From the passenger seat of a Ford Taurus, Scott Langer got a glimpse of the future. Last fall, Langer rode through an auto industry demonstration lot on Belle Island in the Detroit River for a taste of what car travel will one day be like.
The Taurus wasn’t a celebrated “driverless” car, but a “connected” auto, in constant communication with the vehicles and traffic devices around it.
When a vehicle two cars ahead of his came to a sudden stop, even though the driver couldn’t see it, the car Langer was in immediately sensed it. The car’s warning system — with alarms and a vibrating seat — alerted the driver that something was amiss, and he hit the brakes, avoiding a pileup.
“This technology is not that far off,” Langer says. “They’re really getting there with it.”
A traffic engineer with the city of Madison, Langer’s job is to help prepare the city for this future, preparation that has already begun.
Driverless technology, while making strides, is not quite ready for the roads of Wisconsin, because these cars can’t yet cope with snow and ice.
“Snow is difficult because you don’t have constant road conditions, so computers don’t know how hard it has to apply the brake,” Langer says. “They also rely on 3D mapping. [A driverless car] might see snow and think it’s an object in the road. It adds variability, and right now they’re depending on everything being the same.”
However, connected cars like the Taurus Langer rode in don’t have this problem, because they still require human drivers. Sometime soon, Langer expects, the government will require auto companies to install all new cars with radios connecting them to the traffic infrastructure.
Not only will this allow cars to automatically sense other vehicles, accidents, red lights and obstacles, it will help drivers find vacant parking spaces and avoid traffic jams. Traffic engineers will be able to monitor traffic in unprecedented detail, knowing precisely how many cars are on which roads. This will enable engineers to route traffic efficiently.
All of this requires an infrastructure to be in place. Madison has started on this work, methodically connecting the city’s 276 traffic lights (some owned by the state or Dane County, but maintained by the city) to the broad-band fiber network. More equipment will be required in order for these lights to communicate with cars. But the fiber connection makes the city’s traffic lights easier to program and adjust, for both planned events, like a Badger football game, and sudden incidents, like an accident.
Many of the city’s traffic lights have also been equipped with cameras, enabling city officials to monitor traffic patterns and weather conditions — or even spontaneous protests, like those that erupted two weeks ago over the police shooting of Tony Robinson.
“They had no planned route,” Langer says of the protesters. “Nobody knew where they were going to go, so we had to react on the fly.” The cameras allowed city workers to adjust signals to keep traffic flowing even as several streets had to be shut down.
During winter storms, the streets department and Madison Metro are both heavy users of the cameras, as they determine which streets need more attention or whether the buses will be able to operate.
Eventually, connected cars could even help with street maintenance, Langer says. “They’re even talking about cars being able to report road conditions like potholes.”
“It’s really got a lot of applications,” he adds. “It’s not overly complex. The biggest hurdle is getting the radios in the car. The other thing holding them up is security so the transportation network can’t be hacked.”