[Image: Rawpixel]
As more and more cities across the globe turn to AI in a bid to ease congestion, the City of Cape Town is now also considering “AI traffic light tools” to deal with the traffic nightmare commuters face each day.
Member of the City of Cape Town’s mayoral committee for urban mobility, Rob Quintas, said approximately 1,750 intersections in Cape Town are currently controlled by robots operating on various systems.
Traffic lights in the city either operate on a fixed timing schedule or use sensors on the road to adjust their timings when there is a substantial back-up. Which lets face it, there always is.
As reported by News24, a recent study found that systems that used new artificial intelligence tools developed by teams at companies like Google and Alibaba which use a combination of real data and simulations, reduced peak-hour trip times by 11% and off-peak by 8% in China’s 100 most congested cities.
While the study estimated that the annual implementation cost of the systems was around $1.5 billion (R27 billion), they produced benefits worth $32 billion in the form of time savings, CO2 reduction, and fuel efficiency.
“Road transportation is responsible for significant global and urban greenhouse gas emissions. It’s especially problematic at city intersections where pollution can be 29 times higher than on open roads, and about half of these emissions come from traffic accelerating after stopping.”
Google’s Project Green Light, for instance, uses AI and Google Maps data to model traffic movements and generate recommendations for optimising traffic light plans. Early data from the system suggests huge potential benefits, such as reducing stops by 30% and greenhouse gas emissions by 10%.
Recently named one of the most congested cities in the world during peak traffic times, Capetonians could do with any system that helps them cut down on the estimated 94 hours they spent stuck in gridlocked traffic last year,
Quintas says that much of the city’s traffic management efforts have been aimed at getting commuters to use more public transport. “This is evident in the ongoing rollout of the MyCiTi bus service as well as the efforts to re-establish an improved rail service. Other initiatives include travel demand management and improvement of the active mobility [walking and cycling] network,” he said.
Around 25% of the city’s traffic lights are on a system called SCOOT – an acronym for Split, Cycle, and Offset Optimisation Technique. These lights use pressure pads in the road to gather live traffic data to adjust the time that lights stay green in different directions while also syncing with robots in the surrounding area.
Quintas said that while the city is aware of AI developments and the use of big data to improve traffic flow, it has yet to identify a system that can provide substantial benefits.
“The city is aware of developments in artificial intelligence and the utilisation of big data for the purpose of improved traffic flow but is yet to identify a suitable system that is able to provide substantial benefits.”
Quintas says that if the City does identify “a technology/system that offers substantial benefits, we will do the necessary market research to be able to procure a suitable solution for our environment.”
