The St. Pete Times reports on Tampa, Florida’s red-light camera system.
What sets off a red-light camera?
A laser sensor about the size of a hockey puck is embedded in the middle of each lane behind the white “stop bar” line, which signifies the beginning of a signalized intersection.
If a car crosses .Read more...
Google has been in the new with their robot car that uses software and a set of cameras to act as the driver. Fast Company looks at “How Google’s Robot Cars will Revive Sprawl”.
Google’s test cars had traveled 140,000 miles with only one accident. (A car was rear-ended while stopped .Read more...
Eric A. Morris looks at the strange things that cause traffic:
It’s hard to calculate precisely, but estimates I’ve seen suggest that incidents account for perhaps 50 percent of all roadway congestion. The most common incidents (80 percent) are breakdowns, stalls, flat tires, empty gas tanks, etc. In transportation lingo these .Read more...
Los Angeles is considering pulling the plug on their red light cameras (RLC’s). Freakonomics blogger Eric A. Morris weighs in:
Do we need RLCs? First off, yes, there is a problem. Intersections are dangerous places. The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that red-light running caused 676 deaths and 113,000 injuries in .Read more...
Popular Mechanics magazine looks at automotive light bulb technology.
We already use LEDs for taillights, a practice started by Cadillac on the 2000 DeVille. Aside from giving engineers the ability to design lights with substantially different styling, LEDs consume very little energy and illuminate 400 to 500 milliseconds faster than an .Read more...
USA Today discusses the growing trend towards flashing yellow left turn signals to improve safety and keep traffic moving.
The Federal Highway Administration estimates that the signals — which allow drivers to make a left turn after yielding, even when the light is red for traffic going straight and cross traffic has .Read more...
I worked for a man that had served in Iraq and was responsible for guarding transport trucks across the desert to various military installations. Now that the withdrawal in Iraq is in full effect, the issue of protecting the movement of troops and goods is in the news again. Currently, .Read more...
Just outside my first apartment was a ‘Slow Children At Play’ sign and every time I walked past I would think about the ‘slow children’ in my neighborhood and hoped for punctuation that would call out to passing motorists to reduce their speed instead of judging these children.
Over at Slate.com, .Read more...
Tom Vanderbilt writes at length about merging philosophy in his book, Traffic. It seems that the Illinois Department of Transportation is now experimenting with some new ideas in merging.
The Quad-City Times writes about the new Illinois DOT signage:
There’s a new sign in town, and it may just change everything.
The Illinois .Read more...
Fast Company looks at Michelin‘s new ‘self-healing tire’:
Bicycle tire tubes need to stay firmly inflated against the inner surface of the tires themselves to ensure safe, rugged riding. But in the unlucky event of a puncture, that same pressure will only stretch the hole wider — even when it’s closed .Read more...
The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times weigh in on the recent study from the American Academy of Pediatrics on child safety and car seats:
Madonna Behen from the New York Times:“People cheer when they turn their kid around at one year, but hopefully some day they’ll cheer at .Read more...
Traffic guru Tom Vanderbilt discusses Twitter and traffic at Salon.com:
On an early Friday morning rush hour last month, a Seattle-area web designer named Michael Micheletti was driving his BMW, “check engine” light blazing, to his dealer to be serviced. In some kind of disharmonic convergence, the car gave out a .Read more...
