more. That seems tobe the American way newaiz.
~ kjrose
We don't even have intelligent traffic lights down here in America's wang. Intelligent navigation systems and road sensors are quite a ways off.
is likely to be the most advanced ? As somebody living in Berlin and biking 40km a day the only incarnation I've seen so far is a display saying one main street is closed for over a year now.
This could have been done with a much cheaper roadsign. Nobody I know ever talked about this nor have I ever read about this system in a newspaper so it has probably not much impact.
If money were no object my dream is for a completely computerized traffic system. I get in my car tell it where I'm going and it tell the central traffic scheduler which inserts me into the traffic system. Not only can it pick the best route, but it should adjust my speed and that of all other traffic at all the intersections and we don't ever have to stop. Cars can be packed in more tightly because everything moves at the same speed and there won't be anyone slamming on the breaks because traffic unexpectedly cloged. The capicty of the current roads could probably be doubled. Then I'd sit in the back of my car with a good book or a tv and barely notice that I had a commute.
Where do you think traffic would be re-routed. Right now city planners close streets and turn them into one way and add stop signs and sometimes speed bumps because people choose alternate routes through residential areas (with kids present). This is not the answer because to make it work you would just create mini-expressway's as alternative routes which would have to have changes done to handle the added traffic and would have to be more protective of pedestrians.
Usually these types of routes designed for heavier through traffic, as you see in suburban areas, have very long lights which are tuned for the through traffic not the local "I am just going to the store down the street" traffic. That would chop up our nieghborhoods even more into seperate Islands of living. That I contend carries its own social impact as yet to be measures.
I think the best idea is to go Mass transit in the cities, stagger the work days, or foster at home work or small distributed work centers. But the major travel routes need to be channeled and our kids protected from that risk.
I'm talking about driving on Long Island and in the NY area in general. You can't take public transportation to just anywhere. On the weekends, the roads are snarled everywhere. I'm not complaining at all, just stating fact. I like living here very much.
But I'm wondering if anyone else could see could envision the future of the roads. It simply can't keep going the way it is.
These systems sound really good on paper, but they don't really work. People do not (cannot) travel at the speed of light. Unlike a network packet, a route that doubles your travel distance is noticed. When someone miscongifued a router so that packets between them went 1000 miles up and down the US east coast instead of over the cable between them (physically they were sitting one on top of the other, and the ethernet cable inbetween was faster than the WAN link), nobody noticed except those who did a trace route.
When you take an alternate route the distance increases substantially. The difference between hiway and city driving is normally about 5mpg, so a 10 mile detour will increase the amount of gas used (and thus polution created). In most cisites they don't build redundant freeway lanes, so your prefered route may be jamed, but all the other routes are jamed too, so switching over to another road just makes that road over capacity and slows it down (if it wasn't over capacity to begin with). For most people an alternate route is only useful in extreem cases where the prefered route is closed.
City streets are now intentially designed to prevent traffic on them. Nobody wants their kid riding a bike in the middle of a busy street, so they curve and twist such that no only is the speed obtainable (never mind legal limits) slow, but the route is long and doesn't really get you anywhere. In many cases one mile "as the crow flys" will be 2 on the streets. This pushes cars to the freeway, which actually go someplace, even when the freeway is barely moving it is still faster than the easy alternates.
I don't know the solution. Public transport sounds good, but it really doesn't make sense until populations densitiees get much higher than the point where cars on roads no longer make sense. Personal rapid transport has been proposed, but no implimentations are massive enough to be sure it will really work any better.
Cost of SatNav in car in the UK : Approx. 1500 / car
Cost of increased number of accidents due to drivers concentrating on SatNav at speed : Unkown
Amount of roads that can be built for (number of cars * 1500) : More roads than god.
I don't deny that everyone having SatNav would help, but so would computer controlled driving (in a much bigger way). The problem in the UK is that less than 30% of the taxes collected from motoring related taxes are put back into the roads, causing congestion. The welfare state takes most of the rest.
