Webinar Looking at the Future of Smart Cities

In this webinar episode, Jon Barad, Vice President of Business Development at Velodyne Lidar, led a panel discussion with Asad Lesani, CEO at Blue City Technology, and Neel Dayal, Director, Innovation and Partnerships at Rogers Communications, on using lidar for traffic monitoring.

The session was part of the Velodyne Lidar LIVE! digital learning series.

Blue City Technology has developed an AI-powered smart city system for traffic monitoring. They are using Velodyne Ultra Puck sensors to collect reliable, detailed traffic data about road users, including vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists, while preserving anonymity.

Rogers Communications is a communications and media company which is one of the largest telecommunications providers in Canada. Blue City, Rogers and Velodyne have collaborated on a traffic monitoring system in Kelowna, B.C., which was Canada’s first 5G smart city project. The Kelowna initiative seeks to improve how people move in the downtown district, increasing pedestrian and cyclist safety at intersections.

Here are three takeaways from the webinar:

1. Traffic data is the backbone of safety.

Capturing data on all traffic activity including vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists is essential for creating safer crossings and intersections. Asad noted the challenge with camera-based systems is their performance suffers in low lighting and bad weather conditions. This can make them unreliable for traffic operations which need data on a 24/7 basis. Lidar enables data capture during both day and night, and through conditions like rain and snow.

2. Traffic management powered by 5G can help municipalities advance Vision Zero goals.

Vision Zero is a municipal strategy with the goal to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all. Neel discussed how tracking near-misses of accidents at problematic intersections and using this data to help replan around them are important steps in helping municipalities improve roadway safety. He said this provides a preventative opportunity to help cities move towards the Vision Zero objective they have.

3. Lidar protects privacy.

As cities increase their abilities to use and target data, demands for data protection and privacy will grow. Neel noted that Canada, for example, is privacy oriented as a country. Velodyne’s lidar sensors do not identify individuals’ facial characteristics, a growing requirement for civic applications. Lidar has an advantage in privacy over camera-only systems because lidar does not record details like hair and skin color.  

Watch the full webinar below!