California told 85,000 hybrid drivers to move over, literally. Now everyone is feeling the sting.

Starting last July the yellow stickers allowing hybrid owners to drive alone in the high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane expired. The move came in preparation for an anticipated increase in electric vehicles on the road that will be allowed to retain the privilege. Though it may be the case that EVs are gaining popularity, pushing hybrids into regular traffic is causing problems for everyone.

According to a study released Monday by the University of California-Berkeley, the change had the effect you might expect: regular traffic speeds decreased and HOV speeds went up.

That isn’t all though, traffic actually slowed in HOV lanes at points where drivers try to merge back into regular traffic because of the slowdown. In other words, drivers in both lanes are noticing new slowdowns.

The report was based on six months of roadway sensor speed and congestion data, and written by Michael Cassidy, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Katae Jang, a doctoral student in that department.

Cassidy said there is still plenty of space for hybrids in the HOV lanes, even with the new EVs on the road.

The only new production cars available that meet the standard are the Tesla Roadster and the Nissan Leaf. The Chevy Volt doesn’t qualify because of a specific California emissions law, though Gm says it will be addressing the issue soon.

If they don’t, they may find fierce competition. Toyota will be releasing the 2012 Prius Plug-In soon, which qualifies for the sticker. So does the 2012 Fisker Karma.

[Source: Green Car Reports]

Previously capped at 80 mph, the Texas House of Representatives approved a new transportation bill that will raise speed limits up to 85 mph in select areas and put an end to the night-time speed limit as well. Yee-haw!

Though exciting for driving enthusiasts (or anyone in a hurry), don’t pack your bags for the Lone Star State just yet. Texas engineers and traffic analysts must first make safety assessments before the state can swap for new signs. Only after a review on Interstate highways determining which will have its speed limit raised from 70 to 75 mph does the state review which can increase from 80 to 85 mph. Yes, the process does sound a bit lame but hopefully we will be rewarded for our patience.

Imagine having a gadget in your car that could tell you how fast to go to avoid stopping at the next light. Well, now you can. A network of dashboard smartphones can monitor traffic lights and congestion helping drivers avoid idling, cutting fuel use by 20 percent.

SignalGuru collects and analyzes traffic data from images captured on dashboard smartphones, to inform drivers of the most efficient routes. The researchers installed iPhones on car dashboards in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in Singapore, where traffic lights have fixed schedules. SignalGuru can predict when lights will change with an error margin of two-thirds of a second.

The SignalGuru study won a best paper award at last month’s Association for Computing Machinery MobiSys conference, but the program would require many users to be a real solution for traffic congestion.

“If you can save even a small percentage of that, then you can have a large effect on the energy that the U.S. consumes,” Emmanouil Koukoumidis, a Princeton PhD candidate and visiting researcher at MIT, was quoted as saying.

[Source: CNET]

The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to remove its controversial red light cameras, citing difficulties in enforcing them.

According to the photo-enforcement law, paying its tickets was merely “voluntary,” which is an excuse that might not work for your next school-zone speeding ticket. Only 60% of tickets issued were actually paid. Naturally, accusations of revenue generation rather than safety were raised, for reasons that weren’t entirely unfounded.

The cameras were allegedly installed at intersections more suited to raising money rather than improving safety. The council issued a boycott of Arizona businesses in 2010 as a protest against that state’s immigration laws, but allowed Scottsdale-based American Traffic Solutions to continue operating cameras in LA. The cameras came under fire only when city accountants found that the cameras were generating far less than they should for the city—and in fact cost over $1 million to keep the program running.

The final nail in the red-light coffin was when the LA Superior Court found issue with giving out citations, as they were mailed to the vehicle’s owner rather than the one actually driving the vehicle at the time.

Currently, there are 32 red-light cameras in the whole of Los Angeles. The future of these is uncertain, but for drivers in Los Angeles County, there’s one less excuse for a traffic ticket.

[Source: New York Times]

Hate sitting in traffic? Well, don’t expect that problem to go away any time soon. Studies show that traffic congestion is up in metro areas 11 percent.

Not even rising gas prices can stop us from getting in our cars and making that slow commute into work everyday. According to INRIX, a company that tracks traffic congestion, the USA’s 100 biggest metropolitan areas have increased by 11 percent in 2010 last year and things are only going to get worse. This is thanks in part to an improving economy.

“What we’re seeing is small job gains, big movements of people and near-record (freight) movement,” said Rick Schuman, public sector vice president at INRIX. “If that’s what happened with minimal job growth, what happens when the jobs really come back?”

The study shows that 70 of the US’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, which include New York City, San Francisco and Portland, Ore., saw increased congestion last year, and 41 reported congestion that exceeded levels reported in 2006. In 2007, traffic congestion peaked, showing a huge increase of 21% in miles driven from 1995 to 2007. And smaller cities weren’t immune to traffic snarls – smaller metropolitan areas such as Birmingham, Ala., Buffalo and Milwaukee exceeded their 2007 congestion levels, giving them the highest numbers on record.

[Source: USA Today]

Living in Los Angeles and being an automotive enthusiast sometimes doesn’t always mix well together. Some of us here at AutoGuide are based in LA and don’t often get great chances to truly “enjoy” our cars having to regularly sit in traffic staring at brake lights. But now we guess we have it easy since news has broke of a 60-mile long traffic jam in China between Beijing and Zhangjiakou. It’s being caused by road repairs and has been this way since middle of August with the light at the end of the tunnel sometime around September 13th.

Now for anyone that has ever been to Beijing and witnessed the driving there first hand, it’s not exactly what we’d call “by regulation.” In fact, it’s more of a free-for-all to get from point a to point b. Now sprinkle in some road work and a major traffic jam and we’re guessing it’s pure chaos out there. But not all is bad as some drivers have apparently taken up card and chess games while waiting for traffic to move again.

And clever little entrepreneurs have set up shop alongside the highway selling food and drinks at an inflated price. Even the local police has used an upward of 400 officers to get everyone to simmer down.

[Source: MSNBC]

New proposals like a London-style “congestion charge” and highway tolls for special lanes that would move faster are being floated both in Canada and the United States, as major cities grapple with traffic problems and infrastructure that wasn’t meant to deal with an increasing number of cars.

An article in the Chicago Tribune details how a government-sponsored panel concluded that new strategies, involving tolls on key expressways, involving fees on certain lanes during peak demand periods, may be necessary to discourage cars from driving into the city, and collect revenue from drivers willing to pay a premium to for the privilege of driving.

Minneapolis and Orange County, California have both implemented similar schemes, while Toronto, Canada’s largest city, with a population of 5.6 million people is also debating the whether to enact road tolls to discourage drivers in the downtown core.

The key element in all of this is public transit. Toronto has a fairly comprehensive system, that is expensive and fault, but the choice of many due to convenience, and the high costs of owning a car. London’s charge is similarly successful, by making those who can afford it pay the charge, while most people who wouldn’t have driven previously continue to take the subway.

[Source: Chicago Tribune]