A revolutionary new traffic system without traffic lights
To cut L.A. traffic woes, city installs synchronized traffic lights | mother nature network
Los Angeles is aiming for a 20 percent improvement in its legendarily bad traffic with smart lights that work together. Other cities are doing this kind of thing, too, with dedicated busways, improved biking lanes and cellphone incentives for taking transit.
The success of London’s congestion charge, in three maps
In its first few years, the London charging scheme was heralded as a solid traffic-buster, with 15-20 percent boosts in auto and bus speeds and 30 percent reductions in congestion delays. Most of those gains appear to have disappeared in recent years, however. Transport for London (TfL), which combines the functions of our NYCDOT and MTA and which created and operates the charging system, attributes the fallback in speeds to other changes in the streetscape and traffic management …
“What’s the cost of congestion? $105 million dollars for every 5 minutes wasted in traffic”
UPS @ LRA Summit 13
What’s the cost of congestion? $105 million dollars for every 5 minutes wastedin traffic. #LRASummit13
— UPS (@UPS) February 13, 2013
Three Ways to Improve Walkability Without Touching the Street
#1 Red Light Cameras
#2 ‘No Turn on Red’ Signs
#3 Ban Cell Phones while Driving
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Human Infographic! GOOD Attacks Traffic in Los Angeles
In December, GOOD “attacked” downtown Los Angeles with an infographic flashmob of people who care about fixing the city’s transportation crisis.
Big Data Drives Road Safety | Data Innovation Blog
The future of transportation lies increasingly in the continued investment and use of real-time information to make our infrastructure smarter, including enabling vehicles to communicate with each other and with the world around them. It is estimated that by 2050, the number of vehicles around the world is set to double to two billion, placing enormous demands on the global transportation infrastructure and on the networks designed to support them.
Here in the United States, the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT), in coordination with other federal and state agencies, private industry and the nation’s leading universities, is working to advance life-saving connected vehicle technology and real-time data to help prevent traffic fatalities and injuries, while reducing traffic congestion, improving environmental performance and making our transportation system more user friendly.
Urban traffic made beautiful. Mesmerizing video
Mayor Emanuel Expands Open Data on City Portal with Executive Order
Today, the City of Chicago expanded its open data efforts with an executive order by Mayor Emanuel.
“An open and transparent administration makes it easier for residents to hold their government accountable, but it also serves as a platform for innovative tools that improve the lives of all residents,” said Mayor Emanuel, in statement on the city website.
“Chicago’s vibrant technology and startup community will leverage this wealth of open, public data to create applications that will improve service delivery and lead to greater quality of service for residents and more public engagement in City government.”
The city released 21 new “high value” datasets today, including real-time traffic data from Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses, environmental data, liquor regulation, and recycling programs.
When asked what made these datasets high value, the Mayor’s Office responded via email.
“The datasets released today aren’t necessarily more critical than the more than 400 others that have been released,” wrote Caroline Weisser, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office.
“They continue the commitment the administration has taken to being a leader in municipal open data. The executive order itself codifies the actions that Brett and John Tolva, the CTO, have taken over the past year and a half to pursue both open data policy and detailed analytics in tandem. Making a firm commitment to continue adding writable data to the dataportal about how the city works provides the raw materials for the City to collaborate and innovate with the developer community, which ultimately helps the City do a better job of serving Chicagoans.”
For more context on opening government, the Chicago way, read our feature from 2011 and more recent coverage of how Brett Goldstein, Chicago’s chief information officer and chief data officer, is using data in the public sector.
An App that Sees and Prevents Future Traffic Jams - Technology - GOOD
Anyone’s smartphone can caculate the shortest distance between two places and even recommend a route to avoid traffic along the way. But what about an app that helps prevent traffic jams before they begin? That’s the premise of Greenway, a new program for Windows Phone that plugs its users’ locations, destinations, and speeds into an algorithm to figure out where and when traffic jams are likely to occur. Then, it provides a route to steer cars away from those roads. The route is called, appopriately, the “Greenway,” and it’s optimized for traffic, time, and the amount of gas used based on data about where other drivers are headed at the same time.
As cofounder Christian Brüggemann told Technology Review, the app factors in data about a street, like the number of lanes and speed limit, to calculate the maximum number of vehicles it can handle before bottlenecks. Then the app redirects cars from busy streets so they don’t tip past their carrying capacity. A Greenway user’s phone will send updates to Greenway almost constantly so the app can redirect on-the-fly if its led a driver into a jam.
So far, the approach seems to be working. In a computer simulation of 50,000 cars, Greenway users show up at their destinations twice as fast as non-users. And they only burn up one fifth of the fuel. In Munich, a pilot group of a few dozen drivers is trying it out in real life.
