Fast Track: Allowing Bikes To Participate In A Smart-Transportation System

This project focuses on a mode of transportation that is currently left out of V2X (vehicle-to-everything) conversations: bicycling. The project demonstrates how university researchers, city traffic engineers, and signal-controller manufacturers can come together to give bicyclists the same technology appearing on modern vehicles: Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory (GLOSA). GLOSA allows motorists to set their speed along corridors to maximize their chances of catching a “green wave” (i.e., not being forced to stop as they travel through the corridor). This project demonstrates how GLOSA can be used by bicyclists in the same way it is used by motorists on a busy car and bike corridor feeding the UO campus. The project attempts to answer two questions: (1) Can we convey GLOSA information to a phone carried by a bicyclist? (2) Can we present that information in an effective, reasonable and safe manner using the interfaces available on the phone? For the former, we discuss our approach to combining (a) information provided by the city’s traffic office in terms of signal timing-tables with that of (b) a real-time traffic feed from the McCain Transparity server. We discuss a system architecture that we developed to use the real-time feed to keep an up-to-date view of signal state (current phase and its start time). However, if the feed was lost, the system continued to operate with its last known state information, potentially obtained by signal reset by the main office. Our system architecture, and the app that employs it, uses the phone GPS and accelerometer sensors to keep an accurate view of the rider’s location, direction and speed. For our second question, we describe an app we developed and a set of trials we ran to test it. Our overall results are positive. Testing revealed that our GLOSA-based app was effective, reasonable and safe on our test site