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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.
In the article the careening thing is mentioned in regards to Colorado's mountainous highways. So yeah, they are high. The roads are very high and very difficult to make careen-off proof.
Didn't solar roadway take like 3 million dollars between indie gogo and DoT grants, and all they have to show for it is a small patch of sidewalk with LED lights you can't see during the day, has already caught fire once, and currently is producing under 5 cents worth of power a day in the peak of summer. That's of course before asking what kind of solar pannel surface is supposed to remain good at absorbing light with rocks and sand grinded into them under litteral tons of weight. Solar is great... but a good solar panel and traveling surface do not benefit from the same things. want efficiant solar that matches the legnth of the road... build an overpass.
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?