The secret to avoiding red lights during rush hour in Utah’s largest city might be as simple as following a bus.

Transportation officials have spent the past few years refining a system in which radio transmitters inside commuter buses talk directly to the traffic signals in the Salt Lake City area, requesting a few extra seconds of green when they approach.

Congestion on these so-called smart streets is already noticeably smoother, but it’s just a small preview of the high-tech upgrades that could be coming soon to roads across Utah and ultimately across the U.S.

Buoyed by a $20 million federal grant and an ambitious calling to “Connect the West,” the goal is to ensure every vehicle in Utah, as well as neighboring Colorado and Wyoming, can eventually communicate with one another and the roadside infrastructure about congestion, accidents, road hazards and weather conditions.

With that knowledge, drivers can instantly know they should take another route, bypassing the need for a human to manually send an alert to an electronic street sign or the mapping apps found on cellphones.

“A vehicle can tell us a lot about what’s going on in the roadway,” said Blaine Leonard, a transportation technology engineer at the Utah Department of Transportation. “Maybe it braked really hard, or the windshield wipers are on, or the wheels are slipping. The car anonymously broadcasts to us that blip of data 10 times a second, giving us a constant stream of information.”

When cars transmit information in real time to other cars and the various sensors posted along and above the road, the technology is known broadly as vehicle-to-everything, or V2X. Last month, the U.S. Department of Transportation unveiled a national blueprint for how state and local governments and private companies should deploy the various V2X projects already in the works to make sure everyone is on the same page.

The overarching objective is universal: dramatically curb roadway deaths and serious injuries, which have recently spiked to historic levels.

A 2016 analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded V2X could help. Implementing just two of the earliest vehicle-to-everything applications nationwide would prevent 439,000 to 615,000 crashes and save 987 to 1,366 lives, its research found.

Dan Langenkamp has been lobbying for road safety improvements since his wife Sarah Langenkamp, a U.S. diplomat, was killed by a truck while biking in Maryland in 2022. Joining officials at the news conference announcing the vehicle-to-everything blueprint, Langenkamp urged governments across the U.S. to roll out the technology as widely and quickly as possible.

“How can we as government officials, as manufacturers, and just as Americans not push this technology forward as fast as we possibly can, knowing that we have the power to rescue ourselves from this disaster, this crisis on our roads,” he said.

Most of the public resistance has been about privacy. Although the V2X rollout plan commits to safeguarding personal information, some privacy advocates remain skeptical.

Critics say that while the system may not track specific vehicles, it can compile enough identifying characteristics—even something as seemingly innocuous as tire pressure levels—that it wouldn’t take too much work to figure out who is behind the wheel and where they are going.

“Once you get enough unique information, you can reasonably say the car that drives down this street at this time that has this particular weight class probably belongs to the mayor,” said Cliff Braun, associate director of technology, policy and research for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for digital privacy.

The federal blueprint says the nation’s top 75 metropolitan areas should aspire to have at least 25% of their signalized intersections equipped with the technology by 2028, along with higher milestones in subsequent years. With its fast start, the Salt Lake City area already has surpassed 20%.

Of course, upgrading the signals is the relatively easy part. The most important data comes from the cars themselves. While most new ones have connected features, they don’t all work the same way.

Before embarking on the “Connect the West” plan, Utah officials tested what they call the nation’s first radio-based, connected vehicle technology, using only the data supplied by fleet vehicles such as buses and snow plows. One early pilot program upgraded the bus route on a busy stretch of Redwood Road, and it isn’t just the bus riders who have noticed a difference.

“Whatever they’re doing is working,” said Jenny Duenas, assistant director of nearby Panda Child Care, where 80 children between 6 weeks and 12 years old are enrolled. “We haven’t seen traffic for a while. We have to transport our kiddos out of here, so when it’s a lot freer, it’s a lot easier to get out of the daycare.”

Casey Brock, bus communications supervisor for the Utah Transit Authority, said most of the changes might not be noticeable to drivers. However, even shaving a few seconds off a bus route can dramatically reduce congestion while improving safety, he said.

“From a commuter standpoint it may be, ‘Oh, I had a good traffic day,'” Brock said. “They don’t have to know all the mechanisms going on behind the scenes.”

This summer, Michigan opened a 3-mile (4.8-kilometer) stretch of a connected and automated vehicle corridor planned for Interstate 94 between Ann Arbor and Detroit. The pilot project features digital infrastructure, including sensors and cameras installed on posts along the highway, that will help drivers prepare for traffic slowdowns by sending notifications about such things as debris and stalled vehicles.

