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Intelligent Vehicles and Automated Highways
Growing traffic congestion is choking most of the
world's overloaded roads. Intelligent vehicles and automated highways
could solve this problem. Anyone who drives to work in any
metropolitan areas knows that highway traffic congestion is getting
worse. Average travel speed on a crowded commuter corridors near large
cities drop to about 36 miles per hour at rush hour, leading annually
to some 5 billion collective hours of delay and estimated productivity
loses of about 50 billion dollars nationwide. Meanwhile the cars.
trucks and buses caught in chronic traffic janis waste vast amounts of
fi!el as they emit copious quantities of exhaust. Although the public
may be loathe to face it, the unimpeded mobility of the automobile is
threatened by traffic choked roadways.
The traditional solution has been to construct more
and larger roadways, but that is no longer seen as viable option by
transportation planners due to high fmanéial, social and
environmental costs of such giant projects. Only other method was the
efficient use of the existing road network using advanced road
technology. But the diverse group that comprise the countries
transportation community such as federal, state and local govermnent
agencies, industries, academia, trade associations and consumer and
public-interest groups where always on intense debate as to what form
that system should take.
It was needed to better meet the seemingly
unsatisfiable demand or the freedom and mobility provided by cars and
other vehicles. For this it was necessary to find ways to operate the
existing system more efficiently and effectively. One approach would
be to develop automated highways that features a lane or a set of
lanes on which vehicles equipped with specialised sensors and wireless
communication systems could travel under perhaps in small convoys or
platoons. Vehicles could be temporarily linked together in
communication networks, which would allow the continuous exchange of
information about speed, acceleration, braking, obstacles and so
forth. Small networks of computers installed in vehicles and along
selected roadways could closely co-ordinate vehicles and harmonise the
traffic flow maximising highway capacity and passenger safety
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