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Computerized Navigation Systems to the Rescue 210

Posted by michael from the where-do-you-want-to-go-today dept.
Rhys_Lewis writes "There is an article in Newsweek discussing the advantages of traffic avoidance systems in big cities around the world. I can't help thinking that it would be cheaper to subsidise in-car satnav units with traffic avoidance than building new freeways. Surely it makes sense to interactively route traffic than to keep building passive roads?"
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Computerized Navigation Systems to the Rescue More

Computerized Navigation Systems to the Rescue

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  • Computerized Nav Systems (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DrFlex ( 711207 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:10AM (#7228485)
    What's gonna happen when advertising hits these things?

    Your car drives you directly to the nearest McDonalds!

  • Just get out of your car! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you want to avoid traffic, spending your money on silly "Traffic avoidance" boxes is a waste. There is a much easier way to avoid traffic; don't use your car!

    For a nation that claims to be the world leader, public transport is possibly the worst in any civalised country. Buses are few and far between, train systems are unused for shorter journeys and everyone, everyone commutes into work by car. What a waste!

    What is needed is more investment in public transport infastructure. That'll avoid more t

    • Re:Just get out of your car! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Working for a trucking industry, I can say that traffic costs my company millions of dollars a year, from wasted fuel to extra wages, to additional maintenance on the equipment. A good traffic avoidance system would remove some of these costs, and if it were widely adopted in commercial industries, would have the after-effect of making it a moot point for the average commuter to have.
      Aside from the reduction of traffic jams, the incidental costs to the everyday joe would be immense, and they wouldn't even

  • Stop traffic now (Score:2, Informative)

    by Rajesh Gupta ( 716521 )
    Use mass transit.
    • Work on inventing the teleporter.
    • Use mass transit.

      Damn hippies.

      And what are you going to use all this land for? Growing food for the people who live in deserts?

      Just send them U-Haul's damnit, tell them to MOVE!

      What? They don't have roads in their desert? I suppose you want them to move with mass transit? Have you ever tried to fit a mattress on a bus?

      Damn hippies.

    • I would use mass transit, but here in Atlanta, Georgia, the transit system is non existent for people living in the suburbs. Have you thought of that? I would love to take the bus, or the train or whatever means. I have even tried to carpool, but to no avail. Atleast here, people are very happy with driving in their own cars by themselves. That's the fact. Now deal with that and come up with a solution that works.
      • Definitelly the goverment there has not really ecological policy. You subsidize mass transit in order to combat polution and avoid traffic jams. On the longer run you end up with a cleaner environment and a more efficient transportation system and a more efficient society (you don't have to spend 2h each day in traffic jams). But unfortunatelly for the government the longest run is until the next elections.

        • Atlanta (Score:2, Insightful)

          by gfxguy ( 98788 )
          But it's not the politicians fault (totally, anyway). The voters of the nearby counties keep voting down extensions of MARTA that would make mass transit available to them (apparently to keep it difficult for a certain element to reach their nice suburban areas). Of course, the other problem is you need to run the rails through already heavy populated areas - and the stations would have to be ginormous.

          Some counties have combatted the problem by starting bus service all the way into downtown Atlanta. Th
    • Exactly, why aren't we subsidising mass transit systems. More cars = more traffic, just spreading it around doesn't reduce the amount of pollution and it's only a short term measure, you build more road, you'll get more cars. We should be looking at better, more user friendly mass transit systems.
      • Exactly, why aren't we subsidising mass transit systems.

        Uh, we _are_ subsidizing mass transit systems, since they in no way manage to pay for themselves. I do recall a study a few years ago that added up all the fees that a car owner pays to the government - registration, gas taxes, etc., and found that a great deal of it is being diverted to other areas. So the reason roads and bridges aren't maintained, or new ones built, it because the money you presume it going into those funds is being spent else
    • You could also use All-Bran :)

    • Re:Stop traffic now (Score:2, Informative)

      by isorox ( 205688 )
      You wouldn't say that if you lived in London. Every day people are treated worse then cattle by being cramed into overflowing delayed expensive trains.

