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Avoiding Red Lights By Booking Ahead
RedEaredSlider writes "Peter Stone, associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, has presented an idea at the AAAS meeting today for managing intersections: a computer in a car calls ahead to the nearest intersection it is headed towards, and says it will arrive at a given time. The intersection checks to see if anyone else is arriving then, and if the slot is open, it tells the car to proceed. If it isn't, it tells the car that the car remains responsible for slowing down or stopping. He says that even with only a few connected cars, the system still works, even if the benefits are still only to those who have the connected vehicles."
...before arriving at the light? How far ahead are they "booking" a slot? How long until the slot becomes available if the car with the reservation isn't going to arrive. This really only sounds useful in more rural areas. I can't see a city with lights on every block being able to implement this technology with any kind of efficiency.
It sounds good to me.
Or you could just go with the simple solution and use roundabouts.
There are induction loops (metal dectors) buried in the pavement that tell the traffic lights about approaching cars. When my car passes over the loop it is telling the traffic signal at the intersection that I will be arriving within 10 seconds. If there is no cross traffic the light tells me to proceed by changing to green (or remaining green).
Any time you are driving on surface streets (hate that term), you soon learn to "drive the stop-lights" by looking ahead a block or two. Its
not that hard, and even when you can't see the lights driving just about the speed limit will be close enough to get you 5 greens out of 6 tries.
That being said, anything that can guarantee more greens is welcome, but putting it in cars seems the wrong approach. If the stop lights just
talked to each other you would have enough info. When Stoplight A can't clear its queue in the allotted green, you can pretty much bet stoplight B won't be able to do so when that slug of cars reaches it.
In most cases the problem is dumb signals, hold overs from the Pleistocene, with no attempt to make traffic efficient.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Why not just use smart phones it'd be just as simple to attach the correct sensor or it may be able to use the gps most of them already have.
Green lights all the way with my greenlightduino.
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
What does that mean under the law that if the light tells that car it will get a green what if some thing happens who is responsible then?
What about red light crammers let's say the car hits the light right on green or just before it and camera goes off who is responsible for the ticket?
What about people makeing left turns who are waiting for traffic to clear (as under the law in most areas) you want right to enter and wait even if you need to make the trun when the light is red and the other side may get a green as you are makeing your trun..
Yes! It is the year 2012, and our traffic lights are still running on timers. They're stupid, they waste time and fuel needlessly... they need to go. We have computers that can understand the spoken word, read the written word, and do whatever the hell it is that Kinect does. Our traffic semaphores should be far more intelligent than they are. I think I'd prefer something more along the lines of computer vision than and RF announcement -- for privacy reasons, but at least there's technology in the works.
sig: sauer
In Abilene, TX, we would just like to see main avenue lights change back to green once cars are off the detector wire on cross streets. But once someone trips a cross street light, it wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, until a timer decides that we have waited long enough. Count your blessings, Austin.
A few questions:
1) What if the person slows down or speeds up (or some one/thing gets in their way)? Seems this system is hackable by a person with a transmitter standing near the lights and continously repeats that a car is coming.
2) How does the system take into account people needing to cross? Will it tell the cars oops, now you have to stop in a short distance. It doesn't look like the lights push out data.
3) How does the system take into account emergency vehicles (and some buses too)? Same as #3
4) How much are they going to start charging for each message exchange with the intersection after everyone has the tech? (see deployment for ATMs as an example)
5) Why can the system fully fail? The intersection should just drop back to normal light operations if something goes wrong.
They claim this makes intersections safer. I don't see how unless everyone was using it and the roads were closed environments. Say you're traveling along without the tech and you're coming to a light. You've been watching and know you'll arrive when it's still green. However, someone else on the other road zooms in and the lights change because it doesn't see you coming. Now you've got an unexpected and short stopping distance and the other person isn't paying attention because the car said it was all clear.
But it would seem like the unconnected vehicles - which would probably be the vast majority of traffic around these lights - would be impacted adversely. It's not as if it's a situation where connected vehicles benefit while the impact to others is neutral.
This just seems like another concept designed to benefit a privileged few at the expense of the unwashed masses.
#DeleteChrome
From memory, this proposal is not nearly as comprehensive as the totally network aware models that have been proposed in the past, with all traffic flow managed by computers.
This is one of those ideas that only works if few people do it. Like not getting kids vaccinated. Or super-couponing to get $300 of groceries for $10.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I thought it meant if the light turns yellow, you book it(speed up) so you avoid the red light!
