November 21, 2011, 9:12 am

Design Meets Border Crossings

By Garrick Infanger

 

Fast Company looks at the new border crossing in Georgia (think USSR, not the Bulldogs).

Border crossings are supposed to feature somber, vaguely intimidating architecture. Georgia, apparently, didn’t get the memo. The former Soviet republic commissioned German starchitectJürgen Mayer H. to design a security checkpoint between Georgia and its southern neighbor, Turkey, on the Black Sea, and what he gave them was this: a giant concrete squiggle. Yep, a squiggle.

Mayer’s office doesn’t tell us much about the project except that the top squiggle is used as a “viewing platform” and the building is conceived so that it “welcomes visitors to Georgia.”

Does that say “welcoming” to you? We can’t decide. Either it’s the world’s friendliest Panopticon tower or the world’s biggest, most sinister-looking puzzle piece.

Photo credits

November 16, 2011, 4:06 pm

Traffic Cameras: Safety or Revenue?

By Garrick Infanger

The Wall Street Journal looks at the debate regarding traffic cameras.

Nationwide, red-light traffic cameras have surged in popularity. More than 550 localities—including New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago—have installed them since the early 1990s, according to a spokesman the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The cameras have resulted in millions of tickets, which often carry fines of about $100. Fans call them a cost-effective tool for keeping drivers in line and intersections safe.

Critics, though, portray the cameras as Big Brother devices that allow cities to generate revenue from traffic offenses so minor that police might not have bothered to write them up if they had seen them with the naked eye. Others say the cameras raise constitutional concerns, penalizing many violators before they have had an opportunity to explain extenuating circumstances or even whether they were driving the car captured on film. Depending on the community, the cameras also can be used to detect speeders.

City officials in Los Angeles, Houston, and Colorado Springs have recently deactivated the red-light cameras.

Photo credit

November 3, 2011, 7:55 am

Infographic: New Jersey Pedestrian Deaths

By Garrick Infanger

Source

 

October 31, 2011, 9:29 am

Eliminating 90% of Traffic Accidents?

By Garrick Infanger

The IEEE released a new study that says 90% of traffic accidents could be eliminated if current technologies were adopted by all vehicles.

Nearly every traffic accident caused by driver error – up to 90 percent of all crashes – could be eliminated if existing intelligent transportation technologies were implemented in our vehicles and roads, say experts at IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional association. These include electronics and computing technologies such as in-vehicle machine vision and sensors to detect drowsy drivers, lane departure warning systems, and vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications for safety applications. However, costs of such technologies need to continue to fall so the average consumer can afford these vehicle safety features.

“Today’s advanced embedded systems, sensors, microprocessors and control technologies have made our vehicles and roads significantly safer, but integrating them into our vehicles and roads has been a slow process,” said Dr. Azim Eskandarian, IEEE member and director of the Center for Intelligent Systems Research at The George Washington University. “However, within 10 years, as technology costs continue to fall and implementation of these technologies increases, we could see significant improvements in vehicle safety, efficiency, and energy conservation – especially in developing parts of the world where high-end cars are not yet affordable by the general public.”

Dr. Eskandarian says other challenges include market acceptance and potential liability concerns surrounding technologies that take total or partial control of the vehicle, such as collision avoidance and driver assistance programs like automatic braking. However, these technologies may follow the path of driver- and passenger-side airbags and anti-lock braking systems (ABS) or electronic stability control (ESC), initially offered as optional features but today considered proven and often standard safety measures in nearly all vehicles.

 

 

 

October 28, 2011, 2:59 pm

DOT Removes Mandate for New Street Signage

By Garrick Infanger

The United States Department of Transportation proposed to eliminate a mandate for replacing traffic signs based on the potential costs related to ‘menu costs‘.

The Washington Post reports:

Although the order came from Washington, the burden of paying for hundreds of thousands of new signs — at costs ranging from $30 to $110 — would have fallen to state and local governments. Fairfax County estimated that it would cost $1.75 million, New York City pegged it a $27.6 million, and officials in small towns felt particularly burdened by the expense.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation dropped the deadline, saying instead that bigger, brighter street signs should be installed whenever current signs need to be replaced.

“A specific deadline for replacing street signs makes no sense and would have cost communities across America millions of dollars in unnecessary expenses,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said. “After speaking with local and state officials across the country, we are proposing to eliminate these burdensome regulations. It’s just plain common sense.”

The original mandate was churned out by George W. Bush administration regulators in 2003 as part of a routine update of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, an 816-page guide for traffic signs, signals and the like that seeks to set common standards nationwide.

Image: dot.gov

 

October 24, 2011, 2:54 pm

Frequent Commuter Points to Increase Public Transport?

By Garrick Infanger

The Atlantic looks at the idea of frequent flier miles for city commutes.