      The report published on Wednesday found that people using public transport faced a "daily trauma" and were forced to travel in "intolerable conditions". [bbc.co.uk]

      Increase the number of people on mass transit and you get more accidents.
      • Wow. Too many people using public transit... that's simply not something that would happen where I live!

      • By law, even animals get more space than train commuters. And there people who live on the trains; some late-night lady commuters, for instance, have been known to cut vegetables and start preparing dinners for their families by the time they reach home.

        Not that the roads are any better, Indian drivers have already discovered the pleasures of road rage, but still.

    • This sort of thing would be even more useful for mass transit. If people could get into their cars, say where they want to go, and have the car tell them they could get out of the car and onto the subway and get there on time, people would be much more likely to do it. As it is, it is too hard to predict mass transit times and how pleasent the trip is going to be, so people prefer to drive so that they at least feel somewhat in control of the experience.
    • Use a bike whenever possible. There are a lot of guys who drive 2km to the office.
    • In a typical day, going from work, to school, and back home, riding the bus would add 1 1/2 hours to my day.

      As it is, the subsidized bus system we have now just makes traffic worse by driving around almost empty, at 10 mph slower than the flow of traffic, making frequent stops right in busy traffic lanes.

    • Abolish work. Let the machines commute.
  • ...how much to retrofit every damn car?

    Maybe as add-on units...

  • Traffic info is available here [state.md.us] The data is collected from sensors in the road and is updated every 5 minutes
    • Which is totally useless as there are a number of places where there is only ONE viable route to get there. For instance, if one is going from SE MD to anywhere in Montgomery county, there is only the beltway.

      real time traffic data is great IF there are alternate routes to travel. In MD, there is only 1 route going East-West in the DC suburbs, and that is the beltway. The road that would be an alternate has been held up for over 30 years, mostly due to NIMBY.
  • that people won't get fed up with the stupid things and turn them off. From the article, about 10% of drivers in Japan use the navigation systems. The other 90% are still clogging up the freeways, even if Americans turn out to be as gadget-happy as the Japanese (which wouldn't surprise me).

    So, to answer the question in the article, not unless you can force people to USE the satnav units. I for one have used one a few times (in rental cars mostly) and found it incredibly annoying.
  • In large metropolitan areas, traffic systems operate a lot like financial markets. As the supply of quick routes increases, so does the demand. This is why building highways doesn't always result in faster commutes. In this case, the same effect will result in a more efficient traffic system, but not necessarily a faster one.

  • I'm still waiting for my dream to come true - where networked vehicle control eliminates the need for traffic signals and stop signs.

    Imagine sailing down city streets at freeway speeds, with perpedicular streams of traffic flowing through another through the magic of precise timing.

    • ...and those pesky bikes and pedestrians are banned, I can hardlt wait.
      Walking down a city street will be as pleasant as walking down a highway
    • Almost sounds like something public transport could provide... except you would have 4 people to a car rather than 1.

    • Re:No Red Lights (Score:4, Funny)

      by mrtroy ( 640746 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @09:06AM (#7228772)
      Picture this: you sailing down city streets at freeway speeds, with perpendicular streams of traffic flowing through another through the magic of precise timing. The microsoft based system says "critical update required" and you skip it of course, you will download it later. Your car is backdoored, and a 13 year old plays some real life GTA, and drives your car in the other lane. You collide at freeway speed headon with another car going the same speed in the opposite direction. You also hit 50 pedestrians. You lose, the kid wins 60 points, 1 for each pedestrian and 10 for the car destruction
    • Just pray that it won't run on windows.

  • Rather than come up with hugely expensive and complex systems to route traffic, wouldn't it be smarter to use extant technology to create better ways of moving people around congested city centers?

    Well-run light rail and subways with published schedules (e.g. NJ Path trains) would make it easier for commuters to reliably predict their departure and arrival times. Spend the money building roads connecting the suburbs with transportation hubs.

