The maddening quest for street parking is not just a tribulation for drivers, but a trial for cities. As much as a third of the traffic in some areas has been attributed to drivers circling as they hunt for spaces. The wearying tradition takes a toll in lost time, polluted air and, when drivers despair, double-parked cars that clog traffic even more.

via Program Aims to Make the Streets of San Francisco Easier to Park On – NYTimes.com.

Pricing parking spots in urban areas using supply and demand curves.

HT Andrew Sutherland

Forget the fact of there being "9 million bicycles in Beijing, that’s not a fact. Indeed, motor vehicle traffic is fast becoming a big problem that has led to unsustainable pollution and draconian rules in some parts of the city. Now, Nan Ji of the Hebei United University in China and colleagues have developed an algorithm to help traffic planners optimize the flow of traffic across roundabouts.

via 9 million bicycles, but what about the cars in Beijing?.

Optimizing roundabouts for safety and efficiency of road networks in Beijing

“Mathematical model for designing the traffic circle control” in Int. J. Innovative Computing and Applications, 2012, 4, 58-66.

They said they’d do it, and by golly, it’s been done — a specially-equipped Audi TTS drove the entire 12.42 miles and 156 precarious turns of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb without a driver at the wheel. (Google, eat your heart out.) While the vehicle technically performed the feat about a month ago in September, Audi decided to wait until this last week to proclaim it to the world, following a helicopter accident during filming that sent pilot Jim Dirker to the hospital. Thankfully, he survived to fly another day, and at least some of the footage pulled through as well; you’ll find a brief clip after the break of the shiny white Quattro autonomously speeding up that hill.

via Autonomous Audi TTS scales Pikes Peak in 27-minute climb — Engadget.

Audi autonomous car from 2 years ago.

HT Nancy Wu

MIT’s Media Lab demonstrates a system that lets driverless vehicles communicate with pedestrians.

via How Do You Know An Autonomous Vehicle Has Seen You? – Technology Review.

Debugging LEDs! Autonomous vehicles communicating with pedestrians using lights.

"The long-range ambition is to build something like a roadmap, but annotated with everything that’s going on at the moment," Eriksson said. "We’re basically interested in anything that has to do with your commute."

via UIC News Release.

Aggregating relevant traffic information and putting it in one place, with the eventual goal of predicting alternate routes. I’m not sure what is new about this, but multi-faceted data always needs better consolidation.

Carnegie Mellon and AT&T Researchers Evaluate Haptic Navigation Aid

A vibrating steering wheel is an effective way to keep a driver’s eyes safely on the road by providing an additional means to convey directions from a car’s navigation system, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and AT&T Labs have shown.

via Press Release: Vibrating Steering Wheel Guides Drivers While Keeping Their Eyes on the Road-Carnegie Mellon News – Carnegie Mellon University.

Using haptic feedback to help drivers navigate, in addition to visual auditory cues.

Funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore and completed by MIT Senseable City Lab. The project hoped to give Singaporeans a new awareness of how their city behaves in response to their actions and presented the results to them through a series of data visualizations.

via MIT's LIVE Singapore | Postscapes.

Visualizations for the taxi data in Singapore

Sceptical about autonomous cars? Too late. They’re already here – and they’re smarter than ever

via Driverless cars ready to hit our roads – tech – 02 April 2012 – New Scientist.

But concerns about the safety of autonomous cars are misplaced in a world where 1.2 million people die every year in road accidents due to human error

While most automakers are looking to improve real-time traffic data plumbed into cars and bring smarter rerouting to market, Honda is looking at another way of getting you out of traffic: preventing it in the first place.

via Honda Combining V2V, Coaching Technology to Ease Congestion | Autopia | Wired.com.

Smoothing out traffic by determining optimum speed for traffic flow for Adaptive Cruise Control ACC) vehicles communicated over the cloud, potentially increasing the average speed by approximately 23% and reducing fuel consumption by 8%.

Like our Smoothy hack!

Also:

monitors the acceleration and deceleration patterns of the vehicle to determine whether the driver’s driving pattern is likely to create traffic congestion.

This is something I can perhaps look into for Singapore.

Another [src]

HT Jason Du, Leo Urbina

You may soon be sharing the road with intelligent, self-driving cars that promise to save time, fuel, cut traffic jams and prevent accidents.

via Robot cars get ready to roll | KurzweilAI.

Some projections on autonomous capabilities hitting consumers:

Bill Ford, executive chairman of the Ford Motor Company, recently said that the company sees “the introduction of semi-autonomous driving technology, including driver-initiated ‘auto pilot’ capabilities, and vehicle platooning in limited situations” as early as 2017.

In the longer term, from 2025 onwards he believes we will see the “arrival of smart vehicles capable of fully autonomous navigation, with increased ‘auto pilot’ operating duration, plus the arrival of autonomous valet functions, delivering effortless vehicle parking and storage.”