* Robot Buses Pull In to San Diego's Fastest Lane
San Diego,CAL,USA -wired, by Bob Parks -(Originally published) 24 July 2007: -- It was the second hour that did it. When his 60-mile commute became a full fingers-drumming-on-the-dashboard 120 minutes, San Diego County CTO Samuel Johnson was finally convinced that something had to change. His idea: buses that practically drive themselves. Over the next three years, workers will carve a narrow lane down the shoulder of the increasingly congested Interstate 805, exclusively for buses and commercial trucks modded with lane-keeping sensors and adaptive cruise control. Neither technology is new, but most automakers tune adaptive cruise control to keep cars farther apart than normal, making traffic worse. In the robot lane, vehicles will be packed like train cars. They'll still have drivers — everyone has to leave the freeway sometime — but they'll be out of the main flow... "Fixing this problem is going to require some radical thinking," says Jake Peters, founder of transportation startup Swoop Technology, which is designing the system. "And, hey, it could be a way to make a trillion dollars"... (Illustration by Ames Bros. )
* San Diego working on, for mass transit
One reason highway traffic is so bad in some parts of the country, and the world for that matter, is because there aren't any good choices for mass-transit
San Diego,CAL,USA -AutoblogGreen, by Jeremy Korzeniewsk -18 Aug 2007: -- ... If consumers don't have any good reason to choose riding a bus over taking a car, history has shown that they're just not gonna do it... The fact that the automation of the buses in San Diego would allow more people to be crammed into a smaller lane would mean that congestion would go down, and the buses would not be interfering with other traffic. Think of the buses as a train, except the train is not bound to specific tracks. When the buses get to their desired exit, the driver takes control back from the computer brain and the rest of the stops would take place... So, using adaptive cruise control and lane sensors, San Diego hopes to reduce congestion and speed up the morning commute. Sounds like a good idea to us!...
Labels: robot buses
