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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.
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.
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
The application tells you how fast to go if you want to catch every green light. It is not there to tell you that one is coming up.
But that level of understanding would require at least reading the summary.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
11 Minutes before you posted this message you fucked up on the same work in the same manner further up the thread.
Not only have you not read the article, you are a grammar nazi that is bad at grammar. Go jump off a cliff, you'll do the world a favor.
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 /.
...
No.... When your engine breaks, you use no fuel. It's pretty obvious, really.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
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"
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.
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.
Just lots of oil.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
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.
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.
Red traffic lights are quite visible and you can slow down manually when you see one coming up.
And yet... It never ceases to amaze me during my commute, as I stop mashing on the accelerator because I see a light three blocks ahead just went red, several dipshits around me floor it so they can get one car-length ahead of me, test their brakes, and do the petroleum industry a favor. Ironically, from their perspective, I'm sure they think I'm asleep at the wheel since I'm not going 5-10 MPH over the limit all the way to the light.
Ask me about my sig!
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
Well, if you LOOK out the window, you can see not just what is right in front of you, but traffic lights a block or two down the street. I don't know if this is still true but the city I grew up in timed the lights such that if you just drove the speed limit, you would correctly hit each light. You don't need a smart phone, you just need some intelligence.
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.
Trapster already exists...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Meh, same as driving around with a cell phone...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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.
You look out the window? Hahaha. Noob. I'm either looking at my GPS or at my cell phone when I drive.
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, there's a line at the red light. I have as long as it takes for the last car to pass through the light to get to the light. In my experience there's always enough time to speed back up and make the light right after the last stopped car.
They are all coordinated, so that if you drive at the posted speed limit, you rarely have to stop.
In this circumstance, the behavior of the fuel efficiency minded driver and that of the temporal efficiency minded driver will be identical. If someone is slowing you down, it's not helping their fuel efficiency at all, they're just stupid.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Well, they did successfully pass you. To be fair, they know that waiting behind you will likely lead to cars in the other lane passing in front of you, thus causing themselves to be delayed somewhat by remaining behind you. I learned quite a while ago that gaps in traffic will be used by someone, so if you don't want anyone to pass in front of you, then don't leave the gap. That may not go hand in hand with fuel economy, but unfortunately you can't have it both ways.
Well... Another irony is that much of the time, because they really aren't paying attention to conditions even one block ahead of them, the heart attack candidates racing to get one car length ahead of me at each light through aggressive lane changing end up stuck behind someone slower as my steady momentum catapults past them just as the light turns green. Strategy and planning ahead often beat hard driving. And if they "win" and get there 30 seconds faster, at least I've saved a few dollars of gas/brake pad/insurance rates and the stress of trying to constantly alternate between gas and brake to maintain a 12 inch following distance.
I'm looking forward to computers taking over soon, so that driving is a mode of transportation instead of a stupid pissing contest.
Ask me about my sig!
More importantly, it goes hand in hand with fatal car accidents. Actually, any way you look at it, your self professed driving habit is pushing for automation of driving. Why? Because assholes that can't see the big picture think it's fine to cut and weave and generally make a pain of themselves. Meanwhile, perfectly normal and reasonable drivers (I'm cutting you some slack here), pick up the attitude that "well if I don't, someone else will...." and presto! significant portions of the driving public are driving like morons.
The way I see it, the first company to offer a fully autonomous driving vehicle capable of passing a road test in any state (for license) wins all the money on earth. You will instantly have two classes of vehilce on the road. And once a significant portion of the cars on the road are capable of Auto-drive, you pass some laws like Rush Hour Auto Drive only, and Major highways go "auto only" Auto-drive that is. From this point forward, the cascade effect takes over. Insurance premiums plummet, fuel savings skyrocket, traffic congestion apparently disappears (with minor exceptions for terrible road design), auto fatalities plummet, the economy as a whole saves BILLIONS per year SOLELY on gasoline and auto repair/replacement. Of course, this is the rose tinted version. It doesn't include the lobbying/marketing/hysteria that you can expect to try and counter self driving automobiles. Plenty of people will say "I'm a better driver than that damn machine". Plenty of companies will try and make auto-drive illegal, mainly your insurance company. Because they can see the research and projections, auto driving cars don't make mistakes, they don't get into high speed wrecks and they don't incur thousands in damages from 5mph impacts in parking lots. Which means that insurance companies, car repair companies and whoever makes all those spare parts are going to fight this tooth and nail.