    Okay, if you must--set up wireless navigation to get the subur

    • Rather than come up with hugely expensive and complex systems to route traffic, wouldn't it be smarter to use extant technology...

      On Monday I had to drive into Boston. The Boston area has a service called "smart traveller," which you can access using your cell phone.

      I was on Route 2 when I got passed by two state troopers doing 90 and I saw a lot of congestion up ahead. I took the nearest exit and called *1 (for smart traveller) and then 2* (for route 2). I found out that 2 East (into Boston) was

  • www.georgia-navigator.com [georgia-navigator.com] is a great way to find out problems along Georgia's roads.

    Retrofitting all cars with GPS navigation, even if it were free, wouldn't clear up traffic troubles, it would just clog up every alternate route.
  • I can't help thinking that it would be cheaper to subsidise in-car satnav units with traffic avoidance than building new freeways.

    The population is growing. The number of cars on the road is increasing dramatically. How do you think you will be able to avoid the traffic when all of the roads are full? There is no way to reduce congestion without building new roads unless, you somehow restrict the number of cars.

    • The population is growing. The number of cars on the road is increasing dramatically. How do you think you will be able to avoid the traffic when all of the roads are full? There is no way to reduce congestion without building new roads unless, you somehow restrict the number of cars.
      Yes, there is a way to reduce congestion, because the clogging of traffic isn't caused by an abundance of cars, it's just made much worse by it. The problem isn't that the roads can't hold all the cars, but that all the cars

      • The problem isn't that the roads can't hold all the cars, but that all the cars go slow.

        Exactly. If you have a pipe of a given size, the only way to get more material through it is to make it go faster. Unfortunately, people do the opposite, such that they'll drive slower because of the volume.

        All of your points are good ones, but I don't think moving signs around will help much. It comes down to properly educated drivers being aware of the situation around them.

        One of my big gripes is the new highwa
  • This reminds me of the signs telling you whether the Whitestone or Throgs Neck is the fastest route to the Bronx. I always choose the opposite because obviously everybody else is going to go the way it tells them. It is yet to fail me. GWB has something like that but the advice is to always take the local instead of the express. The express always gets backed up first because it has no exits and only two lanes.

    Of course, now that I revealed my routes will be forever slashdotted.

    If this becomes redunda
    • I used to drive to Boston from Philadelphia and back at least twice a month for nearly 2 years. I definitely developed a Zen ability to pick the fastest route over the GWB. My number one trick was exactly what you said. Whichever way the arrow is pointing, go the other way. It was almost a euphoric feeling to fly past 2 miles of cars backed up in the EXPRESS side. Just watch out for the a-holes that cut over using the emergency vehicle only breaks in the divider. For those of you that wonder why I didn

  • 1+0=1 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by twitter ( 104583 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @08:28AM (#7228585) Homepage Journal
    Poor city planning defeats all fixes. The computer will tell you the same thing the radio or habit does when there's only one way to get there from here. Cities that have large walled in neghborhoods at their edges are impossible to get into or around.

    New Orleans and Baton Rouge are good examples of good and bad planning. New Orleans, despite being built on a river that flows both north and south, works. It has a grid that starts with the ancient French quarter. The grid was expanded reasonably when the Americans arived in 1812 or so and continued to expand. It's streets curve with the river and are crossed by streets that look like spokes on a wheel. The city has filled the space between the Lake Ponchitrain and the Mississippi River gracefully, so that there are any number of large streets to get from one end to the other. Baton Rouge is cursed by Bayous. The north end of the city follows a rectangular grid that matches one section of the Mississippi River. It is navicable itself but matches up poorly with the much larger and growing southern half. The sothern part of the city is composed of several large neighborhoods oriented around bayous and rural routes that meet at crazy angles. One two lane road follows the river and only the interstate traverses them all. To get from one side of town to another, a person has to drive a crazy zig zag of short rural routes and the interstate which are always choked.

    It has an effect on people. New Orleans is known for it's couteous and polite drivers. Baton Rouge is full of hot heads. Insurance companies do take note of driver attitudes and told me what I knew from simply driving in one of their publications.