God spoke to me
Look around, cities, states, countries can barely afford to repair their roads. We are lucky to get timer based traffic lights here, the cheaper option is ridiculous round-abouts where the main flow at peak commuter times makes it nearly impossible to travel in the opposite direction.
Traffic lights with sensible and convenient functionality? Sounds like 50's style sci fi visions of the year 2000. How many of those early authors predicted that we wouldn't even be able to do proper repairs on our major highways by now? The New Zealand answer is to reduce the speed limit to suit the unsafe roads.
And its not just poor little islands like NZ, there were reports just last year about certain states in the US not being able to fund road repairs and considering tearing up their hard-top to go back to cheaper loose gravel surfaces for anything that wasn't a main inter-state roadway.
Sure, we SHOULD be able to make clever futuristic technilogical enhancements to our civil infrastructure, but it won't happen unless it can be done cheaper than the current systems, which I don't see happening.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
Anyone remember the article (don't remember if it was Slashdot or elsewhere) some years back about a proposal for having lightless intersections and cars being smart enough to speed up or slow down so that they miss each other when passing thru? It had a Java simulation that showed what it would look like from above and it was amazing to watch. There was an intersection and this big horde of little lines representing cars approaching at high speed and passing thru it from all directions simultaneously. I'd love to find that again if anyone has a link.
All these wonderful innovations in self-driving cars is pointless. The first time it gets hacked will be the last time it's used. If you saw the newer version of BSG, that future is far more likely than the one google envisions.
If the light doesn't have a slot knows there will be one available just a bit later, the light can signal the car to coast down from 45MPH to 35MPH, arriving just a bit later. By doing so it reduces the energy lost into the brakes and the car ends up coasting through the intersection on the green light instead of stopping and then having to restart just a few seconds later.
You can do this manually by paying attention to what's going on in the next several stoplights. It saves gas and brake wear. It's kind of nice just cruising along and hitting all the lights. Getting feedback from the light would make it much more effective.
Unfortunately it also drives some drivers crazy. They can't stand it that I'm going 35MPH in a 45MPH zone and go racing past... Just to end up stopped at a stoplight which then turns green a few seconds later and I go drifting on past. And still they don't get it.
We will soon have a voice telling us Collision imminent
By coming up with a system to retro-fit into current cars, that would add not just intersection negotiation, but show speed limits (which COULD then vary depending on conditions, time of day, etc), give info about traffic, etc. The advantage of this, is that doing simple speed limits will not entire too many. HOWEVER, the ability to continue through an intersection, combined with getting other info, would actually encourage ppl to buy this system. Another advantage of this, is that it can provide information back to the police, etc: cars are moving, but stopped at one intersection. Why is that? Becomes a reason to divert a squad assuming that one is close and not busy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...to help me find red-light districts by booking ahead?
Silence is a state of mime.
And it is such a huge fault of poor city design.
Yeah, sure, it's fine if you were a town built in 1800s, but not a modern city!
One day we might actually have a semi-3D city.
Is it SO hard to build walkways above roads?!
It doesn't even need to be full-on cement walkways above roads. Simple metal frames across the sides of buildings, slabs, DONE.
Just think, with no need for walkways below, you can now crush buildings even closer together! MORE SPACE! GENIUS!
Anyone building a city? I'll design it for you, for free, and even help you build it. Sick of backwards-ass thinking.
Why hasn't the 3D cities era happened yet? It has considerably more benefits than it does negatives, most importantly that space is used more efficiently, less slabs and cement waste due to a standard metal frame walkway around buildings.
Designate main roads for any large-scale vehicles so that the crossing walkways can be brought up like your typical bridge over waters.
And before anyone says it, how often to buildings really get taken down? (either by council, government, or hell, even terrorists)
There is really no difference, the same things will happen really. Area blocked off, (controlled) explosion, clean-up.
The only bad part is that weird, esoteric building designs would be a little harder to fit in to these frames. Admittedly only at the bottom though, anywhere above the walkway frame is completely fine. Most buildings are pretty standard at the bases as it is, maybe different bricks or slabs of granite or whatever.
I hate architects sometimes. Glad I never got in to it, I'd have offed myself by now.
Still, at least it isn't as bad as the other end, all looks and no function is so much worse!
I saw an area around a beach absolutely wrecked by an abomination of a design from some architects wet dream.
It went from:
a neat hill, perfectly functional steps, some seats and a little area where rides were for kids, your usual things like teacups, mouse ride, etc. some food stand, toilets for all the kids near the beach.
to
a murderous, eyesore of a hill with rocky stone that seriously looks like it came out of one of those terrible tessellation demos.
That thing isn't just an eyesore, it was literally a danger to people. Why the hell that even got the green light is beyond me. As a person who used to do acrobatics, even I nearly slipped on the damn thing going up it!
