Stop-and-go waves of dense freeway traffic can flow backward for miles. This TED-Ed video explains the phenomenon of "phantom traffic jams" and shows how self-driving cars that are aware of the traffic conditions ahead can adjust their behavior to prevent phantom traffic jams. Interestingly, models have shown had just one self-driving vehicle for every 20 human-driven vehicles can dampen a stop-and-go phantom traffic jam wave.
Image: YouTube Read the rest
In 2013 Mats Järlström's wife got a red light camera ticket at an intersection in Oregon. Järlström, an electrical engineer by training, investigated the formula used to time yellow lights. Järlström found flaws with the formula and e-mailed the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying to let them know. Here's what happened next, according to the Institute for Justice:
The Board told Mats it had no interest in hearing about his ideas. Fair enough. But the Board didn’t stop there. After a two-year investigation, it fined him $500 for publicly criticizing the timing of traffic lights without having a Professional Engineer license. The Board also forbid him from continuing to discuss his research.
With the aid of the Institute for Justice, Järlström sued the board. In late 2018, the federal court ruled in Järlström's favor. Järlström submitted his idea to the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), which assembled a panel to consider it. In late February, the ITE panel "found that the current equation for yellow light timing should be reconsidered and as of today [Feb 28, 2020], the Institute has voted to recommend Mats’s formula as a recommended practice." Read the rest
As the world gets weirder, so do the faux passengers that unscrupulous drivers employ to gain access the HOV lane. Washington State Patrol officer Rick Johnson pulled over a speeding driver and discovered that the gentleman's only passenger was a stuffed dinosaur. Fortunately, the dinosaur was wearing a safety belt.
According to a UPI report, "The driver could be facing a hefty fine thanks to a law that took effect last summer that adds a $200 fine to the $186 base fine for a HOV violation if a driver is caught 'using a dummy, doll, or other human facsimile to make it appear that an additional person is in the vehicle.'"
In a prank commenting on bad traffic in Cape Coral, Florida, Paxten Sester and his buddies passed time during a long red light by playing Uno in the middle of the road. Dylan Kjos caught the minute-long gag on video for TikTok and its since gone viral.
"(After a minute,) we rushed back into the truck, thinking that the light was about to change. And we still sat in the truck for about another minute," Kjos said.
According to UPI, "Kjos and his friends said they were aiming to poke fun at the local traffic, which they said is particularly slow during the winter.
Mangoes spilling from an overturned tractor trailer caused a messy morning commute on Maryland beltway. Read the rest
I'm glad they didn't wreck but the driver's facial expressions in this clip are really something. He's be a great character actor. The whole clip is like a scene from a Jim Jarmusch film.
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.
Traffic disappears into a higher dimension, on this bridge. Witchcraft. https://t.co/9jXxSFjXv6 pic.twitter.com/yO9MaGokHy
— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) August 5, 2019
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:
Read the restThis 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."
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":
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.
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.
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