    Just try getting the people of Baton Rouge to buy a gadget that's going to tell them the interstate is clogged and there's no way around it. Ha! My 1970 VW van farts in your general direction.

    • I have to agree. While some sort of traffic avoidance and traffic routing system may help somewhat in Los Angeles (which recently won the dubious award as the most congested city in the United States), there is a desperate need for more highways.

      The principle problems in Los Angeles right now are the 405 from the San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica, and the 5 from the San Fernando down through to Orange County. Most traffic congestion through the rest of the city seems to be fed by the fact that people are
      • "The 20 mile drive on the freeway to work typically takes me an hour--on the bus it would take me an hour and a half, minimum. And light rail (and the newly constructed L.A. subway) is a joke here"

        Too true. I actually live not too far from a metrolink line. Problem is that all the lines are designed to take you downtown. I don't need to go downtown, I need to go to Northridge. It too is on a metrolink route, but a different one. They cross, but since the timetables are designed to take people downtown t
    • Complaining about city planning is fruitless -- no metropolis can just redesign their roadways. Some, like Rome and Tokyo, have had their layout literally for centuries. Computerized assistance is the only way anyone can get anywhere.
    • How about the Boston Big-dig [boston.com]?
      Do you think it'll succeed for retroactively refitting Boston into a modern-layout system?
    • Don't knock walled communities. They have been a saving grace in a pinch many times. Most people avoid them in a traffic jam because they can't navigate the maze. On board navagation quickly finds a workable detour in many places I would have just sat stuck in traffic. Most of those planned neighborhoods have 3 or 4 entrances to major highways. They just don't make it obvious the path from one side to the other as they temd to be a maze of twisty little passages all alike. Seeing the layout on screen,
    • There was a study sometime back by the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi which studied the behaviour of drivers from other cities in comparison to their behaviour in Delhi. Their conclusion:- Delhi's poorly designed streets (yes, even in Lutyen's Delhi which is considered to be planned and all that) somehow inspired road rage.

      Unfortunately, proper planning isn't something that a grassroots (read political) campaign can deliver, so it'll be a while before we Indians see any progress.

  • If every single route into the city is jammed, I fail to see how an intelligent traffic router is going to make a profound impact.

    Roads are simply over capacity. We either need to get better mass-transit, build new roads, or have a lot of people telecommute.

    (I guess we could try compression, that sometimes works in networking, right? Everyone has to drive 2-door specs :-) )

  • Isn't this a variation of a classic El Farol Problem? [wisc.edu].

    Thanks to slashdot User urbazewski. [slashdot.org]
    My understanding would lead me to believe that a fully informed public would not neccesarily yield less congestion.
  • The nav system in the article is a nice small step. I certainly wouldn't mind having one. Especially living on Long Island and driving into the city all the time. The traffic is getting astoundingly worse, approaching soul-sucking proportions.

    I remember like 20 years ago, my Dad speculating on how it would be better if there was a way to not have to stop at toll booths, rather just drive your car through some kind of reader and let it send you a bill. Looks like he predicted the future to some degree

    • Especially living on Long Island and driving into the city all the time. The traffic is getting astoundingly worse, approaching soul-sucking proportions.

      You actually have one of the better public transportation systems in the country available to you. I have lived from coast to coast and the LIRR (Long Island Rail Road for those that don't know) has a pretty vast network over the entire island. You can be at a train station in 10 mins from just about anywhere barring you live on one of the forks. Then
      • I take the LIRR every single day, so the lecture is unnecesary.

        I'm talking about driving on Long Island and in the NY area in general. You can't take public transportation to just anywhere. On the weekends, the roads are snarled everywhere. I'm not complaining at all, just stating fact. I like living here very much.

        But I'm wondering if anyone else could see could envision the future of the roads. It simply can't keep going the way it is.

