As traffic congestion in cities is becoming a major problem cities are turning to smart technologies to improve road safety and reduce wasted energy. This helps passengers and drivers save time, reduces emissions and delays in traffic.
The technology behind it is based on software and hardware. The former is the subcomponent that runs, and the second is the command and control center. Both are complemented with advanced sensors and processing technologies like ANPR (automotive plate recognition) which records data about vehicles’ movements and is able to detect road signs.
Depending on the solution, smart traffic lights can process data on-device or send it to a cloud-based location. The latter offers more sophisticated modeling and predictive analysis that can stop traffic congestion and to harmonize public transport schedules. In this way, they can reduce average travel times by 25%, reduce the wait times for signals by 40%, and cut down on emissions by 20% according to Carnegie Mellon University.
In addition to reducing traffic signals’ control delays, a smart traffic light system can also increase the flow of pedestrians and micromobility vehicles such electric bikes and e-scooters. This is because they’re often not able to comply with traditional traffic signal preemption rules. In London, for example crashes on e-scooters jumped by 2800% in the initial quarter of 2021, so it is important to include them in traffic light control.
