Site of Bob

Professional
Driving Links:
 Where can a Bay Area driver go for a driver's workout? Hang your Ego on a peg and buy one of Gordon Booth's driving courses.

What a smart guy has to say about traffic flow
Share your graceful driving story!
MESSAGE BOARD

send email to Bob

top


Driving towards a Solution

Many drivers are pretty courteous, much of the time. The Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," still holds sway in many hearts. Can we identify aggressive drivers ahead of time, and prepare to grant them a little extra room? To stay out of their way, refusing to engage in their potentially fatal shenanigans? Possibly, but just as useful, and easier to implement is identifying the cooperative drivers! Who is going to let you merge? Who is willing to forfeit their "right of way" to avoid an accident? Who is ready to make your driving experience easier and less stressful?

Why, the drivers who Drive with Grace.

Are you ready?

To mark your vehicle?

So that other drivers can count on you to drive in a friendly manner?

Even for that jerk who will be trying to cut over at the last minute?

Or that other jerk who will be diving in and out of lanes?

Will you Drive with Grace even when faced with abuse?

Then please download merge.pdf and print it on yellow paper or color it and put it on your car.

I also have Drive with Grace stickers available, for the cost of printing and postage ($2.00). Black and yellow on vinyl, they stick well and come off of your window glass when you want them to. My near-term goal is to have a small fleet of commuters all striving to drive cooperatively, and each month I'll reward someone with a free tank of gasoline! Sounds great, wouldn't you agree? Click here to email me!

Are you really committed? I'm looking for recruits to have their car decorated with a vehicle wrap like mine? Wouldn't that be great? A fleet of commuters, happier to be driving gently, on a free tank of gas? That would make me friendlier, certainly! Email me!

Grant study opportunity:

What percentage of drivers must be "courteous" to have a net positive impact on traffic flow?

In addition to poorly designed controlled access on many routes of our highways and interstates, aggressive driving practices contribute to congestion. Traffic "pulses" travel either forward (faster than the average speed) or slower than the traffic, limiting the merging opportunities. Drivers refusing to yield or failing to merge cause slow-downs that propogate rearward. Looky-loo behavior snarls roads for hours, often in both directions of travel. How many drivers need to change their driving technique so that the effects of these events are minimized?

I propose to utilize cellular automata to first model realistic driving practices, complete with fast and slow traffic, aggressive and timid drivers. The second phase would be to program "shepherd" cars and gradually increase their numbers until effects from congestion instigators are minimized. Total travel time for all vehicles will be measured. Specific attention will be given to search for a threshold value in the data, or a discontinuity, which could suggest a minimum or maximum number of shepherd vehicles required. The third phase would be to recruit drivers to become "shepherds" and thereby ease congestion without building more highways.

Here's a group already tackling the computer modeling of driver behavior: the Berkeley Highway Laboratory

Venues

Daily- on the highways of the San Francisco Bay Area!

Background for local-channel programming news spot (KTVU) (1999)

26th Annual July 4th Alameda's Mayor Parade (2001)

Alameda Times-Star article by Suzanne Storar

KNTV Channel 11 San Jose story! (1.8 Mb Quicktime® movie)

2001 Art Car Fest

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1