Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

The problem of traffic jam has become a cerebral thrombus in the city of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Under our pattern management, not only the degree of urban road congestion relief is limited, but also develop fancy congestion methods. For example, highway congestion caused by free highways during holidays, and rural road congestion caused by the craze of returning home during the holiday season.

It seems that the way to solve congestion can never catch up with the soaring degree of congestion brought about by economic development.

Congestion management in imagination and congestion management in reality

Whenever such a time, we will pin our hopes on technological progress.

We have fantasized about a lot of technical solutions to traffic jams.

For example, it is hoped that mobile map navigation software can predict traffic congestion through AI algorithm and help motorists plan their routes.

For example, we are pinning our hopes on smart highways and vehicle networking, trying to strengthen the links between cars and cars, cars and roads, and collect more data to coordinate drivers and assist future road planning.

But in practice, the popularity of smart highways and vehicle networking has only just begun, and it is difficult to really play a role. Mobile map navigation software can not really carry out compulsory popularization, can not collect enough comprehensive and authoritative road vehicle information, and can only emphasize the auxiliary guiding role in congestion management.

As a result, the imaginary technology has become the real "policy"-traffic restrictions, number restrictions, purchase restrictions. Correct the congestion by limiting the total amount of traffic on the road. Although this kind of governance has brought inconvenience to many people, under the condition that the driving space remains the same, the demand for driving continues to grow and the demand exceeds supply, forcing some cars off the road may already be the best solution.

In this way, the problem of congestion is essentially a problem of supply and demand. And the best way to solve the problem of supply and demand is not to use price adjustment?

For example, traveling during the peak hours at 09:00 in the morning will increase the fuel tax burden, choosing to enter congested roads will also increase the related tax burden, and so on.

In the past, it was very difficult to coordinate the supply and demand of driving space through driving costs.

Whether it is the road section congestion or the period of congestion, itself has a very strong dynamic. Maybe this hour is congested, and the next hour is unimpeded, which does not have the feasibility of pricing.

At present, most countries implement an one-size-fits-all charging model through the combination of fuel tax and high-speed fares, and the coordination capacity is too limited.

In fact, many people are dissatisfied with the tax model of the fuel tax itself, as mentioned in the article "how Technology eliminates Traffic jams" reported by the Wall Street Journal. many people believe that a single tax based on fuel purchases is a punishment for those who do not have the financial means to replace new cars.

Is the Ore Go model feasible to replace fuel tax with mileage?

But today, congestion pricing through technology assistance is becoming a reality.

In Oregon, a program called Ore Go is under way to replace fuel taxes with mileage records. The mileage of the car in Ohio is recorded by configuring the IoT device on the car and charged by the mileage.

To put it simply, the price of fuel tax varies from state to state in the United States, and the fuel tax itself should solve the problems of congestion and pollution emissions caused by vehicles in the process of driving, so it is possible for vehicles to emit pollution in area A. but pay fuel tax in area B.

Ore Go's solution can not only refine the tax system, but also help drivers save costs. Calculators can be found on Ore Go's home page to make it easier for drivers to calculate which way to save money, and then choose whether to use Ore Go or continue to pay fuel taxes.

Not only that, Oregon collects driving data in this way, which in turn assists municipal decisions on road construction.

This government-led way to attract drivers to install equipment with lower taxes and fees, and eventually achieve universal data collection, is entering more and more cities, California, Colorado, Minnesota.

The future problems of future travel

But what the Ore Go model has changed is not just a little tax today, its real purpose is to deal with all kinds of problems that may arise in the future.

At present, the popularity of autopilot in the future will bring the following problems:

1. Ownership of vehicles

If all vehicles are leased in the future, they will not belong to individual drivers. Then there will be a large number of meaningless empty driving periods for self-driving vehicles to find parking spaces and find users. Not only is it not conducive to dredging traffic, it may also cause more pollution.

2. Payment of driving cost

If the vehicle does not belong to the individual, then the cost of fuel can only be passed on to the individual users through the car timeshare rental company, which contains a large number of complex processes and adds a lot of costs.

3. Get through the data interface of different brands of self-driving cars.

The opening of traffic data, although it can stagnate in the bottleneck today. But for autopilot, especially for future travel based on self-driving timeshare, it can be said to be an essential part. Especially in the process of the popularity of autopilot, there is bound to be a parallel period of autopilot and manual driving. At this time, if there is not a simple and convenient way to collect the driving data, it will bring great inconvenience.

In the United States, there are some future travel pilot programs based on Ore Go, ClearRoad, which are designed to deal with future driving problems.

ClearRoad also promotes the use of small-car IoT devices to collect data and use mileage instead of oil prices. ClearRoad advocates the application of the same "gradient billing model" as water and electricity prices in autopilot mode, where users have a certain mileage per month in individual or household units, and car prices will be increased if the mileage exceeds the mileage. In this way, the difficulty of calculating the car cost under the future car rental mode is solved.

More importantly, ClearRoad aims to collect data on self-driving cars, ordinary cars and even freight vehicles in a lightweight mode, and even through mandatory installation to get through the data protection among manufacturers, so as to achieve the dynamic pricing of road congestion mentioned above, and coordinate road use to alleviate congestion with price.

However, at present, ClearRoad is still in the state of testing, not to mention that the popularity of autopilot applications is far away, just the uploading and downlink of massive data, the cross calculation of road congestion and cost, it needs strong computing power and data transmission ability to support. I'm afraid it has to be 5G.

However, the Wall Street Journal's report on ClearRoad also mentioned that many people do not accept this approach. People think that this is using tax breaks to "buy" personal private data, and it is a creepy picture to expose their whereabouts to countless pairs of eyes all the time in order to reduce taxes.

It can be seen that the development of a technology requires the cooperation of countless details, such as ethics, policy norms, infrastructure and so on. The imaginary AI treatment of traffic jams may not really come until all these are mature.

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