Square wheels on stone pebbles comes to mind.
I wish these were implemented more often in the U.S. I prefer them over traffic lights as they permit a constant flow of traffic and if there is ever a collision, it won't be one driver running a red and broadsiding another vehicle at speed limit (or faster), but more likely a low speed collision which would be safer for everybody involved.
I think the only things prohibiting widespread popularity in the United States is their perceived complexity, people who don't understand when it is and isn't appropriate to yield before entering a roundabout (or people who yield so people can enter the roundabout when they aren't supposed to), and maybe the counter-clockwise rotation that roundabouts usually follow which feels a bit foreign at first. Nothing that couldn't be resolved with time, of course.
and are you going to build overpass sidewalks? so you can cross on foot?
Now las Vegas has some pedestrian overpass but I don't see other citys lineing up build more like them.
You can do the same thing yourself by *looking* ahead.
Perhaps things are different in Texas, but where I live the majority of traffic lights and stop signs are installed for the express purpose of impeding the flow of traffic. Trying to sell them a sensible system to improve traffic flow, reduce pollution and ticketable offenses is the last thing they'd be interested in.
Audi did this in 2008 ... (the link is just some short enough FA that showed at first Google results page)
:: There is no light at the end of a tunnel. There is a tunnel after a tunnel : Thom Y.
um... what about a pedestrian half way when the light changes out of sequence.....
When I lived in Detroit, all the major roads had lights timed for the speed limit..so we could drive miles without a red light, once you got going "in" the cycle. so at most one red light and then all green. worked great! During peak rush hour you had to make sure you stayed in the pack, but at midnight, coming home from the airport or gentlemen clubs...it was smooth sailing. BTW lights timed for 45mph...are also timed for 90. -KI
#include bier;
This is more like frantic efforts to find a use for a marginal technology.
Cameras on traffic lights are used for this now. These replace the old induction loops. The cameras currently just look at rectangular areas to see if they have a car in them. Usually, a few rectangles are defined for each lane, to get a rough count of the number of cars waiting. Enhancing that technology to notice distant approaching cards, estimating their speed and arrival time, and adjusting signals accordingly, is a logical next step.
This isn't that helpful during heavy traffic periods, and the existing systems handle light traffic well. So it's probably not worth having a whole "intelligent car" scheme for this.
Unless it's a pay system, where you can pay for a faster green light.
You mean in PRECISELY the same way that temporary traffic lights have worked for decades? A motion sensor on the light picks up cars a hundred metres away and works the same system? And it doesn't require new hardware in cars, RF communication, or professors. It's there, it works, you're welcome.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
His idea presumes that the city traffic engineers care at all that people are wasting time sitting at stop lights. For the most part, they don't.
In the few cities where they actually care, there's no problem to be solved because they've already synch'd the lights to optimize traffic flow.
would be to monitor approaching traffic and turn ALL directions red when an approaching vehicle is not reducing it's speed. Of course, Idiots would use this as a excuse to blow lights. So Again, Fail.
Then don't sit there. At 3am, on a deserted road, it shouldn't take you more than a few seconds to scan the entire seen and determine that, indeed, there isn't a police officer around and that you can then proceed with impunity. Don't let a light rule your life.
If I had a birds eye view of the intersection, I could easily run the light without hitting anything.
What's his point?
I live in the suburbs of the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. My commute home from work is about 15 miles. On a good night, it takes 35 minutes. On a shitty one, it takes an hour.
So, when all the fucking traffic is going in one direction, why the fuck does it still have to slow down to ten miles an hour on a road where the speed limit is 55?
If you can't solve the gross case of "get everyone outside the city as fast as fucking possible" then the problem of "do I have to wait one minute to make a left fucking turn" is, quite frankly, TRITE.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
and as an added bonus you are tracked in near real time around town.
...laissez faire capitalist groups lobby to have the system modified so that those with the most money can buy slots at the traffic light.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
In this case, they'd crash more than just the system. :P
I look forward to the day where we can have a system that acts like a traffic cop. No induction loops looking at the immediate intersection, but instead smart cameras mounted on the traffic lights to look down the road as far as possible. In my opinion, this would be a much better approach than the one presented in this article. Instead of requiring a vehicle to carry a special communication system in order to signal ahead, just take advantage of the elevation afforded by the existing traffic lights. Most traffic lights have a pretty decent line-of-sight, as it is.
