Auto Manifesto

February 13, 2012

A Path to Smarter Roads

How often do you have a day where your routine drive to work is full of red lights? Every last intersection seems to present you with a red light, even at those where there are no waiting cars on the cross street.

Occasionally there is a distracted driver in front who doesn't go for a while when the light turns green. Which results in the next light turning red on you too. Then it just cascades from there and the trip takes far longer than normal.

Though far better than having uncontrolled intersections, the road system can be maddeningly inefficient. Traffic lights only seem to get added, never taken away because the vehicle population has steadily risen and such removal could also pose a legal liability for those jurisdictions in which they're located.

If there were an effective way to know or estimate:

  • The number of cars on the road at a given time.
  • Where they are going
  • How fast they are traveling

Intelligent routing could occur. It seems the mobile phone is the way to go to provide that information. They offer much faster adoption rates and shorter technology life cycles than anything built into cars. Should enough motorists use such a technology we could likely make a material dent in congested local roads in a short amount of time.

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January 5, 2008

Why Drive In Cities?

The American landscape is primarily based on automobile travel. Everything from roads and interstates to home garages, driveways, parking lots, drive-through lanes, tollbooths, parking garages, rest areas, gas stations, and shopping malls cater to a lifestyle that centers around using automobiles.

That’s a problem now that, in many areas, it’s reached the point of diminishing returns once congestion, pollution, safety, and parking costs are accounted for. It’s a royal pain to drive through Manhattan or any number of other cities.

Following up on electric propulsion, here are some more potential contributing factors. With many states and localities already restricting idling of vehicles (primarily trucks, click here for more info) it’s going to become more and more difficult to operate a vehicle that emits anything. Combined with efforts to reduce gridlock, we need better ways to get around.

Different areas are going to require different modes of transportation to enable the most efficient, environmentally-friendly, and cost effective form for particular conditions (e.g. urban, suburban, rural, etc). In order to accomplish this, one size does not fit all.

My point is this. If more and more cities decide to adopt congestion pricing for automobiles, restrict vehicle emissions, and parking steadily becomes more difficult there’s going to be a point where we may as well not have any cars in the cities.

But in order to do so there have to be some better alternatives, holistic systems that enable people and goods to go from Point A to Point B within a city in a way that is faster, cheaper and better for the environment than we’re doing today.

Whatever system(s) supplants automobile traffic as we know it is likely to require 2 things: Some combination of electric and human propulsion and extensive changes to the landscape. If you don’t have cars any more the roads would naturally be used for something else.

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