16 Nov 2020 News

Forbes interviews NoTraffic’s CEO, Tal Kreisler

Maricopa County, Arizona, using NoTraffic's system

Red Light Waiting Times Cut, Safety Boosted By AI-Based Control System

When Tal Kreisler thinks about the time wasted waiting for a traffic light to turn from red to green, he gets pretty wound up and asks a fundamental question: “We sent a man to moon in 1969 but we’re still sitting alone in the middle of the night at a red light, getting frustrated almost every time asking ourselves, how come?”

Kreisler actually knows the answer and he and his partners at Palo Alto, Calif.-based NoTraffic believe they’ve come up with an effective solution. The answer, he says, we’re still using “traffic light controllers and crazy hardware from the 60’s and 70’s.” The solution, he maintained in an interview is NoTraffic’s AI-based autonomous traffic management system that exchanges the simple timing of lights for operating them based on what’s actually happening on the road.

“Based on the data it has the ability to change the lights based on real time data and adapt to the the demand,” explained Kreisler, who added NoTraffic’s system can also give priority to emergency vehicles and detect obstacles such as pedestrians and bicyclists.

The system is being validated now by what Kreisler terms “some of the biggest departments of transportation in the U.S” including the city of Phoenix.

Initial results during a validation study in Maricopa County, Ariz. where where Phoenix is located attest to the effectiveness of NoTraffic’s system.

According to a product validation study report by the Maricopa County Department of Transportation at three intersections, earlier this year:

>> Vehicle delay at project intersections was reduced by an average of 50%, yielding a time saving reduction equivalent to 322 hours (13 days).

>> During 1 week of operations and at just one intersection, NoTraffic reduced 734.1 hours of driver delay time.

>> An annual calculation of the time saved at just one intersection is equivalent to reducing 23 months (16,759 hours).

Kreisler adds that by keeping traffic moving efficiently, the NoTraffic system can “save about half a million tons of C02 and generate about $1 billion of economic benefit a year” for Maricopa County.

Click here to read the full article by , originally published in Forbes.com

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