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Colorado Prepares To Install 'Smart Road' Product By Integrated Roadways (ieee.org)
Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: On August 30, a startup plans to add its "smart pavement" to an intersection in an industrial corner of Denver, Colorado. The company has encased assorted electronics within four slabs of concrete and will wedge those slabs into the road between a Pepsi Co. bottling plant and two parking lots. Integrated Roadways says its product, which can deduce the speed, weight, and direction of a vehicle from the basket of sensors buried in the pavement, will face its first real-world test at that discreet Denver junction. If this trial goes well, the startup "will replace 500 meters of pavement along a dangerous curve in Highway 285, just south of Denver, with its product in early 2019," reports IEEE Spectrum. The sensors will be able to detect when a driver careens off the road's edge and alert authorities. It even has the ability to prompt officials to reconfigure lanes to relieve congestion.
What good is this for the consumer? When it seems to be a high dollar pork toy for the authorities.
to fix the road so you can't careen off of it?
what, are they high?
I'll submit that particular bit of "Dangerous" Hwy 285 is no more dangerous, curved, slippery, narrow, scary, icy, snowy, than it was when that highway was first built. All that has changed is that drivers have become breathtakingly incompetent, concerned more with not missing that latest tweet or fabulous addition to their wall, or settling in to a nice relaxing phone call. In a vehicle with enough technology its manufacturer implies in advertisements all one has to do is smash the gas or smash the brakes and all will be just dandy because cameras. This is just more of America's addiction to a nineteenth century technology, and various business models that rely on the easy scrape of taxpayers' income to make their own fortunes.
BTW, the view of South Park from the top of Kenosha Pass is glorious. But if you get stuck behind a UPS box truck or some mountain-living-dream idiot it's not a quick drive up from Denver. It's a nice route to Santa Fe too, but nowhere near as nice Walsenburg/Ft. Garland, over La Veta Pass, but much nicer than the mind-crushing I-25-all-the-way. Welcome to Colorado! Don't forget to leave when it stops being cool to be here (and it will).
I have to agree I see some value in some sections of roads where more accidents occur being able to alert authorities there's a problem - that could save response time.
I wonder how much quicker it would really be, since mostly people would dial 911 right away - but it would probably shorten the time it took to know exactly where an accident was.
I've driven on the part of 285 mentioned pretty often, what would really be better is if they widened lanes a bit more at each curve. That section has kind of tight road spacing and a few extra feet per lane would probably help avoid a lot of simple accidents.
I've also noticed that particular part of the road has a real drop in cell quality, and wonder if cell signals dropping out on a fairly curvy road does not somehow play into more accidents.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you want to make a true road innovation, do it without concrete. We are running out of sand to make the material (desert sand is unusable unfortunately), and it does not ages very well beyond 50 years.
I never though of 285 as south of Denver. More southwest. Mountains make a difference.
I welcome our new "rat road" overlords.
The 'benefit' to this is almost certainly that it will ALSO be collecting identifying information about the vehicles and occupants.
A lot of local and state governments are rushing to put technology around roads that allows personal tracking, by monitoring wifi, bluetooth and other similar emissions, and of course once they have enough of this, automated tolling, congestion charges, speeding and other driving fines, etc become SO much easier to levy 'for the good of everyone' (which generally means so the state can spend more and more on pet projects).
This is almost certainly the aim of this project citizen, please comply and be happy, or else.
Are you serious? It's a speed trap
Cue the shock and disbelief when this is used for evil instead of good.
I can just imagine them getting some strange data.
Have gnu, will travel.
They are touting this as "for safety" I'll bet. But, once they work out the bugs, look for mandated NFC, bluetooth or some other ID device on EVERY vehicle. If it can detect the vehicle speed, just think of the unlimited revenue stream for speeding vehicles. Or, detecting if a vehicle license plate/registration/driver license is expired. Oh just think of the possibilities. Sniffers to detect pollution, someone talking on the phone, eating a hamburger, all sorts of thinks government could use to bilk consumers out of...of course, all in the name of "safety". Crock of mule fritters!
The Dream: Roads connected to the Internet, or "IoR", will revolutionize road safety! Reality: Roads will get hacked and send out bad information to Internet-connected vehicles.
I drive past this bottling plant every day, as do many other people as it's between the highway (well, two highways actually) and a large part of residential inner city.
It's historically been an isolated and industrial part of Denver, but there's a huge revitalization effort going on there. If you look on that Google map you'll see more than just car parks and industrial lots. There's a Natural Grocers just a block down and within half a mile there are three craft breweries, including the newish Blue Moon craft brewery (not to be confused with the horrible licensed Coors product).
Here's an article on what's happening to the street it's on:
https://www.denverpost.com/2018/06/21/denver-brighton-boulevard-project-impact/
Hopefully it works out better than this enhanced pavement:
http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/29/first-solar-freakin-roadway-in-the-us-breaks-again/
A local firm, International Road Dynamics, has been manufacturing and selling a product that does exactly the same things as this product does, for 35 years.
https://www.irdinc.com/
spend the money on old fashion maintenance and building additional lanes to reduce congestion. But that is so old school. Must spend on new and shiny stuff. My town just spent a but-load on some new autonomous sensor for testing the one autonomous car they are testing. Meanwhile us meat slabs still get RYG lights with no timing info at all. If there is a walk sign that has the timing info, I can get an idea if I should speed up, hold speed or come off the accelerator based on the pedestrian signa. Funny no one ever seems to suggest the millions of cars with meat slabs driving might find timing info for them useful.
How will they use the data when they find that 95% of traffic on a given road segment exceeds the speed limit? Will they use it for revenue enhancement? Or will they use it to implement the 85% rule?
now we know where all that money made from taxing and regulating legal weed is going...and who's smoking much of it.
With a lump of asphalt strapped to it's back.
Horse says: Bartender, one beer for me and one for the road.
TIL making roads safer by reducing speeds is evil.