Stanford’s Balaji Prabhakar is one of those computer scientists who has become fascinated by the networks of the physical world. After working for years on cloud computing, Prabhakar has turned his attention not to social networks, but to “societal networks,” transportation in particular. His big idea is to create “frequent commuter programs” in which people who travel on public transit would be rewarded for patronizing the system varying amounts depending on when and how far they travel. Prabhakar thinks the system could help create greater public transit usage and simultaneously decrease congestion. And he’s deploying behavioral economics to transform the small monetary rewards a city could offer into something more. They tried a pilot program with Infosys in Bangalore and are rolling out a larger program with Singapore soon.

October 18, 2011, 1:03 pm

Considering Bus Rapid Transit

By Garrick Infanger

FastCompany.com looks at ideas to reduce carbon emissions.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT): This is far from a new technology, as the first bus rapid transit was introduced in Curitiba, Brazil in 1974. BRT is generally associated with dedicated lanes, elevated bus stops to expedite exit and entry, and high frequency. When implemented correctly, BRT systems get awfully close to the ride, speed, and comfort of light rail or subway systems at a fraction of the cost. Currently there are approximately 120 BRT systems around the world. BRTs make a lot of sense because they provide the convenience of rail systems at a fraction of the cost and can move a lot of people on a daily basis. The Bogota Transmilenio serves nearly 1.5 million people daily. Obviously, this results in a significant reduction in carbon emissions–and in fact the Bogota system was the first transportation project approved by the UN Clean Development Mechanism as a carbon project. What’s next for BRT? How about electric, smart-grid connected buses? PerhapsProterra will enter this market soon.

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October 14, 2011, 7:27 am

One Ticket to a Neighboring Star

By Garrick Infanger

DARPA is awarding one lucky company $500,000 to study the possibility of sending a human to a neighboring star. The New York Times looks at the new ‘star shot’.

The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel. The agenda ranges far beyond rocket technology to include such topics as legal, social and economic considerations of interstellar migration, philosophical and religious concerns, where to go and — perhaps most important — how to inspire the public to support this very expensive vision.

Photo Credit: Adrian Mann

October 10, 2011, 3:38 pm

Remote Operators for Air Traffic Control

By Garrick Infanger

Wired.com talke about handling air traffic control from remote locations.

Air traffic control towers may someday go the way of the lighthouse. At least, that’s the goal of a system being developed by Saab with Sweden’s LFV air traffic control service in which landing instructions are barked not from a four- or five-story lookout next to the tarmac but from a tricked-out control center miles away. Starting next year, Sundsvall and Örnsköldsvik regional airports will each host an 82-foot structure topped with a camera array that beams 360-degree views to hi-def wraparound screens in a remote facility. Controllers already communicate from afar while planes are en route, but this will be a first for tower operations. A pair of movable 36X-zoom cameras will provide extra flexibility, while video, weather data, object tracking, and anomaly detection can be integrated right on the hi-def screen. The images are sent from camera to screen in less than a second over an Internet link with several layers of redundancy.

Photo credit: Peter Karlsson/Svarteld

October 3, 2011, 9:20 am

Laser Scanners aiding UK Police

By Garrick Infanger

Gizmodo, of all blogs, reports on the expanded use of 3D laser scanners by police in the UK.

In the UK as in the US, a car wreck involving injuries or fatalities must be painstakingly recorded and preserved for insurance and court proceedings. Police investigators might block off the roadway for several hours as they take pictures of the scene and record measurements to log what happened. In the US, accident reconstruction is also big business, with experts retained by lawyers to discuss speeds, trajectories and impact physics.

The laser scanner will capture a 360-degree image of a crash scene, the BBC reports. Mounted on a tripod, a laser scans the horizon and records up to 30 million separate data points, down to sub-millimeter resolution. Each sweep takes four minutes, and investigators will typically make four sweeps, the BBC says. The image can then be processed into a 3-D computer model, allowing investigators to see where the vehicles are located relative to each other, tire skid marks, and other evidence.

Photo Credit

September 30, 2011, 7:00 am

Trucking Art

By Garrick Infanger

 

 

FastCompany.com looks at art that uses heavy trucks as subject matter.

Photo credit: Julie HassettSutton

 

 

September 28, 2011, 2:25 pm

Eliminating Left Turns?

By Garrick Infanger

Tom Vanderbilt’s latest Slate column discuss Diverging Diamond intersections that we have discussed before here and here at the Hub.

There is, however, a cheaper, less disruptive approach, one that promises its own safety and efficiency gains, that has become recently popular in the United States: the diverging diamond interchange. There’s just one catch: You briefly have to drive the wrong way… The DDI is the brainchild of Gilbert Chlewicki, who first theorized what he called the “criss-cross interchange” as an engineering student at the University of Maryland in 2000. (He eventually changed the name for fear of potential confusion with the singer of “Sailing.”)…

The DDI is the sort of thing that is easier to visualize than describe (this simulation may help), but here, roughly, is how a DDI built under a highway overpass works: As the eastbound driver approaches the highway interchange (whose lanes run north-south), traffic lanes “criss cross” at a traffic signal. The driver will now find himself on the “left” side of the road, where he can either make an unimpeded left turn onto the highway ramp, or cross over again to the right once he has gone under the highway overpass.

Photo credit: Slate.com