In heavy traffic, the system would attempt to minimize and equalize the wait time for cars coming in each direction, as opposed to traffic engineers periodically tweaking the timing of the lights to try to match the usage at each intersection. In lighter traffic, an artificial traffic cop would be a big improvement over the trip sensors that are installed where minor road feed into major roads. An intelligent system would look for natural breaks in the main traffic flow to let the sidestreet traffic through with minimal impact.
The modern solution to actual cities is to promote commuting.. This kind of solution only promotes more traffic after some time, yes at first they seem to work, but you are only inducing traffic.
I understand most American cities are build to travel by car, but this will change... sometime.
The system never asks pedestrians when they will arrive, so cars will get right of way and crosswalk timing will become shorter and less predictable. Also the system probably cannot identify a car stuck in the intersection.. sounds like it lowers safety in order to reduce gasoline usage. If you want to change average red light timing based on real traffic flow you can do it without installing machinery into cars themselves and overriding the traffic lights on demand.
Get this traffic light signaling system into electric cars and safe us from pollution.
Some people will buy the traffic-light-enabled cars just for this one feature.
Couldn't this be better accomplished with roadside sensors that detect all cars, not just connected ones as they drive by?
...but only for public transport!
My wife worked for 9 years optimizing public transport in Oslo, Norway.
One of the key items behind a significant speedup for both buses and trams was a system where each vehicle would signal ahead a given distance before arriving at an intersection, again as it entered, and finally as it left. If you visit Oslo and sit up front in a bus or tram you can see the visual feedback the driver gets: A single white LED mounted near the top of the traffic signal will light up, either blinking or in a steady state.
There is (of course) a web site and a mobile app which will give you real-time information about any given bus/tram/line/stop, as well as rolling displays at all major stops that show the same info.
http://trafikanten.no/ and http://m.trafikanten.no/
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
If your car can talk to lights there is a good chance they can use it to id cars on the road. Where and when.
Most countries (at least all in Scandinavia) have had car detectors buried in the streets since the 1970's (and a few installations even go back to the 1960's). What is the advantages of this approach (the detectors already measure car speed as well as distance from a crossing).
Sounds like a more complicated solution to an already solved problem.
It would be real progress if pedestrian traffic lights (the sort that supposedly react on you pressing a button) had a faster reaction time. I loost count years ago on how many times I crossed despite of a red light because
1. the sign had not changed within half a minute (which seemed like eternity)
2. no car was in sight in any direction
There are very few such installations that actually give me a green light within less than a minute after pressing the button, so I suspect they just ignore the button and run on timers anyway.
How long before Chief Evil gets one of these programmed so it lets you drive through three green lights in a row, then quick changes to red on the fourth and uses the ticket camera to cite you for running the light? Bwaaahaahaaha.
I know it didn't actually happen but this reminds me of the adage about the Americans sending up astronauts with million dollar pens & the Russians sending up theirs with pencils.
I'm living in Australia & a Canadian friend is amazed at our traffic lights. There's a coil of wire run around the intersection (dug underground when it's built. Drive up to a red light while no-one else is going through and the magnetic field of your car sitting above the coil changes the current flowing in the wire and triggers a signal for the switching box to set you up with a green light. Nothing high end/ultra efficient/ultra techno fancy but durable, simple & beats a timer.
'Semi-intelligent' as he puts it.
I do that by LOOKING AHEAD MYSELF! I lead a large motorcycle group, and we don't like to stop at red lights. Or get the group halfway through before the light cycles. So I look ahead and watch the lights cycle, and slow down or speed up as I need to. It doesn't work in heavy traffic in the city, but neither would this since most people won't slow down anyway. And there is no use in forcing all cars to slow down since those making right hand turns can stop and then make the turn anyway. And get out of the way of the rest.
It takes a couple of trips through an intersection to become familiar with the timing, but most cities around here use the same cycles for most of their lights. In Mesa and Tempe, Arizona, the cities there use the left turn signal before the through traffic. In Scottsdale, it's after. In Mesa, many of the lights are also set that if someone maintains the 45mph speed limit, they will hit them all green, except for lights between major intersections that work off of road switches. I don't know how many times I've maintained 45mph down a local street, catching all lights green. While some idiot proceeds to take off at the light, and get caught at every single light as I breeze through.
What drivers need to do is be more observant. That doesn't cost anything....and improves traffic safety. What city planners need to do is understand traffic patterns and set lights to cycle appropriately. And keep them that way.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I had a similar idea awhile ago. If cars were being driven by computers (and not unpredictable humans) and they were in communication with a controller at the intersection, then it should be possible to interleave the traffic such that no cars have to stop.
The idea is that the traffic controller would instruct some cars to speed up or slow down slightly so that no collision will occur.
