So what does this all prove? Is it indeed true that through-traffic coming from Didsbury and the motorway is causing the Northenden bottlenecks? And what can the council do to fix the issue?

Well… the answer is, of course, that it means absolutely nothing.

via Gamasutra: Mike Rose's Blog – Using SimCity to diagnose my home town's traffic problem.

HT Pranjal

China’s Military Transportation University has developed a third-generation unmanned road vehicle with technology that could eventually be implemented for civilian-use, the army’s PLA Daily reported on Tuesday.

via PLA develops unmanned road vehicle | South China Morning Post.

Copenhagen, Denmark, has long been known as one of the world’s leading cities for cycling. In some areas of the city, the modal share of bikes has reached a level of as much as 50 %. And on some of the most frequently used bike paths the average daily number of cyclists is close to 30,000. As these numbers continue to rise, new ways of planning and implementing cycling infrastructure are needed.

via World Highways – Using ITS to maximise safety and traffic flow for cycling.

Cycling efficiency and safety as a UI/modality problem

The margin of error of a commercial GPS, such as those that are used in cars, is about 15 meters in an open field, where the receiver has wide visibility from the satellites. However, in an urban setting, the determination of a vehicle’s position can be off by more than 50 meters, due to the signals bouncing off of obstacles like buildings, trees, or narrow streets, for example. In certain cases, such as in tunnels, communication is lost, which hinders the GPS’s applications reaching Intelligent Transport Systems, which require a high level of security. “Future applications that will benefit from the technology that we are currently working on will include cooperative driving, automatic maneuvers for the safety of pedestrians, autonomous vehicles or cooperative collision warning systems,” the scientists comment.

However, in the case of the new prototype that they have developed they have managed to guarantee the position of the vehicle to within 1 or 2 meters in urban settings.

via A system that improves the precision of GPS in cities by 90 percent.

Low cost Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) — three accelerometers and three gyroscopes

Unscented Kalman Filter

Different levels of autonomy in vehicles:

Full autonomy: This is what Google has: the car drives itself, and can react to changes and emergency situations. Driver optional.

Restricted full autonomy: Stanfords Audi TTS is fully autonomous, but only in specific situations: it can handle all kinds of roads that it has maps for, but not variables like traffic. Driver optional, but only where applicable.

Emergency full autonomy: Toyota is working on this; the car will aggressively take over from you if it detects an impending accident. Driver optional, but only in emergency situations.

Highway assisted autonomy: Volvo has this system operational in Europe. Passenger cars autonomously follow a truck on a highway in a road train formation. Driver required to lead the train, and in cars for entry and exit.

Highway driver assist: You can buy this system in luxury cars; it includes adaptive cruise control on highways and sometimes lane drift warnings. Driver required to be paying attention.

Emergency driver assist: This system is also available in some luxury cars; if an imminent collision is detected, the car will autonomously apply brakes. Driver required the rest of the time. Its also worth mentioning that anti-lock brakes are a very primitive semi-autonomous emergency driver assist system.

Emergency driver notification: I guess this one may not belong in the list, but here it is anyway: some luxury cars will track driver attention and fatigue and provide notifications if a dangerous situation arises.

Now, about this $150 price… Well, here’s the quote:
It could be only 15 years before self-driving systems become commonplace in cities as the price of installing the systems drops: “At present it costs about £5,000, but we’re working to reduce that to £100,” he said.

via UK Unveils Affordable Self-Driving RobotCar – IEEE Spectrum.

Many types of intelligent traffic systems offer a superior benefit-to-cost ratio than the physical expansion of roads:
– “Traditional” road capacity (2.7)
– Electronic freight management system (2.8-3.6)
– Dynamic curve warning (4.2-6.6)
– Commercial vehicle information systems and networks (2.0-7.5)
– Maintenance decision support system (1.3-8.7)
– Intelligent traffic management (14.0)
– National real-time traffic information system (25.0)
– Road weather management technologies (2.8-37.0)
– Service patrols (traffic incident management) (4.7-38.0)
– Integrated corridor management (9.7-39.0)
– Optimized traffic signals (17.0-62.0)

via Exhibit 24

The Google car is the work of a mere 12 engineers, and the company has spent perhaps $50 million on the project. To put this amount into context, it is less than .0003 percent of Google’s revenue over the course of the program. It is also less than a third of what car makers have spent on Super Bowl ads over the same period.

Major car makers would, of course, resist letting Google control the driving OS layer of their vehicles. But, even if some carmakers can match Google’s technology, it is doubtful that every carmaker will succeed. So it is possible that some will turn to Google as a white knight in response to capabilities developed by GM, Daimler or Toyota.

The value of supplying driverless software to some portion of all new cars might warrant Google’s pursuing the Android strategy again by licensing the software for a price so low that manufacturers cannot refuse. Imagine a fleet of millions of cars feeding map and traffic data to Google maps, feeding location and behavior data to Google’s customer intelligence, acting as repeaters to Google’s broadband mesh WiFi network and, of course, exchanging queries and advertising via Google’s search engine.

via Google's Trillion-Dollar Driverless Car — Part 4: How Google Wins – Forbes.