But it's not the politicians fault (totally, anyway). The voters of the nearby counties keep voting down extensions of MARTA that would make mass transit available to them (apparently to keep it difficult for a certain element to reach their nice suburban areas). Of course, the other problem is you need to run the rails through already heavy populated areas - and the stations would have to be ginormous.
Some counties have combatted the problem by starting bus service all the way into downtown Atlanta. That's nice, but I'd have to drive 15 minutes, wait for a bus, take the bus way past my destination (even though there's a station near where I work, the bus I'd have to take goes past it to another one), then take the train back to the station closest to where I work and walk about 1.5 miles (which is not a problem except for time).
When I just drive it takes 35 minutes. I'm willing to sacrifice some time to take mass transit, but it'd take me well over twice as long.
The problem, though, with a GPS system telling commuters how to avoid slow traffic is that we already have one. It's called 750WSB - news, traffic, and weather every six minutes! Unfortunately, the volume of traffic is so high in Atlanta, at peak times, that an accident can cause slow traffic on a different road 20 miles away because everyone already knows the alternates, but the volume is so high that by taking alternates your just making a bad situation worse and often taking even more time to finish your commute than if you'd have just waited through the original jam. One bad accident here can sometimes affect the whole city, and we're talking about a very LARGE city.
The drivers here are also horrible, but I know everybody says that about where they live. However, having lived in three major metropolitan areas (and experienced others), I can say these people are the worst I've seen. I'd like a nice job down in Florida, maybe, somewhere on the keys where I can work out of my house.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
They already have the Sigalert system in California -- all you'd need is a few webcams and people to watch them, and with a simplified on-star type system, the car could warn you that you're about to drive into a traffic jam, and tell you a different way to go. It's really simple, actually, and shouldn't require new roads or anything like that.
stuff |
Another Atlantan...
I've pointed out the problem with alternates in Atlanta, it's good to see someone with the same opinion backing me up.
The thing about the traffic navigator is that you use it to see if traffic is clear before you come in or go home. I've often waited several hours and gotten extra work done just to avoid the mess that it was showing me.
The problem is that I'll look at it, everything's green, I log off, start walking to my car, an accident happens on 85N, I get to my car and pull out of the parking lot, traffic is building on 85, and by the time I get there it's a horrible mess.
That's happened on several occasions. Even listening to the radio you often don't get frequent enough updates, or the updates don't reflect what happened within the past 10 minutes. By then it's too late.
This traffic navigation idea, though, would not work in Atlanta, as you've pointed out.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Intelligent nav systems would be no more effective than any other fix such as signal timing, on-ramp signals, or enforced HOV lanes.
The real trouble is these "fixes" are either never or partially implemented or so long after the fact that they're worthless. If municipalities or departments of transportation could get traffic management devices in place before there's a crisis, they would actually work.
Thankfully in Atlanta, we have none of those things, making any metro commute an exercise in misery. Signal timing is rare if ever found. On-ramp signals were "tried" on two or three ramps and deemed a failure. Well -DUH- you have to install them on all the ramps and coordinate them. HOV lanes have more violators than legal traffic, effectively negating any benefit. The state DOT system with cameras and message boards is helpful. You know where the wreck is that's going to make you an hour late. OF course nothing useful like alternate routes or the like. Last but not least, our local mass transit is a joke, and is the least convenient, most poorly managed transit system in the country.
The solution is to live closer to work or adjust your schedule to avoid congested traffic. Of course that's a far too lowbrow answer.
Everybody needs narrower cars. Preferably 2/3 their current size, so a 2-lane road can be a 3-lane road, and a 2-lane highway can comfortably accomodate a center turn lane.
And in a few years, when our compression algorithms are better, we'll squeeze more into the same roads again! Higher speed limits? Closer tailing distances? Compress, compress, compress!
Fashionable for a while here in the UK was the notion that new roads created extra congestion. The way to remove traffic jams, it was said, was to have fewer roads. Obviously, if you have no roads you have no traffic. Which some people think is a good thing! And building a road might increase total traffic because particular journeys might become more attractive (recreational journeys) or more commercially viable (trade, deliveries etc).
