Traffic
Traffic is one of the chief problems of our times, we suffer from too much of it, causing jams and pollution. Today we went on an AACI tiyul to Tel Aviv to get a glimpse of the future.
We visited the Traffic Management Control Center of the Israel National Roads Company at Beit Dagan, a large intersection outside Tel Aviv. The relatively small modern building built in 2004 houses the company and the police who work in the Control Center with them as a joint project. They are in charge of all the roads of Israel from Dan to Eilat. They have 84 TV cameras arrayed around central Israel, from Ashkelon to Nazareth, and they have banks of TV monitors which they can switch between, monitoring the status of the traffic flow and registering any hold-ups, breakdowns, accidents, etc. A lot of their information comes in from the national number *2120 that anyone can call to give or get traffic information. They also have direct liason with the IDF in case of an attack or security situation. Although quite modest by US standards, this Center nevertheless is very advanced. They are currently beginning testing in several sites of the computerized Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) that can automatically monitor traffic and predict problems either before or as they arise. For further information see their site at iroads.co.il, where you can view the traffic status in real time at any major intersection in Israel.
Our second stop was at "Better Place," located at Pi Glilot north of Tel Aviv, the site of the former oil storage facility, now the first electric vehicle (EV) company in the world. We were given a tour of the facility and watched an audio-visual presentation that was very persuasive. There are four major reasons why there needs to be a revolution in our transportation system: 1. Pollution, the number of cars in use around the world is now in the billions and the pollution caused by them is the greatest source of pollution in the world; 2. Economic: The cost of using gasoline with its inflated price is a major negative factor in western societies; Political, the transfer of huge sums of money from the west to the Arab/Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, etc.) has resulted in the empowerment of their regimes and the support of terrorism. 4. Quality of life: we need to get away from the noisy, polluting, expensive gas guzzlers and develop an entirely new people friendly method of transportation. According to Better Place that new means of transportation is the electric car. We took a spin in one of their prototypes on a road track inside Pi Glilot, and it was wonderful to drive without exhaust and without noise (I joked that I missed the noise of the internal combustion engine and the gear changes and they said they could instal an application through their computer system to generate whatever noise I wanted).
Better Place does not make the cars themselves, they are produced by Renault-Nissan, for about the same cost as a normal car. Better Place will provide the infrastructure to charge the battery, that can run for 100 miles (or 160 km), and if the driver needs to drive longer continuously they will provide switching stations where a new battery can be replaced in ca. 3 mins (as long as there is no queue). As part of their subscription they will instal a battery charging connection at your home and at your place of work. Since cars are not usually used at night that would be the optimal time during which the 6 hours required to recharge the battery would be taken, using electricity at off-peak rates.
This seems to be the wave of the future, and as well as Israel, the San Francisco Bay area, Denmark and several other countries are slated to be switched to electric vehicles starting in about 2012. Hopefully this will decrease the amount of pollution, noise and dependence on oil (for more information see www.betterplace.com ).
We visited the Traffic Management Control Center of the Israel National Roads Company at Beit Dagan, a large intersection outside Tel Aviv. The relatively small modern building built in 2004 houses the company and the police who work in the Control Center with them as a joint project. They are in charge of all the roads of Israel from Dan to Eilat. They have 84 TV cameras arrayed around central Israel, from Ashkelon to Nazareth, and they have banks of TV monitors which they can switch between, monitoring the status of the traffic flow and registering any hold-ups, breakdowns, accidents, etc. A lot of their information comes in from the national number *2120 that anyone can call to give or get traffic information. They also have direct liason with the IDF in case of an attack or security situation. Although quite modest by US standards, this Center nevertheless is very advanced. They are currently beginning testing in several sites of the computerized Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) that can automatically monitor traffic and predict problems either before or as they arise. For further information see their site at iroads.co.il, where you can view the traffic status in real time at any major intersection in Israel.
Our second stop was at "Better Place," located at Pi Glilot north of Tel Aviv, the site of the former oil storage facility, now the first electric vehicle (EV) company in the world. We were given a tour of the facility and watched an audio-visual presentation that was very persuasive. There are four major reasons why there needs to be a revolution in our transportation system: 1. Pollution, the number of cars in use around the world is now in the billions and the pollution caused by them is the greatest source of pollution in the world; 2. Economic: The cost of using gasoline with its inflated price is a major negative factor in western societies; Political, the transfer of huge sums of money from the west to the Arab/Muslim countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, etc.) has resulted in the empowerment of their regimes and the support of terrorism. 4. Quality of life: we need to get away from the noisy, polluting, expensive gas guzzlers and develop an entirely new people friendly method of transportation. According to Better Place that new means of transportation is the electric car. We took a spin in one of their prototypes on a road track inside Pi Glilot, and it was wonderful to drive without exhaust and without noise (I joked that I missed the noise of the internal combustion engine and the gear changes and they said they could instal an application through their computer system to generate whatever noise I wanted).
Better Place does not make the cars themselves, they are produced by Renault-Nissan, for about the same cost as a normal car. Better Place will provide the infrastructure to charge the battery, that can run for 100 miles (or 160 km), and if the driver needs to drive longer continuously they will provide switching stations where a new battery can be replaced in ca. 3 mins (as long as there is no queue). As part of their subscription they will instal a battery charging connection at your home and at your place of work. Since cars are not usually used at night that would be the optimal time during which the 6 hours required to recharge the battery would be taken, using electricity at off-peak rates.
This seems to be the wave of the future, and as well as Israel, the San Francisco Bay area, Denmark and several other countries are slated to be switched to electric vehicles starting in about 2012. Hopefully this will decrease the amount of pollution, noise and dependence on oil (for more information see www.betterplace.com ).
posted by Jack Cohen at 1:35 PM
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