Ohio is building the country’s longest driverless highway

AP

Ohio is relying on a $ 218 million freeway to bring tech freaks out of sunny California and test their autonomous technology alongside cornfields, cows, and Cedar Point.

The state of Fuc – um, Buckeye lines 35 miles of Route 33 with fiber optic cables that broadcast traffic conditions, accidents, and weather changes to driverless cars over a Wi-Fi network. The Internet on the Autobahn will be available until the end of September. It will connect the autobahn to driverless car sensors sometime next year. Inverse reports:

The miles of orange cables are 15.2 cm in diameter and can support seven different fiber optic cables. Eric Phillips, CEO of Union County Economic Development Partnership, told Inverse.

Only one fiber optic cable is currently being rolled out, which has 432 strands of fiber optic cable to meet the internet needs of local communities and the connected motorway. The sensors along the freeway will use fiber optic internet to support communication between receivers and sensors-equipped cars along the route.

Ohio received a $ 50 million federal government grant last year to prepare Columbus infrastructure for connection with autonomous vehicles. Cars with vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure capabilities are very important to make sure driverless cars are as safe as possible. The US Department of Transportation expects connected cars to be eliminated 80 percent of unaffected crashes, and the Obama administration proposed a stipulate that all new cars have networked technology until 2023.

Reverse Reports Ohio’s motivation here is to stop the state’s “brain drain” when young people take up job opportunities elsewhere (Can you blame them? Who wants to spend more time in Ohio than necessary?):

To reverse the brain drain, you have to do something that isn’t happening in the rest of the country, says Phillips. “We have to be innovative, we have to look for other ways and [smart mobility] is an opportunity that a lot of people didn’t take, ”Phillips tells me. In the past 14 months, his city has moved from a slow internet to the focus of a major development that he hopes will make Columbus a little more like Silicon Valley.

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FYI: The University of Michigan built the first “Driverless car ready” city, not just a measly freeway … just in case you’re wondering …