Economics is the study of satisfying endless wants from limited resources. "Satisfying" does not mean artificially limiting the resources. So the movement to limit road building is anti-economics.
Unlike some others (here in the UK at least) I am in favour of recreational and commercial traffic. Technology can increase the efficiency of road usage. But it cannot compensate completely for the lack of a road or adequate road capacity.
Paul Beardsell
It is true that shifting the use of a network during previous peak demands will result in less deviation in travel time (read: rush hour not as horrible).
One way to reduce demand of roads is to increase the usage of less traditional means of transportation. Bicycle lanes. Better mass/public transit. HOV lanes. Tollroads. Carpooling.
Another way is to encourage shorter trips. Think "distributed computing" for neighborhoods. More, small markets result in shorter drives for everybody. This is the antithesis of Wal-Marts and Home Depots, and Americans have shown that they're willing to drive 30 minutes to save $12 by shopping at Wal-Mart. Perhaps we Americans don't value our time as much as we claim we do.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Wouldn't large scale adoption of something like this cause more problem? 5 lane Highway system can't just be switched to the side roads. They can't handle that much traffic. I can see where this would benefit the first groups of people using it, but I don't know if it would still work if everyone had it.
An accident causes a traffic jam, suddenly every car 5 to 10 miles back chooses an alternate route - suddenly all exist are blocked and people who did get off are stuck in a maze of stop light to stop light traffic because suddenly everyone else got the same ideas.
So then more sensors will have to be added to not so big roads until eventually your in car navigation system starts telling you that you really should be carpooling or using public transportation.
I think the most interesting thing would be to obtain the traffic needs of the whole city in a central source. When you tell you car you need to get from your house to your job, it transmit that to LATA and they have the computers figure it all out. Then perhaps they could figure out what to do.
By then of course maybe we could have computer controlled commuter car-trains. Where a certain lane gives the computer control and all the cars go 1 foot from the car ahead and switch on and off where they need to go by themselves.
Just ideas spinning from my head - I walk to the other end of the house to go to work, but I hear traffic jams suck.
Interestingly enough, there was a program on Discovery-Times called "Nowhere Fast", where all sorts of data and solutions were put forward about the traffic problem.
:)
I personally think that a single approach won't solve the problem. Simply building more roads or buying more busses is not the answer. There has to be a coordinated approach between the public and private sector in terms of town planning, traffic control, etc etc. Where I live, public transport is laughable (there basically isn't any), the city is sprawled out into a mass of little satellite towns (that have grown into each other), the roads are in terrible shape (such that the constant construction slows traffic) and the road system is openly hostile (IMHO) to pedestrians.
I think the solution needs to involve:
1, Better public transport that provides an incentive for people to use it (i.e. cheaper than driving and can get you where you want to go).
2, More HOV lanes on freeways with single occupant cars able to pay a premium (this was one of the good suggestions from "Nowhere fast"
3, More roads linking suburban areas with the fairly typical "one entry - one exit" road systems
4, Better town planning, where you don't have the old style "hub and spoke" system.
5, Revitalising down town areas, to encourage more people to live in inner urban localities, thus reducing the amount of people driving 45-60 minutes on freeways every day.
6, Make cycle paths easier for people to use if they actually want to ride to work.
I used to bitch about the city I am from (Perth) being crap about traffic, but after living in Houston, I doubt I'll ever complain again
Here in the UK there's a service called RDS-TMC that broadcasts traffic events over a national FM network (ClassicFM) this is intrepreted by your SatNav system and it can route you around the incident, it certain works better than stand-alone systems. On digital radio there's a new serivce called TPEG which does the same but in more detail.
Incidentally you may have noticed a little arieal on top of new bus stops, this is used to recieve RDS-TMC broadcasts in regards to the bus schedule and display them on the scrolling screen inside.
Several people have said "Don't use your car!"
Others have said..."That's just not possible! I need to drive."
How about something in the middle?