  • Would this be IPV4 or IPV6?
  • It would seem that if there is a traffic jam on Road A yesterday at a certain time. Then the computers decide it will happen again at the same time today. They would send the cars down street B and jam it up instead???
  • traffic using the same information. Yes, like that's going to help anything.

    The only solution is to provide enough bandwidth. Sooner or later a limit on the amount of traffic will be reached as nobody is going to drive for more than 24 hours/day.

    That's a point that is lost on the mentally-challenged planners where I live. These turds are closing roads, narrowing roads, lowering speed limits and installing roadblocks instead of making life easy. My daily commute time has gone up by 40 minutes daily over th
    • The only solution is to provide enough bandwidth. Sooner or later a limit on the amount of traffic will be reached as nobody is going to drive for more than 24 hours/day.
      That depends a little on where you live. If everyone in New York wanted to drive to work we would need 20 stories of roads. That's taller than some buildings. The cars would also have to be electric unless we all wanted to wear scuba gear. That would certainly bring up the cost, as would the overwater level switching interchanges.

      If you l
    • Everybody needs narrower cars. Preferably 2/3 their current size, so a 2-lane road can be a 3-lane road, and a 2-lane highway can comfortably accomodate a center turn lane.

      And in a few years, when our compression algorithms are better, we'll squeeze more into the same roads again! Higher speed limits? Closer tailing distances? Compress, compress, compress!

  • Try to use a technological system to bypass the symptom while ignoring the root of the problem.

    Traffic congestion (during rush hour) is caused by people commuting from the suburbs to the city to get to work. But why do people commute? Why not just live in the city near to where you work? Well, the housing is shite and bloody bloody expensive for what you get, it's cheaper and better to live in the burbs and then spend 2 years of your life sitting in a steel cage in traffic.

    So traffic congestion is a sym

  • Just learn to F*#king Drive! (Score:3, Funny)

    by MrJerryNormandinSir ( 197432 ) on Thursday October 16, 2003 @09:15AM (#7228880)
    Enough of this bullshit! Driving is fun, and maybe people should just pay attention to the road and get off the damn telephone!
    • If driving is fun just do it for fun, not driving to the office. I allways love run my car on track, or have a nice drive into the mountains. But for day to day office traveling I just use the mass transit. It is really no fun to drive through the center of the city at rush hour.
  • The simple solution is not to continue to use cars, but to use intracity transport pods. (basically cars that run on tracks within a city.) It is currently being tested in Europe and it works amazingly well, and unlike roads, it is uses electricity (produced from hydro in le Pays-bas, you don't mix in people you can't drive into the service (Which is pretty severe). There is no need for traffic lights, etc, since the service is properly designed to handle that from teh start. It can go considerably faster (
  • We don't even have intelligent traffic lights down here in America's wang. Intelligent navigation systems and road sensors are quite a ways off.
  • Where do you think traffic would be re-routed. Right now city planners close streets and turn them into one way and add stop signs and sometimes speed bumps because people choose alternate routes through residential areas (with kids present). This is not the answer because to make it work you would just create mini-expressway's as alternative routes which would have to have changes done to handle the added traffic and would have to be more protective of pedestrians.

    Usually these types of routes designed fo

  • These systems sound really good on paper, but they don't really work. People do not (cannot) travel at the speed of light. Unlike a network packet, a route that doubles your travel distance is noticed. When someone miscongifued a router so that packets between them went 1000 miles up and down the US east coast instead of over the cable between them (physically they were sitting one on top of the other, and the ethernet cable inbetween was faster than the WAN link), nobody noticed except those who did a

  • Cost of SatNav in car in the UK : Approx. 1500 / car
    Cost of increased number of accidents due to drivers concentrating on SatNav at speed : Unkown
    Amount of roads that can be built for (number of cars * 1500) : More roads than god.

