Commuter Shuttle and 21-Hayes EB Bus Stop Observations from Paul Supawanich on Vimeo.

San Francisco does have a real problem: Hundreds of private commuter shuttles move through the city every day, collecting people who work in Silicon Valley but can’t bear the thought of living there (with some ingenious sleuthing, Wired’s Kevin Poulsen just counted 36 Apple buses passing by his house on an average day). These shuttles clog city streets. Sometimes they block public bus stops. In a city wary of the rising might of tech giants, these things have come to constitute a massive (and exclusive) parallel transit network that competes for space with publicly funded transportation.

via This timelapse from a San Francisco street may change how you see the Google bus.

Reminds me of a time lapse of commuting hours at a NYC subway/train station from several decades ago. The biggest difference is perhaps the way people dressed back then. Even so, it was fascinating to see, and I’m glad that piece of history was captured.

To guide driverless cars, Volvo Car Group has been experimenting with creating a corridor of magnets that are placed in the pavement. The automaker says magnets are better than GPS or cameras for pointing the way because they are not as easily affected by poor weather.

"The magnets create an invisible ‘railway’ that literally paves the way for a positioning inaccuracy of less than (four inches). We have tested the technology at a variety of speeds and the results so far are promising," says Jonas Ekmark, preventive safety leader at Volvo, in a statement.

Volvo Cars has a project underway in which in which 100 self-driving Volvo cars will use public roads around the Swedish city of Gothenburg.

via Magnetic roads could guide driverless cars.

They are missing a citation! CA PATH designed and implemented the Magnetic Guidance System (MGS) back in 1997.

I think I saw something like this in my 7th grade Technology Education class:

Here’s an innovation in bus usage that’s so smart we’re not sure it can even work: Helsinki’s Kutsuplus lets you select your pick-up and drop-off locations and times, using a phone app, and then sends out a bus to take you exactly where you need to go.

You don’t get the bus to yourself, of course; Kutsuplus cleverly bundles you with other people going the same way. But it beats standing on a street corner forever waiting for a bus that will take a roundabout route to your destination. And while it’s a little more expensive than a standard bus ride — the equivalent of about $5 base price plus $2 per two miles, while most bus rides would be $2.75-$5.50 — it’s still significantly cheaper than a taxi.

via Helsinki’s personalized bus service is like Uber for public transit | Grist.

Yesssssssss.

For more information, see this paper (not so technical).

By the end of the year, the U.S. Department of Motor Vehicles DMV [of California] must write rules to regulate autonomous cars

Among the complex questions officials sought to unravel:

• How will the state know the cars are safe?
• Does a driver even need to be behind the wheel?
• Can manufacturers mine data from onboard computers to make product pitches based on where the car goes or set insurance rates based on how it is driven?
• Do owners get docked points on their license if they send a car to park itself and it slams into another vehicle?

Much of the initial discussion Tuesday focused on privacy concerns.

via California given deadline on plan to integrate driverless cars onto public roads | Driving.