The problem is that this doesn't work if some people are riding in computer driven cars and some are driving the car themselves.
It also gets increasingly difficult to manage as traffic increases, so in a dense city where you need it most it would be more likely to have to force one direction of traffic to stop.
As soon as cars are beaconing themselves, it will become very easy to track a car across town.
The best bet are passive sensors at the start of each block in each direction. Two sensors in a row spread out a bit can say that a car is entering the block at X speed. If all the sensors around are in cooperation, one can get a better idea of traffic flow and come up with similar enhancements without needing a unique identifier and all that communication.
Gilbert Shelton had a similar idea ages ago.
Drivers in most Asian (and many European) don't need wimpy traffic signals. Of course, Europeans don't always get it right
an even more efficient system would be to tear out the traffic lights entirely, thus in addition to savings in peoples time, wear and tear on vehicles and fuel there would be savings on electricity and maintenance.
If the city planners who get kickbacks from traffic light manufacturers were sacked, that would save even more.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
On the surface this sounds like a neat and potentially very useful idea, but once you sit and think it through for a few minutes you see the flaws. In order for this to work on a large scale you need to know position and velocity of cars at any given moment. That would require GPS in cars that transmits that information to the system(s) controlling the intersections. Ideally you'd also want to know what the ultimate destination of a given car is going to be. This tracking system would be in operation all the time you're in your car, even on the open highway. To improve overall performance they'd likely use a cellphone-like radio system, so it'd work pretty much everywhere -- even on the open highway, where you don't need it at all. Now we're tracking the movement of citizens in their cars everywhere they go, by default. The DOT would be the ultimate authority overseeing the implementation, operation, and maintenance of this system. Now we have a federal government agency in posession of realtime GPS data on the movements of all vehicles within the United States. Is anyone really so naive as to believe, especially in this day and age, that this is a good idea in any way, shape, or form? Sure, they'll candy-coat it, tell us it'll improve traffic flow, reduce accidents, get you to your destination quicker, maybe even save you money on fuel and insurance costs -- but you're still being tracked, all the time, everywhere you go, by your own government.
"Land of the free", my ass.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"Your Honor, the defendant drove through all the same traffic lights they would if they were leaving the victim's house at the estimated time of the victim's death and heading towards their own house. There were only a few other cars on the road at the time, so they had a straight shot all the way home. We estimate that with no traffic and the defendant speeding, since there were no police watching, that they made the thirty minute drive in under fifteen minutes. This means that the alibi their neighbor gave was still correct, he was home at the time he said he was, which was approximately sixteen minutes after the murder. Obviously the defendant is guilty since they were the only one on the road at the time."
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
This isn't new. In fact, the city of Assen is building such a system. Prototype, of course, but it's not just a theoretical idea anymore.
Would improve things to have the light turn orange just before it turns from red to green like in Europe...so I would know not to slow down or stop as I approach it b/c it's about to turn green. Also would speed up traffic flow because people will ease onto the gas when it goes from red to orange...instead of playing the light like a starter gun in a race and slamming on the gas when it suddenly goes green with no warning.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
The Professor is missing the point, at least as far as the UK is concerned.
I believe that the more modern traffic lights here deliberately turn red as you approach, as part of someone's idea of "traffic calming".
I am often driving late with no other traffic around when a green light I see ahead turns red as I approach. They turn green again when I have slowed to about 5mph, if not stopped. I am particularly thinking as an example the lights on the big roundabout at Avonmouth, near Bristol, that gives access to the M5, if anyone else here knows it.
And for readers outside the UK, yes we have roundabouts with traffic lights at every entry; it can take 5 minutes to get round one. Why these cannot be switched off outside busy times is beyond me.
And far from "traffic calming" I know several people (otherwise law abiding) who admit they jump such lights at quiet times. Respect for traffic lights is being undermined.
Anyway, such a device already exists - what else are those magnetic loops buried in the road surface?
He says that even with only a few connected cars, the system still works
Great, it only works under very low traffic conditions, in which case where's the problem ?
I for one welcome our new stop light overloads.
Highway on-ramp lights.
Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine, but we're all programmers here. The situation is an on-ramp for a highway has 2 lanes each with traffic metering lights. One line has 2+ cars lined up, the other has none. New car rolls up to the neighboring lane and immediately the light turns green for him. WTF? Seems this is lazy programming. Two clock chips timing the green for each light, when the fairer method would be one timer that either gives all the traffic to the only light with cars queued up or evenly alternates between the 2 occupied lanes. Would that have been so hard for the original designers of the system to implement? To me this is the most visible sign of lazy programming I've even run across as an ordinary user.