Sydney to install new traffic system to speed up traffic
Sydney Australia has decided to install a major advancement in the way that they direct traffic. This new system has been given $123 million dollars to make the worlds most advanced transport management system by 2020. The current traffic coordination in the city is run by the Traffic Management Center. It is essentially a group of people watching the cameras at key points in the city and then find spots with heavy traffic and then somehow communicate to the commuter that the area is moving slower than normal. It is difficult for them to find a new and faster route in the moments after they identify the traffic as to ease the tension in that area. This manual system has done very little to effectively reduce traffic as it hasn’t changed since 2000, when it was installed to help deal with increased traffic from the olympics. The new system will instead be based on “CCTV real time video footage, satellite technology, incident data from the emergency services agencies, data from roadside infrastructure, two-way data exchange with private motorways and real time public transport data to make bold predictions.” This system will be able to predict where traffic is likely to occur even 30 minutes before it actually happens. There is hope that as technology advances, the system will be able to directly control self driving vehicles to greatly reduce the traffic in the city.
Once the new system receives all of the data from the cameras and emergency services, its predictions are run based on many of the ideas that we learned in class. In order for there to be minimal traffic in the city, the machine has to make a prediction that is closest to achieving the Nash equilibrium of the system of the roadways. If there is an accident on one road, the system is able to run predictions that show that if it were to direct all those cars on their way there to the next closest route, the other route would become congested and then end up creating just as much traffic. The implementation of all the news and data outlets available allow the system to judge where it should send cars and how many it should send to each in order to reduce traffic by the greatest amount. The problem that has been pointed out is that people do not always listen when offered what the machine tells them is the best route available meaning traffic still has the potential to occur. As technology advances and self driving cars become more of a norm, the system may be able to directly control the routes of the cars and get closest to the Nash equilibrium as possible.