Smart traffic system allows dynamic control of traffic lights, school flashers, signage
The city of Dallas, Texas, has tapped Ericsson’s Connected Urban Transport suite to help add automation and responsiveness to the city’s traffic management system, as well as providing data analysis, monitoring and management tools in an effort to continuously add efficiency to the way the city manages its transport networks as well as reduce congestion and improve traffic flow for motorists.
The city’s Chief Information Officer William Finch painted this focus on smart traffic management as part of broader smart city goals built on “making data actionable…It is from this technology that we will derive more robust data, that leads to greater business intelligence, which in turn enhances our application.”
According to Ericsson, the smart traffic management solution includes a collaborative “ecosystem to share data and system services;” a unified dashboard available to multiple government departments; KPI tracking; and automation features “where one system can trigger or notify another system when thresholds are violated–for faster responses and reduced workload.”
Ericsson Head of IoT Jeff Travers said quality of traffic management “is a major factor in business and industry investment decisions. The Dallas metroplex is one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Our Connect[ed] Urban Transport solution will enable the city to manage growing traffic and increase driver safety more efficiently and at lower cost.”
This is just one part of Dallas’ multi-pronged approach to creating a smart city. The Dallas Innovation Alliance (DIA) has tested several uses cases to implement different technologies to make Dallas a smarter and safer city. DIA is a public-private partnership dedicated to the design and execution of a smart cities plan for the City of Dallas. The DIA has 30 public-private partners in their smart city project, and the lead partner is Dallas-based AT&T. Other partners includes Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, AECOM, ParkHub, GE, CIVIQ Smartscapes, Schneider Electric, Philips and the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas.
Dallas is home to 19 Fortune 500 company headquarters, and has the ninth largest concentration of technology jobs in the U.S., with 360 people moving to the Dallas region every day. DIA is using the Central Business District (West-End Historical District) as a living lab pilot zone. That particular area of Dallas has seen a dip in revenue over the years, but presents an area of potential for the city.
a Phase I living lab by incorporating five to seven projects in the downtown, West End area. These projects include smart lighting, waste management, digital citizen-centric kiosks, smart irrigation, smart parking and public Wi-Fi. They are testing KPIs around economic development, energy and water cost and usage, public safety, transportation and others.
