Another example of what continues to attract research funding and investment dollars. As others have pointed out, after seeing how well top down planning has solved so many transportation issues, I will continue to choose walking and biking as a bottom up alternative type of intelligent vehicles.

The holistic perspective, however, tends to undermine the legitimacy of the techno-fix approach with the fact that the most intelligent and healthy vehicles are self powered! Steve

Steve

How Intelligent Vehicles Will Increase the Capacity of Our Roads

As the percentage of computer-controlled cars on the road increases, traffic should flow smoothly for longer, says a new study.

Adaptive cruise control systems work by monitoring the road ahead using a radar or laser-based device and then use both the accelerator and brake to maintain a certain distance from the vehicle ahead. (Other variations can bring the car to a halt in the event of a potential accident).

These devices have been available on upmarket cars for ten years or more and are now becoming increasingly common. If you drive regularly on freeways, the chances are you regularly come across other vehicles being driven by these devices, especially in Europe and Japan (here, the density of traffic means that ordinary cruise control has never caught on in the way it has in the U.S.).

So how does the presence of computer-controlled vehicles affect traffic dynamics? Today, Arne Kesting and pals at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany provide an answer of sorts using a model of traffic flow in which both human and computer-driven cars share the road.

They say that the presence of computer-driven cars increases the amount of traffic that can flow on a road before jamming occurs. And the more of these cars, the greater the capacity becomes. "1 percent more [computer-controlled] vehicles will lead to an increase of the capacities by about 0.3 percent," they say.

That's interesting but there have been other studies suggesting that computer-controlled cars can lead to greater congestion and it's not at all clear why Kesting and company's analysis is superior.

Either way, the argument is probably moot. Computer-controlled cars are just the first step in what many expect to be a revolution in car travel. The big increases in traffic capacity are likely to come when cars are able to communicate with each other. This should allow entire platoons of vehicles to travel as one unit, with just a few centimetres gap between cars and the vehicle in the front communicating its intentions to all the others. Platooning should improve fuel efficiency, too.

Of course, that won't be possible until there is a critical mass of computer-controlled cars on the roads. Even then there is a bigger hurdle to overcome of creating the legal framework in which all this can happen: imagine the insurance claims if one of these platoons were to crash.

The biggest challenge for the makers of cars that drive themselves is no longer technical but legal.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0912.3613: Enhanced Intelligent Driver Model to Access the Impact of Driving Strategies on Traffic Capacity

A sign [article] of what's trending in California. Reusing landfill makes sense [you may even be able to capture the landfill's methane]; the conversion of ag land into power generation land is already creating battlelines as 'we' struggle to maintain our "way of life". In the words of Stewart Brand, "The climate change problem is principally an energy problem". Steve

Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors Watch (12/23/09)

last updated: December 22, 2009 10:53:17 PM
By unanimous vote, Stanislaus County supervisors Tuesday:
• Awarded a one-year exclusive negotiating period to Sol Orchard, which wants to build a solar energy farm at the former Greer Road Landfill. Sol's response beat those submitted by two other companies, including JKB Energy, which recently won a one-year negotiating period for a much larger solar farm next to the county's Fink Road landfill near Crows Landing. Sol has a pending partnership with Solar Power Partners, the nation's third-largest solar energy developer. Preliminary plans include a mounting system that doesn't penetrate soil. Sol will have a year to do environmental studies, make a power-selling deal and negotiate a lease with the county.
-- Garth Stapley