Anyone who has had the pleasure of driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike in the last four years has encountered the “FASTLANE”. If you are not lucky enough to pay sky high tolls for the “Big Dig”, Fastlane is a transponder mounted on a car’s windshield that allows the driver to use a special lane to pay the toll without stopping. Although I hate the concept of paying the toll, Fastlane has made paying the tax a lot easier.
While waiting in line at Logan Airport’s parking garage to pay, I looked around. Probably half of the cars had Fastlane transponders. Why not use Fastlane to pay for parking? There would not be a need for a ticket since the transponder would record when the car entered the garage, similar to the Massachusetts Turnpike. It could also accurately charge the customer by the hour or even minute. This would entice more people to get the transponder and further reduce the cost of collecting the parking fee.
Using the “Where else could a Fastlane transponder be used?” concept, there are other ideas. Where else do you have to roll down a window to pay for something? How about a car wash? Fast food drive-thru? Actually, McDonald’s is already discussing the idea with Fastlane. Full service gas stations? Any other ideas?
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If FASTLANE (or whatever it is called in various places; it is EZ-Pass where I live) were universal (I guess that means mandatory) then it could be used to save electricity in highway lighting. If its the middle of the night and there isn't a vehicle around for miles (as is often the case) then the DOT system could safely shut off the highway lights along a stretch of road.
I like the idea of saving electricity by only lighting areas that are used. Good thinking!
Here's my idea. In remote areas you could use this technology to make sure that people exit the road when expected, i.e. have not encountered some sort of problem. If you are willing to state ahead of time which exit you plan to leave, that would narrow the time down quite a lot. If not, then they would need to wait until the time you are expected at the far end.
Once everyone has a transponder, we can start thinking about hooking cars together into convoys with only the person in front actively in control (especially in remote areas). I wonder if the current generation of Fastlane/EZPass transponders give any distance information, that could be used to maintain seperation?
Well, if you can track people that are way under speed, as GaborKiss points out, then you could also use it to track speeders -- or at least the most egregious.
If it is mathematically impossible to get from scanner N to scanner N+M without speeding, then "Pull it over, buddy!"
Yow!
But what would be cheaper in the long run, installing such a system, or leaving lights as they are (or replacing them with more efficient lighting)?
In response to paron:
FASTLANE could easily determine if you are speeding since they know exactly when/where you entered and exited. This was an initial concern of many drivers. The Mass Pike didn't want this to stop people from getting transponders, so they set a policy that the FASTLANE would not be used for handing out speeding tickets.
However, I believe the FASTLANE records have been used in court to prove a person was in a particular place at a particular time.
In Houston, where these devices are much more rare, they announced plans to catch speeders using them, but I dont think that was ever implemented.
INSTEAD, Houston, with the help of Texas A&M, uses sensors on signs on the major (almost all non-toll) highways to track the speed of cars, averages it and publishes it as a real-time *TRAFFIC REPORT*. The system is brilliant. I have never seen it down; since you're averaging data, you get a good feel of highway speed. In Houston, these highways can vary a lot very quickly in speed. If there were even more devices, like the ubiquitous EZ-Pass where I now live, the data would be even better. The site is here.
The fact that these systems could be used to monitor speed, and/or to tell where I am at any given point in time, is precisely why I won't get an EZPass transponder. Similary, they were experimenting with GPS in rental cars as a way to control their use (and avoid abuse), but people rebelled and the car companies abandoned them as a result. Don't underestimate people's desire for privacy.
I think that this is madness. Whay are we speeding at all. Surely manufacturers are to blame for this. If cars can't travel above the speed limit we can't be fined for speeding and the resources used to catch people can be used elswhere.
Or are the powers that be using speeding as another source of revenue and wouldn't want speed restrictions built into cars.
The FASTLANE or "TeleVia Tag" as its called here in Santiago de Chile is practically mandatory. All urban highways use the same system and therefore most cars have them installed. They were also given out for free, so most interesting applications could be used here, even though we only use them to be charged on urban highways.
I think that a very useful application could be traffic lights dynamicaly adapting to current demand. If the traffic light could know how many cars are on each street, it could determine how much "green time" or "red time" to give to each, depending on flow, time, effect that action will have on the next interseccion, etc. much more accurately. Besides, since each Tag has a unique ID code, certain vehicles, such as ambulances, firetrucks or diplomatic cars could trigger an "all green" on the street they are moving, so that they dont get stuck in traffic jams.