Stimulus Watch

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[edit] General Description

Creates a set of vehicle detection stations in Austin to use as sensors for an intelligent traffic management system.

This is not a new toll road or an improvement on an existing toll road, this has nothing to do with toll roads.

This would build a system the leverage off the existing toll tags which are common on vehicles in austin to build an intelligent system for improving traffic flow by controlling signal lights and posting messages on the roadside information billboards.

[edit] Points in Favor

• Reduces traffic congestion.

• Given a good estimate of the percentage of vehicles that have toll tags you can extrapolate the current traffic level using the sensors. The program does not need a large percentage of vehicles with tags to work.

• An example of a long-term successful use of this system in Houston may be seen at traffic.tamu.edu - for drivers the system was useful both for avoiding particularly congested areas and for hurricane evacuation

[edit] Points Against

Only helps with traffic if enough cars on the road have a toll tag that the system can make estimates about overall traffic. Well below 50% (more like 25%) of the cars on the road have the tag, but as only around 10% are needed that should be sufficient but could concievably change over time. A similar system in Houston worked well with less than 10% of tagged cars.