Future Bites

Traffic Control? There’s an App for That

This is Future Bites, a clearinghouse for bite-sized morsels of future news.  Offered every Monday.  To get a mix of Future Bites and future-focused essays delivered to your inbox, click “subscribe” at the right.

This week, I offer you the latest in navigation apps.  This one can not only route you around traffic jams, it can actually prevent them in the first place.

screenshot from the Greenway app

Behold Greenway.  This app works a lot like Google Maps, or a typical GPS unit, providing directions from your current location to a destination of your choice.  The genius part?  Its algorithms account for all its users simultaneously.  This allows the system to route its drivers in different ways to make sure no single street gets over capacity.  Of course, it couldn’t work perfectly unless every single driver was using it.  But this is the kind of stuff I get really excited about!  Humans connected to one another, in the right way, can see more of a situation, and make smarter decisions about it, than any single person.  Hat tip to Good.is.

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