Want to reduce rush hour traffic by an easy 10%? Find an alternate way to work twice a month. That's pretty much all it would take.
Not everyday. Not even every other day. If we could average alternate transport (carpool, bus, bike, whatever) twice a month, the problems would go down significantly.
I'm doing enough for about 5 of you (ride my bike 2-3 times a week).
What are you doing?
Traffic avoidance does not exist. In any case, it is a concept for wimps. You build a road, a beautiful smooth curving road into the hills, an asphalt work of art calling out to you "driiive mee! Take that cuuuuurve!" and there's some yokel driving an old Pontiac station wagon at 20 mph. And buses coming the other way. It's a historical inevitability. You can't win.
Instead, I propose a traffic elimination system. It's been tested in numerous locations across the world, and has proven mighty effective in those really dense congestion situations.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Any government money put toward subsidizing and installing techno-toys in cars would be much better spent on mass-transit. Public transit should be subsidized by local/state/federal governments as close to the point of being free as possible. Paid for by license and registration fees, lotteries, and other vice-taxes and an urban business tax. And, once it costs nothing to ride, you no longer need to employ ticket takers, print and sell tickets, operate ticket systems or install turnstyles or other payment checkpoints. It also removes any pretence of the system having to operate at a profit. Once ridership is free, governments no longer have to try to invent token tax-break incentives to induce people to use it. If you think routes will get clogged or blocked because of all the increased users, well you can add more busses/trains/subways/metros. Routes can be added and the system can be grown to reflect the area's needs. And face it, when faced with a one hour commute, wouldn't you rather sit down with your laptop and mobile gprs connection and catch up on your /. before getting to work? Although I am sure that you could get your gov't installed satnav/on-star thing to do the same for you. That way, you will have something to read while you wait upside down for the emergency road services people to extract you from your overturned car that drove off into the ditch while you were reading instead of paying attention to the road.
100 years ago, the SUV equivalent was a horse and carriage with a driver. Note the driver. Why do we now have to drive our own cars? The biggest waste isn't the time we spend in transit, it's the time that the act of driving takes away from us.
If you want to avoid the frustration of being stuck in traffic, don't drive. Let someone else do it for you and take the train/bus/whatever.
If you can afford your urban assault vehicle, then you can also afford to subsidize public transit for a few plebes and mundanes.
That about finishes up my rant. Although one last thing. If you have to get in your car in order to get a coffee, you are part of the problem. Either learn to pull a proper shot at home or move downtown and ditch the car. You'll find that the higher cost of living in an urban area without a car balance out with the cheaper suburban costs with increased vehicle operation costs. I speak from experience (though I kept my car for weekend use ;-)
-- What can I say. I like gay dance music.
All these things would help make the use of the infrastructure more efficient, but the population will expand in the area until the traffic is again at an intolerable level.
Until population density is somehow managed to match transportation capacity this problem will reoccur. Everyone wants to be able to get around quickly. If you reduce travel times by whatever means; technology, roads, mass transit systems, more people will move there to use it.
Of course managing population density is often viewed as against truth, justice and the American way. The only way we have to manage population density in otherwise desirable locations is through costs. I moved out of San Diego, California, USA because it was getting too crowded. I really miss the great weather but I don't miss the traffic.
OnStar (or any other in-car wireless communication) + GPS + central monitoring service = Private sector traffic management system.
Don't alter the roadways when you can put the technology in the vehicle, and get the user to pay for it. If the automakers would link my dashboard GPS with wireless communication, I would have:
Automatic routing around construction and traffic
Live weather radar (am I driving into snow?)
Monitoring my teenage daughter's driving habits
Directions to the closest theater screening "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"
I'd pay for the equipment up front, and I'd pay a monthly service fee as well. With enough subscribers (5% of the traffic on the road?) there would be a clear traffic pattern revealed to central monitoring.
Stop wasting tax dollars, and let the consumers pay for their convenience.
