I live in a place where road traffic congestion has gotten so bad that you have to leave hours early to get to an appointment that is just in the next town or city. I sometimes suspect the government has given up on finding solutions to mobility and so we will eventually have to depend on private companies that will come up with experimental solutions to getting people and goods around the city more easily. The Bulgaria-based designers for the transport design studio is proposing a city-wide transport system called Halfgrid. It involves individual person-sized capsules moving around the city through suspended cables and powered by artificial intelligence. Basically, you can get a person and whatever goods you want to be transported to your destination on a separate layer above ground in order to not add to the continuous road congestion on the ground.

Israel's traffic congestion ranks near the worst among developed economies, but an algorithm can help, says one of the country's IT firms engaged in the auto and mobility sector. ITC, or Intelligent Traffic Control, was one of the artificial intelligence players at Tel Aviv's recent EcoMotion showcase where high-tech and AI firms hope to make transport more efficient and cleaner. Its AI software collects real-time data from road cameras and then sends instructions to manipulate traffic lights based on vehicle flows. "ITC managed to prove mathematically that many traffic jams can be prevented –- if you intervene early enough," said its co-founder and chief technology officer Dvir Kenig, citing a 30 percent drop in traffic at the two junctions using their system. The company says road congestion is a global scourge, calculating that the average driver spends three days a year stuck in traffic, also pumping out greenhouse gas emissions.

Israel's traffic congestion ranks near the worst among developed economies but an algorithm can help, says one of the country's IT firms engaged in the auto and mobility sector. ITC, or Intelligent Traffic Control, was one of the artificial intelligence players at Tel Aviv's recent EcoMotion showcase where high-tech and AI firms hope to make transport more efficient and cleaner. Its AI software collects real-time data from road cameras and then sends instructions to manipulate traffic lights based on vehicle flows. "ITC managed to prove mathematically that many traffic jams can be prevented -- if you intervene early enough," said its co-founder and chief technology officer Dvir Kenig, citing a 30 percent drop in traffic at the two junctions using their system. The company says road congestion is a global scourge, calculating that the average driver spends three days a year stuck in traffic, also pumping out greenhouse gas emissions.

Self-driving vehicles have the potential to reduce the cost of congestion on Australia's roads by more than a quarter over the next decade if there is a quick take-up of the technology, new modelling shows. The cost of congestion to the nation would, by 2030, drop to $27 billion a year from $37 billion if automated vehicles made up 30 per cent of the kilometres travelled, according to analysis of a "fast-penetration scenario" by the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics. Drawing on the analysis, federal Cities and Urban Infrastructure Minister Alan Tudge will tell a conference on Monday that potential benefits from self-driving vehicles would be the equivalent of spending tens of billions of dollars on boosting the size of roads and railways. A trial of an automated shuttle bus has been under way at Sydney Olympic Park since late 2017. "There are several ways that automated vehicles can reduce congestion, but the main one is that it would allow cars to safely travel more closely together," he will say in a speech to the Cities Symposium in western Sydney.

THE most distractingly unrealistic feature of most science fiction--by some margin--is how the great soaring cities of the future never seem to struggle with traffic. Whatever dystopias lie ahead, futurists seem confident we can sort out congestion. If hope that technology will fix traffic springs eternal, history suggests something different. Transport innovation, from railways to cars, reshaped cities and drove economic advance. But it also brought crowded commutes.