Smart Traffic Management Systems or Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are technology solutions that municipalities can integrate into their traffic cabinets and intersections today for fast, cost-effective improvements in safety and traffic flow on their city streets. These systems utilize sensors, cameras, cellular routers, and automation to monitor and automatically direct traffic and reduce congestion. The right technology solution can be scaled to any size and painlessly upgraded anytime. Simultaneously, these technology solutions prepare Smart Cities for coming technological evolutions, including Connected Vehicles and the deployment of 5G.

Budgets for public infrastructure are always tight, and constructing roads and bridges is always expensive. Smart Traffic Management Systems help municipal and regional transportation departments to cope with the situation – quickly and cost-effectively. Integrating smart traffic technology helps them affordably get better performance from their existing infrastructure.

Let’s explore how augmenting and retrofitting infrastructure can dramatically improve the efficiency and safety of existing traffic networks.

Some of the key functionality cities achieve with these systems include the following:

  • Congestion detection: With cameras and sensors constantly monitoring intersections, technicians can monitor the entire city from the city’s traffic management center.
  • Adaptive control: Congestion detection also enables adaptive control, which causes dynamic adjustments to systems, including traffic lights, on-ramp signaling, and bus rapid transit lanes.
  • Connected vehicle: This up-and-coming technology enables vehicles to communicate directly with intersections. Smart Traffic Management can include a connected vehicle roadside unit for this purpose.
  • Emergency routing: A critical application of the Smart Traffic Management System is the ability to give priority access to police, fire, and ambulance services.

Smart monitoring and analytics with 3D lidar

Digital lidar technology provides privacy-safe 3D data for high-accuracy tracking and analytics of motor and foot traffic. Moving objects are classified and measured by the speed and position of vehicles and pedestrians to uncover traffic flow patterns. This makes vehicle detection and tracking, people analytics – analytics of pedestrians and bicycles (where collect no personally identifiable information is collected and all data is privacy-safe in all scenarios) – as well as multi-lane traffic analytics a pioneering technology in the Intelligent Transportation System area.Â