You will be able to summon an autonomous taxicab (AT) using your smart phone, and direct it to leave you at your desired location, at a cost that is about a third of current taxi fares and thus comparable to the user cost of public transit. (AT services will normally not need government subsidy.)

However, an AT service would be a form of public transit and thus public transit may be considered due for major expansion, albeit in a very different form from what we have now.

via Why the future of urban transit might be a taxi – The Globe and Mail.

Granted, such vehicles must have drivers, and drivers must be able to control their vehicles – these are international requirements that date back to 1926, when horses and cattle were far more likely to be “driverless” than cars. Regardless, these rules, and many others that assume a human presence, do not necessarily prohibit vehicles from steering, braking and accelerating by themselves. Indeed, three US states – Nevada, Florida and most recently California – have passed laws to make that conclusion explicit, at least to a point.

Under Nevada law, the person who tells a self-driving vehicle to drive becomes its driver. Unlike the driver of an ordinary vehicle, that person may send text messages. However, they may not "drive" drunk – even if sitting in a bar while the car is self-parking.

via How does a traffic cop ticket a driverless car? – opinion – 24 December 2012 – New Scientist.

CLEO can perform continuous GPS sensing for a year and a half efficiently enough to be sustained by just two AA batteries. In a typical mobile phone, Liu says, continuous GPS sensing would burn through the device’s battery in roughly six hours. (In practice, data from Wi-Fi base stations and cellular towers contribute to location information in mobile phones so GPS doesn’t always do all the heavy lifting.)

Microsoft’s Liu believes that low-power GPS systems on mobile phones could make continuous location logging feasible, which could make the device smarter. You could, for example, opt into a service that contributes to a database of noise pollution levels in your city. Or, if your smartphone kept a record of your driving habits, you might receive tailored directions or search results based on your usual walking or driving directions.

via A Microsoft Research Project Offloads GPS Data and Calculations to the Cloud to Save Battery Life. | MIT Technology Review.

SenSys 2012: [link] [paper]

Location is a fundamental service for mobile computing. Typical GPS receivers, although widely available, consume too much energy to be useful for many applications. Observing that in many sensing scenarios, the location information can be post-processed when the data is uploaded to a server, we design a Cloud-Offloaded GPS (CO-GPS) solution that allows a sensing device to aggressively duty-cycle its GPS receiver and log just enough raw GPS signal for postprocessing. Leveraging publicly available information such as GNSS satellite ephemeris and an Earth elevation database, a cloud service can derive good quality GPS locations from a few milliseconds of raw data. Using our design of a portable sensing device platform called CLEO, we evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of the solution. Compared to more than 30 seconds of heavy signal processing on standalone GPS receivers, we can achieve three orders of magnitude lower energy consumption per location tagging.

Microsimulation of road traffic flow