Transport demand is evolving and cities need to better understand mobility trends for all road users to anticipate what the future might look like.
There has been a focus on learning about a community’s needs so that plans can be made to create, grow or revitalize areas. In cities, especially ones with a lot of traffic, the planning of intersections, their physical configuration and other details (such as traffic light placement and their timing) are all vital parts of the process.
Decisions regarding how an intersection should operate are based on traffic data that is collected through a variety of methods, which can include inductive loops, radar and video cameras. The goals for urban and transport planners are to improve the flow of traffic at an intersection and increase safety. These can be achieved by changing many parameters, such as the timing of traffic lights, allowing right turns on red, widening the lanes, adding lanes or adding dedicated lanes.
Inductive loops and radar were unable to provide multimodal data on vulnerable road users or data in real-time. Safety analytics and information about vehicle speed, crashes, trajectories or turning directions were difficult or impossible to obtain. Even when the available information was used, once adjustments were made to intersections, new studies would have to be implemented to measure the results of the changes to see if they were successful. It could take some time before a municipality could judge the changes implemented.
Radar and video cameras have been used to obtain the data cities need to make policy changes regarding intersections, but each comes with its own set of drawbacks, including cost, data limitations, privacy issues and more.
Planners can improve the functionality of an intersection with detailed traffic data, but up until recently, existing methods didn’t offer the right type of information. This is why BlueCity combines lidar sensors and artificial intelligence to provide real-time multimodal data for city engineers, transport planners and consulting firms involved in improving traffic flow. BlueCity provides many benefits over existing systems.