Using Technology to Eliminate Traffic Congestion

Traffic congestion is a pervasive worldwide problem. We explain how to harness existing technologies together with new methods in time-and-location markets to eradicate traffic congestion along with its attendant social harms. Our market design for road use builds on congestion pricing and models of efficient pricing in the electricity sector. The market maximizes the value of a transport network through efficient scheduling, routing, and pricing of road use. Privacy and equity concerns are addressed. Transparent price information provides essential information for efficient long-term investment in transport

Sistema de telepeaje en zonas urbanas

Las Low Emission Zones (LEZ) limitan el acceso de vehículos a las zonas más céntricas de las ciudades con el objetivo de reducir la densidad del tráfico y la contaminación ambiental. Estos sistemas tienen problemas de privacidad de los conductores y de efectividad en la detección del fraude. Este artículo presenta un sistema de telepeaje para LEZ que mejora estos problemas.Este trabajo está parcialmente financiado por el Gobierno de España (a través de una beca FPI BES-2012-054780 y los proyectos CO-PRIVACY TIN2011-27076-C03-01, ARES-CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00004 y BallotNext IPT-2012-0603-430000)

Local steps in an international career: a Danish-style consensus conference in Austria

The article gives an account of the first Austrian nationwide Danish-style consensus conference, held in the summer of 2003, treating policy issues related to genetic data. Consensus conferences are currently widely discussed for their promise to democratize fields of technological decision-making which are both crucial to the fate of modern society and inaccessible to public involvement. Instead of evaluating the “democratic efficiency” of the deliberative exercise, the essay will contextualize the event in local, as well as international developments comprising discursive, institutional and political elements. Rather than offering definitive claims about the normative significance of the rapidly diffusing deliberative technique, the discussion of a local experience with it will arrive at ambivalent conclusions

Complexity aided design: The FuturICT technological innovation paradigm

"In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. This skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will probe and monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies-even our dreams ....What will the earth's new skin permit us to feel? How will we use its surges of sensation? For several years-maybe for a decade-there will be no central nervous system to manage this vast signaling network. Certainly there will be no central intelligence...some qualities of self-awareness will emerge once the Net is sensually enhanced. Sensuality is only one force pushing the Net toward intelligence”. These statements are quoted by an interview by Cherry Murray, Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Professor of Physics. It is interesting to outline the timeliness and highly predicting power of these statements. In particular, we would like to point to the relevance of the question "What will the earth's new skin permit us to feel?” to the work we are going to discuss in this paper. There are many additional compelling questions, as for example: "How can the electronic earth's skin be made more resilient?”; "How can the earth's electronic skin be improved to better satisfy the need of our society?”;"What can the science of complex systems contribute to this endeavour?” Graphical abstrac

High resolution accessibility computations

The goals of this chapter are accordingly: to define an accessibility measure for each point of the region; to clarify how access to and egress from the transport network are handled; for grid-based computations, to clarify the effect of different spatial resolutions; to consider computational performance issues; to perform illustrative sensitivity studies in a real-world setting including the effect of traffic congestion. Section 4.2 describes in detail how this accessibility measurement is implemented. Section 4.3 describes a real-world scenario to which the approach was applied. Section 4.4 presents results of this application, in particular with respect to spatial resolution and computing times. The chapter ends with a discussion and conclusions in sections 4.5 and 4.6.EC/FP7/244557/EU/Micro-simulation for the prospective of sustainable cities in Europe/SUSTAINCIT

Congestion Pricing: A Parking Queue Model

Congestion pricing imposes a usage fee on a public resource during times of high demand. Road pricing involves cordoning off a section of the city and imposing a fee on vehicles that enter it. Parking pricing increases the costs of on-street and perhaps off-street parking. Following an historical review, we develop a new queueing model of the parking pricing problem, recognizing that many urban drivers are simply looking for available on-street parking. Often, reducing the number of such “cruising drivers” would reduce urban road congestion dramatically, perhaps as effectively as cordoning off the center city