Editor's Blog - March 2019
Autonomous Vehicles to predict pedestrian movement
University of Michigan researchers are teaching self-driving cars to recognise and predict pedestrian movements.
Prior work in this area has typically only looked at still images.
Predictive power requires the network to look into the minutiae of human movement: the pace of a human’s gait (periodicity), the mirror symmetry of limbs, and the way in which foot placement affects stability during walking.
One researcher said “If a pedestrian is playing with their phone, you know they’re distracted” “Their pose and where they’re looking is telling you a lot about their level of attentiveness. It’s also telling you a lot about what they’re capable of doing next.”
We wonder if the system will have a random generation movement factor for children or drunks.
Global Traffic Scorecard
The results of the 2018 Global Traffic Scorecard have been released. The score card, produced by INRIX, is an analysis of congestion and mobility trends in more than 200 cities, across 38 countries.
I am reminded of the comment key note speaker Brent Todarian said at the 2016 National Conference as he spoke on the day that Melbourne had been again chosen as the world’s most liveable city. He said “These scorecards are mainly for the benefit of promoting the companies that put them together”.
The top three worst cities were Moscow, Istanbul and Bogota. Sydney was 13th, Melbourne was 17th and Brisbane was 24th.
Surprisingly Los Angeles is not in the top 25 nor is Dublin which had the slowest travel speed of 9.5 km/h in their city centre.
They don’t just measure the worse travel speeds. One factor that they take into account is the difference in travel speeds on the roads between the peak time and the non-peak time, which is a measure of just how bad the peak period is.
Global Traffic Scorecard
There is a continuing trend to implement high tolls for people driving cars into city areas.
New York’s governor has suggested that unless some form of dynamic pricing is imposed on motorists in the city, there will be a 30% hike in public transit fares and tolls.
Cordon charges around a CBD are rather a blunt instrument hitting one type of user hard.
Town planners are pushing for a wider road user charge where vehicles are taxed based on how far they travel, where they travel and when they travel.
Work by Sydney University suggests that if registration fees were reduced and vehicles were charged 5 cents a kilometre if they travel in the peak period, governments would be no worse off.
Federal Funds removed for California High-speed Train Project to Connect Los Angeles and San Francisco
The US Federal government is cancelling more than US $900 million in federal grants originally approved to construct a high-speed railway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Originally, the project was to connect the Los Angeles basin with San Francisco’s Bay Area in two hours and 40 minutes. The plan was approved by voters in 2008. Construction began in 2015. But last week, the California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the project would be cut down to only 117km, citing cost overruns and construction delays.
The reasons and recriminations are running hot.
The Los Angles times said that Newsom observed that the project had suffered from “too little oversight and not enough transparency”.
This is also a criticism that has been levelled at some Australian projects, most recently the Newcastle light rail proposal.
Choosing a ride share electric vehicle
Lyft, a competitor to Uber, is launching a Green Mode feature within its app to provide riders in Seattle with the option to travel in an electric or hybrid vehicle.
The move follows the company’s planned introduction of thousands of electric vehicles (EVs) onto its platform this year.
Obviously, the cars are cheaper to run but, at the moment, are more expensive to buy.
One of the benefits could be to allow travellers to access appropriate cars as Governments implement restrictive controls on what type of vehicles are allowed into, for example, city business districts.
This is a major trend in city planning where high polluting vehicles, such as diesel-powered cars, are being banned from or heavily tolled for access to high activity and crowded areas.
Insurance rates losing gender classification
With modern digital recording systems your style of driving, and where and when you drive could be used to assess your personal risk.
Old factors may be phased out for this and other reasons.
California has become the latest in a handful of states that have outlawed setting rates for automobile insurance based on gender. It is generally thought that women have a lower crash rate although this is not always the case.
Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, typically passed their laws in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the women’s rights movement.
California found that there was no consistency in how insurance companies were underwriting their rates and so modern technology may give a higher level of accuracy and fairness.
Land-use is more than housing
Bob Meyer, who is the head of planning at Cox Architecture, has lamented that the housing boom means that the big profits are in building dwellings, with high rise using land that was formerly used for business activities. Having high density is said to be good for supporting public transport but local jobs are especially good for public transport.
AITPM Fellow Alan Finlay worked in the offices of the Department of Motor Transport in Rothschild Avenue, Rosebery. He sent in the following photo with the caption “Who could have imagined?”.
Land-use is more than housing
I saw some pictures of timber guard rails recently.
The web site for Southern Guard Rail says “Wooden guardrails provide an aesthetically pleasing safety barrier solution for low speed roadways. Wooden guardrails are commonly installed in subdivisions, driveways, parking lots, and national parks as an attractive and economical alternative to steel guardrails”.
Would they encourage people to slow down because they are “aesthetically pleasing”.
I asked AITPM Fellow John Jamieson to comment on this and he suggested that this approach has no value (not his actual words which were much more expressive).
He pointed out that timber, by definition, would not predicably deform or flex.
He pointed out that “W”- Section steel Guardrail has been subject to the equivalent of probably about 100 years of research and crash testing (crammed into about 50 years). But - great for car parks – as long as they are not supposed to be actually protecting anything (e.g. a playground).