The speed limit is 70 miles per hour on I-16, so I set the cruise control for 79. I hit the reset button on the steering wheel, erasing the bad gas mileage-average that city-driving created. So on Thanksgiving Day, while the Macy’s Parade crept along in New York City, I concocted a new car game as we cruised I-16 leaving Macon. I enjoyed that challenge on that trip and a few other road trips since. My new relationship with cruise control bore a “game” where I watched the “miles per gallon” gauge increase instead of my previous game of filing down the “ETA” on my Google Maps navigation. In 2016, the game was updated by CTS.Last spring, I wrote about a road trip where I landed a speeding ticket in our new car. Gridlock Buster was originally developed by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute at the University of Minnesota, with funding from the USDOT's University Transportation Center program. PowerPoint slides for Lessons 1-3 (PPTX).Lesson 3-Who’s Driving Us to the Future? (grades 5-12).Lesson 2-Roadblocks to Designing Better Transportation Systems (grades 9-12).Lesson 1.2-Putting the Brakes on “Phantom” Traffic Jams (grades 5-12).Lesson 1.1-Mixed Signals: Measuring and Modeling Traffic (grades 5-12).The curriculum includes three lessons, targeted to different age groups: We encourage you to further refine these materials and tailor them to your broader curricular goals. Through brief instruction, hands-on activities, and guided exploration of computer models, students can form and test hypotheses about traffic. It emphasizes how ever-evolving technologies help measure and model traffic flow. This curriculum, featuring Gridlock Buster, provides K-12 students enrichment on many fundamental topics related to traffic engineering, helping them uncover how their everyday world is carefully designed. (However, not all of them are top-secret underground taskforces run by renegade engineers.) Traffic Engineering Curriculum Traffic engineers call this the split: the fraction of a cycle for which the signal is green for traffic going in one direction.įinally, the traffic control center in the game is realistic: many large metropolitan areas (such as New York, Boston, and the Twin Cities) have traffic control centers that actually do look like that. As you’ve noticed in the game, fixed-time control must take into account the traffic patterns on a street: the heavier traffic is in a certain direction, the more green time it needs relative to the other traffic. Traffic engineers use a formula based on delay and queue to measure how well their signal timing works.Īctual traffic engineers call signal programming fixed-time control. The delay is the average length of time a car has to wait at a light, and the queue is the average number of cars waiting at a light before it turns green. Traffic engineers call these two factors the delay and the queue. And if there is a lot of traffic passing through an intersection, long lines of cars tend to form if those cars don’t get enough green time. In the game, the more a car is delayed, the more “frustrated” it gets-causing the “frustration meter” to increase.
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