Similar technology is being employed for a smart freight corridor around Austin, Texas, that aims to inform truck drivers of road conditions and eventually cater to self-driving trucks.

Darran Anderson, director of strategy and innovation at the Texas Department of Transportation, said officials hope the technology not only boosts the state’s massive freight industry but also helps reverse a troubling trend that has spanned more than two decades. The last day without a road fatality in Texas was Nov. 7, 2000.

Cavnue, a Washington, D.C.-based subsidiary of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Infrastructure partners, funded the Michigan project and was awarded a contract to develop the one in Texas. The company has set a goal of becoming an industry leader in smart roads technology.

Chris Armstrong, Cavnue’s vice president of product, calls V2X “a digital seatbelt for the car” but says it only works if cars and roadside infrastructure can communicate seamlessly with one another.

“Instead of speaking 50 different languages, overnight we’d like to all speak the same language,” he said.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Kamilaroi Country lies in far northwest New South Wales, past Tamworth and crossing over the Queensland border. Here, the bunyip bird (Australasian bittern, Botaurus poiciloptilus), and the brolga (Grus rubicunda or burraalga in Kamilaroi) have been part of life, lore, spirit, dance and culture with Country for thousands of generations.

In this Country, these two species are now rare. Kamilaroi people want to turn this around. But to do that, we come up against a gap between Western conservation laws and culturally significant species/entities.

Under Australia’s conservation laws, a species is considered threatened when its numbers fall so low, or its distribution shrinks so much, it might not recover. But the threatened species legal protections—and any recovery funding it provides—are focused on the Western approach of countable nature, not the Indigenous focus on nature-with-culture.

We are not splitting hairs. The difference is momentous, as we document in recent research. It determines whose environmental research and management is considered legitimate and resourced, and the terms on which knowledge is shared and exchanged.

Understanding this helps find common ground between ecological and Indigenous priorities. It will also be crucial to the now-delayed major overhaul of Australia’s nature laws.

Threatened species on Country

To list a species as threatened under federal and New South Wales law, two things must be determined.

The first is how many animals or plants of a given species are still in their habitat and how consistent this is over generations.

Second is how widespread the species is compared to the past, and how much habitat is left.

This formula—abundance plus distribution—determines if the species is in decline and if it needs urgent attention.

Kamilaroi Country is home to the Gwydir wetlands, an immensely sacred place where brolgas and bunyip birds were once present in great numbers.

Brolgas are known for their elaborate mating dances, and embodying their spirit is an important Indigenous dance. With long legs and necks, Brolgas are this continent’s largest water bird. But their presence has fallen sharply in southern Australia. These days, brolgas appear in the Kamilaroi wetlands less often.

It’s also rarer to see or hear the well-hidden bunyip bird. The Kamilaroi believe the bittern’s’ booming cry signals the presence of the bunyip, a creature from ancestral times whose songs and stories keep people away from sacred water holes.

Buruuugu (Dreaming) stories passed down from the old people connect these birds with Kamilaroi people and freshwater life, encompassing culture, lore, language, dance, meaning and existence.

The brolga is listed as vulnerable in New South Wales and the bunyip bird is endangered. Both species have been found or their presence predicted in regions close to Kamilaroi Country.

Because these species are present close by, it makes it harder for Kamilaroi people to access Country, government funding, resources and protections for these species.

The problem is worse where culturally significant species / entities are generally abundant, but on a shrunken range. Species important to Indigenous people may be lost entirely from Country where they belong, yet government programs offer very few options for protection or resources.

When one plus one does not equal two

There is a growing openness among ecologists, governments and Western land managers to foreground and include Indigenous knowledge in decision making, Indigenous people are ready and waiting. This respectful knowledge exchange is often called two-way learning.

It’s common to think of these different value sets as additive: ecological values plus Indigenous values equals better conservation. At times, reports on threatened species will include a section on Aboriginal people’s cultural values. And Indigenous caring for Country is seen as a vital tool in the toolkit for recovering threatened species.

But Kamilaroi knowledge is not just a management tool. And these species are not separate from the people who care for them. For Kamilaroi, the brolga and the bunyip bird are culture and kin. This is not nature plus culture, two categories alongside each other, but nature with culture—a transformation rather than an addition.

Typically these two categories are divided for study and management, as in the natural and social sciences. But Country weaves nature and culture together and focuses on which relationships are important and why. From this viewpoint, ecological species and habitats become folded into Country, which also includes its people.

