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Ann Arbor plays home to the University of Michigan, and with the football games, Kid Rock concerts, and daily commuters comes traffic, and lots of it. On the average weekday, the 125,000-person town swells to hold 200,000 people, most of whom travel in by personal car. The city is exploring buses, commuter rail, and carpool options to clear up its roads, but knows it can't drive the car out of its home state anytime soon. So it turned to tech to manage its streets.
Intelligent traffic systems have been adjusting traffic lights and signs to smooth out congestion in real time for more than three decades, all over the world. More than 100 cities, including London, Santiago, and Toronto, use the same car-corralling program as Ann Arbor.
Now, that tech is getting smarter—and it's winning the battle. New numbers from Siemens, which co-owns the Ann Arbor program with UK company Imtech, show the city's more advanced software puts a serious dent in local traffic.
Cities program your standard traffic light by observing traffic patterns for a few hours, extrapolating what local vehicles need, and then letting lights do their thing for years, even decades. More advanced systems will be able to sense if a vehicle is stopped, and turn the light green to help it along. The most advanced systems—like Ann Arbor's—will know how many vehicles are stopped, in which lane, and how many vehicles are coming down the pike.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 06 2017, @01:04PM (1 child)
Depending on tech to tell you that it's safe to cross the road is a sure way to die.
The right tech is grade separation, its very difficult to get run over when crossing the street between the parking structure and the mini-skyscraper at my employer because there's a nice skywalk connecting floor 3 of both buildings. The local hospital has the same strategy. It does make things weird for the business because people are wandering in on the 3rd floor or ground floor or who knows what.
I suspect every American skywalk it within 500 miles of the Canadian border. Maybe the tornados and hurricanes down south make it too dangerous, I donno. You'd think being out of the sun would be strongly appealing. Its definitely a nordic ancestry far northern tier thing.
Tunnels are a college campus thing. West of the mississippi we get too much rain, many feet per year, so drainage would be an issue, unless the tunnel is literally only 5 feet between adjacent buildings or one street width apart.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday March 07 2017, @10:04AM
I suspect every American skywalk it within 500 miles of the Canadian border.
Daytona Beach, FL has several with more on the way. That said, unless you want to go out of your way to cross at one, you have to cross streets infested with tourist traffic. I find that, at least in the beachside area, it is easier and safer to cross in the middle of blocks rather than at intersections, even (or especially) if there are traffic lights. You only have vehicles coming at you from two directions to watch out for as opposed to at least four directions at intersections.