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SignalGuru Helps Drivers Avoid Red Lights
cylonlover writes "Researchers at MIT and Princeton have now devised a system, dubbed SignalGuru (PDF), that gathers visual data from the cameras of a network of dashboard-mounted smartphones and tells drivers the optimal speed to drive at to avoid waiting at the next set of lights." In their testing, the system saved drivers about 20 percent in fuel.
Personal Rail Pods would save 95% of the idiocy that accompanies the inefficiencies in fuel consumption from motor vehicals.
Something like this could definitely be useful to me anyways. Damned red lights.. I hates em...
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
When I approach a red light, I don't continue driving and then stop, but start braking immediately and bring my speed down quickly. I then continue rolling at relatively low speed (with the shift stick in neutral, so the car doesn't brake on the engine). Often, I've still speed when the traffic light turns green. This works too if there are cars in front of you, but of course worse the longer the queue before the traffic light is, as they have to pick up speed.
I've always been waiting for the time that my TomTom gets info from the traffic lights to tell me the best speed, but alternative approaches would be fine too.
Bert
Terrific! What would be the effects of a 20% fuel savings in town?
My iPhone told me to NAIL IT....can you give it the ticket?
In the interests of efficiency, most lights here in Melbourne have been converted to a triggered system.
The idea is that the main road (determined by some guru in a government department) has right of way and light changes are triggered by cars moving over sensors at the stop lines of the red lights, in some cases (though not all) they can detect 2 cars per lane. Of course the habit of many drivers to sit back a good car length from the stop lines often means that they do not get close enough to the coils in the road to properly trigger them and as a result you get a few drivers saying"to hell with it" and running through a red light after waiting for 10 minutes. It is really funny to then see the lights change a matter of moments after, in response to the car driving over the sense coils in the road.
The result is that there is no correct speed to catch the green light because there is no direct coordination between lights.
da da da dum indeed.
just let you foot of the gas and stay in gear, when you engine break in a modern car you don't use any fuel. you can even downshift if the RPM are getting to low, the same goes for driving downhill don't use the breaks use the engine break to drive without using fuel.
For as long as I can remember, I've always said that if the United States wanted to be serious about fuel consumption, that it would install roundabouts throughout it's cities.
The cost of the infrastructure switchover would be offset by the savings to tax payers in no time.
The government wouldn't like this because it means more money spent on infrastructure and less tax income from gasoline. In the end, less money fed to the machine.
It's good to see hackers like this out there trying to (and succeeding) in subverting the elite.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Couldn't the same processing power and communication be used to avoid the need for traffic lights completely?
Adapt speed limits seems a better way to reach a fluent traffic and save fuel. In addition, the proposed device does not handle the other vehicles that could force you to inadequate low speed.
Instead pf reverse engineering the traffic lights timing, the responsible offices could simply document them, also on road signals.
All the stuff needed to reverse engineer the timings will produce more CO2 than simply say them.
Nonetheless, that idea is really smart.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
If you look at all the available safety systems coming in the next generation of cars:
- automatic braking
- infrared night vision
- reverse backup sensors
- adaptive cruise control
- lane departure warning systems
- traction control systems
- electronic stability control
- emergency brake assist
- cornering brake control
- precrash system
- automated parking
It is just a couple of steps away from turning you into a mere supervisor of your car's automatic driving.
If you add fuel efficiency to the safety concerns, it will add a new set or constraints that will give automatic driving an advantage over human driving.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
tells drivers the optimal speed to drive at to avoid waiting at the next set of lights."
The problem is that the speed to travel at to not stop at the next set of lights could be 12 km/h or 1.5 times the speed limit. It is hardly ever a speed you are actually going to travel at. We had a system in Melbourne which did this. They had to change it to not display a speed above the speed limit and then the displays showed stupidly low speeds.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://cars.failblog.org/2011/08/26/funny-car-photos-smartphones-can-make-you-more-fuel-efficient-gas-science-percent-cooler/#comments
Its a sad day for /.
...
Don't forget: when you're perfectly synchronized with the traffic lights at 30 mph, you are also at 60 and 120 :)
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Instead of saving 20% in fuel, why don't we rip up most unnecessary lighted intersections and replace them with roundabouts. The initial cost would be high, but the fuel savings for ALL cars will recover that cost in a few weeks.
This technology could also be used in conjunction with optical recognition of police cars, with their locations being reported to a real-time web application.
