If you happen to be in Eugene or Portland, Oregon – it would be great if you’d download Green Driver’s EnLighten App and let us know how it works.
What it does: you run this app on your phone and it dings at you before the signal you’re stopped at will change to green. It also has a timer that counts down how long it will take for the signal to go green.
This seems useful if you’re stopped 30+ seconds several times on your way home. It would be very useful if you hit signals where you have to wait 2+ minutes. Give you time to read War and Peace.
The big leap for Green Driver as a business is to do the hard work of getting connected to all of the traffic signal operators out there (city’s, county’s, state DOT’s). Then they get bought out by Google or Navteq and real time signal data gets added to travel time algorithms.
Eventually, this data stream will get rolled into autonomous vehicles where the driver tells the car where they want to go and the car figures out the fastest way to get there.
A little bit more about the technology from Green Driver’s Website:
The US Department of Transportation is planning to invest millions of dollars over decades to connect vehicles with traffic signals by installing Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) hardware in vehicles and traffic infrastructure.
Green Driver‘s exclusive real-time traffic signal monitoring and prediction offers the only technology that can connect vehicles and traffic signal infrastructure today. And it does it with short time horizons and negligible startup and infrastructure costs.
Green Driver securely interfaces to each city’s traffic management system to obtain available information on signal and sensor states. This information is combined with map and speed limit information. All this information is converted to a vendor-independent format, providing a unified view for all connected cities.
Once collected, we apply our proprietary technology to model light behavior and predict future behavior. These predictions, together with the unified signal state data can be used in applications to reduce driver distraction, improve driver behavior, help avoid accidents, lower fuel-consumption, and even reduce congestion. Green Driver and our partners are working to bring innovative new applications of signal data to cities across the country.
