In 1998, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Toshiba and Nokia got together to launch the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) to define and develop a new short-range wireless technology allowing devices to seamlessly exchange data. Today, the Bluetooth SIG has more than 35,000 member companies and the technology is used to connect everything from headphones to fitness sensors.
As populations grow, so do urban areas. It’s expected that by 2050, more-developed regions in the world will have 86.6% of their populations living in cities and towns.
Both citizens and traffic teams feel the pressure when unexpected traffic issues arise. Citizen complaints are good indicators of these issues but rarely provide all the information needed for a traffic team to take action.
The Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor doesn’t just carry a lot of traffic. It carries more than a quarter of the approximately $700 billion of goods traded annually between the US and Canada via thousands of trucks that cross the border daily. That creates a lot of traffic along Huron Church Road – the main road in Windsor leading to and from the bridge. And, that in turn creates two challenges: moving goods (and people) efficiently while reducing the impact of all this traffic on the local community.
If signal retiming makes travel faster, won’t that just induce more demand and erode any gains made? According to Miovision’s Senior Traffic Engineer Sajad Shiravi, even with some increased demand, signal retiming still makes a measurable improvement in traffic.
There are no shortages of traffic nightmares caused by live events. Although they allow us to support our favourite artists, athletes and celebrities, the process of navigating events is usually centered around traffic and transportation. Questions like: How early should I leave? Is it worth driving or should I take public transportation? Can I beat the traffic by leaving early? Are all top of mind when attending an event and ultimately, deter the overall experience.
There are several types of traffic data that can be collected from roadways to give traffic engineers insight on the usage and traffic performance of different modes of traffic in the road network. This post is a high-level overview of the traffic data types that are typically gathered to complete traffic engineering projects.
With their low cost and relatively quick installation, pneumatic road tubes have long been the go-to standard for collecting volume-based traffic data. However, in recent years, we’ve seen cities steadily adopting safer, more efficient methods of traffic data collection, namely video.
The US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) released their annual Urban Congestion Trends for 2010, which shows an increase in congestion and traffic levels overall within US urban cities. Twenty cities are measured annually and the latest report shows an 18 minute increase in daily delays from 4:20 to 4:38. Congestion levels have been steadily increasing since 2008 when levels dropped due to the downturn in the economy. However, they haven’t reached the levels previously seen prior to the recession in 2007.