The Wireless Future of Transportation

Have you ever driven across Baltimore City? It can take 20 minutes to drive four miles. Unsynchronized traffic lights and the lack of a traffic engineer in the city are largely to blame. It is often the case that I get stopped at a red light, and as soon as it turns green the next light (which is two blocks away) turns red. This pattern repeats itself over and over again and leads to lots of frustration and tardiness. I have read an article, Glimpse the Wireless Future of Transportation, that gives me hope that this red light problem could be fixed. Not only that, but it discusses solutions for multiple transportation issues. It presents a new method for improving transportation by describing the use of wireless technologies to make transportation safer and more efficient.

Radio Frequency Identification tags could be placed on busses and subways to track their exact locations. Users of these modes of transportations would know precisely when their bus or subway will be arriving at their stop and when it will be arriving at their destination. Extremely accurate information on delays would be available. This data could be text messaged to riders. If one is waiting for their bus to an important job interview and he or she receives a text message that it is running late, then one knows to take an alternate method of transportation. This would have been very useful in the two snowstorms we were hit with a couple of weeks ago. Riders could have been informed when busses and subways were stopped as well as when they started running again and on what lines.

In regards to Baltimore’s red light and traffic problems, mobile navigation systems could communicate with a new Intelligent Transportation System to send data on traffic patterns. City officials would be able to see where the bottlenecks are and would get a good picture of how unsynchronized traffic lights are contributing. They could see how long vehicles are stopped at lights and how long it takes them to travel certain distances across the city. According to the article, more money needs to be spent on research and more importantly on the implementation of this transportation communication system. I, for one, cannot wait.