Smart thinking
Motor City gets world’s most advanced traffic control system
KITCHENER — The world’s smartest intersection is in Detroit and uses technology developed in Kitchener by Miovision.
The company’s chief executive officer, Kurtis McBride, is starting to feel like Canadian musicians who have to make it big in the U.S. before anyone closer to home pays attention to them. No Canadian city has deployed as much Miovision technology as Detroit.
“It’s kind of frustrating for us,” said McBride.
On Tuesday, McBride and the City of Detroit unveil what they are calling the world’s smartest intersection, just in time for the annual convention of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America.
Thousands of traffic engineers and urban planners are meeting in Detroit to learn about the latest in smart city technology. The Miovision product, called TrafficLink, will have centre stage along Larned Street, which runs in front of Detroit City Hall.
The world’s smartest intersection is really five sets of traffic lights along that downtown corridor, which also has lots of pedestrians and cyclists. Video sensors, traffic signals that can be changed remotely and an array of sensors connect smart vehicles with the infrastructure.
Detroit is a major customer of the Kitchener company. In the past three years, the city has wired up about 200 sets of traffic lights with Miovision technology. Transforming the ones along Larned Street into the smartest traffic lights in the world was a matter of adding software to the technology that was already deployed around the city.
“We describe the TrafficLink product that is deployed in Detroit as the smartphone of intersections,” said McBride. “With the TrafficLink, you buy one device and add software to improve its capabilities.”
For years, Miovision has sold technology that eases congestion, counts vehicles and alerts city officials when the lights are not working. It allows traffic lights to be changed remotely from a central location.
The TrafficLink technology encourages heavy trucks hauling freight to use certain routes by promising fewer red lights. City buses can remotely change lights to stay on schedule. Police can use video collected at the intersections. The technology helps cyclists and pedestrians get through the intersections safely. It continually collects data about traffic, and sifts the data for insights that improve safety. Sensors communicate with connected vehicles.
“The city was great in terms of driving the requirements, and driving the vision around the device,” said McBride. “Then we took those ideas and turned them into products.”
The result is a smart city network.
“When we started working with them, they had very little connectivity at their intersections, very little sensing ability, old infrastructure,” said McBride. “We have taken them from where they were to having the most sophisticated intersections in the world.”
Response times for emergency vehicles are down 20 per cent, he said. And traffic congestion has been eased during rush hours and off-peak times.