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
I always question the idea of pushing systems to their limit through tech-enabled optimization. This practice generally stretches things to the point where a failure is catastrophic. Examples:
Phone network with dynamic routing - allows higher traffic over less hardware. Software bug took out entire east coast with cascading failures.
Power grid - dynamic rerouting of power allows higher total output without expanding the network. One overload took out the entire northeast in a series of cascading failures.
Surely readers can offer other examples.
Optimizing for economic efficiency often leads to more interesting failures when they do happen.
They should definately also subsidize in-car GPS with ability to receive these navigation warnings... The passive part of the system seems like only half of the answer: It gathers live data from 125 infrared sensors posted at major streets and 40 Webcams at key intersections. It combines these data with past patterns, including speed, flow, construction sites, road closings, temperature and precipitation, and feeds them into a battery of computers. The machines then tell city drivers the quickest way to get from point A to point B.
It's not easy, and it seems as though the mass-transit administration goes out of its way to make life more difficult. But it's workable. If fares increase too much more, it will be only marginally cheaper than operating a car for the same trips. At this point the car is exercised on weekends with trips to the grocery store, mall, or what-have-you.
I'd like to see the best of all worlds: Assisted navigation of some sort, cars that spew less filth, and reasonably adequate mass-transit.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
When you make an area more desirable then the population will increase there. Improving transportation is one of those independent factors.
As I said, I moved from San Diego because of the traffic. In most other ways it's a wonderful place to live. Beaches, mountains, culture and the weather... oh the weather.
But now I live in Austin Texas because it's half the population of San Diego. I can get anywhere in Austin in 20 minutes or less during non-commute times. For me, transit time was more important than good weather.
As far as telecommuting, I do work from home much of the time. This reduces the traffic but the result is that some else will move into the area and fill my slot on the freeway.
This is how a free market works. And we need to get used to it. The world is filling up with people. No one is even talking about the population increases.
I think we are like the red tide. Our population will increase until our waste products kill us off or stabilize our numbers. This is natures free market. Unless we can use our intellect to control our growth and consumption we are bound to have a crash. Traffic is just one visible consequence in our unchecked world population growth.
Why you ask? Because its one of the areas that Linux/Gnu sucks at providing any applications or features for and its an area in which an opensource community should be able to accel at. But we don't do anything about it. So why post a topic about something we ignore?
We ignore the need for a decent GPS navigation application for PDAs, car projects, autonomous vehicles, research and disabled needs.
Maybe I'm missing something here though. Is there some reason that we can't be successful at such a project? Like is all of the road map and route data proprietary?
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
And turn a 30 minute drive into a two hour ordeal and costs twice as much.
The journey is better then the end.
Offboard, cheap (500 ukp) and also detects speed cameras.. Smartnav uses Trafficmasters sensors to dynamically route you around traffic problems.
How about the Boston Big-dig?
Do you think it'll succeed for retroactively refitting Boston into a modern-layout system?
Shh.
I became curious about the possiblities of a dashboard computer a few weeks ago. Many people have done it themselves with mini-ITX and other low power, small form factor motherboards. A few companies sell car computers, but I have not been impressed. Currently, there are many separate systems on the market, such as DVD players for passengers and MP3 players for the stereo. Dashboard space is precious, though. Of course, there are the standard stereo and climate control dash components on the dash, too. Navigation is another clearly useful role. One system, although possibly using mostly independent parts for stability reasons, should allow all these features on the dash.
I read about Wayfinder at Howard Forums. It uses a Bluetooth GPS unit and a mobile phone running Symbian to provide navigation. Service currently is for western Europe. I do not think it includes information about current road conditions.
Navigation Technologies seems to be the system many automobile manufacturers are now selling in their cars. They release updates on CD or DVD, but they are annual. I have read users complain about outdated information.
Both of these approaches are incomplete. A better navigation system is obvious. It should have an onboard database, and it should communicate with a server farm. It would have some processing power and static information, probably distributed annually by DVD, so that it can remain useful even when there is no wireless signal. It also would connect through a cell network, possibly through a GSM/GPRS Bluetooth phone as in the Wayfinder approach, to query a server that has both updates of the slowly changing information, such as maps and phonebooks, and the quickly changing information, such as weather and traffic. It would interact via voice. Why I cannot buy such a system is beyond me.
