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Navigation Systems
This is the new Infiniti 350Z, and this one comes with the optional navigation system.
This thing has a GPS satellite system in there so it knows exactly where you are at all times. It’s got DVD maps of the entire western hemisphere in there. All you got to do is tell it where you want to go by punching a few buttons, the thing plans a route and takes you there: brilliant. But there is one thing that it doesn’t do. It doesn’t warn you if those roads are blocked from construction or a crash. Just the other day I was getting on the highway, I had just passed the no return on the on-ramp and, Oh darn it!! It was backed-up, it took me 20 minutes to get through there.
It’s not that this system couldn’t warn me about that because it does obviously have satellite reception, it does have the maps. What it doesn’t have is the information from the road itself. We would need sensors in the road measuring traffic flow, you’d have to coordinate traffic and police reports and somehow communicate those to the individual cars. That’s not going to happen unless someone, maybe the government, invests huge amounts of money in the infrastructure. They do this in Europe already, but of course they are ahead of us.
There is another area where technology can help traffic management; it’s also a good news story for Canada because it is a reverse brain drain situation. It’s a new guy that has just moved to Canada: his name is Professor Baher Abdulhai; he’s a professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto. He’s one of the world’s leading authorities on computer simulation of traffic management flow. He’s got this program, which can consider whether a particular strategy is going to work or not before we spend millions of dollars implementing it. He’s looking right now at the traffic-monitoring situation for on ramps and freeways. You’ve probably seen this in the states, where they have a green light letting two cars go at a time. The idea being that is it easier to spend 20 seconds at a traffic light than spending 20 minutes in traffic jams. Now, we tried that here in Canada a few years ago and it didn’t work out because they didn’t get the timing right and that’s what the professor’s computer can do: it can evaluate these systems. The professor got a little bit of notoriety recently by recommending that the speed limit on our freeway should be raised to 130k: the theory being that everyone is going that fast anyway. And if we can encourage everybody to drive at the same speed or closer to it not only can we assure that traffic moves much smoothly: it’s safer.
This is a professor saying this ok, a really smart guy. He also said, that to do this properly we’d have to have better discipline, we’d have to drive on the right and past on the left. This is a university professor, smart guy saying this. Have you ever heard anybody else making recommendations like that? Anyway. This guy is a university professor so maybe the government will listen to him.
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