Engineering Applied to Traffic

By: Buck

             For those of you that live in a big city, I am sure you know the stresses of commuting to work every day while slowing lugging through traffic. Sitting in what resembles a parking lot but is truly the freeway, you eye the clock, making calculations in your head trying to determine if you will make it to work on time. This problem was looked at through the eyes of engineers at Kennesaw State University, and a potential solution has risen.
         
             The solution to this problem is a simple bus system, except it is not just any bus system that runs behind schedule and overcharges its passengers. This is a system of reliable, timely, efficient, electric, and semi-self driving buses. They are called Slim Modular Flexible Electric Buses, or SMFe-buses. Associate electoral engineering professor Bill Diong has been working on this idea and leading the research. The idea is that a slimmed down electric bus with a human driver is given its own custom lane on the free way, thus making it a quicker and reliable source of transportation. On top of this, the human driven bus will be followed by multiple electric buses, except these ones are different. The buses that follow the first bus are all self-driving buses, programmed to keep within a certain distance of the bus in front of it while still keeping up. This allows for a larger scale of transportation, with no gas to cut down prices, as well as less drivers needed to also cut down on the pricing. This is expected to add up to a 20 percent savings compared to current busing systems.

             The key to this innovative form of transportation lies within the sensors in the self-driven cars. These sensors have to be extremely accurate in order to both insure the safety of the passengers and to maximize efficiency. Diong, as well as some of his graduate students, are working on these sensors to perfect their performance. The team is designing these buses to reach 65 miles per hour, which is impressive for a self-driving vehicle of that size and weight.

             Hopefully, with this new engineering, the hours spent sitting in a car while commuting to work can be drastically reduced for Americans in big cities. Diong and his team plan on utilizing this innovation fully to benefit the consumer. The team already has a patent being processed for the SMFe-bus concept and hopes that it won't be long until the public gets to see this invention put to the test.