Fast Track: Allowing Bikes to Participate in a Smart Transportation System

NITC-RR-1160This 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 \u201cgreen wave\u201d (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 University of Oregon (UO) campus. The project attempts to answer two questions: (1) Can GLOSA information be conveyed to a phone carried by a bicyclist? (2) Can the information be presented in an effective, reasonable and safe manner using the interfaces available on the phone? For the former, the authors discuss their approach to combining (a) information provided by the city\u2019s traffic office in terms of signal timing-tables with that of (b) a real-time traffic feed from the McCain Transparity server. They discuss a system architecture that they 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. The system architecture, and the app that employs it, uses the phone global positioning system (GPS) and accelerometer sensors to keep an accurate view of the rider\u2019s location, direction and speed. For their second question, the authors describe an app they developed and a set of trials they ran to test it. The overall results are positive. Testing revealed that the GLOSA-based app was effective, reasonable and safe on the test site