If a hacker targeting connected cars in Manhattan could randomly stall 20% of them during rush hour, total gridlock would ensue. “This isn't just bad traffic where you are an hour late. It becomes impossible to get from point A to point B,” says Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Peter Yunker who ran a study on the "cyberphysical risks of hacked internet-connected vehicles." From IEEE Spectrum:
Not all cars on the road would need to be self-driving and Internet-connected for such paralysis to occur. For example, if 40 percent of all cars on the road in Manhattan were online and autonomous, hacking half of those would suffice.
...Cities without large grids—-Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles, to name a few—were more vulnerable to gridlock from such attacks.
Yunker and his colleagues cautioned that they considered only static situations where roads were either blocked or not blocked. Future research with more dynamic models would likely show that blocked roads would spill traffic over into other roads. Given such effects, it might be possible to trigger gridlock by stalling much less than 20 percent of all cars, Yunker says.
image: Shutterstock/View Apart
Read the rest
Where they're going, they don't need roads. Read the rest
From Practical Engineering:
Traffic management in dense urban areas is an extremely complex problem with a host of conflicting goals and challenges. One of the most fundamental of those challenges happens at an intersection, where multiple streams of traffic - including vehicles, bikes and pedestrians - need to safely, and with any luck, efficiently, cross each others’ paths. However we accommodate it now or in future, traffic will continue to be one of the biggest challenges in our urban areas and traffic signals will continue to be one of its solutions.
Read the rest
Hurrah for Norwich, New York schoolbus driver Samantha Call and her astonishing reflexes! From Norwich City School District/Facebook:
This is exactly why you should NEVER pass a school bus when the stop arm is out and the red lights are flashing!
..."Samantha did an outstanding job," NCSD Transportation Supervisor William Loomis said. "All of our drivers undergo continuous training so they're prepared to handle situations like this. We hope this video helps everyone to realize the dangers of passing a stopped school bus."
Read the rest
Mesa, Arizona police busted a man for driving in the HOV lane with a dummy as his passenger.
"Another one Busted! Don't let this be you.... A driver was cited for HOV lane violation along the SR 202 at Alma School, for having a dummy masquerade as a passenger," tweeted the Department of Public Safety.
You'd think people would realize that the fuzz are onto this by now. At least he invested in a real mannequin unlike the below, from a classic gallery of "15 Hilariously Awful Dummies Used by Busted Carpool Lane Cheaters as Fake Passengers":
Read the rest
According to Digg, this bus driver in China realized he wouldn't make it through a toll plaza so he pulled a u-ey. I think he actually wanted to grab a killer parking spot on the other side of the road.
Read the rest
A new report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority attributes the majority (51%-73%) of the prodigious 2010-2016 increase in San Francisco traffic congestion on Uber and Lyft; the rideshare companies dispute the finding and say that it's really down to increased Amazon Prime delivery vehicles and Lyft has offered to work with the city on "congestion pricing" whereby use of the public roads are taxed at the same rate for both the city's incredibly wealthy tech elite and struggling underclass, with the intention of limiting private vehicle use.
Read the rest
Road diets (previously) have been proven to reduce fatalities and unsafe speed incidents. Here's how it works. Read the rest
The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) posted this video of a batshit driver near Canal Winchester, Ohio. Amazingly, there were no collisions. "Don't be that driver," says ODOT.
Read the rest
YouTuber euverus modded Cities: Skylines to demonstrate how 30 different types of intersections have dramatically different amounts of traffic flow. A four-way intersection with no traffic lights gets a flow of 191 vehicles per minute, where a stack interchange can handle 1099 vehicles in the same time frame.
The mods used, Traffic Manager: President Edition and Network Extensions 2, are both available for free on Steam.
The big surprise for me was the roundabout, because we rarely have them in the Midwest or the West Coast. They seemed like a lot of extra space needed for an incremental benefit, but it appears they can be more efficient and safer, even weird ones.
• Traffic flow measured on 30 different 4-way junctions (YouTube / euverus) Read the rest
Location platform Here Technologies calculated how far one hour of driving can take drivers out of major American cities starting on Friday at 4, 7, and 10 pm. Read the rest
Convenience always carries costs. In the case of e-commerce, the surge in residential deliveries is causing in urban gridlock. Citylab goes out on delivery routes for their interesting report: Read the rest
In this segment from the excellent Australian highway patrol television show "Highway Patrol Australia," a motorist is pulled over after being observed traveling 28 kilomiles per candle faster than the limit in a rather obvious speed trap. Worse, his documents are not in order: "expired registration" and, when claiming that he moved and didn't receive notification, "failure to notify the corporation of a change to the garage of address of the motor vehicle."
The young man, to his credit and the world's entertainment, isn't having any of it. Read the rest
A spool of cable fell off a truck on Route 40 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, turning the highway into a hyperrealistic video game.
Read the rest
Do not drive anywhere in Los Angeles between the hours of 4 and 7 p.m and within 10 days either side of Thanksgiving. [via B911Weather]
Read the rest
Los Angeles is a car town, so it's controversial to promote "road diets," a form of roadway reconfiguration intended to slow cars and reduce collisions, especially with cyclists and pedestrians. Scientists reviewed data from one controversial road diet and found that crashes were cut in half, and unsafe speed crashes dropped to zero. Read the rest
Researchers from the University of Michigan EE/Computer Science Department (previously) presented their work on hacking traffic signals at this year's Usenix Security Symposium (previously), and guess what? It's shockingly easy to pwn the traffic control system. Read the rest
