If you live in busy cities like Klang Valley, Seremban or Johor Bahru, there’s a good chance you’ve spent way too much time waiting at the traffic lights due to huge traffic queue. You probably asked yourself, “why didn’t that traffic light just turns green sooner?” To that end, Google is using AI to help you stop less at traffic lights.
Google’s Project Green Light
The aptly-named Project Green Light does what it says on the label – to improve traffic efficiency by reducing stoppages through fine-tuning the timings of traffic lights on intersections. This is a classic computational problem that can be difficult to solve due to lack of complete dataset, and ways to gather such information can be expensive and limited in efficacy.
Since Google already has vast amounts of traffic data on hand (like the ones you see in Google Maps when you open Traffic view), the search engine giant is perfectly poised to solve problems like this one. Some number crunching later and you can get an optimized signaling on exactly how many seconds a traffic light should go green or red, depending on the unique characteristics of each intersection.
Google noted that this uses historical traffic data to compute the best signaling interval that reduces the average waiting time for everyone – this has knock-on effects of reducing vehicle emissions and fuel/energy consumption as well, since you won’t have to do start-stops as much. The best part? Cities won’t have to pay for what is effectively a free upgrade to their traffic management systems, no additional hardware required.
Currently, the project is open to city councils to join the waiting list, and it has been successfully tested in 70 intersections across 13 cities worldwide.
Source: Android Authority
Pokdepinion: Hopefully cities in Malaysia can get onboard with this.
