Smart City Traffic

City governments everywhere are turning to smart city traffic technology to reduce costs, improve quality of life for citizens and mitigate the impact of traffic on the environment.

Smart city traffic systems combine data, technology and analytics to provide city managers with real-time information about traffic conditions throughout an urban environment. Superior smart city traffic technology can help to address a number of traffic management challenges, including:

• Increasingly longer commute times that reduce productivity, increase fuel costs and lower quality of life for citizens.
• Slower response times for emergency vehicles due to congested city streets.
• Higher levels of smog and poor air quality – the result of more vehicles on the road and longer commute times.
• Increased deterioration of roads, bridges and tunnels due to increased traffic and longer traffic stoppage.
• Greater likelihood of accidents for motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians as the volume of traffic and congestion grows.

Smart city traffic management involves a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices that provide a real-time understanding of traffic volume and patterns. Smart city traffic solutions also include smart traffic lights that can better manage intersections and protect pedestrians while keeping vehicles moving, along with signage that can direct drivers to alternate routes and flexible carpool lanes that can change in real-time to accommodate traffic conditions. Robust network connectivity is critical to connecting these traffic management devices and transmitting a flood of real-time information to a city’s IoT platform, where analytics software transforms raw data into actionable intelligence and automated actions for smart traffic management.

The benefits of smart city traffic technology

With smart city traffic solutions, cities can:

• Improve traffic flow by more efficiently routing traffic through city streets and assisting drivers in accessing relevant GPS information that can help them determine fastest routes, avoid street and road closures, find available parking.
• Promote traffic safety by managing the flow of vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians at intersections more carefully.
• Increase enforcement by more effectively identifying traffic violations.
• Enhance quality of life by reducing commute times, lessening congestion and improving air quality.
• Provide helpful information to drivers through better signage and through location-based data accessible via smart phone apps and onboard vehicle information systems in connected vehicles.
• Reduce costs by minimizing wear on aging infrastructure.

Spectrum Enterprise: connectivity for smart city traffic systems

Implementing smart city traffic management requires an infrastructure of productivity that provides the speed and reliability to connect thousands of devices and collect mountains of information in real time. As a trusted technology partner to smart cities throughout the U.S., Spectrum Enterprise has already laid the foundation of connectivity that communities require to implement smart city traffic management and other smart city innovations.

Spectrum already has over 840,000 miles of fiber network infrastructure in place and is investing an additional $25 billion in additional capacity and capabilities, bringing high-speed connectivity to even more cities, households and businesses. To serve the needs of smart city traffic deployments, Spectrum also provides:

• High-speed connectivity with symmetrical speeds up to 100 Gbps for cities, large institutions and enterprise clients.
• Gigabit connectivity for homes and businesses across the Spectrum service area.
• Over 350,000 Spectrum WiFi hotspots across the country that will soon provide wireless speeds of 1 Gbps.
• Cellular connectivity through Spectrum Mobile, one of the largest LTE cellular networks in the country.

Learn more about Spectrum Smart Cities at www.spectrumsmartcities.com.