So what do we suggest?

Our current conservation policies look for ways for Indigenous peoples to fit in with biodiversity conservation approaches. Instead, we need to find protections and resources to support Indigenous people’s knowledge and relationships with Country. The significant growth of Indigenous Protected Areas is a start, as these large areas of land and sea are managed by Indigenous groups and rangers.

But we need our environmental laws, reporting frameworks and levels of resourcing to include support for Indigenous governance across their systems. These matters go well beyond protected area boundaries.

It could mean writing laws to recognize and invest in culturally significant species under Indigenous guidance. It could mean programs supporting Indigenous peoples to set their own priorities and measures of success for Country and culture, and set the terms of how knowledge about Country is used and exchanged.

And it could mean flipping governance so conservation is increasingly led by Indigenous people, to be the voice for and with responsibilities to Country—the enfolded relationships of brolga and bunyip bird and Kamilaroi people—at the fore rather than an afterthought.

When the migrating brolga arrives in the Gwydir Wetlands to perform its hopping, swooping dance, to nest and mate, you get an ecological outcome: a vulnerable species is breeding. But you can also witness how and why the world’s oldest living culture keeps brolgas close, as kin.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Orange, blue, calico, two-toned and … cotton-candy colored?

Those are all the hues of lobsters that have showed up in fishers’ traps, supermarket seafood tanks and scientists’ laboratories over the last year. The funky-colored crustaceans inspire headlines that trumpet their rarity, with particularly uncommon baby blue-tinted critters described by some as “cotton-candy colored” often estimated at 1 in 100 million.

A recent wave of these curious colored lobsters in Maine, New York, Colorado and beyond has scientists asking just how atypical the discolored arthropods really are. As is often the case in science, it’s complicated.

Lobsters’ color can vary due to genetic and dietary differences, and estimates about how rare certain colors are should be taken with a grain of salt, said Andrew Goode, lead administrative scientist for the American Lobster Settlement Index at the University of Maine. There is also no definitive source on the occurrence of lobster coloration abnormalities, scientists said.

“Anecdotally, they don’t taste any different either,” Goode said.

In the wild, lobsters typically have a mottled brown appearance, and they turn an orange-red color after they are boiled for eating. Lobsters can have color abnormalities due to mutation of genes that affect the proteins that bind to their shell pigments, Goode said.

The best available estimates about lobster coloration abnormalities are based on data from fisheries sources, said marine sciences professor Markus Frederich of the University of New England in Maine. However, he said, “no one really tracks them.”

Frederich and other scientists said that commonly cited estimates such as 1 in 1 million for blue lobsters and 1 in 30 million for orange lobsters should not be treated as rock-solid figures. However, he and his students are working to change that.

Frederich is working on noninvasive ways to extract genetic samples from lobsters to try to better understand the molecular basis for rare shell coloration. Frederich maintains a collection of strange-colored lobsters at the university’s labs and has been documenting the progress of the offspring of an orange lobster named Peaches who is housed at the university.

Peaches had thousands of offspring this year, which is typical for lobsters. About half were orange, which is not, Frederich said. Of the baby lobsters that survived, a slight majority were regular colored ones, Frederich said.

Studying the DNA of atypically colored lobsters will give scientists a better understanding of their underlying genetics, Frederich said.

“Lobsters are those iconic animals here in Maine, and I find them beautiful. Especially when you see those rare ones, which are just looking spectacular. And then the scientist in me simply says I want to know how that works. What’s the mechanism?” Frederich said.

He does eat lobster but “never any of those colorful ones,” he said.

One of Frederich’s lobsters, Tamarind, is the typical color on one side and orange on the other. That is because two lobster eggs fused and grew as one animal, Frederich said. He said that’s thought to be as rare as 1 in 50 million.

Rare lobsters have been in the news lately, with an orange lobster turning up in a Long Island, New York, Stop & Shop last month, and another appearing in a shipment being delivered to a Red Lobster in Colorado in July.

The odd-looking lobsters will likely continue to come to shore because of the size of the U.S. lobster fishery, said Richard Wahle, a longtime University of Maine lobster researcher who is now retired. U.S. fishers have brought more than 90 million pounds (40,820 metric tons) of lobster to the docks in every year since 2009 after only previously reaching that volume twice, according to federal records that go back to 1950.

“In an annual catch consisting of hundreds of millions of lobster, it shouldn’t be surprising that we see a few of the weird ones every year, even if they are 1 in a million or 1 in 30 million,” Wahle said.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.