Once the technology gets cheap enough, we can start watching the watchers.
you can find advertisements from the 1980s about radar systems warning people about stuff behind them.
in reality, the cheap models of cars will not have any of that stuff, in order to keep the price low.
that is almost a necessity in this new age, where the distribution of wealth has become so uneven, where you have 9% unemployment measurements (and much higher in reality) , tens of millions of people on food stamps (a historical high), where minimum wage is not enough to live on, let alone buy a car, and more and more people are getting minimum wage jobs, while a very small number of people get most of the income.
you cant sell a bunch of fancy, gadget filled cars in such an economic environment.
i've always said "dont drive down this street, theres a fucking roundabout and every time you go into it, someone just about kills you. whoever the fucking idiot is who put that roundabout in obviously doesnt live on planet earth. they should have built more bicycle lanes and made it easier to walk around the city instead of this bullshit"
Town planners time traffic lights to make the traffic flow though cities , its the moron drivers , who go and screw the whole thing up by racing to the next set of lights.
It will all be obsolete soon anyhow as we wont be able too afford the insurance, let along get any petrol for our cars.
Roads are not for "saving" on fuel or brakes. Roads are for getting from A to B.
You selfish "saving" on fuel leads to you occupying extra road time-space. You are basically hogging it, take it from other drivers, which leads to heavier traffic, in fact, very often it will lead to creation of extra traffic jams.
Instead of that technology, they should invent technology that will get medieval on the asses of those local government official who intentionally program traffic light system to slow drivers.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The real issue with this technology is privacy. You have a third party holding information about your cars speed, etc. Imagine what would happen if some party goes to court and asks for a warrant to collect that information...you could be screwed! So be careful.
You don't really have that much leeway in how fast you drive. Sure 5 above or below the speed limit is fine, but anything more and you will be pulled over at some point.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
IT seems the idiots here think drag-racing from light to light make it faster. it turned green! FLOOR IT!
Until they either increase the requirements to have a drivers license this green light trickery will be ineffective as all the nimrods will bunch up in front of you causing traffic delays and negating getting a green light. It's why I stopped all hypermiling tricks in town, all the other drivers drive like idiots.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
OK, now can they combine the data with the data from Trapster so you can know when it's worthwhile to EXCEED the speed limit in order to break out of a holding pattern where you're driving against the timing-optimized direction of traffic and would otherwise end up hitting every single red light? When I drive to work in the morning, about 3 miles of my trip goes against the direction FDOT optimized the timing. If I follow the speed limit, I'll hit every light, every inch of the way, every time, guaranteed. But... if I can make it through light #1 a fraction of a second before it turns red, and keep going 60mph instead of 45mph, I can make it through the next light with ~3 seconds to spare, then the next with 5-7 seconds to spare, and so on. Once I'm comfortably making it through lights before the crosswalk countdowns begin (which, if you're watching for them, is a dead giveaway that the light's going to turn yellow in 10... 9... 8... seconds), I can drop down to 55, then 50, and make it through the remainder of the lights. The key is making it through that first light... once you're stuck at it, the only way to break out of the holding pattern is to aggressively fight your way to the front of the pack and try to make it through the NEXT light a fraction of a second before it turns red.
If it's going to take an hour to drive home anyways, I would rather spend 15 minutes stopped at lights sending emails. That's 15 minutes more to myself at home rather than cruising along doing 40 in a 65, angering other drivers.
Around here the only way you're going to be able to avoid red lights is by speeding excessively; it's like traffic lights have been set up to penalize anyone driving at or near the speed limit. It seems like American traffic engineers solve every problem by adding more traffic lights, stop signs and slowing drivers every chance they get.
Roundabouts are great, but they're far from being a panacea and Americans are going to have to change their driving habits too. Americans are too self-righteous and too comfortable with violating the rules of the road.
So when the app determines (like I've already done) that the lights on 75th St in Overland Park, KS are timed such that you have to go either 55 or 25 in order to hit the green lights, can I tell them where to shove the ticket for doing 55 in a 35 MPH zone?
Didn't think so.
Fuckers.
Put more sensors and "intelligence" in the traffic lights and let people drive around as normal.
Traffic light systems are really stupid, last night I was driving home at 2am and came to some traffic lights, they changed to red and there was no other cars around.
It didn't take me too long to figure out the road I drive down has the signals set so that if someone drives 45mph (i.e. the speed limit in that area), they will hit them all green. It also didn't take too long to figure out that one cross street didn't follow that rule, probably because it's a busier street, has more lanes, and more left turns. I also observed that the left turn lanes go first, so if someone was sitting in the left turn lane facing towards me, I'd catch the light. And that a few of the lights between major intersections are on switches so it didn't matter what speed I went. And that 'walk' signs are great indicators of when a light is about to change to yellow and red, so I could figure out if I was going to catch a light red or not and if it was possible to speed up a little bit to catch it green.
