In an interview with Business Insider, North Miami Beach commissioner Michael Joseph said the plan would alleviate a lot of traffic, and that commuters and visitors alike would benefit from a tunnel connecting the city center to the beach. The cost per mile would be “a fraction of what is seen in other types of mass transit projects proposed in South Florida, while the construction would not be disruptive to the local economy.”

If you’re wondering how, exactly, this would work, look to the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop as an example. Part of The Boring Company’s plan for an eventual 29-mile tunnel system which will connect Teslas to more than 50 stations across Las Vegas, this 1.7-mile tunnel network opened in April 2021 and has three stops. Built in about one year using the Godot Tunnel Boring Machine at a cost of $47 million, the tunnel is able to ferry thousands of visitors around the Las Vegas Convention Center area, reducing a 45-minute walk to about two minutes. The company says it will eventually enable large conventions with upwards of 100,000 attendees to occur without road closures or disruptions to street traffic. Even better, the trip is free for convention center visitors.

The Boring Company’s renderings for such tunnel projects once included 16-passenger public transit vehicles, but now, they’ve been replaced by Tesla Model 3 cars holding up to five people at a time. And while the company previously said the vehicles could go up to 155 miles per hour, the cars within the Las Vegas loop are only going about 50. The point seems to be using existing technology to make a difference now, with Musk claiming that incremental advances in technology could allow different types of vehicles or connections to subterranean Hyperloop rail systems. But Musk has a penchant for making big announcements and then changing his mind, so it’s unclear exactly how this project will evolve.

Skeptics have called these tunnels little more than brief Tesla test drives, and a bid to sell more of Musk’s cars. The tunnel proposals for various cities have also drawn a lot of criticism and controversy. Projects in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore seem to have faltered, and The Boring Company website no longer even mentions them. Civil engineering experts and tunneling industry veterans call into question Musk’s claims that his company can bore tunnels faster and cheaper than ever before. In Los Angeles in particular, the Boring Company dug a tunnel 40 feet beneath a low-income part of the county without even informing the local community.

In Florida, where the water table is much higher than average, one has to wonder just how safe the tunnels will be from flooding. It seems like there are a lot of kinks to be worked out in these plans, but as usual, Musk is simply boring straight ahead with his plans, apparently planning to figure it out as he goes.

The post Elon Musk Aims to Solve Miami Traffic Problems with a 6.2-Mile Tunnel first appeared on Dornob.

At the forefront is A³, a Silicon Valley subsidiary of Airbus, and their urban aircraft, the Vahana. The company chose to establish itself in Silicon Valley to take advantage of the speed of innovation and tolerance for risk-taking that exist in the area — factors that allow A³ to iterate much faster than its parent company.

During an interview at LA CoMotion last month themed “Highway in the Sky: Is Air Transport the Answer to Our Urban Congestion Woes?,” A³ CEO Rodin Lyasoff spoke in a subdued but positive tone about the high-minded activities going on at his company.

“We have a flying taxi,” he explained. “It’s a tilt wing, which means that it takes off and lands vertically, but in forward flight it’s essentially an airplane, which makes it a lot quieter and actually gives it a meaningful range with batteries.”

“Vahana”  is a VTOL aircraft, meaning it can hover, take off, and land vertically. It will take 90 seconds to hover up to the maximum cruising altitude of 1000 feet and transition to horizontal motion, then another 90 seconds to hover down to a particular destination. It is fully autonomous and features no manual controls. Eight electric rotors make Vahana aerodynamically superior to most helicopters.

“The project’s not even two years old, and our first full-sized, fully autonomous vehicles are already doing final testing before flight,” says Lyasoff. “And they will fly within the next couple of months.”

There are several other companies testing similar flying vehicles. For instance, Boeing recently acquired Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. and will provide UberAIR with 50 air taxis to test by 2020. Despite the competition, none offer both the VTOL flexibility and autonomy of Vahana. Plus, Vahana’s form language (and especially its canopy), make commuters want to use it over other services.

Of course, showing the public glossy renderings and videos is not as powerful as showing them a real-world demonstration. In São Paulo, A³ launched Voom, an air taxi mobile app that lets users hire a helicopter from one of six helipad locations throughout the city. According to its website, by using Voom, “you can travel from downtown to the airport for about the price of a private car.” Voom, which does not own or pilot any of the helicopters, simply connects people to certified operators in the area. It even offers a few ground transportation connections.

“We recognized that operations on the ground (and regulation) for some of these vehicles will be a challenge…this (Voom) gives us the footprint on the ground with current vehicles.”

