Smarter streets needed
For now, the best solution to snarled traffic lies not in driverless cars but in smart streets. Both government and entrepreneurs are working hard to shorten your commute by raising the road's IQ. Thanks to the ebbing of the Cold War, some scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have turned their attentions to solving commuter headaches. Commissioned by the Department of Energy to create computer simulations of traffic, the Los Alamos facility is now the home of TRANSIMSâ€"Transportation Analysis Simulation Systems. The group is conducting studies of the Dallas area.
Based on census data and behavioral analysis, TRANSIMS is pinpointing traffic-flow problems and predicting bottleneck areas and emission levels. The simulator shows how little traffic snags resonate across a metropolitan area.
Meanwhile, several Web sites now post personal traffic reportsâ€"the best of which beam updates to your phone or pager. SmartRoute Systems and MetroNetworks.com are two of the leading services. TrafficStation.com provides reports in the 28 most congested areas in North America.
But none of these companies has found the perfect business model. Subscriber-based services will almost certainly give way to free traffic reports. The Strategis Group predicts that in-car information services will jump from 820,000 in 2001 to 11 million in 2004. By partnering with the right car portals and integrating its information with a vehicle's GPS unit, traffic Web sites could ease the pain in your commute.
The BIG QUESTION about computers-in-cars is reliability in adverse conditions!
We had a bad flood recently in our part of Brisbane, and quess why late model
cars were most at risk? How water-proof is the engine-management-computer
installed in today's cars? Why isn't it always installed high-up under the dash
and throughly water-proofed?
With MORE computers coming to future cars - won't this problem get worse?
Seeing how world weather patterns are changing, and flooding is on the increase,
in my opinion amphibious cars are a major need!