Traffic Lights With Artificial Intelligence Could Help Your Terrible Daily Commute

With the exceptions of a horrible wreck or having a child in the car that you aren’t particularly fond of, nothing drains the enjoyment out of a drive like being stuck in rush-hour traffic. Every second of idling, waiting, and creeping along city streets is another agonizing moment where you could be enjoying a backroad or at home eating dinner.Thankfully, IEEE Spectrum reports that a team of researchers is working to solve this problem with traffic lights that know all and see all.Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have a startup called Surtrac that has installed traffic lights with artificial intelligence all over Pittsburgh. Surtrac — an acronym for Scalable Urban Traffic Control — collects traffic data from cameras and radar signals, allowing the network of lights to coordinate with each other to ensure flow through intersections happens as quickly as possible.The project started with nine intersections in 2012 and has grown to fifty, unbeknownst to most commuters. The startup eventually plans to implement its network across the entire city and ultimately bring the technology to other metropolitan hubs in need of silky smooth transit.Stating the case for the project, Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics Stephen Smith told an audience at the White House Frontiers Conference that congestion costs the U.S. economy $121 billion every year and produces about 25 billion kilograms of excess carbon dioxide emissions.That’s a heap of money and pollution, although it’s probably the reduction in travel time that will get most people excited. In Pittsburgh, the AI light network reportedly reduced travel time by 25 percent and idling time by over 40 percent. That translates to more time at work, more time at home, and less time cursing your own existence while you are stuck in traffic.While other cities have complex traffic management systems, even some that adapt to changing circumstances and vehicle frequency, Surtrac is the only one where each light is responsible for its own intersection. This decentralized technique reduces the overall load on the network and makes it easier to scale up. The team has also begun working on a system to communicate directly with cars, allowing the network to notify drivers of traffic conditions in advance. It could also be used to prioritize certain types of traffic, such as emergency vehicles and city buses.There is no set date for when AI traffic lights will be exported to other U.S. cities. But they should be a welcome addition for anyone who has ever spent the better part of their commute staring at a John Kerry ’04 bumper sticker plastered on the back of a slow-moving Prius.[Image: Joisey Showaa/ Flickr ( CC BY-SA 2.0)]