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.
There's a road in town that goes for a couple of miles with lights at every intersection, and a light-rail line that runs along side. The lights are timed such that it is impossible to travel down the road faster than the light-rail, even though the light-rail stops at every other intersection. Tell me that isn't intentional.
Well, they did successfully pass you. To be fair, they know that waiting behind you will likely lead to cars in the other lane passing in front of you, thus causing themselves to be delayed somewhat by remaining behind you.
So what? Did they win the lottery by wasting gas and wearing out their vehicles faster? No. Was there a life threatening emergency so that they got to hospital 1 minute faster to save someone's life? No. Did they become rich, famous and successful? No.
Then please explain the purpose of this activity - other than ego and being a 'tard.
I was stating the practical truth, not exactly advocating driving like an ass. Frankly, I think it should be a lot harder to get a license and lane etiquette should be strictly enforced. That would go a long way to smooth traffic flow and a reduction in weaving. No automated cars needed. They certainly wont hurt though.
Then please explain the purpose of this activity - other than ego and being a 'tard.
I doubt it has much to do with ego. Some people are just assholes. But I'd wager that most of those weavers are probably just regular otherwise decent drivers who've gotten stuck behind some oblivious person talking on a cell phone one too many times. In the end, a lot of people just want to get to where they are going without unnecessary hold-ups. When these people encounter a lot of unnecessary delays, they get frustrated. Frustration leads to poorly reasoned decisions.
Yes, it's easy to say that everyone should just take a chill pill, but that's not going to happen, so what's a real solution?
In many cities I've been in, they time the lights specifically so that if you drive the speed limit, you hit every red light. The only way to avoid this is to drive faster than the speed limit.
I only see an idiot that does not have the balls to troll under their own account.
Maybe someday you will get your drivers license. Your mom might even let you drive her car!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They may actually be timed to allow you hit a chain of green lights. The trouble is that if you hit one red light, then the time you (and every moron in front of you not paying attention) spend accelerating to the speed limit is time lost on catching that next green light. This is what requires you to drive faster than the speed limit. I will however admit that some municipalities have their traffic systems so poorly programmed that you can catch one green light, doing the speed limit, maintain the speed limit, and still not catch the next green. Those are the cities with civil engineers that need killed. Well, I'm of the opinion that all civil engineers need killed anyway. Any group of people as seemingly retarded as they are shouldn't be allowed to exist with the rest of us. At the very least the ones down in Florida. Whoever thought mile long medians and requiring U-Turns to get practically anywhere certainly needs removed from existence.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
Well, I'm of the opinion that all civil engineers need killed anyway. Any group of people as seemingly retarded as they are shouldn't be allowed to exist with the rest of us. At the very least the ones down in Florida. Whoever thought mile long medians and requiring U-Turns to get practically anywhere certainly needs removed from existence.
I'm of mixed opinions about this. While I did notice in engineering school that the guys who didn't do as well in class tended to go for CivE degrees, from what I've read about "traffic engineering", most of it isn't actually done by engineers, but by local politicians, i.e. the politicians tell them what to do and the engineers just do it. So all the stupid "design" you see in your roadways may not be due to traffic engineers at all, but due to their micromanaging bosses and the local politicians who order them to reduce the yellow-light times to unsafe values.
Of course, part of being a professional engineer means not signing your name to anything you don't feel is up to your standard, so these engineers really should quit instead of passing the blame.
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