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.

Comments

Re:You can do that right now

[FireFury03]

(with the shift stick in neutral, so the car doesn't brake on the engine)

On a modern car this is bad for fuel consumption - in neutral, the engine is burning fuel to idle, but under engine-braking conditions the ECU cuts the fuel entirely. So if you used the brakes (wasting kinetic energy as heat) and then put the car in neutral to avoid slowing down further, you wasted a load of fuel. Better to just let the engine brake the whole way.

It won't work here

[rust627]

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.