Smart Traffic Lights

Smart traffic lights provide cities with powerful tools for more intelligent traffic management. By more efficiently controlling the flow of vehicles, pedestrians and bicycles through city intersections, smart traffic lights can help to reduce congestion and commute times while improving traffic safety.

Cities across the U.S. face growing challenges when it comes to managing traffic and transportation in urban environments. As city populations continue to rise, city streets become more congested causing commutes to grow longer. Drivers spend more time in their cars and less time on productive work. First responders have more difficulty reaching emergency sites, traffic accidents and pedestrian injuries become more frequent, and air and noise pollution increase as well. Altogether, the trend toward more congested cities translates to a lower quality of life for city residents.

Smart city traffic management and smart traffic lights can have a significant positive impact on these conditions by routing traffic through the city more efficiently and protecting drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists from dangerous conditions. With the help of IoT-enabled cameras and sensors as well as GPS technology on smart phones and in connected vehicles, smart traffic lights can adapt to real-time traffic volume, enabling traffic to flow through intersections with less stoppage. Smart city traffic signage can direct drivers to alternate routes in order to reduce congestion in certain areas or to make it easier for emergency vehicles to reach their destination. Smart traffic lights can also detect signals from the smart phones of pedestrians and bicyclists as they approach an intersection, helping to facilitate their safe passage through crowded crossings.

By implementing smart traffic lights at intersections throughout an urban footprint, smart cities can:

• Enhance the quality of life for citizens by reducing congestion and commute times.
• Reduce the impact of congestion on air quality and the environment.
• Increase productivity of commuting workers and commercial operations that rely on transportation for goods and services.
• Ensure the safety of drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists by reducing the likelihood of traffic - related accidents.
• Provide drivers and commuters with helpful information about real-time road conditions, accidents and road closures that should be avoided, and about alternate routes and forms of transportation that may help them reach their destination faster.

The technology behind smart traffic lights

Smart traffic lights and the smart traffic management systems that power them rely on four separate layers of technology.

• IoT-enabled sensors and cameras help to monitor the flow of traffic throughout the city, while GPS applications on smart phones help to track the flow of pedestrians and bicyclists as they approach intersections.
• High-performance networks and a variety of connection protocols enable the city to connect thousands of devices and transmit the data they produce to IoT platforms in the cloud.
• Robust analytics software combines data from multiple sources, aggregating and analyzing it to produce the actionable intelligence that city planners need for better decision-making, as well as the data that enables smart traffic lights and other systems to automatically route traffic more efficiently.
• Interfaces like smart traffic lights and smart signage communicate the insight gleaned from smart traffic data to drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists, while dashboards and reports offer city managers the information they need to manage traffic in real time and to plan for infrastructure to meet future demand.

Spectrum Enterprise: high-speed connectivity for smart traffic lights

Spectrum Enterprise, a leading provider of connectivity solutions to the country’s largest businesses, has established a national fiber network that spans more than 840,000 miles and serves as the foundation of connectivity for many smart city environments. With an additional $25 billion investment in expanded capacity scheduled to be completed by 2021, Spectrum is perfectly positioned to serve as a trusted partner to municipalities across country as they implement smart technology.

To support smart traffic lights and smart traffic management, Spectrum provides:

• High-speed connectivity for local governments, large institutions and enterprise clients, with symmetrical speeds up to 100 Gbps on a two-way, fully interactive digital network.
• Connectivity to homes and commercial facilities, with gigabit speeds that enable residents and businesses to fully participate in smart city initiatives.
• One of largest LTE cellular networks in the country, providing a range of connection protocols for the IoT devices connected to smart traffic lights.
• Over 300,000 Spectrum Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the country that will soon offer connection speeds up to 1 Gbps wirelessly.

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