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March 21st, 2016 
Awake Goy
Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | Media Spokesperson, HEALTH MAX Brands
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) teamed up with the Swiss Institute of Technology (SIT) and the Italian National Research Council (INRC) to develop a concept for getting rid of traffic lights via a futuristic transportation system.
Without the use of self-driving cars, these scientists have improved on Carlo Ratti, director of SENSEable City lab at the department of urban studies and planning at MIT, and Paolo Santi’s slot-based intersection.
Santi points out that this system is “actually much simpler … from a technological standpoint, there are no big hurdles to implement this idea.”
Ratti explained that “an intersection is a difficult place, because you have two flows competing for the same piece of real estate”; however “if a system has advanced technology and lacks traffic lights, it moves control from the [traffic] flow level to the vehicle level. Doing that, you can create a system that is much more efficient, because then you can make sure the vehicles get to the intersection exactly when they have a slot.”
The findings of the study are “ based on mathematical modeling” wherein the researchers “examined a scenario in which high-tech vehicles use sensors to remain at a safe distance from each other as they move through a four-way intersection.”
In order for the slot-based intersection to work, cars would have to have sensors attached to them so that it can “dictate the car’s cruising speed and trajectory” while the human driver remained in control.
On the other hand, this means that the system could fail if the driver disobeyed speed limits or changed lanes.
While the idea of eliminating traffic lights at intersections becomes a possibility, Alphabet, formerly Google, and their Sidewalk Labs project have joined forces with the US Department of Transportation (DoT) to collect and analyze transportation data using the new Flow platform.
Flow is able to collect information on buses via frequencies; as well as foot traffic on sidewalks via embedded sensors. That data is combined with surveillance information via Waze to produce real-time analytics of city traffic in order to redesign more efficient “public transit routes, mitigate vehicular congestion, and work more effectively with rideshare startups.”
Dan Doctoroff, chief executive officer of Sidewalk Labs, said: “We will build a platform for ingesting lots of different kinds of data to enable users… to understand the ground truth in real-time. It will be fed essentially into an analytical engine that will enable cities map assets against demand, create dashboards for transportation, parking, maybe even permitting. And on top of that, we can potentially build applications over time, some of which may be consumer applications.”
During 2016, the DoT will use Flow in cities that won the Smart City contest wherein they competed for $40 million in federal funding for transportation infrastructure.
Those cities include:
• Pittsburgh
• Austin
• Denver
• Columbus
• San Francisco
• Portland
• Kansas City
Each winner was given $100,000 by the DoT to “better develop their ideas”.
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