    I don't deny that everyone having SatNav would help, but so would computer controlled driving (in a much bigger way). The problem in the UK is that less than 30% of the taxes collected from motoring related taxes are put back into the roads, causing congestion. The welfare state t
  • They already have the Sigalert system in California -- all you'd need is a few webcams and people to watch them, and with a simplified on-star type system, the car could warn you that you're about to drive into a traffic jam, and tell you a different way to go. It's really simple, actually, and shouldn't require new roads or anything like that.
  • It is true that shifting the use of a network during previous peak demands will result in less deviation in travel time (read: rush hour not as horrible).

    One way to reduce demand of roads is to increase the usage of less traditional means of transportation. Bicycle lanes. Better mass/public transit. HOV lanes. Tollroads. Carpooling.

    Another way is to encourage shorter trips. Think "distributed computing" for neighborhoods. More, small markets result in shorter drives for everybody. This is the anti

    • I shop at WalMart not just to save money, but because they have things. A small market that doens't have my size is useless. A small market that doesn't have something I want isn't too useful. It isn't worth my time to go to a big market for a jug of milk, but I don't just buy a jug of milk normaly, I combine my trips with other things. It only takes one thing on my list that isn't at the small market and I may as well get everything at the big market and save a little money as long as I'm going anyway.

  • Wouldn't large scale adoption of something like this cause more problem? 5 lane Highway system can't just be switched to the side roads. They can't handle that much traffic. I can see where this would benefit the first groups of people using it, but I don't know if it would still work if everyone had it.

    An accident causes a traffic jam, suddenly every car 5 to 10 miles back chooses an alternate route - suddenly all exist are blocked and people who did get off are stuck in a maze of stop light to stop l
  • Several people have said "Don't use your car!"

    Others have said..."That's just not possible! I need to drive."

    How about something in the middle?

    Want to reduce rush hour traffic by an easy 10%? Find an alternate way to work twice a month. That's pretty much all it would take.
    Not everyday. Not even every other day. If we could average alternate transport (carpool, bus, bike, whatever) twice a month, the problems would go down significantly.

    I'm doing enough for about 5 of you (ride my bike 2-3 times a we
    • It's not easy, and it seems as though the mass-transit administration goes out of its way to make life more difficult. But it's workable. If fares increase too much more, it will be only marginally cheaper than operating a car for the same trips. At this point the car is exercised on weekends with trips to the grocery store, mall, or what-have-you.

      I'd like to see the best of all worlds: Assisted navigation of some sort, cars that spew less filth, and reasonably adequate mass-transit.

      Anne
  • Traffic avoidance does not exist. In any case, it is a concept for wimps. You build a road, a beautiful smooth curving road into the hills, an asphalt work of art calling out to you "driiive mee! Take that cuuuuurve!" and there's some yokel driving an old Pontiac station wagon at 20 mph. And buses coming the other way. It's a historical inevitability. You can't win.

    Instead, I propose a traffic elimination system [defenselink.mil]. It's been tested in numerous locations across the world, and has proven mighty effectiv
  • OnStar (or any other in-car wireless communication) + GPS + central monitoring service = Private sector traffic management system.

    Don't alter the roadways when you can put the technology in the vehicle, and get the user to pay for it. If the automakers would link my dashboard GPS with wireless communication, I would have:

    Automatic routing around construction and traffic
    Live weather radar (am I driving into snow?)
    Monitoring my teenage daughter's driving habits
    Directions to the closest theater screening "T
  • "Surely it makes sense to interactively route traffic than to keep building passive roads?"

    I always question the idea of pushing systems to their limit through tech-enabled optimization. This practice generally stretches things to the point where a failure is catastrophic. Examples:

    Phone network with dynamic routing - allows higher traffic over less hardware. Software bug took out entire east coast with cascading failures.

    Power grid - dynamic rerouting of power allows higher total output without expandin

  • I became curious about the possiblities of a dashboard computer a few weeks ago. Many people have done it themselves with mini-ITX [mini-itx] and other low power, small form factor motherboards. A few companies sell car computers, but I have not been impressed. Currently, there are many separate systems on the market, such as DVD players for passengers and MP3 players for the stereo. Dashboard space is precious, though. Of course, there are the standard stereo and climate control dash components on the dash, too. Nav

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