Intelligent Transport System Today,
there are many ways to travel around a large metropolitan area, for work or
pleasure. You could walk, although the range is admittedly low. You could
bicycle, but you still do a lot of work, and it’s dangerous. You could drive a
car, which takes concentration and sobriety and a license. You could ride a bus,
and let someone else drive. You could take a train, and let a computer drive
you. Or you could fly, and wait a long time for the plane to take off and
land. All modes of transportation have advantages, and
disadvantages. However, in recent decades, the single system that has won over
all others is the private automobile. This allows you to go from your starting
point to your destination point, with your complete control, at a reasonable
speed in a reasonable time. Unfortunately, apart from the pollutants created by
the vehicle itself, the fact that so many other people seem to enjoy its
perceived freedom causes major traffic jams, and the requirement for traffic
control devices. Too many people using too little road space at
the same time causes traffic jams. It is most profound on large grade separated
roads, that have limited access. There have been various solutions tried out,
including high occupancy vehicle lanes, ramp metering, or road widening.
Unfortunately, they simply don’t solve the problem of lack of
capacity. Traffic control devices impose certain controls on the
flow of traffic. Most common are traffic lights. These meter the flow of traffic
between two or more roads so that at no time is any vehicle in conflict with any
other. However, they also impose that traffic comes to a complete stop,
requiring vehicles to stop and then start again. This not only slows vehicles
down, but also is the prime cause of wasted energy in urban settings.
Unfortunately, cities are very reluctant to spend money. Therefore any
future transport system has to be cheap for cities. This implies that current
infrastructure is kept as much as possible, or improved. Using roads, the prime
infrastructure available today would mean the form factor for vehicles would
stay the same, but each individual vehicle could be made more
intelligent. So for tomorrow, we need to design a transport
system that uses roads or a very slight improvement on roads to provide a high
capacity system that provides service for everyone. This could be achieved by
implementing the following eight systems, each of which provides more of a
burden on the car manufacturer, but would eventually provide a system, which is
automatic, safe and efficient. Firstly, all cars should have
intelligence brakes and cruise control. These would remove the driver from the
responsibility of having to follow along behind somebody. By pressing a button,
the driver would give control of the distance between his car and the car in
front. If the car in front slowed down, you would not have to wait for the brake
lights to light up, the driver to see them, Wen press the brake pedal the right
amount, and continuously monitor the distance. Instead the car would be
programmed to continuously monitor the distance to the car in front and
instantly alter its speed to match and maintain the distance. By
speeding up the feedback circuit, you can close the distance of cars, and
therefore increase the capacity. You also remove driver error so reducing the
number of accidents. Also, cars could communicate locally with each other and
ware ahead of time that following cars need to slow down. Next,
you need to remove the driver from the responsibility of steering the vehicle.
Having complex vision systems on a car seems over the top as they not only
dramatically increase the cost of the car, but also the complexity of the
control software. Instead you could build detector into the front of the car
that detect the middle of a lane of traffic. The car would try and keep the
vehicle in that lane. Junctions could be built by having the centerline split.
The operator or route planning software would decide which of the two or more
signals to follow. Separating lanes of automatic cars from those
driven by humans especially on high speed highways, would give an incentive to
not only purchase an automatic car but also to purchase the road space which it
uses. Since these separate lanes would have not only fast moving traffic but
also safer traffic, they could be marked and sold by cities to create a revenue
stream to allow the building of more augmented roads. Having a
device in the car that does route planning is a great help for people who don’t
know the way around your city. But what if you lived in the city for many years
It’s not going to be that much use, is it By linking route planning with real
time information on traffic levels in the city, you can quickly divert your
journey to use the most efficient roads. This information could be relayed to
vehicles using broadcast radio. Roadside sensors that determine the flow of
traffic on a road would detect the speeds. The ability to remove
the parking requirements from near a building would allow more compact cities,
which are better pedestrian environments. However, people don’t like to walk
from a parking structure that is a long way from their destination. The solution
is to allow the car to drop off the passengers where required and then drive
itself to the nearest parking structure that is known to have a space.
By automatically controlling the speed and location of all traffic, you
can’ make junctions work very efficiently. At the moment, some traffic has to
stop, and when it resumes, the cars spread out into a large disperse volume.
Instead you could move each group of cars as a packet, adjusting its speed so
that it arrives at an intersection at just the right time so that it never has
to stop. This could be achieved by changing the speed of a section of road so
those cars slow down gradually. The speeds of road segments would be set by
nearby junction computers each linked to the other. This would create a holistic
traffic control system. If one section lost power, the system would revert to a
normal junction. When a group of people move from one location
to another, it would make sense to allow them to travel together instead of
having to each use a separate vehicle. On demand group transport would allow the
request of a large vehicle which can automatically move people from one location
to another. These vehicles would be stored at strategic locations, and then sent
to the requesting site as quickly as possible. Vehicles could be booked in
advance, and you pay by the time used in minutes, not the distance traveled or
destination. At the other end is the replacement of the taxi.
This would be similar to the group transport but for smaller groups. Again these
vehicles would be stored at strategic locations, so that people don’t have to
wait very long. Again they are hired by the minute of use. Since you are no
longer required to own your own vehicle, the total number of vehicles required
in the whole system is reduced, and therefore the number of parking spaces
required. Given a fully demand driven transport system, you would never need to
find another parking space in your life. After the above is
implemented, you have on demand private or group transport vehicles driving
themselves from point to point without the need to stop at junctions, wait for
traffic jams on freeways, or get lost along the way. To solve the problem of parking, we need the car to drive itself to the nearest parking structure after ______.