Smart cities start at the intersection

By Dave Bullock, Vice President of Market Strategy

Just a few years ago, the traffic operations team in the City of Detroit was relying on phone calls from concerned citizens and reports from other departments to know when something was wrong. Faced with ageing infrastructure, failing systems, and a lack of resources, they were struggling to maintain their traffic network.

Much of the city’s traffic budget was going towards signal maintenance, but because staff was unequipped to know when signals were in flash, or traffic lights were completely off, their solution was largely ineffective. Plus, the city had very little in-ground connectivity, leaving them unable to connect to or communicate with 80 percent of their signals. They needed the ability to communicate with their intersections remotely. So they partnered with us.

To-date, Miovision solutions have been implemented in 40 percent of the city, with a plan for 100 percent coverage by next year, helping Detroit completely transform the way they identify and solve these day-to-day issues. What’s more, our unique partnership with the city gave rise to the World’s Smartest Intersection.

The World’s Smartest Intersection

A groundbreaking technology showcase in Detroit, Michigan, the World’s Smartest Intersection is situated in the heart of the city. Powered by Miovision TrafficLink, it features both the existing functionality and future capabilities of the Miovision platform.

The World’s Smartest Intersection puts the safety of citizens first, communicates with the world around it, and completely transforms the way traffic engineering teams operate. With all of this technology available in one intersection, we can begin to explore the potential of how one smart intersection can lead to many, and ultimately end with the creation of a fully interconnected, smart city.

Safer streets

Every citizen wants safer streets. So it makes sense that most cities are either starting or implementing their plans to achieve Vision Zero. However, they all face what seems to be a universal challenge: a complete lack of data to identify safety hazards, determine what behaviours are causing safety risks, and the ability to measure the impact of their countermeasures. Our goal at Miovision is to help cities use predictive safety analytics to advance Vision Zero goals to eliminate deaths and serious injuries involving road traffic.

One example is our work on creating safe streets for pedestrians. The World’s Smartest Intersection is in constant communication with the outside world. Active safety measures are in place, allowing intersections to change their behaviour to keep citizens safe, while also alerting drivers and connected vehicles of hazards in real time. For example, if a pedestrian is crossing the street, the intersection itself can broadcast their presence to connected vehicles.

Efficient operations

Many traffic operations teams still rely on concerned phone calls and reports from other departments to know when something is wrong with their traffic infrastructure. Now, Miovision has developed a brand new set of tools to proactively manage cities, completely transforming the way you can identify and solve issues.

With Miovision TrafficLink, traffic operations teams can identify issues in their network, triage and rank them, solve them, validate the fix, and communicate results internally. Using Automated Traffic Signal Performance Measures (ATSPMs) automatically generated by Miovision, your traffic team can find issues they may not have identified otherwise. This new data and visibility empowers your traffic team to solve traffic problems in just days.

Open innovation

The World’s Smartest Intersection is built on open architecture, allowing cities and their partners to create innovative solutions to age-old infrastructure problems. An open technology platform enables cities to future-proof their infrastructure by ensuring both their current and future investments will work with their smart city platform. Issues traditionally left to expensive, and proprietary vendors can now be solved by innovation on top of the Miovision platform. And, because it’s open, traffic data can be shared across multiple city departments as required, to improve the lives of citizens. Open data also accelerates time to market by making it easier to integrate complex systems.

Smart cities start with Miovision

Miovision solutions are designed to help expand your smart city ecosystem piece by piece, building each innovation on top of your existing investments. We help make cities smarter, one intersection at a time.

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