Mini-ITX
Only part of the problem of traffic is a jammed area, there are many other causes, including but not limited to, bad drivers, stupid rivers, too many drivers, bad weather.
All of these things are something that cannot be remedied by an interactive system, which would prove to be less and less helpful as more ofthem were adopted.
This certainly would help in avoiding accidents, but at rush hour, sometimes it doesn't matter.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
First, see this article from five years ago.
Now, take a look here and here.
Is it any real surprise that the Japanese are leading the way? It's just a matter of time...
Wouldn't it be better if we made cars into self navigating robots who used simple rules of politeness to maxamize capacity and minimize accidents? Then we could use packet switching technology and make the road into an extention of the internet? We could have high and low priority packets. Have car move aside for pregnant women and Orsen Wells? That would be great! Oh wait people like to drive and the really bad at it too.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magnetic media hurtling down the highway."
I have always believed that pedestrian crossings are one of the biggest causes of traffic slow-downs.
For example:
One person presses the button at a pedestrian crossing and the lights go amber; the lights go red. It's the start of rush hour. 30 cars back up behind the lights on either side. The lights go green and the traffic resumes. Someone else presses the button at the crossing and the lights go amber; the lights go red. 10 of the 30 cars from before are now stuck behind the lights, plus another 30 cars. There are now 40 cars behind the crossing. This continues all the way through rush-hour(s). Eventually there are 100 cars backed up from the lights and a lot of people who will be late for work. Hundreds of people are late for work costing the local economy thousands of $s because several people wanted to cross a road.
Would it not be easier to pay those people not to cross the road?! Obviously, that's a silly idea. However, an alternative crossing - a bridge, a subway - could be placed there instead of the lights. Yes, a large initial cost, but in the long run those thousands of $s lost every day - because of several people crossing a road - would be avoided.
I know that what I have stated above is a very simplified version of the truth. In reality there are many many crossings, and a lot more money is lost due to the inefficient transportation system(s).
Not that the roads are any better, Indian drivers have already discovered the pleasures of road rage, but still.
More than mere navel gazing.
Unfortunately, proper planning isn't something that a grassroots (read political) campaign can deliver, so it'll be a while before we Indians see any progress.
More than mere navel gazing.
... only a few people are using them.
If all (or even most) people had a traffic avoidance system, they would all take the alternate route to avoid congestion, and then the alternate route would also be congested.
I know several routes that help me avoid very congested stretches of road and make better time, but they work only because most people don't know them and/or can't use them to get where they're going.
More in tune with this article, though, are several other options for reducing traffic:
- Motorcycle lanes. I live in Los Angeles, CA, and if more people rode motorcycles instead of gigantic SUVs, traffic would be SIGNIFICANTLY better. Unfortunately a current reality is because many of those people would be killed, but if there were motorcycle-only lanes on the freeway (they woudn't have to be as wide as vehicle lanes), and government rebates for motorcycle users, this could help a lot.
- Stop building huge ugly homes in suburbs. San Diego is just becoming a depressing place for me to visit as I see all the neighbourhoods I used to live in going from nature to huge ugly $700,000 homes.
:-( Build higher density housing closer to where people work. Then provide quality, convenient public transportation. Americans need to understand that we can't have the "American dream" of a large house and land ownership along with the quality of life of no commute. It doesn't work on a mass scale, and I for one would rather have no yard but a large nature park (of all our combined yards and saved space from roads), park the SUV for off-roading on the weekends and take a train to work.
Actually I work at home, which is how I avoid the commute...www.clarke.ca
Swedes get 5 weeks, except Public Servants.
who get 6 weeks holiday (known as )
each week.
Maybe there's a web site that lists
the working conditions - in various
countries around the world...?
This is obviously bullshit. Did the guy paint his windshield black too? And side windows? He wouldn't make it more than a mile by blindly following a NAV system.