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Posts Tagged ‘traffic’

The Bay Area town of Pleasanton, Calif., is the only municipality in the nation to use this system, which cyclists say is already improving efficiency and safety. The Intersector motion and presence sensor can tell the difference between bikes and cars, and alter traffic signal patterns accordingly.

Many cities have embedded road sensors that can detect bikes as well as cars, but they don’t work if the bike isn’t positioned properly or if the bike is not made of metal. Bike commuters might be tempted to ride through the intersection rather than wait, which is neither legal nor safe.

Video-monitoring systems can also help detect bikes — Pleasanton uses these at all intersections — but they are stymied by wind and fog, according to the Contra Costa Times. Continuous video monitoring can also spark privacy concerns.

The microwave sensors can monitor up to eight detection zones, which the city would specify, and send up to four commands to the traffic signal control box — such as “right turn,” “straight through” and so on. It updates 20 times per second and can track both moving and stationary vehicles, according to the manufacturer, MS Sedco. The systems cost between $4,000 and $5,000 apiece, the Contra Costa Times says.

Pleasanton has the systems at seven intersections so far, with plans to add at least one more. It should come in handy when cars are eventually outnumbered by bikes in that part of the country.

[Contra Costa Times]

Researchers at the Institut Teknologi Bandung in Indonesia built a responsive streetlamp system that recognizes a toy car speeding past, and switches on automatically. Jakarta, the massive megacity at which this effort is aimed, has more than 200,000 street lights, which cost about $17 million to operate in 2007, according to their study.

Researchers Suprijadi, Thomas Muliawan and Sparisoma Viridi built a prototype automatic lighting system that consists of a video camera, a lamp, a PC and a toy car. The camera, shooting at 25 frames per second, captures a car and the computer processes the image to determine whether it’s really a car.

The system recognized the passing toy car 91 percent of the time at speeds up to 2 mph, according to the paper, posted to the arXiv database and reported by Technology Review. The system’s accuracy falls as the speeds increase, however.

There’s plenty more work to be done to improve the system’s sensitivity, as well as test how it would react to pedestrians and cyclists, and how it works in different types of weather. But it’s a good first step toward a more efficient system for lighting the streets, as Tech Review points out.

A system like this could help reduce energy consumption in cities throughout the world. Then we won’t have to worry about injecting trees with glowing nanoparticles.

[Technology Review]

Ravnitzky is a chief counsel at the Postal Regulatory Commission, the government agency that oversees the U.S. Postal Service. The post office is in bad shape. From 2006 to 2009, mail volume dropped by 17 percent; the USPS lost $8.5 billion dollars last year, and officials have threatened to cut Saturday service. But where others see an inefficient and increasingly outdated system, Ravnitzky sees opportunity.

With its 218,684 vehicles stopping at more than 150 million delivery points along some 232,000 routes every day, the postal-delivery fleet could be reconceived as a vast data-gathering network. “If you were designing a data collection system from scratch, it would look a lot like the postal service,” Ravnitzky says. As he reasoned in a New York Times op-ed last December, the postal network could be used to measure air pollution and ozone levels while aiding Homeland Security operations by scanning for biological or chemical agents. Or it might detect and report WiFi and cellular dead zones. Using telematics, the postal service could evolve into an entirely new kind of public utility. It could also provide a new source of revenue. Private companies or other government agencies could buy space for their sensors on mail trucks.

Although Ravnitzky’s idea is just that—an idea—there’s precedent: Two years ago, 32 Greyhound buses rigged with sensors set off across the country to gather atmospheric and environmental data for the National Weather Service; 2,000 more such buses will roll out soon.

There’s already real interest in Ravnitzky’s plan. Marc Chapman, a compliance director for Atmos Energy, the largest natural-gas distributor in the country, says he is looking into whether sensors could be attached to postal-service trucks to detect gas leaks. Telematics might just save Saturday delivery.

The DOT is interested in rolling out vehicle-to-vehicle technology (known as IntelliDrive) that networks cars and roadways together in a way that they can share information on everything from impending bottlenecks to abrupt lane changes. DOT thinks 76 percent of accidents among the unimpaired could be prevented with such technology in place.

The IBM rollout will not go quite that far, but the DOT sees it as a step in the right direction. At both the state and local level, IBM plans to install road sensors and implement predictive analytics that won't just monitor traffic in real time but actually project future traffic patterns up to an hour in advance.

For its part, IBM is trying to build on successes overseas and convince officials that its telematics know-how should be implemented nationwide. Finnish officials have praised IBM's traffic analytics as both time- and money-saving, and IBM would certainly relish the government contracts that might accompany a successful test drive in Texas.

For drivers across the country, the stakes are equally high. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood and President Obama are both committed to implementing IntelliDrive technology that would wire our roadways for the 21st century. If IBM succeeds in reducing congestion, pollution, and commute times with its proof-of-concept pilot programs in car-crazy Texas, more U.S. cities and states will likely see similar programs in coming years.

[CNET]