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?"

Comments

Computerized Nav Systems

[DrFlex]

What's gonna happen when advertising hits these things?

Your car drives you directly to the nearest McDonalds!

1+0=1

[twitter]

Poor city planning defeats all fixes. The computer will tell you the same thing the radio or habit does when there's only one way to get there from here. Cities that have large walled in neghborhoods at their edges are impossible to get into or around.

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.

Re:Just get out of your car!

[steelerguy]

I think you got it wrong. Americans, although over consumers, are certainly not lazy. We have just about the longest work weeks and shortest amounts of vacation for a first world country. This is exactly why people can't just go adjusting their schedule. When you are so strapped for time that you find it car to eat three squares in a day or have a life outside of work, losing another hour of it is the last thing you are going to sign up to do.

Your comments reak of someone who thinks everything in the US is handed to Americans on a silver platter. There is a reason the US has the largest economy in the world and it is certainly not due to laziness. Think about it next time you are on your 3 week holiday.

Re:No Red Lights

[mrtroy]

Picture this: you sailing down city streets at freeway speeds, with perpendicular streams of traffic flowing through another through the magic of precise timing. The microsoft based system says "critical update required" and you skip it of course, you will download it later. Your car is backdoored, and a 13 year old plays some real life GTA, and drives your car in the other lane. You collide at freeway speed headon with another car going the same speed in the opposite direction. You also hit 50 pedestrians. You lose, the kid wins 60 points, 1 for each pedestrian and 10 for the car destruction