911 should be able to stop a train
It was over 5 years ago that I blogged about a robot that would travel in front of a train to spot cars stuck on the tracks in time to stop.I recently read a local story about an RV that was demolished...
View ArticleBorder Travel in an underpants bomber world
I just landed on a flight from Toronto to San Francisco. If you were inside the USA you may not have heard about the various crazy rules applied to travel to the USA, or at least not experienced them....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Transit energy chart updated from latest DoE book
Back in 2008 I wrote a controversial article about whether green transit was a myth in the USA. Today I updated the main chart in that article based on new releases of the Department of Energy...
View ArticleThe radio will be a major innovation center in cars, near-term
I’ve been predicting a great deal of innovation in cars with the arrival of robocars and other automatic driving technologies. But there’s a lot of other computerization and new electronics that will...
View ArticleElectric car vendors: bundle in short-term gasoline car rentals, with charging
Looking at new electric cars like the Nissan Leaf, we see that to keep costs down, cars with a range of 100 miles are on offer. For certain city cars, particularly in 2-car families, this should be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I'm loving the Shweeb concept
There was a bit of a stir when Google last week announced that one of the winners of their 10^100 contest would be Shweeb, a pedal-powered monorail from New Zealand that has elements of PRT. Google...
View ArticleNeeded: An international hand signal for "There's a problem with your car"
You’re driving down the road. You see another car on the road with you that has a problem. The lights are off and it’s dusk. There is something loose that may break off. There’s something left on the...
View ArticleMy phone should know when I start a trip
Every day I get into my car and drive somewhere. My mobile phone has a lot of useful apps for travel, including maps with traffic and a lot more. And I am usually calling them up.I believe that my...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Another pedal-powered monorail: Skyride
Last year I wrote about an interesting but simple pedal powered monorail/PRT system called Shweeb which had won a prize/investment from Google. Recent announcements show they are not alone in this...
View ArticleTerminal mode or a standard mounting port for mobile phones in cars?
It’s very common to use mobile phones for driving activities today. Many people even put in cell phone holders in their cars when they want to use the phones as navigation systems as well as make calls...
View ArticleCar users frustrated with their tech
The latest JD Power survey on car satisfaction has a very new complaint that has now the second most annoying item to new car owners namely problems with the voice recognition system in their...
View ArticleITS vehicle to vehicle demo at ITS World Congress
I’m just back from the “ITS World Congress” an annual meeting of people working on “Intelligent Transportation Systems” which means all sorts of applications of computers and networking to...
View ArticlePaying drivers to leave the road
Congestion on the roads has a variety of sources. These include accidents of course, reductions in road capacity, irrational human driving behaviours and others, but most of all you get congestion when...
View ArticleWhat to do in high speed rail?
Last week, new studies came back on the California High Speed Rail project. They have raised the estimated cost to $99 billion, and dropped the ridership estimate to 36.8 million and $5.5 billion in...
View ArticleTime for delivery companies to work weekends
This time of year I do a lot of online shopping, and my bell rings with many deliveries. But today and tomorrow, not Saturday. The post office comes Saturday but has announced it wants to stop doing...
View ArticleA drone with a tele-doctor and defibrillator in 100 seconds?
There’s a lot of excitement about the potential of autonomous drones, be they nimble quadcopters or longer-range fixed wing or hybrid aircraft. A group of students from Singularity University, for...
View ArticleIs the California High Speed Rail Plan ignoring accelerating technological...
(Of late I have been writing a few articles for some other online sites. The following is an article that appeared on Forbes.com It was also commented on positively and negatively with angry...
View ArticlePerils of the long range electric car
You’ve probably seen the battle going on between Elon Musk of Tesla and the New York Times over the strongly negative review the NYT made of a long road trip in a Model S. The reviewer ran out of...
View ArticleSolving V2V Part 2: Make it Phone to Phone
Last week, I began in part 1 by examining the difficulty of creating a new network system in cars when you can only network with people you randomly encounter on the road. I contend that nobody has had...
View ArticleV2V and connected car part 3: Broadcast data
Earlier in part one I examined why it’s hard to make a networked technology based on random encounters. In part two I explored how V2V might be better achieved by doing things phone-to-phone.For this...
View Article
