Can AI Solve Our Traffic Problems?
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More People, More Cars
Traffic lights keep us moving and keep us safe.
But if it seems like traffic in North Carolina’s Triangle region has gotten worse, there’s a good reason for that. There are a lot more people living here, and all those newcomers prefer cars to get around. Yes, there are plans to improve public transportation, but most folks rely on cars.
The Triangle has been the 10th fastest-growing region in the country since 2020. There are now 2.4 million people (about the population of Kansas) living in the area, and much of that growth is coming to the region’s booming suburbs and outlying counties.
But the traffic signal system is having trouble adjusting.
A little traffic science
Traffic lights seem pretty simple—green, yellow, red, go, wait, stop. But it turns out there are a lot of factors to consider.
You must look at the flow of vehicles. You must also time the flow of traffic. Remember, it takes time to speed up and slow down. There’s also the length of each light to consider, as well as how those periods need to be adjusted depending on the time of day, such as rush hour.
It’s a lot.
AI studies traffic cameras for solutions
Which is why Raleigh is turning to AI (artificial intelligence) to help manage street congestion, safety and other concerns.
“We can now push traffic video into the NVIDIA DeepStream platform and can quantify in real time how many vehicles are entering and exiting intersections and visualize it for our engineers,” said James Alberque, a geoinformation systems and emerging technology manager for the city, in a blog for NVIDIA. Raleigh is testing the NVIDIA Metropolis AI system.
Raleigh uses hundreds of traffic cameras to feed into the system. The information produced by the AI system is then given to city traffic crews as well as vendors who must reprogram the traffic lights.
The city plans to test the system to address other issues, including road flooding, parking utilization and even bus stop wait times.
To learn more about AI and traffic, watch this story from the PBS digital series Overview.