Maybe what is really needed is for more drivers to just pay fucking attention.....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Put more sensors and "intelligence" in the traffic lights and let people drive around as normal.
You've got that completely arse about.
Put more intelligence into the drivers so they stop doing stupid things. People thinking that doing 80 (Kph) in a 60 zone is normal are the problem, not traffic lights. In the vast majority of cities traffic lights and speed limits are designed to work together to ensure traffic flows correctly, when Dingbat McHoon drives at 90 in a 60 zone he is the problem, not the traffic lights.
Driving is somewhere where the Dunning-Kruger effect is very obvious.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
That's fantastic...
Now can they make it work for people who are too cheap to have smart phones, GPS, or any mobile device?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
This won't work properly in the Netherlands, because most traffic lights respond to traffic using induction loops in the road. If you add a system that directs traffic responding to the way the lights work, you'll have a loop and my guess is you'll get oscillations.
in the Netherlands we have a 'green-wave' system on some traffic lights.
http://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/images/Groene%20Golf%20Team_tcm174-263374.jpg
it tells you what speed to go at if you want to go through the next light without stopping, and it includes calculations for the amount of cars already at the light that need to accelerate away ect.
not sure how much fuel it saves on average but it works well for me.
So how do bicyclists and motorcyclists lawfully proceed through intersections at all? There's one intersection that I must go through when commuting to and from work, and even with my bicycle parked directly on the crack in the road indicating a induction sensor, I can't get through unless there's a car with sufficient metal mass behind me. No, there isn't a marked crosswalk nor a pedestrian signal. No, putting a stereo patch cable in my shoe and standing on the crack didn't help.
Hi, I'm looking for GPS trace data to use for data mining purposes. The location can be anywhere but I want to get lots of it hopefully from a single city or region.
Who can afford 2 smartphones, let alone a whole network?
Traffic light systems are really stupid, last night I was driving home at 2am and came to some traffic lights, they changed to red and there was no other cars around.
Even if there were no other cars around, not all signal devices installed in intersections can detect vehicles smaller than cars. I guess this one was on a timer so that a bicycle or motorcycle too small to trip the car sensor would eventually be given a green light.
Unless you misjudge the timing of the light and it turns green while you are still some distance away. Now the cars behind you are cursing your name for holding them up with your genius fuel saving methodology. When the commute is crowded, and the light only stays green for 30 - 45 seconds, it may mean the difference of getting 5 cars through the light or getting 15 cars through.
I have to pass 13 lights in 5.5 miles on my commute. They are all coordinated, so that if you drive at the posted speed limit, you rarely have to stop. That is, unless I get behind some fuel savings genius. Funny, as soon I pass them and I am the first car at the next light, the problem instantly disappears and I hit all the rest of the lights on the remainder of the commute.
Almost every country would benefit from one simple rule:
If you aren't passing get out of the LH lane. And when I say that I mean "actually passing" not "I intend to pass, but I don't want to go faster".
Nope, if you aren't actively going faster than the car to the right of you, get over immediately.
Yes, it will suck because you'll need to match the speed of the guy in back and in front of you, but you're being an inconsiderate jerk and safety hazard otherwise.
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way" would improve traffic flow and save gas everywhere it's employed.
I see it every day driving home. I have 13 lights over a 5.5 mile stretch. The problem is either the assholes who drive 10 - 15 MPH under the speed limit or the assholes who poke around getting up to the red lights. It always causes the traffic to back up. As soon as I pass them, I catch the green all the way home. Of course, they think I am a maniac for passing in all the horrible traffic, but once I'm past, it's smooth sailing all the way home. It cracks me up to look behind me and see all the traffic blocking both lanes, "saving fuel" by stopping at all the lights, because they can't read a speed limit sign.
They can turn my 12 minute commute into a 30 minute commute.
It only takes one single "fuel saver" to clog up the road and cause traffic to line up into jams. If you want traffic to flow smoothly, drive the fucking speed limit. Everybody behind you expects it. Instead of bitching about the aggressive driver causing jams, drive or get out of the way and let someone else who can. I don't lose my temper if the guy in front of me can't drive the limit, but when he is driving under the limit and there is nobody in front of him and a shitload of cars behind him, it's time to pull over and let the adults through.
