Smart Technologies for Traffic

by admin

As congestion in the city becomes a major challenge cities are turning to smart technologies to improve road safety and decrease wasted energy. This helps drivers and passengers save time, reduces carbon emissions and delays in traffic.

The technology behind it is built on hardware and software. The resource former is the executing subcomponent, while the latter serves as the command and control center. Both are equipped with the latest sensing technologies and processing, such as ANPR (automotive plate recognition), which captures data about vehicles’ movements and detects road signs.

Depending on the solution, smart traffic lights can either process data on-devices or send it to a cloud location. This type of solution offers more sophisticated modeling and predictive analysis to prevent traffic congestion and harmonize public transportation schedules. In this way, they can reduce the average travel time by 25%, shorten signal wait times by 40%, and decrease emissions by 20%, according to Carnegie Mellon University.

A well-designed traffic light system is not only able to reduce the amount of time traffic signals take to operate it can also improve the flow of pedestrians and of micromobility vehicles, such as e-bikes or electric scooters. This is due to the fact that they’re often not able to comply with traditional traffic signal preemption rules. In London, for example, e-scooter crashes increased 2800% during the first second quarter of 2021. therefore it is vital to factor them into traffic light control.