Motorways are pretty dumb things: they’re a wide flat surface, shaped by engineers and designed to allow motor vehicles to travel quickly and efficiently from one place to another. The design though tends to lie in things like the width and camber of the road, the materials used in its construction, its layout and so on.
Then drivers take their cars along the road, speeding along and slowing down, changing lanes, sometimes breaking down or having accidents or getting stuck in traffic jams that have no apparent cause.
Wellington’s Urban Motorway takes drivers north from the central city. The motorway parallels the waterfront for a bit then veers left to feed State Highway 1 on the west coast, up through Kapiti, or right to feed State Highway 2 through the Hutt Valley and on over the Rimutakas to the Wairarapa.
In the morning and evening rush hours that motorway, like the State Highways it feeds into can be jammed up and at a crawl in one direction. But not for much longer, as it’s about to become
smart, using predictive traffic models to shape the traffic, making travel smoother and speedier.
… it will boast a world-first predictive traffic model that will anticipate likely changes in traffic flows during rush hours, and set optimal speed limits to ensure that traffic keeps moving. …
A network of traffic cameras, radar, sensors embedded in roads throughout the region, and Bluetooth and wifi signals emitted from passing cars will enable the computer models that sit behind the smart motorway to assess the numbers and speeds of cars on the motorway.
The system will learn as it goes. When the smart motorway becomes operational in mid-2016 there will still be a large human input into decision-making. This will lessen over the next few months as the computer model ‘learns’ how Wellington drivers use the highway network at different times of the day and year, and the system will eventually become fully automated.
The predictive model will set variable driving speeds to avoid what are known as ‘shock waves’. These result from sudden braking and lane changing, and cause cars to slow down and back-up. Extensive computer modelling as well as real life experience shows that it is better for traffic to drive steadily and slowly, rather than speeding up and slowing down all the time.
[Via The ‘smarts’ behind a smart motorway | Our Changing World | Radio New Zealand: The ‘smarts’ behind a smart motorway | Our Changing World | Radio New Zealand.]
Of course, an even smarter option is to take the train. 🙂