It’s important to note that the biggest challenge to urban air mobility is not the technology, but the regulation. Lyasoff believes that figuring out how these aircrafts could operate while minimizing their energy consumption, cost, and noise footprint are questions that became easier to answer with the advent of the iPhone. He gave a brief description of how we got to flying taxis so quickly:

“Batteries finally got to good enough energy densities that you can actually do something useful with just batteries. You could go across an average metropolitan area. You could go 100 kilometers. Once that was possible, we could do distributed electric propulsion, which meant that you don’t have to push power to the propellers using mechanical gear boxes and shafts, and that all of a sudden makes them a lot lighter. And it allows you to have levels of redundancy that you couldn’t do before, which means that you can actually make them safer. And we could achieve that safety at a lower cost. But then they do require a degree of autonomy that traditional vehicles hadn’t required because they are so many actuators that a single pilot couldn’t directly control. A lot of that was enabled by the iPhone, because a lot of the sensors that we in the aviation industry developed, like accelerometers, GPS…(the iPhone) took them and commoditized them on a scale that was completed unprecedented in the aviation industry. I think that’s what actually miniaturized (batteries), lowered the cost, improved the performance, and enabled drones. And it really got people thinking about what’s possible and it became less of a black magic and more accessible.”

For now, Vahana needs to be tested so that regulators can approve of its use in urban environments. Luckily, it seems like A³ already has an idea of how to cross that looming threshold of bureaucracy.

“The main challenge is that regulators track innovation, but they track it with a latency that is prohibitive to deployment. You have to solve this very complex problem of implementing a policy, and in the case of airspace flight rules, you don’t really know how they are going to work until you deploy them.”

What A³ did was create Altiscope: a tool that allows regulators to simulate the experience of air taxis in real-time, both alongside and hovering below existing air traffic. It’s a way for the regulatory process to be enhanced and sped up while the actual vehicle is being tested.

“It will show you in real-time what your policy will look like when implemented. That’s our attempt to enable regulators to engage better with technology innovators and at the same time dry run their decisions before they deploy them to shorten that time and close that feedback loop.”

With Vahana about to undergo flight testing, and A³ helping regulators approve of urban air mobility, how long will it take for our traffic daydream to become a viable and safe option? Lyasoff is sure it won’t be long.

“I think in five or six years, it is feasible to have some of these vehicles fully certified and operating commercially. We can make them safe today, but we have really high standards for what it takes to make a safe airplane that we trust to sit inside and to fly overhead…I believe that Airbus is well positioned in this space, because there aren’t that many companies that know how to do that and know how to build a manufacturing process around that.”

The post How Autonomous Urban Air Mobility Became a Reality So Quickly first appeared on Dornob.

Michael Zeto, AT&T’s Vice President and General Manager of Smart Cities, explains: “We’re exploring possibilities with the City of LA to create a technology-first environment that can improve experiences for residents and visitors across the community. We’re looking to help the city improve problems like traffic congestion and public safety.”

European cities were some of the earliest adopters of smart city technology, though US cities are starting to come around. In many of these places, sensors used in Internet of Things (IoT) devices already connect components across municipal infrastructures to gather data. LA hopes to make that data more user-friendly in the future by providing residents and visitors with mobile apps to help them do things like avoid traffic jams, find street parking, and report overflowing dumpsters.

“Access to information is the foundation of equality, opportunity, and prosperity,” says Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. “We are establishing unique partnerships as we deploy new networks and technologies across LA — and we’re excited to be discussing with AT&T how to empower Angelenos with new tools that could make their lives easier and our communities stronger.”

Other solutions being explored range from digital kiosks and infrastructure to structural monitoring. A key point is that this plan aims to benefit the disenfranchised neighborhoods that are traditionally left off the list when it comes to municipal improvements.

5G Network and Small Cell Technology

According to CTIA, “A small-cell installation consists of small radio equipment and antennas that can be placed on structures such as streetlights, the sides of buildings, or poles. They are about the size of a pizza box and are essential for transmitting data to and from a wireless device.” This technology is vital to creating a 5G network, which will supposedly be up to 100 times faster than the current 4G network.

To make LA “smart,” the city needs to rapidly install a great number of small cells and begin deployment of a 5G network. More than 222 petabytes of data run through our global network as is, so it’s safe to say that a truly smart city would not be possible without without 5G.

In October of 2018, Los Angeles partnered with Verizon to test an initial 5G rollout. Lampposts throughout downtown were wired with small cell technology and fiber optic cables. Of course, that array won’t really do anyone good until early 2019, when Samsung and Verizon are expected to release the world’s first-ever 5G smartphones. This means that 5G will be a competition between carriers as early as next year. Driven by competition, experts predict that 5G will be available in most major cities, if not globally, by the start of 2020.

The post LA to Become One of the Smartest Cities in America first appeared on Dornob.

The post Full Stop, New Direction: Shape-Based Traffic Signal Design first appeared on Dornob.

And not just any part of the world: Los Angeles, the most infamous car-infested, traffic-clogged metropolis on the planet – delicately adjusted through digital editing tools until it is completely devoid of all vehicles (as well as pedestrians).

This is not the end of the world, and certainly anything but apocalyptic in its aesthetics. Without cars, buses, bikes and people on foot to get in the way, it is simply a bright, sunny, well-manicured LA like no one has ever imagined.

From the roads and sidewalks to streets and highways, everything becomes crystal clear as the viewer is able to pierce the omnipresent layer of activity that always acts as an overlay to the architecture and landmarks of a city.

Student Tom Baker began this as a class project, but it has since become something of an internet sensation – his photography shows a world we can barely picture on our own and still hardly believe even when we see it.

The post Wonderful! Our World Without Traffic [Full-Color Photos] first appeared on Dornob.