I think you fail to see all the idiots. You think the "kids" who race light to light are idiots, but you see yourself perfectly self justified in engaging in your own little experiment on the road to save your nickel per day by drafting and coasting. There are a lot of us that think the hypermiler is just as big an idiot and inconvenience on the road as those kids.
This was done in Hungary about 25 years ago, using networked traffic lights on "Soroksari Avenue". The lights are all synchronized to create "green waves" and there are digital sign posts indicating the optimal speed to sync up with the next green wave.
If the optimal speed was over the speed limit, the signs just display a dot.
To go along with that, I've always thought the terrorists win with every new stop sign or signal light we install. Decreasing fuel efficiency by creating extra or unnececessary stopping just means we'll have to ship more of our currency over to unfavorable foreign governmental regimes to buy more oil.
This won't work in most cities. Why? In most cities, you usually have a combination of city & state roads intersecting together. In our city, the city wants the right of way on streets, and the state wants the right of way. Conflict. If you travel a city street, you can usually hit the lights green until you cross a state maintained road, then it is red most of the time. Same thing driving a state maintained road. The city here, has built in cooperation with the state, a multimillion dollar traffic management system with a bizillion tv's smart intersections, electronic billboards that are mounted less than 2 blocks from the intersection, to notify you of traffic problems. The results? No better. The problem is there are too many cars! Oh, the city wants everyone to use public transportation, but it is too slow, and hampered by a turnaround terminal instead of a simple grid system. Some intersections are traffic sense signals, some are on timers. Then you run into the entire problem that the city thinks the way to fix a traffic problem is to install more traffic lights. Traffic will not get better in major cities, it's just something you have to put up with when you have X number of people on the roads that were designed in the 50's & 60's.
The camera approach would be useful for off network lights, but I'd rather have a real time feed of all the lights available from the municipalities to build from.
http://imagreendriver.com/ incorporates a real-time feed into our smart phone app. Currently live in Eugene and Portland Oregon. Much of Utah coming online soon.
Listen to Reality!
people have old cars, and those features break, and they dont get them repaired.
thus. there are a lot of automobiles with no air conditioning, and no working airbags, on the road right now. look for people with their windows rolled down in summer.
You forgot to mention that the average age of a Miami driver is eighty. It is retirement village for North America. Round-abouts are great. I lived in France for a while, and the round-abouts were a blessing. One slowed down to enter, and if we missed the exit, we just went around one more time. (As a tourist, I occasionally missed the exit, because I was not sure what each street's exit was, until I passed it) Perhaps a training course is needed for drivers to learn courtesy and to not always want to be first in line.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I have tried with the usual html code to add an empty line or some bold text, but on posting, all the white space is gone. How to add a tab, paragraph, bold, etc would be appreciated. I tried to Google the info and did not find it.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The UK Govt recently admitted that they were programming traffic lights to increase fuel consumption to make more money through fuel tax. I can't find the exact article but here's another one with "Previously the Department for Transport (DfT) had discouraged the systems which reduce fuel use, resulting in less tax being paid to the Treasury." Certainly, in the city where I live, on a major dual carriageway with a 30mph limit from/to the north to the centre, if you drive at 30mph, you will hit every red light. Conversely, if you drive at 15mph or 45mph, you will get a green light. I don't do speeding, so I do 15-20mph average on this dual carriageway. This same dual carriageway has 37 sets of traffic lights over a 2 mile stretch - really, why this much?
Why not remove traffic lights? An experiment at Portishead has shown that traffic has reduced when they switched off a set of traffic lights in the town centre. Recently a roundabout I use often has new traffic lights and I find I waste so much time sitting there waiting for the red to turn green while there is not a single car on the roundabout - I sometimes wait up to 2 minutes. They do have their place, but I'm starting to feel a lot of them are a waste of space & money
ie. Horn, or in one (or more case) a STROBE LIGHT which emergency vehicles utilize. That messes up ANY timing...
Here in Germany, traffic lights at many street crossings have a feature that is referred to as the green wave. We invented this a long time ago, long before there were sensor-controlled traffic lights or cell phones.
This is how it works:
Traffic lights at crossings are connected to each other. They know when lights at the next crossing turn red and green. The trick with the green wave is to synchronize traffic lights with each other, i. e. someone worked out how much time a car would need to travel from one crossing to the next. Now the traffic light at the next crossing has to turn green just in time and the driver doesn't have to stop. This system works fine as long as you're driving at the right speed (which is posted as a speed limit) and as long as you don't turn left or right. Even when there are just two crossings connected to each other it makes driving much more comfortable.