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Guinea pig rush hour10/30/2022 They will include “dynamic speed limits” that adjust to move traffic more effectively and tinkering with the timing of stoplights that control the ramps leading into freeways. It will study the behavior of truck traffic and how it may respond to decongestion changes in Chattanooga. The next two years will be devoted to a regional traffic solution, one that includes other highways leading into the Chattanooga area. “We convinced ourselves we had a viable route to get there,” he said, referring to a citywide congestion solution. Farrell called the result “shocking and gratifying at the same time.” Before that, their approach had been all computer-based theories. With one move, they had brought an area close to the fuel-saving target they had set for the whole city. One of their “congestion relief” moves was the ability to adjust the timing to the traffic, which resulted in more green lights and a thumping 16% decrease in fuel use for vehicles on the highway. #Guinea pig rush hour driversThe researchers found that four traffic signal controllers along Shallowford were timed to handle very heavy traffic, which meant that in the middle of the day drivers found themselves stopped by a parade of red lights. The first “what” that Eagle pounced on was Shallowford Road, a multilane highway that feeds drivers from the suburbs into the city. “One of the areas where machine learning struggles is that it can tell you the what but not the why” of trouble-prone areas, added Farrell. Global Positioning System, automated cameras, radar detectors, weather stations, city records showing where cars were located and visual observations. More than 500 data sources were factored into the research. Those included the city’s transportation department, three universities, the Tennessee and Georgia departments of transportation, and several trucking companies such as FedEx Corp. The scientists worked with a long list of partners. Chattanooga’s traffic provided mountains of data. It helped NREL use a process called “machine learning” that can explore huge amounts of data and quickly recognize patterns that might otherwise take humans weeks or even months to pick out. #Guinea pig rush hour how toThe computer’s technology and the accumulating knowledge of how to apply it, he pointed out, are a combination that didn’t exist five years ago. It can do 8 million-billion calculations per second. #Guinea pig rush hour driverIn a typical (non-COVID-19) year, according to NREL, a driver spends 46 hours “stuck behind the wheel.”Īs Farrell explained in an interview, the key to the two-year study of Chattanooga’s traffic was Eagle, NREL’s latest supercomputer. The national goal is to save 3.3 billion gallons of fuel wasted each year, to reduce the 8.8 billion hours of lost productivity and to cut the surges in emissions that cars idling in traffic jams produce each year. “Eventually, the plan is to apply these solutions to larger metropolitan areas and regional corridors across the country.” “Chattanooga provided an ideal microcosm of conditions and opportunities to work with an exceptional roster of municipal and state partners,” explained John Farrell, who manages the vehicle technology management program for NREL. The first step for NREL scientists was to make a detailed computer model, or what it calls a “digital twin,” of the city’s traffic patterns to isolate and then explore solutions to its snarled rush hours. The city, nestled among the hills and ridges of the southeastern corner of the state, is ranked among the nation’s top 20 most traffic-congested cities. (population 182,799), as the guinea pig for their first traffic-cutting experiment. Two years ago Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., selected Chattanooga, Tenn. transportation fuel consumption up to 20% and reduce auto emissions.Ī second goal is to recover as much as $100 billion in lost worker productivity by unsnarling rush hour traffic jams in U.S. The effort is aimed at more than just improving motorists’ moods. The Department of Energy is preparing to use the massive computing power of its national laboratories to tackle a daily scourge of American life: traffic jams.
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