Automotive / Cars
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Background: When traveling in a vehicle, a person’s intuitive sense of speed is partly determined by the feeling of air movement. For example, going at 30 miles per hour on a bike (enclosed cabin: no) may feel faster than going 600 miles per hour in an airplane (enclosed cabin: yes). The issue: It’s important for…
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The issue: Imagine that you are driving a car down a narrow road and you see a person unloading groceries from a car trunk. There are two common options: Continue driving: hope the person unloading the car doesn’t walk out into the street Honk the horn, to inform the person unloading the car that you…
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Background: In many cities, there is no substantial funding for public transit. This results in extremely poor service (routes with minimal coverage of the city and few buses). This leads to a “death spiral” where people stop taking the (terrible) public transit, the service gets even worse, and so on. These problems can, in theory,…
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Background: In many cities, there are a large number of “almost-a-parking-spot” locations (for example, between two driveways) that can only fit an extremely small car. Additionally, most popular models of small cars have gotten substantially larger over time. For example, a 1959 Mini Cooper is 120 inches long, while a 2005 model is 143 inches…
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The issue: One transportation model used by ride-sharing cars (formerly called “taxis”) is the “carpool”-style trip, where multiple passengers are picked up and dropped off at various points along a mostly-shared route. (Lyft Line and Uber Pool are currently the most well-known of these.) This “carpool”-style trip is cheaper than a normal ride for each…
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Background: Phone map apps often have a few optional settings for a route, such as: Avoid highways (for driving) Fewer bus transfers (for public transit) Avoid hills (for walking) The issue: Sometimes, you want drive on the most scenic route from point A to point B, without too much concern about efficiency. For example, you might…
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Background: In most American cities, four-way intersections with stoplights are the most common form of traffic control. The issue: As a pedestrian, these intersections are frustrating: if the stoplights are not synchronized, you’ll randomly encounter red lights while walking from block to block. But even when lights are synchronized, they are synchronized for car driving…
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Background: In a hypothetical future where self-driving cars are increasingly common, they’ll have to do a really good job of automatically distinguishing between things that require sudden braking (e.g. a person in the roadway) and things that are OK to hit (e.g. a tumbling empty cardboard box). The issue: This is a hard problem. When…
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The issue: One ever-present hazard for bicyclists is the possibility of being “doored”—hit by a suddenly-opened driver’s side door of a parked car. A similar issue confounds carpool passengers: when exiting a full vehicle, the driver’s-side passenger must open the door directly into traffic (since they cannot exit on the curb side). This presents the…
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Background: “Lost cat” and “lost dog” signs are often placed up on telephone poles (Fig. 1), but it’s unlikely that a specific person who sees a lost pet will also have seen the sign (or even know that the pet is actually lost in the first place). Proposal: In order to add more people…
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